Yoshiko Uchida was a Japanese American writer of children's books intended to share Japanese and Japanese-American history and culture with Japanese American children.
15 Facts About Yoshiko Uchida
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Yoshiko Uchida is most known for her series of books, starting with Journey to Topaz that took place during the era of the mass removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII.
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Yoshiko Uchida authored an adult memoir centering on her and her family's wartime internment, a young adult version of her life story, and a novel centering on a Japanese American family.
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Yoshiko Uchida was born in Alameda, California, on November 24,1921.
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Yoshiko Uchida was the daughter of Takashi, and Iku Umegaki Uchida who were both Issei.
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Yoshiko Uchida's father, Takashi, was a businessman who worked for Mitsui before he was interned.
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Yoshiko Uchida attended Longfellow School in Berkeley and University High School in Oakland.
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In 1943 Yoshiko Uchida was accepted to graduate school at Smith College in Massachusetts, and allowed to leave the camp, but her years there left a deep impression.
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Yoshiko Uchida's career began in Philadelphia after accepting a teaching job at a Quaker school.
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Yoshiko Uchida spent several years there before moving to New York.
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Yoshiko Uchida began submitting her work, with no result at first.
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In 1959, Yoshiko Uchida received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study the folk pottery movement in Japan.
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Yoshiko Uchida spent two years researching and becoming acquainted with major figures in that artistic current, including Shoji Hamada and Kanjiro Kawai.
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Yoshiko Uchida wrote a book with Kawai, We Do Not Work Alone: The Thoughts of Kanjiro Kawai.
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Yoshiko Uchida collected several pots by Hamada and Kawai that she later donated to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.