NEWS & EVENTS
From Camp Amache to Two Faces
In the spring of 1989, Diane Lohman, a dear friend and an Albany, California fourth grade school teacher, invited me to her class to share my family’s story of being imprisoned during World War II.
California teaches fourth-graders state history but did not at the time cover the evacuation and internment of persons of Japanese ancestry. Diane decided to fill that gap and developed a two-week lesson plan on World War II, covering the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the tragedy of the evacuation and internment.
By the end of her curriculum when I sat down with her students, they would have read Jeanne Wakatsuki’s and James Huston’s Farewell to Manzanar. I told stories of my life as a child behind barbed wire and answered their questions about my experiences.
Diane passed away in 1998 but Christine Julian, who took over the class, continued teaching Diane's WWII/internment curriculum and welcoming me to her classroom. My last visit was in the spring of 2007 just before my wife and I moved to Eugene, Oregon. That fall, I contacted a fifth-grade teacher at my grandson’s school and resumed sharing my evacuation and internment story with classes there.
In 2009, I developed a new version of my talk, adding structure, historical context, photographs, references, and began delivering it to a variety of new, adult, audiences in and around Eugene. So when Christine called me in 2017, she had moved to Corvallis, Oregon, just an hour north of Eugene, we were back on with my new and improved presentation.
I began co-writing Two Faces (2023) with Nina Wolpe, a high school friend, in 2013. Again, I told my story although now altered just enough to reflect the voice and point-of-view of a ten-year-old and a much greater focus on what I had been thinking and feeling while those stories unfolded. Nina’s story, woven together with mine, providing even greater breadth and narrative tension.
Finally, coming full circle, on December 5th of 2023, a few months after its publication, I visited not just Christine’s classroom, but the entire school’s fourth and fifth grade classes, to read from Two Faces.