Ken Mochizuki – författare

The daughter of Japanese immigrants, Michi Nishiura Weglyn was confined in Arizona’s Gila River concentration camp during the Second World War. She later became a costume designer for Broadway and worked as the wardrobe designer for some of the most popular television personalities of the ’50s and early ’60s.In 1968, after a televised statement by the US Attorney General that concentration camps in America never existed, Michi embarked on an eight-year solo quest through libraries and the National Archives to expose and account for the existence of the Second World War camps where she and other Japanese Americans were imprisoned. Her research became a major catalyst for passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, in which the US government admitted that its treatment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War was wrong.  Thoroughly researched and intricately told, Michi Challenges History is a masterful portrayal of one woman’s fight for the truth—and for justice.

The second installment in the series of graphic novels that began with Washington State Book Award Finalist We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime IncarcerationBasketball-loving Sumiko Tanaka, then 11, narrates this graphic novel about the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans. Through her eyes, we watch as her family is forced from their home and subjected to indiscriminate racism as they are shipped off to the concentration camp called Minidoka in Idaho.But Sumiko and her 17-year-old sister Yuri also see acts of charity and solidarity from their non-Japanese neighbors and friends in the Seattle area that make them hopeful for the future. As the young girls struggle with the horrors of being imprisoned in the dusty desert, they also find solace in the fact that some people chose to help. This story highlights the actual actions and experiences of those neighbors and friends.