Maggie, I'd love to start by finding out how much of the history of the Japanese-American incarceration did you know growing up. I know a lot of survivors didn't really discuss the experience more than a mention. Were your grandparents pretty open about their experience, or was it something that you had to learn about later?

[00:02:49] Maggie Tokuda-Hall: My grandfather passed away when I was a year old, so I never got to talk to him about it directly. George, who's in the story, I never got to know. Tama was a writer and my mother is a journalist. Tama did talk about it more than a lot of other survivors did. She wrote speeches and worked with other survivors quite a bit. My mom was pretty adamant about keeping both my sister and I very educated about the topic and in an unflinching way.

I think the story of how George and Tama met is a story I've always known. The full extent of incarceration and the lived experience of it is something that I'm still learning about to this day because of, like you said, we didn't have a ton of stories about it all the time. I just read a book recently Seen and Unseen by Elizabeth Partridge and Lauren Tamaki that had a story about a protest at Manzanar that I had never heard about, where three young men were shot and killed. I had never heard that story before, and so I feel like it's a period of time that I'm still learning a lot about right now.

[00:04:03] Host: It wasn't taught in public education. We didn't talk about it, and there weren't children's books to my knowledge that-- It wasn't until I was an adult and working on these projects that I really got a full thorough education on what happened in my own country and in my own state of California. Yas, growing up in the Philippines, I'm not sure how much of American history was taught to children, but how much of this did you know before coming into this project?

[00:04:37] Yas Imamura: I think I mentioned this a couple of times before when I was talking to Maggie about it. We definitely have a more idealized lionization of the West. For sure, obviously, the Philippines was also a very integral part of World War II and every effort that came from looking like the access front for doing anything, felt like it was all coming from a savior narrative. I think because we were also subjected to the cruelty of Imperial Japan when they were there, I feel like-- I don't know because I candidly mentioned this story to my father when he was still alive. He died of COVID a year ago.

[00:05:15] Host: I'm so sorry.

[00:05:17] Yas: No worries. I told him, "Oh, this is messed up." Then candidly, he was like, "Yes, but it was needed at the time." I think it was coming from a place of-- It was fear-based. “Imperial Japan is such a scary force. Of course, you'd want to sequester your own Japanese citizens. I would do the same if it was my house.” That energy they're telling me about, it wasn't shocking to me either. I'm pretty sure a lot of Filipinos would share this, in the anxiety of just how, at the time, America definitely is an entity that could be excused for a lot of things because they were also doing a much bigger good. You know what I mean, like, "War is messy."

I migrated here I think almost 11 years ago now. Even the cynicism wasn't really there either. I never really have this-- obviously super-idealized way of the way I look at America, but I think it slowly became more apparent to me as I lived here because people are way more political here. Now I'm realizing that. I don't know, we meddle in other places, in the Middle East and all that. Then moving here, you do look behind a curtain in a lot of ways, and then this doesn't become surprising anymore.

[00:06:39] Host: Maggie, along with the stories from your grandmother and the research that your mom did, what was the research that you did in putting Love in the Library together?

[00:06:49] Maggie: The plot of Love in the Library is something that I've known for my entire life pretty intimately, so it didn't require a lot of research. The research really came on the illustrative side to make sure that things were accurate to Minidoka specifically. Densho is an incredible resource for that. Then it was more in the author's note, and then for school visits that I do in conjunction with it, that I did a lot of research to make sure that when I was talking about the circumstances for the story, that I had all the details correctly. That was a lot.

Again, Densho was probably my number one go-to place for information but also, just going to the public library and checking out books and fact-checking things that I had assumed or thought I understood. There were things that I had thought I'd understood from my entire life of knowing these stories like Korematsu versus the United States. That was a Supreme Court case, right? It was like, "No, it went to the US District Court." [chuckles] Actually, when it was overturned, it was just his conviction that was overturned. The actual ruling was that it's perfectly in line with our constitution to round people based up on their heritage.

That was one of those things where I was like, "Oh, I see. I got very partial pictures of some of this story as I was growing up." As I was preparing to educate kids about it, and I wanted to make sure that I had the fullest and most honest recounting I could give them, that I had to check my own-- against the stories I'd just been told over and over again that were apocryphal, and also to make sure that I wasn't just basing what I understood off of Minidoka because every camp was so different.

