Betrayed: Surviving an American Concentration Camp

[ Wind whistling ] -The day you walked through that gate, you know you lost something.

There are some things in your heart that you can't forget.

-We were afraid.

We looked like the enemy, but we're American citizens.

-We were stripped of our civil rights.

We were stripped of everything!

-Towers, searchlights, barbed-wire fences around us.

If they thought we were trying to escape, they had the right to shoot us.

-We had no clue.

My parents just called it the lost years.

That was it.

-It was something that we kind of shut out of our life because it was more merciful to us to forget than to talk about it.

-There was certainly despair and depression, a lot of suppressed anger.

-We didn't talk about it for 40 years.

Imagine!

[ Indistinct conversations ] -This is the first time they've really gotten together in this community to specifically remember the camps and to honor the, uh, the first generation that endured so much in the camps.

-I remember my mother deciding to attend that day.

-We were shocked at the turnout.

2,000 people showed up.

-I remember when my mother came back from that event.

And she was changed.

Something opened up in her.

That shift, I think, happened across the community.

-Not only was the evacuation wrong, but Japanese Americans were and are loyal Americans.

-The Day of Remembrance marked a turning point.

The Japanese American community was ready to publicly confront the injustice they had suffered almost 40 years before.

-The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

-We heard it on the radio.

And we asked our dad, "Where's Pearl Harbor?"

And he thought a minute, and he says, "I think it's in Singapore."

And that night, they came and they took him.

-Within hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the FBI began raiding Japanese American homes up and down the West Coast.

-We lived in fear because the FBI came and picked up many of the fathers of the families.

-When my father was taken away, I don't think our family knew anything about where he was.

This left my mother panicked as to what was gonna happen to us.

-They were shop owners, language teachers, Buddhist priests, law-abiding citizens.

Why the FBI targeted them?

They happened to be prominent in the community.

-Almost all of them were then placed in Department of Justice or military camps where they were essentially prisoners held by the U.S. government.

-Our constitution is unique in that it doesn't say "no citizen," it says "no person" shall be arrested without due process or a warrant.

None of that was done.

-The men swept up by the FBI were first-generation Japanese immigrants, who had come to America seeking a better life.

-The majority of Japanese when they start coming here to this country were farmers, laborers.

-They worked hard, saved, and then invested in an operation in Japan Town; starting a restaurant, a laundry, a hotel.

There was a close connection between the Issei, first-generation Japanese, and the Nisei, second-generation Japanese.

They were very proud that we were citizens, that we were able to own property, that we were able to vote.

-But decades of entrenched racism, combined with powerful economic interests, kept Japanese Americans in segregated communities and limited their opportunities for success.

-In the early 1900s, there were alien land laws and exclusion acts that kept out Japanese immigrants and you could not apply for citizenship if you wanted to.

-We were called the "Yellow Peril."

The newspapers, the billboards, everything was anti-Japanese.

-As long as we were laborers and working for them, no problem.

When we became competition, that was a no-no for us.

Then resentment, jealousy.

-As America went to war, the racial hatred intensified.

-There were rumors fueled by newspapers that the Japanese farmers were poisoning people so the Japanese could come in and invade.

All propaganda.

-Japanese hunting licenses were being given away as promotional items by commercial businesses as well as private groups.

-Many West Coast newspapers and politicians exploited the war hysteria to promote their anti-Japanese agenda.

-"The Japanese should be under armed guard to the last man and woman right now and to hell with habeas corpus."

-Most of the West Coast newspapers were calling for the relocation or incarceration of Japanese Americans.

-My parents had a grocery store.

And my dad put up a big sign in the front window saying, "We are Americans."

-Some of my childhood friends turned against me.

I was always called a dirty Jap, so whenever I took a shower, I felt like I couldn't get cleaned.

-Our bank accounts were frozen.

We could not leave our homes after 8: 00 p.m.

Many people had to close down their businesses because of the curfew.

-My father owned the City Cafe in Juneau, Alaska.

My mother had to rely on my two teenage brothers who were in high school to close the restaurant completely because we couldn't run it anymore.

The banks closed their accounts.

-The fate of Japanese Americans was sealed when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066.

-The signing of Executive Order 9066 on February the 19th of 1942, it then gave unbridled authority to one General John DeWitt.

-He had this concept that loyalty was based on ethnicity and blood and -- and not by, um, you know, by whether you were American or not in your beliefs.

-Every day, that's all we talked.

"Well, they won't take us, we're citizens.

"We're citizens," that's all we kept saying.

"They wouldn't take us."

-General DeWitt designated the entire West Coast as a military exclusion zone and then said anyone of Japanese ancestry would be excluded from that zone.

And so you could be a newborn baby or you could be a 90-year-old invalid.

