What I've been up to ...

Resurrecting a book I published over 20 years ago

Apologies for the recent absence. I’ve been burrowed in the last few weeks, focused on preparing my 2005 book, Strawberry Days, for republication. And now it’s finally ready for sale through Barnes and Noble here.

The book originated as a five-part newspaper series for the Bellevue Journal American published in June 1992, on the 50th anniversary of the removal of the town’s Nikkei population. I interviewed over 20 surviving members of the prewar community for the first iteration. The series won a regional Blethen Award for best series. But afterward, knowing the story was really incomplete, I conducted a number of further interviews and researched the places where the events took place, but more important, I also conducted a great deal of archival research with the Densho Project in Seattle and at the University of Washington Archives, where Miller Freeman’s archives are stored. Most of the text was finished by 2001, and we finally found a publisher in 2005 with Palgrave Macmillan, which had published my first commercial book (Death on the Fourth of July).

The original version was very well received, especially among the Japanese American community in the Pacific Northwest. It was one of five finalists for the Washington State Book Award for nonfiction. And I wound up making a sizable number of speaking appearances to discuss its contents.

But it didn’t sell well enough for Palgrave to release a paperback edition, and after 2010 they ceased printing new copies, so by 2015 it was no longer available except as a used book, or as an e-book (it’s still available on Kindle).

In recent years, I’ve been receiving an increasing number of requests to make it available. Those requests intensified as the Trump administration launched its program of mass deportation of immigrants. So last fall I petitioned Palgrave to have the rights reverted back to me, and they did so in early March. I promptly went to work creating a new edition, using the original text, but adding a new introduction and a new postscript that discusses the events of 1942 in the context of our current horrifying milieu.

The new edition also includes a number of photos that didn’t make it into the original edition. And it has a new subtitle—which in fact is the book’s original subtitle, but was changed by Palgrave at their insistence (about which I was never happy).

One of my favorite new things about the 2026 edition is the cover, which features some truly beautiful art from the great Michelle Kumata, who created a mural in 2022 titled Emerging Radiance honoring the Bellevue Nikkei farmers; it won a Tribeca Festival award in immersive art. It can now be viewed at the Bellevue Library where it is on display. (Here’s an explanatory PDF of the mural, which can also be seen at Meta’s Bellevue headquarters.)

Kumata was inspired by Strawberry Days, and each of the figures it depicts are people I interviewed for the book (except for Shin Matsuzawa, who had passed away by 1992, but whose son Joe plays an important role in the text). So she was pleased to be able to give the book a fresh new look and pitched in to create a clean revision for the cover. I myself remain grateful to have such beautiful art for one of my books. (I’m also deeply grateful to my old friend Alice Ito for helping organize all this, including obtaining permission from the surviving family members of the people depicted.)

Hope you all find it not just readable, but insightful and useful in these bleak times.