The experience of the 30,000 Japanese American children torn from their homes and incarcerated in camps left a tangle of social meanings that had not been inspected with the care it deserves until this book was written. Because they were schoolchildren, theirs was an educational history; and James tells it here, fully mindful of the irony of children studying democracy and its ideals while suffering as victims of the most undemocratic of all processes--imprisonment in a relocation camp solely on the basis of their race.