-General DeWitt -- I call him General Dimwit.

There was no Japanese spies or saboteurs.

If they were suspicious of anybody, they should have picked up that person, questioned him, instead of the whole community.

-No person in Congress opposed Roosevelt's executive order, not one.

On the West Coast, most cities and states were happy to see it happen.

Two-thirds of these Japanese Americans were citizens by birthright.

With just a sweep of a pen and a couple of words, you're no longer a citizen.

-Why should they single out just the Japanese?

Why not the Italians, why not the Germans?

There had to be a racial implication there.

-The government even had intelligence showing that the exclusion order was unnecessary.

-As tensions with Japan were growing, the President delegated a wealthy businessman from the Midwest, Curtis Munson, to investigate for him.

Curtis Munson went to the coast, looked around, talked to the right people, and came to the right conclusion that there was no Japanese "problem" on the coast, that there would be no armed uprising of the Japanese.

He found that the Issei settled in America, wanted this to be their home.

He found that the Nisei were eager to prove themselves as Americans and not tied at all to Japanese culture.

Had the President embraced the findings of his investigator, none of this would've happened.

But history suggests President Roosevelt caved in to the boys in California who really wanted the Japanese out for political and economic reasons.

-Bainbridge Island, just west of Seattle, was the first community to be forced from their homes and incarcerated.

-They said aliens and non-aliens, and we thought, "Who in the Sam Hill is non-aliens?"

That was us.

They didn't dare say "American citizens."

-So many euphemisms were used during the time.

First of all, that this was an evacuation.

An evacuation implies a natural disaster from which you're fleeing.

This was a man-made disaster ordered by the government and supported by the American public.

-You could only take what you could carry.

And me still in diapers at 13 months and an older brother and my mother pregnant, it was like, "What do you take?"

-Suitcases full of diapers and children's clothes.

I was more concerned about children than myself.

-Every family had a number assigned to them.

And so each person in that family and their luggage were tagged with that number.

-Oh.

It was difficult.

It really was.

I can't even find words to describe the feeling.

You know, your home is your safe haven.

By the time we closed up and everything and Caucasian friends came to say goodbye, brings back awful sad memories.

We were herded onto the ferry.

And then you think, "Am I ever gonna see my home again?"

As we got off the ferry, there was a train waiting.

I was thinking "Where are we going?"

They never told us.

The windows were all blacked out, black curtains, three days and two nights.

so it was almost claustrophobic.

And then you're transferred onto the bus, and I'm looking out the window.

Vast desert, flat, miles and miles, black buildings, and the heat waves were just shimmering.

And I nudged my seat mate and I said, "Am I glad I don't live in a place like that."

And then the bus driver turned in there, and I tell you, my heart sank down to my toes.

-The Bainbridge Islanders were initially taken to the California desert... to Manzanar, the first of America's concentration camps to be constructed.

-The soldiers that went with us, when they left us at Manzanar, they had tears in their eyes.

I'm sure that they wondered, "Why are we doing this?"

-I've always thought.

personally, that the government had used Bainbridge as kind of a test case to see whether they could move an entire population of Japanese from one area and relocate them to another.

-Within a few weeks, the Army began the forced removal of all Japanese Americans on the West Coast.

At the same time, the government carefully crafted propaganda films to shape public perception.

-Neither the Army nor the War Relocation Authority relished the idea of taking men, women, and children from their homes, their shops, and their farms.

So the military and civilian agencies alike determined to do the job as a democracy should, with real consideration for the people involved.

-We were given approximately a week to pack up all of our goods.

-To be told they can only take what they could carry, they didn't even know where they were going.

It was very terrifying for my parents.

-My grandfather was so proud to be an American.

He had a store he had to sell.

He had a car, a home.

-Many people sold their goods, like, pennies on a dollar.

It was a 99% discount.

Those losses were real, and they were substantial.

-My father, who had a fruit and vegetable stand, two of them, he had to close them down.

-My parents had just bought a new tractor and a delivery truck and the crops were in.

To have all of that just wiped out, taken away from them was really devastating.

-Most of the families got rid of everything.

My mother and father in 1939 had purchased a General Electric radio.

And $100 was big money at that time.

They sold it to a policeman on the beat for $5.

Working 15, 20, 30 years in America and having it all taken away suddenly.

-What did we do to deserve this?

And, of course, the answer is... our face, our race.

-The government set up 17 temporary detention facilities on the West Coast, which they called assembly centers.

-Now they were taken to racetracks and fairgrounds, where the Army almost overnight had built assembly centers.

They lived here until new pioneer communities could be completed on federally owned lands in the interior.

-We all got numbers, and we became numbers.

We weren't people anymore; we were numbers.

-On the day of the evacuation, everybody was dressed in their Sunday best.