[00:08:24] Host: Yas, I want to compliment. I was fascinated by some of the details in your art. I loved the clothing and the style that you were able to capture, and this overall dusty palette of the desert. Everything felt dusty. It almost felt dusty in its texture. The few images that we have from the camps are all black and white. What was that research in trying to capture that feeling and that time in history?

[00:08:59] Yas: I've never been given a book like this before. As an artist, I always get-- it's almost like a funnel of, it starts really big and then starts to narrow, but I was too ambitious. I always start with color palettes first, and it's like, "Oh, I wanted it to be eclectic and earthy." I think that's naturally my style, but I initially had an explosion of colors. I wanted purple in there. This was a very rich tapestry of people with clothes and personalities. I had to redo a few spreads as I narrowed down the style. I would finish a spread first, and I would pick a part of the story that really encapsulated the story for me.

I think it was when she was waiting by the bus and you were all just standing there. I had to do that four times, and I keep not nailing it. I think the story tends to dictate the colors actually, if I really listened to-- That would be the best practice. Oftentimes, I'm very stubborn. I get inspired by color palette that I'm raring to use for the next project, even if it's not the correct project. I'm glad that sense does tend to gravitate me towards like, "Well, let's not do this whole eclectic assortment of color." I eventually started the library and how sparse it was to really inform my decision. There was a scene where they were playing baseball outside, also informed it. It's really just like a plethora of scenes that just, like if you're a kid at a grocery store and you're just grabbing the marshmallows and the parents say no kind of process.

It was a narrowing down of things to where the muted and earthy was still there, but I still got to infuse the colors in the clothing. I know the pictures are black and white, but the fact that they were different families let me know that it was a vibrant-- Vibrant is such a weird word for it but when they were sharing a room together, with different families, and then they would just pull up blankets. These weren't families that were used to living that way.

They have their own personalities and identities and they're not just this collectivist group of people like Japanese. They are Americans. I imagine that people would try to sequester themselves differently and so, yes, there are the blankets and there's going to be just different shades and patterns and colors. I imagine it would be chaotic in real life, but obviously, in the story I wanted it to also, I don't know, show my artistic style. It's a weird balance to not make it too wistful Wes Anderson because that was a very tough time too but it also needs to be, I guess, visually interesting to look at.

[00:11:37] Host: You captured this other idea, though, that I think permeates through a lot of the stories that I've heard through interviews and conversations and books that this idea of trying to create normal in this traumatic environment. Whether it is in the home or whether it is in the library, they wanted to create some sense of normalcy. I feel like you really captured that well with your art.

[00:12:06] Yas: I think it was a good way to show their resilience, I guess, in terms of-- because these are people that are with their families and they'd want to make a very comfortable situation for them. I feel weird speaking about it like I was there, but I was obviously seeing from the photos and it's pretty apparent that you see the way families would still recreate home life despite the manner they're forced to live in, and kids are still doing their homeworks.

I'm sure in that small bubble, the mother would want to make it as close to home as possible. The normalcy is something that I think wasn't just something that they fell into because that's what humans do. I feel like they had to work for that. They really had to strive to make that normal. I feel like even the pictures of them playing baseball or just trying to kill time, it wasn't just like, "Oh, shit, you know what's a great idea. We can play baseball." It's almost like it's an active decision to swim against something, I think.

[00:13:08] Maggie: Yes. As I recall, Yas did not need direction from me about this. We both came from it with such a similar philosophical trajectory of we wanted to both highlight how beautiful their story was while being honest about the ugliness of the circumstances in which it occurred. Every time I saw illustrations that Yas did, it was hard to be critical because her work was so incredible out the gate, and she really did understand the importance of how this story is told.

[00:13:40] Host: That is the root of this story, is finding the beauty in all of this ugliness.

[00:13:47] Maggie: Yes, while still being honest about the ugliness.

[00:13:49] Host: Sure, not shy away.

[00:13:50] Maggie: The ugliness doesn't go away.

[00:13:52] Host: Have you been wanting to tell this story for a while? Why did this moment in time seem like the right time to share this story?

[00:14:02] Maggie: Yes. No, it had never occurred to me to write their story as my own story ever, in the whole time I was writing children's books and trying out different ideas until early 2017 when President Trump took office and his very first executive order was the Muslim or travel ban. It was clear he was going to be using his time to enact as brutal a white supremacist agenda as he could possibly muster. I was horrified and so furious, and I tried to think of what I had to offer in that period of time that was maybe unique.

