in February 1942, Yoshio Torikawa, a Japanese immigrant, is arrested by FBI agents and taken from his home to the county jail in Portland, Oregon. Although never accused of any crime he is moved across the United States from one Justice Department camp for enemy aliens to another. Each move creates more uncertainty about his legal situation and anxiety from being separated from his family. The conditions are difficult, and as months become years, Yoshio's physical and mental health deterioate. Yoshio's American-born wife and two young children are also uprooted from their home and, like over 100,000 Japanese Americans during World War II, imprisoned in internment camps.To Breathe the Sky explores the effects of the loss of liberty and physical contact with family, the influence of culture and religion on the choices one makes, and the unseverable bond between parent and child.

To Breathe the Sky

Takahashi, Grace

Asian American Curriculum Project, Inc.

In his book Cressey: Land of Sand and Stars Eugene Lee lovingly documents the life of a small agricultural town in California s Central Valley called Cressey.    It was a community made up of many immigrant cultures Japanese, Mexican, Portuguese, and a scattering of Anglo Saxons. All were struggling to establish families and to survive. United in their love for the United States, they shared their meager earnings as a community getting through the hard times of the Great Depression, World War II, and the Japanese American Internment.    So much of the history we may read or see is about grand or major events. Often what is lost are the personal aspects of life and how we lived. Cressey is a valuable record of just that a slice of life in a period personally known by a generation that is fast disappearing.

Cressey: Land of Sand and Stars

Eugene William Lee

The book gathers together plays that chronicle the experiences of Japanese Americans from the hardships of the Depression of the 1930s, through the bitterness and dislocation of the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II, through the rise of Asian American consciousness and pride in the late 1960s and 1970s to today.
 "Laughter and False Teeth" is perhaps the most famous of the plays presented since it was included in The Big AIIIEEEEE!: An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature (1991), a staple book used in college Asian American Studies classes across the country. Procuring false teeth in an internment camp becomes a tragicomic observation of the breakdown of morality and decency in such places where even the dentist has to be bribed to do substandard work. "Kisa Gotami" (The Parable of the Mustard Seed) has the distinction of being George Takei's first role as an actor, a decade before his pioneering work as Sulu on Star Trek.
 "The Betrayed" a play that was included in Hiroshi's earlier book published by AACP, Swimming in the American, is perhaps the most powerful work, presenting as it does the fundamental conflicts between those Japanese Americans that cooperated with the government to prove their loyalty as Americans during the years of internment and those that resisted because the government had violated their rights as Americans.
 These are just a few of the plays in this book composed over the past 60 years and stored literally in a shoe box.

Shoe Box Plays

Hiroshi Kashiwagi

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Books by Asian American Curriculum Project, Inc.

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Asian American Curriculum Project, Inc. publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

To Breathe the Sky

Cressey: Land of Sand and Stars

Shoe Box Plays