Yoshiko Uchida

Yoshiko Uchida (November 24, 1921 – June 21, 1992) was a Japanese American writer of children's books intended to share Japanese and Japanese-American history and culture with Japanese American children. She 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. She also authored an adult memoir centering on her and her family's wartime internment (Desert Exile, 1982), a young adult version of her life story (Invisible Thread, 1991), and a novel centering on a Japanese American family (Picture Bride, 1987).

She attended Longfellow School in Berkeley and University High School in Oakland. She graduated from high school in 2 1/2 years and enrolled at University of California, Berkeley.

Yoshiko's career began in Philadelphia after accepting a teaching job at a Quaker school. She spent several years there before moving to New York. There she worked as a secretary as well as began her writing career. She began submitting her work, with no result at first. Her first publication came in 1949 with The Dancing Kettle and Other Japanese Folk Tales. This is where she began to gain traction in her writing career as she published many more children's books. Through these publications, she was known for creating the genre of Japanese American children's literature.

In 1952, she traveled to Japan on a Ford Foundation research fellowship that gave her the information needed to create three more collections of folktales.

In the early 1980s, Uchida traveled, lectured and earned more than 20 awards for her works. During this time, she created her 1982 autobiography, Desert Exile, examining her experiences of her and her family's internment. In addition to Desert Exile, many of her other novels including Picture Bride, A Jar of Dreams, and The Bracelet deal with Japanese American impressions of major historical events including World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, and the racism endured by Japanese Americans during these years.

I try to stress the positive aspects of life that I want children to value and cherish. I hope they can be caring human beings who don't think in terms of labels—foreigners or Asians or whatever—but think of people as human beings. If that comes across, then I've accomplished my purpose.

Work on Japanese folk pottery In 1959, Uchida received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study the folk pottery movement in Japan. She spent two years researching and becoming acquainted with major figures in that artistic current, including Shoji Hamada and Kanjiro Kawai. Uchida wrote a book with Kawai, We Do Not Work Alone: The Thoughts of Kanjiro Kawai. She collected several pots by Hamada and Kawai that she later donated to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.

Awards Ford Foundation Fellowship American Library Association's Notable Book citation for Journey to Topaz Commonwealth club of California Medals in 1972 for Samurai of Gold Hill and A Jar of Dreams in 1982 New York Public Library's Best Book of the Year citation in 1983 for The Best Bad Thing Child Study Association of America Children's Book of the Year in 1985 for The Happiest Ending Japanese American of the Biennium award from the Japanese American Citizens League in 1988