I realized that our family has this beautiful story about not only the ugliness of those kinds of policies and the pain that they cause but also, the incredible resilience and the power of the people that they often victimize. That was when I wrote the original text for Love in the Library. It took some going back and forth with my agent and editing it, and that was when it came out. It was very much in reaction to current events because I don't think that without him reinvigorating white supremacy the way that he has in our country, I would have ever considered telling their story because it felt so much as though it wasn't mine to tell.
 

[00:15:22] Host: When you were writing your author statement, did you hesitate at all on what you were going to say or did you know from the inception that this needed to be stated, the comparison to our current challenges with racism and racially motivated legislation? I almost imagined an email. I don't want to diminish what you wrote, but that heavily worded email that you're sending to a boss and you're hovering your finger over send, and then it's just like, "F it, I'm sending it. It's going."

[00:16:00] Maggie: No. Candlewick has always been so supportive, so I've never been afraid of what I wanted to say around this book. They've been so respectful to give both Yas and I the space to tell this story the way that we both felt it needed to be told. I wasn't afraid of sending it in. I did wonder if they might rein me back in, and instead, the opposite happened. The editor we were working with, Karen Lotz, was like, "You give this one mention to the Trail of Tears. That deserves its whole own sentence. You need to break that out, be a little bit more explicit about that."

I was like, "No problem." Because of how this story was inspired to actually be written as a children's book, for me, its connections to present time were its most important aspects. I did feel like if I was going to tell their story, I had this greater responsibility, because it's not my story, to make sure that I was honoring not only their suffering but the suffering of all the 120,000, 125,000 Japanese-Americans who were incarcerated with them.

I think one of the greatest disservices we can do to them is to pretend like what happened to them was an aberration, it was just like a little whoopsie doopsie moment in American history and it's not. It's very much part of a tradition.

[00:17:20] Host: Will you walk us through this emotional roller coaster of receiving the licensing offer from Scholastic and then seeing the details? Did it all happen at once or was there this uplift and then complete floor dropping out from underneath?

[00:17:41] Maggie: Yes, there was. It was the latter, but it was within seconds. I got an email from the subwrites person in Candlewick Press saying, "Scholastic wants to license your book for this AANHPI collection that they're putting together, and they want Love in the Library to be a part of it." I was so excited because I wrote this book explicitly to be used in schools. I wanted it to go into schools. Scholastic has a unique place in the market where they have relationships with so many schools, direct relationships. They're the only publisher who does that.

I was thrilled. Then they were like, "But there's an edit they need you to make if you want to do this. Because of this politically sensitive moment that we're in and this rising culture of book bans, they want you to make these cuts." Attached was a PDF. The PDF had this brutal red line all the way through the whole paragraph that connects it to the present, but they had also taken out the word racism from the note altogether, which was the moment where I realized, like, “Oh, there's absolutely no negotiation here.”

This is a scorched earth [chuckles] and there's nothing to work with here. I could have potentially been amenable to rewording some of that paragraph so that it had smaller ideas or referred to specific policies. There were edits that could be made that I would respect and that I would consider but cutting it all together was like, "Okay, so you want to pretend like this is a special moment in history, that this never happens, and doesn't happen right now. That is a huge problem," but also, refusing to call it racism altogether means we're not in a place where we're going to negotiate. This ship has sailed. This edit is so heinous and so ugly. I was furious. I was immediately furious, and I immediately knew the answer was no.

I clarified with my subwrites person like, "Is this mandatory? Is my offer contingent on it?" She said, "Yes." I drafted the blog post that I would put up about it and the tweet and I slept on it. I talked to Yas, and she and I were very much in agreement on, like, "This is absolutely unacceptable. We're both furious. The answer is 100% no. Categorical no. There's no way to talk about this."

Then the next day I talked to my editor, who is also the president of Candlewick Press. I love working with her, but it's weighted when I talk with her because I know she's always got more important things to do. She runs the whole company, so I was really afraid to tell her what I was about to do, but I wanted to give her the professional courtesy of a heads up, that not only was I going to say no and not only was I going to ask Candlewick to send them back this email where I made clear how deep my disgust and rejection of this offer went, but I was going to be doing it publicly. She had about five minutes warning.

Candlewick had about five minutes warning before I published everything, but they've been incredibly supportive. She was from the moment I told her on that call, supportive. Yas and I have both been really lucky that Candlewick is the house that we did this with.

