Tomodachi: Yesterday's Enemy

By Zillah Williams, Jeff Gifford

Description:

Janice Lewis, seventeen, and beginning a university course in Sydney, finds a friend in Hisako, a Japanese fellow student. However, when Hisako meets Ben Lewis, Janice’s dad, old hatreds bubble to the surface. What is the secret Ben has carried since the end of the Second World War—a secret which has the potential to destroy more than one family relationship? Told against the historical background of the Cowra Breakout in 1944, Tomodachi is an exciting, fast-moving Australian historical novel for older teens.

Awards:

Why the author wrote this book:

My daughter introduced me to some of the Japanese students she met at university in Canberra. I wanted to tell of some of her experiences as she formed friendships with them, and somehow the incident known as The Cowra Breakout, when Japanese POWs broke out of a prison camp at Cowra, NSW, inserted itself into the story and became the main theme. The experience of a sixteen-year-old Cowra boy at this time was quite extraordinary, and the aftermath of the Breakout, with the town of Cowra forging strong relationships with Japan after the war, is inspirational. Reconciliation born out of tragedy.