Journey Home

Journey to Topaz (1971) took twelve-year-old Yuki Sakane to a WW II concentration camp in the Utah desert; now, released, the Sakanes are in Salt Lake City where Papa is working as a shipping clerk, Mama is cleaning houses, Yuki feels uncomfortable, and all of them are lonely: ""Here. . . their world was made up only of hakujin--white people who were strangers to them in a strange city that wasn't home."" Then the order excluding Japanese from the West Coast is rescinded, and they head for Berkeley--where nothing is quite the same: best-friend Mimi has new interests, Papa's good job is gone, their house is occupied, their garden overgrown. But, by pooling their meager resources, the Sakanes, bossy Grandma Kurihara (whose granddaughter, show more Emi, is Mimi's replacement), and old Mr. Oka, touchy but steadfast, manage to buy back Mr. Oka's grocery store; and though hostile neighbors set it afire, sympathetic neighbors help restore it. Meanwhile older brother Ken, serving with the Nisei regiment, returns wounded and withdrawn; and in his reconciliation, the others also find a way to accept the divided past and the diminished present. Commendably blunt about the wartime misfortunes of the West-Coast Japanese, this is also hearteningly even-handed in treating of its outcome: it's staunch old-neighbor Mrs. Jamieson who best responds to Mr. Oka's grief when the atom bomb, obliterating Hiroshima, wipes out his kin. Uchida is not suggesting that many small rights--gestures or words--undo a monstrous wrong, only that each individual and each act counts.

-Kirkus Review show less

Journey Home is the story of a Japanese-American family who was kicked out of the US during World War II. They then went to a concentration camp and were then moved back to Salt Lake City. Eventually, the family was allowed to go back to California, where they were originally from. Other residents of California work together to buy a grocery store and fix up a house for everyone to live in. This story is a great book about friendship, family, and forgiveness. I liked this book because I liked the plot of the story. I learned much about what families had to go through once they moved back to their homes. For example, people were still hostile towards the families and they even torched the store that the Japanese-Americans bought and show more owned. The main message of this book is forgiveness. This reoccurring theme comes up when the family must forgive people that have hurt them in the past. Overall, I enjoyed reading and learning from this book. show less

Journey Home is told from the perspective of an eleven-year-old Japanese-American girl, Yuki Sakane. She remembers the horrible things her family had to endure during their stay in the internment camp in the deserts of Topaz. As she tries to move on with her life, she realizes how the memories of the camp haunt her and still affects her.
This book is the progression of emotions Yuki Sakane feels after leaving the internment camps and trying to live a “normal” life. The impacts of World War II have left her family and her in states of uneasiness but as they start new once again, they continue to learn many things. Journey Home is appropriate for students in grades three and up because it is a chapter book so it will require a lot show more more attentive reading and perseverance as students are challenged to read bigger books. show less

Second Book it follows Journey to Topaz telling a child's experience and account of returning home after the illegal incarceration of California's Japanese American population at the outbreak of World War 2, a very sad story, but one that needs to be remembered.

A Japanese-American family tries to reintegrate into life after being released from an internment camp.

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