Either you wear your clothes or you throw it away.

-Japanese Americans in the Seattle area were forcibly removed to the fairgrounds at Puyallup, newly converted into a temporary detention center.

-My mother was 1 month pregnant when she was taken.

The sanitation was bad.

The medical services were not great.

My mother was worried about nutrition for the kids.

-They were saying, "Well we're putting you here to protect you from people who might hurt you."

Well, why were the guns pointed at us?

-My mother -- she was quite stoic.

When we got to Puyallup, we had our typhoid shots.

And then, you know, they told us to pick up our bags and fill it with straw for the mattress, and that's the first time I saw my mother's tears.

To be reduced to that, this was too much to bear.

-They fully expected my grandparents to be deported because they were resident aliens.

-One day my father, who was a respectable businessman, he had a wife, a family, a car, a place in this society, he could vote.

Two weeks later, he was prisoner in a camp surrounded by barbed wire.

-A similar story unfolded in Portland, Oregon.

-They drove us out to North Portland, and there we were in the ex-livestock yard.

And I remember to this day the pungent odor of manure seeping through the floor, flypaper black with flies, barbed wire circling the building, Army soldiers with fixed bayonets.

And I, as a 9-year-old, looking at that frightened.

-It's clear that the incarceration and the roundup of Japanese Americans was based in racism.

And a clear example of that is the roundup of babies of Japanese ancestry who were living in orphanages and sent to Manzanar to live in the children's village.

The military necessity of rounding up babies is ludicrous.

-There was nobody that stood up for us from outside of our community.

If we dared to try to resist, they probably would have killed everybody, you know, without any hesitation.

-Individual members of the community had challenged the government's actions in court.

Portland lawyer Minoru Yasui brought a test case to argue that the curfew for Japanese Americans was unconstitutional.

-The curfew order and the travel restrictions, to me, this is certainly an infringement upon the rights of American citizens.

-University of Washington student Gordon Hirabayashi also defied the curfew in Seattle, while Fred Korematsu fought a legal case against the exclusion orders in California.

-The courts ruled against him all the way up to the Supreme Court.

They said it was okay.

Same with Yasui and Korematsu.

They lost at the Supreme Court level.

So in a sense, the whole system was against us.

-As the Japanese American community was held in uncertainty, 10 concentration camps were being built in states across the west and south.

-These were located in some of the most desolate, isolated places in the United States.

It was fairly quick for them to construct essentially a prison at these locations with barracks and barbed wire.

-We got orders towards the end of August to be ready to move.

And they put us on old coal trains.

-We were not to see where we were going.

Headed east, that's all we knew.

-It was a 2-day journey.

We were covered with soot.

-We were then ordered to deboard.

We could see a sea of sagebrush.

That's all we could see.

And suddenly Army barracks -- hundreds and hundreds of Army barracks.

And somebody said that this is Minidoka.

-There was a dust storm when we got off the train, and my mom grabbed my hand.

I remember her saying to me, "Joni, this is our new home," and crying.

-Most of the Japanese Americans from the Pacific Northwest were sent here to Minidoka in the southern Idaho desert.

-Minidoka was not finished yet, but we had to move in there and they didn't have the toilets or anything.

Nothing was done.

-It was really in the middle of nowhere, and there were 44 blocks.

Each block consisting of 12 barracks, each barrack was 6 units from "A" to "F." A mess hall in the middle.

We would eat together, we would shower together.

-No privacy whatsoever anyplace.

-By the fall of 1942, the forced removal was complete.

Including babies born in camp, the government imprisoned over 120,000 innocent people.

Minidoka held over 13,000.

-We had dust storms constantly, and we had so much dust that it would seep through the walls of the barracks.

-When the wind blew, it just -- We would just suffocate in our quarters.

-During the summertime, it would be boiling hot.

In the wintertime, we would freeze.

And when it rained, we would just be in a slosh of mud.

-People say, "Oh, yeah, you know, we complained about the food, we complained about the lodgings."

That wasn't it.

The damage was psychological.

Here you are with people all in various stages of grief.

They were in anger, they were in denial.

They wanted to prove their loyalty.

They were grieving the loss of their lives 'cause their lives were stolen by the government.

-What was I, alien or citizen?

If I were a citizen, what am I doing in camp?

Why can't I get out?

Why are my constitutional rights constantly being violated?

I was just held.

-My father was so withdrawn, it really destroyed him.

I didn't know about suicide at that time, but if there was a way, he may have ended his own life.

-There's that two Japanese word -- shikata ga nai.

That means it cannot be helped.

Whatever that's happening cannot be helped.

And gaman, bearing the unbearable.

Those two words we were brought up with.

-I was born in an American concentration camp.

