Treadmill

Treadmill is a truly unique and historically significant novel and the only book written about life in the Japanese-American internment camps during World War II written at the time by an internee.Hiroshi Nakamura, along with his family, spent the war years in Salinas Assembly Center, Salinas, California; Camp II of the Poston Relocation Center, Parker, Arizona; and Tule Lake Segregation Center, Newell, California. It was during this period that he put down on paper what he was observing, experiencing, and hearing and expressed them in this novel. Nakamura captures exquisitely the thinking and mood of the people. It accurately evokes the fears, anxieties, suspicions, cynicisms and passions brought out by camp life. Nakamura ‘almost' succeeded in getting Treadmill published in the late 1940s. While editors and publishers thought well of the novel, they would not publish it as it was ‘too sensitive' an issue. Professor Peter Suzuki discovered Treadmill while he...