Where did yoshiko uchida first go to college?
- •
A prolific author best known for her children’s books about her concentration camp experiences at Topaz, Yoshiko Uchida was born November 24, 1921 in Alameda, CA, to Issei parents Dwight Takashi Uchida and Iku Umegaki Uchida, leaders in their local Japanese American community who often hosted visitors from Japan. Uchida spent her childhood and adolescence in a largely white enclave in Berkeley, California, before enrolling at the University of California, Berkeley, where she majored in English, history and philosophy. Uchida was a precocious student, enrolling in college at age 16 and finishing her degree in two and a half years. As many university institutions excluded Asian Americans on account of race, Uchida’s friends in college were largely other Nisei Japanese Americans, attracted to Berkeley because of its more welcoming enrollment.
Because of Dwight Takashi Uchida’s leadership position in the Japanese American community, he was arrested on Pearl Harbor day, and held in Immigration Detention Quarters in San Francisco before being mo
- •
Yoshiko Uchida papers
Skip to main content
Collection
Identifier: Ax 549
Scope and Contents note
The Yoshiko Uchida Papers are a useful resource for researchers interested in the publications of this prolific writer of children's books. Researchers interested in Uchida's personal life will not find many resources in this collection, while those who seek details about her professional life and a glimpse at multiple drafts of her books will be rewarded.
The Yoshiko Uchida Papers contains correspondence with publishers, reviews and publicity, fan correspondence, manuscripts, galley and page proofs, and some illustrations. Collection is organized into eighteen series. To preserve the original order of the collection, the papers have been arranged according to book title in chronological order. However, the galley and page proofs have been grouped into separate series because of their size and special storage requirements. The collection also contains miscellaneous publicity and correspondence that does not fall under a specific book title and is, therefore,
- •
Yoshiko Uchida (1921-1995)
Yoshiko “Yoshi” Uchida was an award-winning writer of children’s books, all of them drawing on her experience as a Japanese American who lived through the prejudice directed at Asians during World War II. Her best-known books include Journey to Topaz, the story of a young girl whose family is forcibly evacuated to the Topaz internment camp in Utah, and the 1982 autobiography Desert Exile.
Yoshi and her sister, Keiko, were born in California and attended Berkeley schools, including Willard. Their parents, immigrants who were prominent in the Bay Area Japanese community, became targets of suspicion during the war. Uchida’s father was arrested on the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, and sent to an internment camp in Montana. The rest of the family was forced out of their Berkeley home by an exclusion order on April 21, 1942, and eventually sent to a relocation camp in Topaz, Utah, where they were reunited with Uchida’s father.
After the war, Uchida and her sister went on to attend graduate schools
Copyright ©axissmog.pages.dev 2025