When Mako Takahashi was five years old, her family was swept up in the turmoil and devastation of World War II. The FBI arrested Mako’s father without explanation from their Seattle home in 1942 and two months later, the U.S. government forced Mako, her mother, and three sisters from their home and imprisoned them in a concentration camp. They were incarcerated along with nearly 120,000 others of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast,  many of them U.S. citizens. For four years, Mako and her family were held against their will in three different concentration camps. 

Nearly 80 years later, Mako Nakagawa completed her memoir, Child Prisoner in American Concentration Camps, which describes this life-altering injustice she endured as an innocent child and how it has affected her throughout her adult life. Alarmed by the backlash after September 11, 2001, Nakagawa recognized that the United States was once again on the precipice of repeating history—this time focusing on Middle Eastern people. She writes in the Afterword of her memoir: 

“Stories from the Muslim, Arab, and Sikh communities in the United States had a ring that was much too familiar. Children were called names at school, Middle-Eastern looking people were spit on, harassed, fired from jobs, and their property vandalized. Our Japanese American stories from the 1940s and the stories from the newly targeted communities are frighteningly familiar; there was a feeling of déjà vu.” 

Mako Nakagawa worked on her memoir for more than ten years, realizing she needed to share her story in the hopes that history would not repeat itself.  In Child Prisoner, she weaves her adult understanding of the racism and mistreatment of Japanese Americans during World War II with her childhood memories of living within barbed-wire camps. Her memories are sometimes playful, describing the strange benjos (bathrooms) in the camps, and at other times confusing, recalling being sexually abused by a friendly “father-type.” 

Nakagawa’s brother-in-law, Mits Katayama, also imprisoned in American concentration camps, later became a well-established Seattle illustrator. He was inspired by Nakagawa’s writings and created original illustrations to accompany her childhood stories.  

Along with Nakagawa’s childhood memories, she offers explanations and insights as an adult looking back on this grave injustice. She is particularly attentive to avoiding euphemisms that are historically used to describe the U.S. incarceration of Japanese Americans. Instead of using words such as “internment camps,”  “evacuations” or “living quarters,” Nakagawa accurately describes them as “concentration camps,” “incarcerations” and “horse stalls.” As Nakagawa states in her Prologue, “Words are important. Being honest about what happened has taken a long time.” 

Nakagawa also describes her family’s struggle to re-establish their lives in Seattle after the war. The aftermath of this incarceration weighed on her family for a lifetime, financially and psychologically.  In the Afterword, Nakagawa writes about her elderly father preparing to testify at a public hearing before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. She also outlines distinct comparisons between U.S. prejudices against Japanese Americans in the 1940s and those of Middle Eastern families facing similar discrimination more than 40 years later.