Join author Mitzi Asai Loftus and her son David Loftus for a presentation and discussion of Mitzi’s new book From Thorns to Blossoms: a Japanese American Family in War and Peace. Books will be available for purchase at the event.

About the Book:

The book tells the story of a Japanese immigrant family in Hood River, Oregon. Mitsuko Asai was the last of 8 children delivered by her father on the farm. When she was in the fourth grade, she was sent to the prison camps for Japanese immigrants and roughly 80,000 U.S. citizens of Japanese American ancestry. She and much of her family (save for two older brothers who served in the Pacific with the U.S. Army; eventually, all five of her brothers would enter military service) spent a year in Tule Lake, just over the border from Klamath Falls, then two years near Heart Mountain, Wyoming.

But her real ordeal and test of character came when she returned to her hometown to face unchecked, rampant racism from people who had known her family all their lives. Mom’s older brothers in the service were two of the 16 Nisei servicemen whose names were effaced from the “Honor Roll” on the county courthouse by the local American Legion post—an incident that garnered national notoriety. Most of the stores in Hood River placed “No Jap Trade” signs in their windows for years. People cleared out of any pew the girl sat in at church. No classmates would walk to or from school with her for a year. A neighbor lady who had regularly invited her in for milk and cookies before the war now yelled abuse and sic’d her dog on my 13-year-old mother as she made her way to and from school—every day. Stung by the isolation and abuse, she rejected her heritage, changed her name, got her bachelor’s at U of O and began teaching in Creswell, Oregon . . . and then, in the late 1950s, was sent to Japan on a Fulbright scholarship, where she reconnected with her heritage and family roots.