Desert Exile

Here, Uchida develops the culture of fear experienced by Japanese-Americans in the months following Pearl Harbor, leading up to the April 21, 1942, when President Roosevelt announces Exclusion Order Number Nineteen. This order decrees the internment of nearly 120,000 Japanese in detention centers. The chapter concludes as the gates of Tanforan Assembly Center—a converted horse racetrack surrounded by barbed-wire walls—close on Uchida, Keiko, and Mrs. Uchida. Chapter 4 further develops the theme of the Uchida family’s erasure of identity and home. The once beautiful garden becomes decimated. The family piano goes to their Norwegian neighbors, where the final morning before leaving for Tanforan, Uchida sits on the bench, a guest in her neighbors’ home: “My mother couldn’t bear to leave her favorite plants to strangers and dug up her […] London Smoke carnations […] to take to a friend for safekeeping […] Gradually ugly gaps appeared in the garden that had once been my parents’ delight, and like our house, it began to take on an empty abandoned look” (63).

Uchida recounts being “accosted by an angry Filipino man who vividly described what the Japanese soldiers were doing to his homeland” (52-53). A close white friend asks if Uchida had “any idea the Pearl Harbor attack was coming” (53).