Laura Atkins and Stan Yogi are the co-authors of Fred Korematsu Speaks Up, illustrated by Yukata Houlette (Heyday, 2017). From the promotional copy:
Fred Korematsu liked listening to music on the radio, playing tennis, and hanging around with his friends—just like lots of other Americans.
But everything changed when the United States went to war with Japan in 1941 and the government forced all people of Japanese ancestry to leave their homes on the West Coast and move to distant prison camps.
This included Fred, whose parents had immigrated to the United States from Japan many years before. But Fred refused to go. He knew that what the government was doing was unfair. And when he got put in jail for resisting, he knew he couldn’t give up.
Inspired by the award-winning book for adults Wherever There’s a Fight: How Runaway Slaves, Suffragists, Immigrants, Strikers, and Poets Shaped Civil Liberties in California by Elaine Elinson and Stan Yogi (Heyday, 2009), the Fighting for Justice series introduces young readers to real-life heroes and heroines of social progress.
The story of Fred Korematsu’s fight against discrimination explores the life of one courageous person who made the United States a fairer place for all Americans, and it encourages all of us to speak up for justice.
Today we welcome the co-authors, editor and illustrator to share with Cynsations readers a glimpse into the creative process behind the book.
Stan, can you talk about the inspiration behind the book and series?
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| Fred Korematsu |
I wish I could claim credit for initiating the book and series, but they are the brainchildren of Heyday’s founder and retired publisher, Malcolm Margolin.
He thought a children’s version of Wherever There’s a Fight, the book I co-wrote with Elaine Elinson about the history of civil rights in California, would inspire kids.
That initial idea morphed into a plan for a series of books about civil liberties heroes and heroines.
He stood virtually alone against a powerful government he knew was violating the rights of Japanese Americans. His fight for justice was difficult. But he ultimately prevailed.
His story is all the more important now with threats to Muslims, immigrants, refugees, and LGBT people. Kids need to know that we can organize and fight against injustice.
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| Laura, white headband, seated far end of line, blockading Lawrence Livermore Lab. She was arrested soon after. |
Laura, what inspired you to work on this project?
I was delighted to be asked to come on board!
Molly, our editor at Heyday, approached me and asked if I could get involved as a person with children’s book experience, to help Stan create a story pitched at our middle grade readership. It was a dream project for me.
I love that the book, and the series, focus on people who have fought for social justice and civil liberties in California history.
I grew up as the child of activist parents, and got involved in activism myself in middle school and high school, including getting arrested as part of anti-nuclear and anti-apartheid protests.
I learned from my family and from my peers, that my own happiness and well-being is connected to other people’s, and that when we fight for everyone’s rights, we make the whole world better.
I am so excited that we were able to create a book that will hopefully inspire young people today to feel like they can have a voice, and the power to speak up when they see something unfair.
We are in a time when basic civil liberties are being threatened and undermined.
I hope that our story will help kids to understand more about what happened to Fred Korematsu, and how 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans were put in jail during WWII just for looking like the enemy.
This can help them to reflect on issues today — a potential registry of Muslim Americans along with the travel ban for people from predominently Muslim countries, anti-immigrant attitudes, and other forms of discrimination — and consider how they can have the power, and the ability, to speak up themselves.
Molly, how did the editorial process for this book work? Was it similar to other books you’d worked on or different?
As we built the book from the ground up, the editorial process was more collaborative than that of any other project I’ve worked on.
We spent many afternoons together talking about Fred’s experiences and how to best convey them to young readers, and it was nice that we all lived in the Bay Area and could brainstorm in person.
Stan and Laura did amazing work collaborating on the writing front, melding their different strengths, and Yutaka thought about illustrations that would complement the themes of each chapter, then beautifully realized them.
Meanwhile, we gathered photos, art works, news headlines, and other documents to help extend Fred’s story.
On a basic level, the challenge was helping readers understand and relate to Fred’s story, which
involves a complicated legal fight.
