During World War II the Japanese imprisoned more American civilians at Manila's Santo Tomas prison camp than anywhere else, along with British and other nationalities. Placing the camp's story in the wider history of the Pacific war, this book tells how the camp went through a drastic change, from good conditions in the early days to impending mass starvation, before its dramatic rescue by U.S. Army "flying columns." Interned as a small boy with his mother and older sister, the author shows the many ways in which the camp's internees handled imprisonment--and their liberation afterwards. Using a wealth of Santo Tomas memoirs and diaries, plus interviews with other ex-internees and veteran army liberators, he reveals how children reinvented their own society, while adults coped with crowded dormitories, evaded sex restrictions, smuggled in food, and through a strong internee government, dealt with their Japanese overlords. The text explores the attitudes and behavior of Japanese officials, ranging from sadistic cruelty to humane cooperation, and asks philosophical questions about atrocity and moral responsibility.

This is a touching and sometimes humorous story of an American family’s survival in a Japanese internment camp during World War II. Eleven-year-old Peter Wygle's story and his father's diary create a poignant adventure that reads like a novel. This is a compelling story of the struggle to survive when the enemies were not only the Japanese, but also some fellow prisoners.

In Artifacts of Loss, Jane E. Dusselier looks at the lives of these internees through the lens of their art. These camp-made creations included flowers made with tissue paper and shells, wood carvings of pets left behind, furniture made from discarded apple crates, gardens grown next to their housingùanything to help alleviate the visual deprivation and isolation caused by their circumstances. Their crafts were also central in sustaining, re-forming, and inspiring new relationships. Creating, exhibiting, consuming, living with, and thinking about art became embedded in the everyday patterns of camp life and helped provide internees with sustenance for mental, emotional, and psychic survival.

The author recounts her childhood experiences as a Japanese prisoner during World War II.

Between 1942 and 1945, the U.S. government wrongfully imprisoned thousands of Japanese American citizens and profited from their labor. Japanese American Incarceration recasts the forced removal and incarceration of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II as a history of prison labor and exploitation. Following Franklin Roosevelt's 1942 Executive Order 9066, which called for the exclusion of potentially dangerous groups from military zones along the West Coast, the federal government placed Japanese Americans in makeshift prisons throughout the country. In addition to working on day-to-day operations of the camps, Japanese Americans were coerced into harvesting crops, digging irrigation ditches, paving roads, and building barracks for little to no compensation and often at the behest of privately run businesses—all in the name of national security. How did the U.S. government use incarceration to address labor demands during World War II, and how did imprisoned Japanese Americans respond to the stripping of not only their civil rights, but their labor rights as well? Using a variety of archives and collected oral histories, Japanese American Incarceration uncovers the startling answers to these questions. Stephanie Hinnershitz's timely study connects the government's exploitation of imprisoned Japanese Americans to the history of prison labor in the United States.

Mine Okubo was one of 110,000 people of Japanese descent--nearly two-thirds of them American citizens -- who were rounded up into "protective custody" shortly after Pearl Harbor. Citizen 13660, her memoir of life in relocation centers in California and Utah, was first published in 1946, then reissued by University of Washington Press in 1983 with a new Preface by the author. With 197 pen-and-ink illustrations, and poignantly written text, the book has been a perennial bestseller, and is used in college and university courses across the country. "[Mine Okubo] took her months of life in the concentration camp and made it the material for this amusing, heart-breaking book. . . . The moral is never expressed, but the wry pictures and the scanty words make the reader laugh -- and if he is an American too -- blush." -- Pearl Buck Read more about Mine Okubo in the 2008 UW Press book, Mine Okubo: Following Her Own Road, edited by Greg Robinson and Elena Tajima Creef. http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/ROBMIN.html

Many Allied POWs in the Pacific theater of World War II suffered terribly. But abuse wasn't a matter of Japanese policy, as is commonly assumed. Sarah Kovner shows poorly trained guards and rogue commanders inflicted the most horrific damage. Camps close to centers of imperial power tended to be less violent, and many POWs died from friendly fire.