The Children of Topaz: The Story of a Japanese-American Internment Camp: Based on a Classroom Diary [Hardcover]

George W. Chilcoat (Adapter, Author), Michael O. Tunnell (Author)

Book Description

Age Level: 9 and up | Grade Level: 4 and up

The diary of a third-grade class of Japanese-American children being held with their families in an internment camp during World War II.

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

Grade 4-6?The authors have constructed their text around an actual classroom diary kept by American children of Japanese ancestry, unfairly and unconstitutionally remanded to prison camp during World War II. Selections of entries made by a third-grade class cover the period from March 8 to August 12, 1943. Under each date, the brief accounts are given, followed by extensive, well-researched commentaries explaining the children's allusions, expanding upon the diary text, and placing events in socio-historical perspective. The youngsters reveal a lively interest in the world around them and a patriotic support of the war effort. The commentary details the bleakness and cruelty of their situations and amazing loyalty in light of the injustices heaped upon their families by the U.S. government and their fellow citizens. The well-chosen illustrations consist of fine-quality period photographs, a layout of the camp, and black-and-white reproductions of the children's crayon artwork. The photos are often quite moving and bring home the experiences described in the text. Others have written first-hand accounts of the internment camps, largely reminiscences for children told from an adult perspective. Here readers are exposed to nine-year-olds writing as it happened?and are given a timely reminder for those who say, "It can't happen here." A vital purchase for all collections.?John Philbrook, San Francisco Public Library
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Gr. 6^-10. Interned behind barbed wire in a desert relocation camp in Topaz, Utah, Japanese American teacher Lillian "Anne" Yamauchi Hori kept a classroom diary with her third-grade class from May to August 1943. In simple sentences, she recorded what the children thought important; they took turns illustrating each page. Twenty of the small diary entries appear in this book, together with several black-and-white archival photos of the camps. Tunnell and Chilcoat provide a long historical introduction and then detailed commentary that puts each diary entry in the context of what was happening in the camp and in the country at war. They fill in the cataclysmic events of Americans taken from home to camps in the wilderness, families broken up, the bitter injustice of a mother imprisoned while her son is fighting in Europe. Their commentary is sometimes unfocused, with little of the storytelling power of personal memoirs, such as Yoshiko Uchida's Journey to Topaz (1971). Yet the primary sources have a stark authority; it's the very ordinariness of the children's concerns that grabs you as they talk about baseball, school, becoming Scouts and Brownies, etc. For curriculum use and for personal reading, this is a moving account of World War II at home. Hazel Rochman

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 9 and up
  
• Hardcover: 74 pages
• Publisher: Holiday House; 1st edition (April 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0823412393
• ISBN-13: 978-0823412396
• Product Dimensions: 10.3 x 7.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #775,588 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I love books! This love affair began when I was small. My grandmother who raised me would read to me every day: fairy tales, comic books, and wonderful picture books like Caps for Sale and Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. I soon discovered that books were the world's best teachers and entertainers. So, naturally, I grew up wanting to spend my life working with books.

When it came time to pick a profession, I decided to study law (which doesn't involve the kind of books I like). I was well into my university course work to prepare me for law school when something happened that changed my plans. At the time, I was working for an automobile dealer in Salt Lake City, Utah, and the service manager asked me to deliver a car to a customer at a nearby elementary school. The second I walked through the school doors, I was flooded with the strangest feelings. I remembered my favorite books and my magical childhood years. The next day I changed my major to education. Since then, I've completed several degrees, all of them relating to reading, children's literature, and teaching.

As with many avid readers, I harbored, since childhood, the wish to create my own stories. I wrote off and on when I was young, and then tried my first novel during my middle twenties (it was rejected by twenty or thirty publishers). Then for a number of years, instead of creating stories I channeled my writing efforts into professional educational books and journal articles. All the while, my desire to write books for young readers stayed strong. In the early 1990s, I found my way back to writing stories. My first effort was the manuscript for the picture book Chinook!, which was accepted on my third submission attempt by Tambourine Books (William Morrow).

