Naomi Hirahara of Pasadena, California, author of the 2021 release book “Clark and Division,” presented to a full house in the Northbrook Public Library auditorium on Oct. 18 on a Wednesday evening.
Hirahara’s talk was timed for the library’s third One Book, One Northbrook community read. One Book, One Northbrook is held every other year. The next one is 2025.
Alli Gilley, co-owner of Northbrook retailer Book Bin, said One Book, One Northbrook, “gets everyone in the town reading the same pages and having an open discussion about what it all means to all of us.”
Northbrook Public Library Executive Director Kate Hall said, “Sharing our stories helps us build empathy.”
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Friends of the Northbrook Public Library, event sponsor, is a volunteer organization that supports library programs and services via membership fees, a bookshop and book sales, according to https://www.northbrook.info/friends-library.
Hirahara’s visit was the first time the Northbrook Public Library could invite a One Book selected author to the library for an in-person discussion with question and answer session.
The library was poised to host an author visit in 2021, but the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated switching to a Zoom online format.
Hirahara is an Edgar Award-winning author. Her first historical mystery is “Clark and Division,” a Mary Higgins Clark Award-winning book that follows a Japanese American family’s move to Chicago after being released from a California detention center during World War II.
“As a lifelong Chicagoland resident, I did not know anything about the relocation of Japanese Americans to Chicago during World War II,” Hall said. “Reading about it in ‘Clark and Division’ was eye opening.”
A feature film about “Clark and Division” is possible and, “It has been optioned, but who knows what happens,” Hirahara said to Pioneer Press.
Erik Matsunaga of the Chicago Budlong Woods neighborhood served as event moderator.
“Erik is like a social historian and a lover of Chicago history,” said Hirahara, who has Japanese heritage.
Matsunaga, of Japanese and German heritage, collaborated with Hirahara on research and brought Hirahara on Chicago neighborhood walking tours starting in 2016. The Clark and Division vicinity, on the CTA red line, is along Chicago’s Gold Coast and Old Town.
“I was scared out of my mind to write about Chicago,” Hirahara told Pioneer Press. “But I just felt pulled because I thought there was something very rich in the particular time period.
“And I decided, because I was an outsider, that I had to pinpoint a very narrow place, the geography, and a very narrow time.
“So I decided to set my book in 1944, the war is still going on,” Hirahara said.
The wartime detention center that Hirahara writes about is Manzanar.
According to the National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/manz/learn/historyculture/japanese-americans-at-manzanar.htm, 10 war relocation centers were built in remote deserts, plains and swamps of seven states including Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Utah and Wyoming.
Manzanar, located in the Owens Valley of California between the Sierra Nevada on the west and the Inyo mountains on the east, was typical of the 10 camps, according to the website.
About two-thirds of all Japanese Americans interned at Manzanar were American citizens by birth. The remainder were aliens. Many had lived in the United States for decades but were denied citizenship by law, also according to the National Park Service.
“Chicago was the number one destination for the people out of the 10 camps,” Hirahara said. ” … 40,000 people came to Chicago at one time after World War II and I thought that was fascinating.
“The first to be released were young people in their 20s without their parents.
“So just imagine, you know, if you’re torn from your homes, and then you’re behind barbed wire and then you’re released in a kind of notorious place like Chicago,” Hirahara added.
Clark and Division, the South Side and north Lakeview were Chicago destination neighborhoods.
At Clark and Division, “It was kind of a transitional area, Japanese Americans at the time were told to not congregate, but that was basically impossible because they had to find housing, and they kind of piggy backed on their housing,” Matsunaga said.
“And then they needed businesses that would serve them, they needed places to go that they wouldn’t feel discriminated against.
“So they set up a little bit of a community but it was still a transient kind of area.
“My family landed there, that’s how I got interested in it, that was where they first came in 1945,” Matsunaga said.
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Matsunaga’s older sister (of two years) interviewed their grandmother for a social studies report while his sister was a high school sophomore.
“She had to interview a family member and my father said, ‘Oh, you ought to talk to grandma and ask her about camp,” Matsunaga recalled. “And at that time, I’m what, 14 years old, and I thought he was talking about a summer camp that she went to when she was a kid.
“And then I saw this history, and I thought, ‘What is this?’
“When I got to her age, 16 years old, we had a paragraph in our history book about it (the camps),” Matsunaga recalled. “And then I spent some time sitting down with my grandparents.”
Both of Matsunaga’s grandparents were incarcerated in the Gila River Relocation Center in Arizona (south of Phoenix). Matsunaga’s mother is of German descent and his father is of Japanese descent.
“They (his parents) grew up in the same neighborhood and they would have never have met and I wouldn’t be here if this experience didn’t happen.
“Doesn’t make it right, you know?” Matsunaga said, “but at the same time, I know that things happen in life.
“Life happens.”
Karie Angell Luc is a freelancer for Pioneer Press.