Caged Eagles

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

A sequel to War of the Eagles (1998), Caged Eagles overlaps in time with
the previous book set during World War II. Told from the perspective of
Tadashi Fukushima, 14, the story follows his family as the people of the
fishing village of Sikima, now “enemy aliens,” are forced to abandon
their homes and load their possessions on board their boats before
sailing to Vancouver, where the fishing vessels are surrendered to the
authorities. In the fenced and guarded grounds of Vancouver’s Hastings
Park, the people of Sikima, along with thousands of other West Coast
Japanese Canadians, are separated by gender, with women and children
being housed in cattle stalls in barns. Walters superbly re-creates the
appalling and dehumanizing conditions under which these people were
forced to live before transiting to the inland locations where they were
to spend the remainder of the war.

A new teen character, Sam Uyeyama, becomes Tadashi’s friend and camp
mentor. Since Sam had been the only male of Japanese heritage in his
school, he provides another perspective on the prejudice against Asians
that had existed before

the war.

The book’s action is not limited to the internment camp for, under
Sam’s tutelage, the two teens break out and explore the surrounding
community, passing themselves off as Chinese. The War of the Eagles
episode in which Jed and Tadashi released the captive eagle is echoed in
Caged Eagles when Tadashi and his father slip away to scuttle the
family’s fishing boat, which is being held by the Canadian government.
Highly recommended.