Yoshiko Uchida was born on November 24, 1921, in Alameda, California, to parents Dwight Takashi Uchida (1884–1971) and Iku Umegaki Uchida (1893–1966).  She had an older sister, Keiko ("Kay," 1918-2008).

Yoshiko and Keiko enjoyed a relatively privileged upbringing. The family lived in a rented home in an area of Berkeley.  The girls took piano lessons and the family went to concerts and museums, while also taking vacations to the East Coast and to Japan.  As leaders in the Bay Area Japanese community, their parents often hosted visitors from Japan.

Despite being sickly as a child, Yoshiko graduated from high school in 2-1/2 years and enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, at age 16.  She majored in English, history and philosophy.

World War II brought dramatic changes for the Uchida family. As a community leader who often hosted Japanese visitors, Takashi was immediately suspect in the eyes of authorities and was arrested on Pearl Harbor day, held first in the Immigration Detention Quarters in San Francisco, then moved to the Missoula, Montana, internment camp.

The rest of the family was forced to leave their home and were sent to the Tanforan Assembly Center where they lived in a former horse stall.  About a week into their stay, they learned that Takashi had been "paroled," and he joined them shortly thereafter. After helping her sister establish a nursery school in camp, Yoshiko became a second grade teacher. Finding that she enjoyed teaching, she decided to seek teaching credentials, having received her Berkeley diploma through the mail. She also took first aid and art classes and joined the church choir.

After five months, the family moved to an interment camp in Utah, where they lived for almost three years.  Yoshiko first worked as a secretary before getting another teaching job. Her father became the board chairman of the camp co-op.  In the camps Yoshida had the chance to see and experience the injustices and ill-treatment Americans perpetrated against the Japanese/Americans.  These experiences would provide the basis for many of her books, both autobiographical and fiction.  Many of her other books deal with issues of ethnicity, citizenship, identity, and cross-cultural relationships. The years she was incarcerated left a deep impression. Her 1971 novel, Journey to Topaz, is fiction, but closely follows her own experiences.

In describing her experiences during those years, Yoshiko wrote: “I worked hard to be a good teacher; I went to meetings, wrote long letters to my friends, knitted sweaters and socks, devoured any books I could find, listened to the radio, went to art school and to church and to lectures by outside visitors.  I spent time socializing with friends and I saw occasional movies at the Coop.  I also had a wisdom tooth removes at the hospital and suffered a swollen face for three days.  I caught one cold after another; I fell on unpaved roads; I lost my voice from the dust; I got homesick and angry and despondent.  And sometimes I cried.”

In May of 1943, she received a full scholarship to graduate school at Smith College in Massachusetts. At the same time, Keiko received a job offer at nearby Mt. Holyoke College.  The sisters left camp on the same day in June. A few months later, their parents left camp to resettle in Salt Lake City, due in part to threats Takashi had received because of his position with the co-op.

Uchida graduated with a M.Ed. from Smith College in 1944, first and took a teaching job at the Frankford Friends' School in Philadelphia. But the demands of teaching made it difficult for her to pursue her interest in writing—and having contracted mononucleosis—she moved to New York where Keiko had settled and took a job as a secretary.  She worked first for the Institute of Pacific Relations (1946–47), then for the United Student Christian Council (1947–52). In her off hours, she wrote short stories, submitting them to publications like the New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly and generating piles of rejection slips. After taking a class on writing for children at Columbia University, her instructor encouraged her to submit a manuscript she had written of Japanese folk tales she had learned from her mother and adapted for American audiences. The Dancing Kettle, and Other Japanese Folk Tales was published by Harcourt, Brace in 1949 to great acclaim, setting Uchida on the road to a successful career as a writer of children's books. Her second book, New Friends for Susan (1951), was her first with Japanese American characters and was set in prewar Berkeley. 

Over the course of her career, Uchida published more than thirty books, including non-fiction for adults, and fiction  for children and teenagers.  She is best known for her books on the concentration camp experience, the first such books for children written by a Japanese American author. In speaking about her children’s nooks She said, “ I try to stress the positive aspects of life that I want children to value and cherish. I hope they can be caring human beings who don't think in terms of labels—foreigners or Asians or whatever—but think of people as human beings. If that comes across, then I've accomplished my purpose.”

Yoshiko continued to write into her last years. Plagued by health problems in later years, she passed away at the age of seventy on June 21, 1992

For more information including a list of her books go to Wikipedia.

Also see Densho Encyclopedia