[00:21:01] Yas: I always had this impression that publishing– I've always assumed the big ones are oftentimes very, just liberal and even sometimes maybe too neo-liberal. I feel like it's almost like, first thing is to perform for each other. You know what I mean? If I had a sense of it, it would be even to that bend. I was surprised that it was actually completely the opposite. It was even pandering to people that want books banned. I was pretty surprised. I don't know. I was also not worried because it was Maggie. It's like she had the wheel.

I don't know if I'd feel the same way with any other person. I feel like she knew how to handle that with so much more-- She was very vigorous about it and very targeted and pointed and clear about her intention. While I was angry and surprised, I also felt like it was in good hands. It's not like I took the backseat but I was like, "Oh, thank God. Maggie's on it." She probably doesn't have the luxury obviously, because it's her own book and she needs to really wield her own sword and then really fight for this. I was happy that she was the one doing it.

[00:22:10] Host: What was the experience of hearing about the 650-plus librarians and educators writing a letter to Scholastic demanding an apology and a retraction of their demands?

[00:22:25] Maggie: I was really heartened. I don't know what else to say. The response has been a lot larger than I would've expected because there are real book bans happening right now. They invariably tackle books from Black authors, books from queer authors, and particularly transgender authors. Any place where those identities intersect are the most attacked. I think this might have been the first public evidence that we had that publishers are softening their blades behind closed doors to accommodate this culture instead of defending the books and the authors who they say that our voices are so important and that they support us.

It meant a lot to me to see particularly librarians and educators signing this letter and organizing themselves around it because that is not my personal network. When authors did it, and I scaned that list, so many of those people are my friends. It's like, "Yes of course we do because we get drinks together, and if you didn't support me I'd be so sad." [chuckles] It meant a lot to see librarians. It meant a lot to see everyone. It was just more of a surprise to me to see the educators come out the way that they did.

[00:23:55] Host: This is what I don't understand, the voices calling for banning of books and editing our history, the same voices that are influencing this trepidation that Scholastic has, they're loud, but it seems like they're the minority. I don't know if this is my-

[00:24:20] Maggie: No, they're absolutely--

[00:24:21] Host: -California glasses that I'm seeing this through. I have a liberal perception, but it seems like they're not the majority but yet, they're so loud and so powerful.

[00:24:34] Maggie: They're well funded and really well organized and they're absolutely the minority, is what I believe. Seems to be true across the board, but it is really insidious. It's one of those things where you hear about them being really well-funded by right-wing interests. I don't know what the best counterattack is to something like that because this is not my specialty. My specialty is writing books for children that are usually make-believe. I do know that the answer cannot be preemptively accommodating them.

I'm Jewish as well and that sets off every single alarm bell that there possibly can be. We already have the permission structure for doing violence against certain types of people, particularly Black Americans, particularly queer and transgender Americans. People are already getting away with doing incredible bodily harm to these people. When you take away their voices to even have stories, you're building the permission structure for complete eradication. I am past the point of being concerned that I sound alarmist.

I don't know what the answer is, but I do feel like all of us who feel like, "Hey, we're the majority here. We need to be as vocal and as organized as the people that are working so hard to make sure that those voices disappear entirely."

[00:26:21] Host: Yes. The American Library Association put out a statement saying that more bannings and more calls for bannings of books are happening than have happened in 20 years. In looking at your book, it feels like 20 years ago this book would've come out without complaint, with everything, with the artist statement. Obviously, your artist statement would've been a little different because of what's happened in the last decade.

[00:26:56] Maggie: I don't think it would've been published by a major publisher. I don't know that that's true. I think that the idea of calling it racism would not have been considered divisive 20 years ago because it was in 1987 when Ronald Reagan signed the bill authorizing reparations paid to Japanese-Americans. He's infamously a woke secret agent. He called it racism. He said that's what it was. It was racism, plain and simple. I think that aspect of it clearly has been moving right. There has always been a longstanding squeamishness in publishing to publish the stories about people of color from our own perspective.

I don't know that this book would've been published 20 years ago. If it had, I think they would've forced it into being a simple love story in a way that Candlewick did not force us into doing now. I think there's a reason why baseball saved us. Even the title is optimistic sounding. Even though it's a wonderful book that tells a lot of really hard truths about incarceration, it's framed in something positive. That was the standby children's book about Japanese incarceration for a really, really long time and still absolutely deserves to be read. I don't mean this to be a criticism of that book at all. I think that one book was published and so every publisher was like, "There's already a book about that. We don't need more."