There was a constant balancing act of keeping things simple enough for our audience while presenting the complexity of topics accurately. Our conversations ranged from discussing how to talk about racism with this age group to how to present the fact that the U.S. government lied during Fred’s trial.
Through the lens of his story, we talked about many important and difficult subjects that are increasingly relevant today.
From the text to the visuals, our process involved discussing possibilities, trying out ideas and approaches, and gathering input.
We were grateful to have had the help and guidance of Fred’s children Karen and Ken Korematsu, local teachers and librarians, a focus group of fourth-grade students, and staff at several nonprofits and historical societies.
Slowly, the book began to take shape, coalescing more and more until it “came into its own” as the book it is today, a book that feels, to me, like a real community project, and one that will continue to expand beyond its covers as kids start to read and interact with it.
I hope readers are moved to have the same kinds of important conversations that we had while making the book, and that Fred’s example moves all of us to act when we see others treated unfairly.
Yutaka, what was your process for thinking about and creating the artwork?
I had never worked on a narrative project that involved so many drawings before, and honestly, I was a bit overwhelmed at first.
To try to make the project less daunting, I tried to plan as much as I could before diving too deep into any one drawing. Planning involved things like creating a color-palette, gathering reference images and trying to work out the compositions for as many of the rough sketches as I could.
The color-palette was inspired by kamishibai illustrations from the 40s and 50s.
Kamishibai, or ‘paper-theater’ was a popular Japanese form of storytelling for kids that took place outdoors. The illustrations for ‘kamishibai’ were intended to be eye-catching even from afar, so the colors often have a bright, pop-art feel to them. But many of the remaining ‘kamishibai’ from the 40s and 50s are a faded and worn out from heavy use in the outdoors. I was hoping this mix of bright and faded colors would subtly evoke an older time without feeling musty.
Because the story takes place in specific times and places, there were many reference images to find, like Fred’s old high school, barbershops from the 40s, and Tanforan.
Molly and Diane from Heyday helped out a lot by giving me some reference books about life in the
internment camps. I was also inspired by the artworks of Miné Okubo and Chiura Obata, who were both imprisoned at Topaz.
I think that in any art-form, once you introduce more than one element, the relationship between the elements becomes impossible not to think about.
So it was important for me that the drawings worked well individually but also in relation to each other. When creating rough sketches, I tried to vary the compositions from one drawing to the next to try to make them flow together but also to not be too redundant.
Once most of the planning was done, I started work on the final drawings, which is the most fun. I used a drawing tablet for the line work and a combination of watercolors, color-pencil and Photoshop for coloring.
Cynsational Notes
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| Yutaka, Laura, Molly and Stan |
Fred Korematsu Speaks Up received a starred review from Kirkus. “Written in free verse, Fred’s story engages in powerful bursts and shows how speaking out brings complex consequences. Enhanced with pictures and archival materials, well-researched and approachable historical essays interspersed throughout Fred’s account offer context, while Houlette’s reverent illustrations give humanity to Fred’s plight.”
Laura Atkins is an author, teacher and independent children’s book editor with more than 20 years editorial experience. She recently completed an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults at Vermont College of Fine Arts and also holds an MA in children’s literature from Roehampton University.
Stan Yogi managed development programs for the ACLU of Northern California for 14 years. In addition to Wherever There’s a Fight, he also coedited two literary anthologies. His work has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, MELUS, Los Angeles Daily Journal and several anthologies.
Yutaka Houlette is a Japanese-American illustrator and front-end engineer based in Oakland, California. He designs and builds user interfaces for CommitChange, a fundraising platform for nonprofits and social good companies. His illustrations have also appeared in Smithsonian Magazine and Orion Magazine.
Molly Woodward is a freelance editor and the former children’s acquisitions editor at Heyday, an independent, nonprofit publisher. Heyday promotes widespread awareness and celebration of California’s many cultures, landscapes, and boundary-breaking ideas.
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| Insets in the book provide broader historical context, timelines, definitions and questions for readers to reflect on their own contexts. |