Because I teach children's literature courses at a university, people sometimes ask if my teaching helps me to be a better writer. After all, I teach my students about children's books, what makes some books "better" than others, and I have, as a part of my professional endeavors, critiqued books for review journals. Therefore, I should know what makes for good writing and what doesn't. However, when I began writing my own books I discovered critiquing someone else's work is an entirely different process than creating your own stories. Perhaps I was simply too close to my own work, which made applying what I thought I knew about quality literature difficult. In any case, I had a lot to learn (and the learning has just begun!) about the creative process. I guess writers are born perhaps more than they are made. (I feel the same way about teachers.) So, part of the challenge has been to find and cultivate any spark of literary creativity with which I might have been blessed.

For more about Michael O. Tunnell, see the following sources:

Something About the Author, volume 103. Edited by Alan Hedblad. The Gale Group, 1999, pp. 168-173.

The Eighth Book of Junior Authors and Illustrators. Edited by Connie Rockman. H.W. Wilson, 2000, pp. 529-533.

Something About the Author, volume 157. The Gale Group, 2005, pp. 247-252

ALSO SEE MY WEBSITE: http://www.michaelotunnell.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars 5th grade class learns about discrimination during WW2, February 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Children of Topaz: The Story of a Japanese-American Internment Camp: Based on a Classroom Diary (Hardcover)

We are class 5T in Holland Elementary School in Holland, MA, USA. We just finished reading The Children of Topaz for our Holocaust unit in Reading. This was our fifth literature study book of the year.

This book is about a diary kept by a 3rd grade class in a Japanese internment camp in Utah during WW2. It was about the life and times of the camp community. The 3rd graders illustrated their diary. The book showed some of those pages. There were also photographs. The book covered the span of one school year.

Some of us liked how such young children wrote such an amazing story. It was amazing how the Japanese took the relocation so well. The children drew very good pictures in the diary.

Some of us did not like The Children of Topaz because it wasn't fiction, and we like fiction. The book was also kind of boring. It didn't have very many exciting parts. It was also depressing to read. Some of us felt there could have been more writing by children and less commentary. We found the terms and names confusing.

Some of us felt uncomfortable reading this book. The people who put the Japanese in this camp were us, the American people. We should have thought before we placed innocent American people in camps because of the way they looked. The whole story was about racism. It was heartbreaking.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Amazing book, May 14, 2005

By 

Tristi Pinkston "Freelance Editor, Author" (Orem, UT United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Children of Topaz: The Story of a Japanese-American Internment Camp: Based on a Classroom Diary (Hardcover)

This is an amazing and powerful book. I used it as research for my own historical novel and found it to be not only immensely useful, but touching as well. I learned so much about the dignity of the Japanese Americans and their fight to maintain joy under the worst of circumstances. This book is a must read.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Somewhat biased account of a Very Biased Act, March 28, 2005

By 

Randy Keehn (Williston, ND United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Children of Topaz: The Story of a Japanese-American Internment Camp: Based on a Classroom Diary (Hardcover)

I picked up this book at a museum in Delta, Utah that contained, among other local historical displays, a reconstruction of in internment building. Most Americans are aware of what WE did to Japanese Americans after 12/7/41. There are similarities with how we look at Arab Americans after 9/11/01. There are a number of things that make the treatment of Japanese Americans more egregious such as the absence of similar segregation of German and Italian Americans. There would certainly seem to be obvious racial overtones to this although, in fairness to a supposed "other point of view", we were not so directly attacked by the Germans or Italians.

"The Children of Topaz" is a short book that arose from a diary of an elementary class at the Japanese American internment camp in Utah known as Topaz. The diary itself would barely fill a page or two. The book is comprised mostly of the Introduction, Afterward, and the supplemental information that embelishes each day's diary entries. This supplement comes in very handy. For example, there is an entry for 4/14/43 that reads, "...an old man, Mr. James H. Wakasa passed away." The author's supplement lets us know that Mr. Wakasa was shot by a camp guard and decribes suspicious circumstances. Much information was thus shared about this otherwise "insignificant" entry. There are many other such supplements all of which are longer that the diary entries they describe. There was one entry that I thought was quietly brushed aside; April 20, 1943 "Today is Hitler's birthday". Possibly just an innocent observation but I didn't think the authors gave it an unbiased evaluation. Yet that is OK for me because this book is about what the victims of this injustice went through. The "3" rating is because there wasn't anything that I would consider to be great or outstanding in this book. It is helpful but if you want a truly compelling story about the internment from a child's view, read the book "Obasan".