[00:28:28] Host: Even though there's 120,000 different stories and experiences.

[00:28:33] Maggie: Yes.

[00:28:36] Host: As an artist, I'd love for you to talk about how important it is that stories like this, that talk about history, but that also just talk about different points of view, different experiences, how important they are as illustrated stories for children to read, to really get that sense to see the people in line with the tags on their clothes, the identification tags, how important it is to see that and to connect to that as a visual medium in conjunction with the story.

[00:29:16] Yas: First of all, it was completely just explicit to the story. It wasn't something that I thought in my own creative decision it should be seen. I think it was almost pretty obvious that I need to draw it. I think for kids to see, I feel like it was a good step. I feel like we could even still be more vulgar in terms of letting them know it's still happening. I'm even worried that maybe the palette might have made them look fridged in history in some way, but I think it's a good step. Anything that's a step towards that direction felt very necessary.

If anything, I felt I wish I did more. Knowing now that that could be interpreted a different way where it's like, "Oh, let's hope the kids don't think America's still this scary place," especially after the reaction of the Scholastic thing. I think even more so now, I was happy that it was pretty explicit, that parents, kids, babies in mom's arms are being carried off into different buses and they have the tags and different faces of anxiety. Some of them are just-- Parents are all unanimously worried looking, but the kids are agitated, antsy, bored, crying.

I don't know because I don't think I've ever really experienced reading a book like that as a kid, so I'm curious if-- I don't know the feeling, but I hope kids do draw from it in a way. I know that art for me as a kid was a big draw for stories. I do get distracted if the art isn't great. It was important for me to make it visually interesting for children because I don't disrespect kids in thinking like, "Oh, we don't have to make it that sophisticated. They're kids. Just make it colorful." I do think children get sucked into the world when they're vivid and lush.

I think making it vivid and lush and also a disturbing image of society being sequestered just because of their race was a great combo to really pull them in. I was very happy that on text it was right there for me to just flesh out.

[00:31:22] Maggie: Yes. I purposely wrote Love in the Library as a picture book script, despite it getting rejected a few times and being told it would be better as a young adult novel because I know that children at the picture book age suffer from state-sanctioned violence. They bear the brunt of these kinds of horrible policies as children. The children of those communities know that these things are happening. One of the things that I've learned over time and for me was important about this book was, as a kid, I knew the story about Japanese incarceration, but I didn't know about all these other instances of state-sanctioned violence against different minorities in text-align:justify;">I turned that fear inward and I was like, "Well, what's wrong with us? Why does our nation hate us? What did we do?" I knew that I got made fun of at school for having mochi in my lunch. I knew that one time I got beat up because my eyes are Asian looking. I was like, "What is so wrong with us?" I genuinely felt like we might be doing something wrong. It wasn't until I got more educated and I got older and I realized, no, we do this to different groups of people all the time and there's nothing wrong with any of these people. There's nothing wrong with us. There's nothing wrong with any group of people as a group, the way that sometimes these policies will make us feel.

Telling these stories without that context makes the children of those It's not the kids who already experience it because knowing that someone else sees what you're going through is not a painful thing. That's solidarity. That's a way that you support them. It breaks my heart because I think it's such a disrespect to white children, frankly, who are smart enough to do this and who are being cheated out of a wiser, more resilient version of themselves. They're being sold a false bill of goods under the label of education and they deserve better. Recently I got a DM from someone on Instagram. She's my age. She grew up in Idaho and she had never heard of Minidoka. She had no idea that she grew up right next door to one of these incarceration camps.

I asked her, "Well, did you know about Japanese incarceration at all?" She said, "Well, kind of. I heard about it as a side note in a lesson about Pearl Harbor." To me, that was like a perfect encapsulation of what happens with the way that we usually tell these stories. We start with the state line of justification for why this was okay and we do not delve into the stories. I hope that people who were horrified by what Scholastic did in this particular circumstance take that same horror and apply it to every time they read a news story about a police murder of a Black person. They're going to start with the state justification and they're not going to go further than that.

We should all be deeply critical of that method of storytelling.

[00:34:57] Host: We'd like to thank Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Yas Imamura for their time, their expertise, and their passion. Medium History is produced by Chapman University's Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, and Past Forward. For more socially conscious content, visit pastforward.org or follow us at Apple, Spotify, or wherever you podcast.

[music]