Michi Challenges History

In 1968, Michiko Nishiura Weglyn heard the U.S. attorney general declare on national television that there had never been concentration camps in the United States. Michi was the daughter of Japanese immigrants. In 1942, when she was fifteen, she had been sent to such a camp and imprisoned during World War II along with other Americans of Japanese ancestry. Her family lost everything—but Michi asserted herself as a student leader in high school and, against the wishes of her family, went on to college; then to New York, where she forged a career as a costume designer, dressing some of the most popular show business personalities of the day. At the time the attorney general made his remark, the existence of the camps was unacknowledged by both the government and much of the Japanese American community. Michi chose to rock this boat: she left behind her career and set out to document the story of the camps. Her book, Years of Infamy, used the government’s own records to account for the camps’ existence and for the racism and political calculation that led to their creation. It became a milestone in Japanese American history and a catalyst for the government’s eventual acknowledgment of its discrimination toward its citizens of Japanese ancestry. In Michi Challenges History, groundbreaking children’s book author Ken Mochizukiweaves a captivating portrait of a woman who defied cultural and political constraints to fight for justice and to uncover the truth of her people’s history—and her own.