She is most known for her series of books, starting with Journey to Topaz (1971) that took place during the era of the mass removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII.
Soon after, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered all Japanese Americans on the west coast to be rounded up and imprisoned in internment camps.
Uchida's father was questioned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the whole family was interned for three years, first at Tanforan Racetrack in California, and then at Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah.
[3] In 1943 Uchida was accepted to graduate school at Smith College in Massachusetts, and allowed to leave the camp, but her years there left a deep impression.
[3] Her 1971 novel, Journey to Topaz, is fiction, but closely follows her own experiences, and many of her other books deal with issues of ethnicity, citizenship, identity, and cross-cultural relationships.
[3] Over the course of her career, Yoshiko Uchida published more than thirty books, including non-fiction for adults and fiction for children and teenagers from 1949 to 1991.
In addition to Desert Exile, many of her other novels including Picture Bride, A Jar of Dreams, and The Bracelet deal with Japanese American impressions of major historical events including World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, and the racism endured by Japanese Americans during these years.
[9] She spent two years researching and becoming acquainted with major figures in that artistic current, including Shoji Hamada and Kanjiro Kawai.