Showing results by author "Ken Mochizuki" in All Categories

Baseball Saved Us is about a Japanese American boy who learns to play baseball when he and his family are forced to live in an internment camp during World War II. Hearing about how his ability to play the game helps him after the war is over adds to this touching story. A Passage to Freedom offers an even more dramatic understanding of the difficult decision that the Japanese diplomat made in 1940.

In 1968, Michiko Nishiura Weglyn heard the U.S. attorney general declare on national television that there had never been concentration camps in the United States. Michi was the daughter of Japanese immigrants. In 1942, when she was fifteen, she had been sent to such a camp and imprisoned during World War II along with other Americans of Japanese ancestry. Her family lost everything—but Michi asserted herself as a student leader in high school and, against the wishes of her family, went on to college; then to New York, where she forged a career as a costume designer.