Treadmill

Hiroshi Nakamura’s Treadmill holds the distinction of being the only novel about Japanese American wartime internment written in one of the camps during World War II. In Treadmill, the characters of Nakamura’s novel suffer a similar fate he experienced in his own life. Prior to the War, Nakamura worked as the English editor for a large Tokyo newspaper and in Manchuria. After he returned to the U.S., he was incarcerated in the Salinas Assembly Center, in Salina, California. Treadmill is a unique novel, providing an exceptional look into life in Japanese-American internment camps as that singular way of life was being played out. Nakamura exquisitely captures the thinking and mood of the people. It accurately evokes the fears, anxieties, suspicions, cynicisms and passions of the people brought to the camp. Nakamura almost had Treadmill successfully published in the late 1940s, however it was deemed to controversial for publication. Nakamura died in 1973. Twenty years later, Professor Peter Suzuki discovered the manuscript for Treadmill in the National Archives and shepherded this unique novel to publication. This revised new-edition of Treadmill includes a new Foreword detailing the importance of Treadmill in the history of Japanese-American Word War II internment and a new series of historical photographs.