PENINSULA LITERATURE: ‘White Road of Thorns’
A longtime Rancho Palos Verdes resident honors her mother’s legacy in a new book detailing firsthand accounts of the Japanese-American experience during WWII Mary Yoko Nakamura, 87, with her new book in her Rancho Palos Verdes home. Photo Mary Yoko Nakamura was just 12 years old when the Pearl Harbor bombings ignited a war between her motherland and adopted home. The Hawaiian born Japanese-American citizen does not remember too many details of those havoc-ridden days, but her mother Aoki Hisa, a renowned writer before her death at age 63, diligently kept a journal that would become a best-seller in Japan. Originally published in 1953 in Tokyo, White Road of Thorns is a raw account of her mother’s experience in the Japanese internment camps during WWII, a composite of observational and intimate journal entries documenting her day-to-day life in the Santa Anita Internment Camp and Gila Relocation Center in Arizona. As the sole survivor in her family, Nakamura, 87, recently decided to issue an English version of her mother’s journal after her friend Archie Miyamoto read the original book and offered to translate it. He noted that an authentic account of the WWII internment camps did…
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