Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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".

The Children of Topaz is the story of one year in the life of a third-grade class of Japanese-American kids who have been moved to an internment camp in Topaz, Utah during World War II. Their teacher, Miss Anne Yamauchi, kept a journal of the daily goings on of the internment camp through the lives, commentary and drawings of her third-grade students.

The authors Michael O. Tunnell and George W. Chilcoat fill in the historical context for this journal with additional documentary photographs and an excellent historical narrative about events taking place within the country and how they impacted the lives of the Japanese-American evacuees in internment camps such as Topaz. The combination of the children's classroom journal, with photographs taken around the Topaz camp, and supported and enlivened with first-person accounts of time spent in Topaz camp, make this a rich and important historical document

This book is aimed at an older reader, but could be used in the elementary grades; if a study guide or companion lesson plan has not already been developed for this book, it should be.

Children will respond to the daily accounts that the children share in their classroom journal, to their illustrations, and to the pictures of the children and their families in scenes taken from around the camp. What is evident is the heroic work Miss Yamauchi did in trying to make life as "normal" as possible for her students and how she helped them adapt to life under very difficult circumstances. More mature readers will appreciate the broader and deeper historical context the authors provide about the plight of Japanese-Americans in this country during WWII.
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