Edward Miyakawa was born and raised in Sacramento until his family was incarcerated at Tule Lake in 1943. After a year in camp, his family moved to Colorado where they remained until they returned to Sacramento in the late 40's. Since then he has served in the U.S. Navy, graduated from the University of California in Architecture, conducted a 35 year architecture practice on the Oregon Coast while he and his wife raised an international family of six adopted children. The children include Huong and Man from Viet Nam, Keith and Isaac, both African American, Kanka from India, and Kimi from Korea. There are also four beautiful rainbow grandchildren.

As a young man attempting to make sense out of the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans, he began research for a 12-year writing of TULE LAKE. In the process he discovered  the books by Dr. Dorothy Swaine Thomas, who conducted a sociological study the duration of Tule Lake with the help of her interned graduate students. The novel portrays the actual events that took place in Tule Lake, as described in Dr. Thomas’s sociology studies.  The characters are fictional composites of persons the author knew as he grew up.