I have been able to do things with my life because of the strength of my parents and their values.

-I cannot admire more the pioneering spirit of the first generation.

Amongst the hardship and the loss of freedom and being stripped of civil rights... the first-generation Isseis and the older Niseis tried to make it into a livable community.

They put forth the effort to get organized, to build crude baseball diamonds.

They would have sewing classes.

They would have Go clubs.

They would have art clubs.

They tried to make do so that the rest of the stay became just a little bit more bearable.

-Minidoka employed a small number of white staff, mostly as administrators and teachers, but the camp functioned primarily on the low-wage labor of the incarcerees themselves.

-The top pay was $19 a month.

My father became a fire chief, and he was paid that.

-I got a job at the public health department, one of the typist clerks, and I made $16 a month.

The farmers that worked out in that hot sun got $12 a month.

-People lost their livelihoods back home.

They weren't able to earn real money to pay off their debts, to pay off their mortgages, and so they foreclosed on a lot of their homes, their businesses, and their farms.

-In early 1943, President Roosevelt announced the formation of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team.

This was to be a segregated Japanese American unit that would fight in Europe.

They recognized that they had to have a process for Japanese Americans to leave the camps.

-The government now wanted to enlist young Japanese American men into the Army and start moving other incarcerees to civilian life away from the West Coast.

-And so they came up with the idea of a loyalty questionnaire.

-Questions 27 and 28 were the ones that people talk about a lot.

And the first one dealt with, "Are you willing to fight on behalf of the United States against all foes and enemies?"

And the second one was, "Do you swear all allegiance to the United States and do you foreswear any allegiance to the Emperor of Japan?"

-The first question was whether I'd be willing to fight for this country, which I said, "Yes."

But the second question was, would I renounce my allegiance to the emperor of Japan?

Well, if I'd said yes to that, then that would mean I had that allegiance.

Now, if I said no, then I was being disloyal to this country.

No matter which way you answer the question, we were in trouble.

-How can we disavow something we never avowed to in the first place?

Our allegiance is to America, and I think that many of them were insulted.

"How dare you ask me questions like that?

I'm as good an American as you."

-No one had any idea, including camp directors, of what the consequences were of a yes or no answer.

This led to...mass confusion, mass frustration, many arguments inside families on how to answer.

-If you did say no, no to those two questions, you became infamous, known as a "No-No Boy."

You were deemed a troublemaker.

You were deemed someone that they had to watch.

-The vast majority of incarcerees at Minidoka would ultimately answer "Yes, yes."

Those who did not faced incarceration at Tule Lake Segregation Center, a maximum-security prison in California, where they were later subjected to martial law.

-The unintended consequence of the loyalty questionnaire was that you had these answers on paper that would then lead to segregation of thousands of people and lead to their branding, for life, by the government and the Japanese American community as being disloyal.

-Meanwhile, young Nisei men were being actively recruited from behind barbed wire.

-The Army came in to the camp and held meetings asking for volunteers.

It was quite an indignation for a lot of our parents to think that they wanted our boys after they had done all that to us.

So there was quite a bit of controversy between the parents and the sons.

-There were some that said, "I'm not going because my parents are in American concentration camp.

Until they are released, we're not going to fight for our country."

But many of them wanted to prove they were Americans, so they wanted to fight.

-My dad volunteered without any hesitation because he was an orphan, he didn't have to get approval from his parents.

And so he, without question, decided he needed to go.

It was really about family honor, about hoping that they could prove their loyalty to this country.

-10 months later, in January 1944, the military re-instated the draft for Japanese Americans.

New inductees were assigned to the segregated 442nd combat unit, or the MIS, the military intelligence service.

-The vast majority of our people said, "Yes, we will -- we will do everything possible."

And a small percentage said, "No, I'm not going to do it.

You let my parents out of Minidoka, sure, I'll do it, but as long as they're there, I'm not going anywhere."

-Across the 10 camps, 300 chose to resist the draft, including 40 young men at Minidoka.

-Without due process of law, they had taken all of our rights away.

I was the first one to be called in from Minidoka.

And I, of course, refused to go.

-Resistors from Minidoka would spend up to three and a half years in McNeil Island federal penitentiary.

-People say he brought so much shame to the family, and I don't think of it that way, you know.

Courage comes in different forms.

-For its size and length of service, the 442nd would become the most decorated unit in American military history.

-All the while, their mothers and fathers were incarcerated in an American concentration camp.

-Two of my brothers left camp to join the 442nd, and my brother Masaru was killed in action in Italy two weeks before Germany surrendered.

You know, people went off to fight, and people refused to join.

You have to admire all of them because they tried to do what they felt was right.

-The loyalty questionnaire made it easier for individuals and families to apply to leave camp for college or work.

Yet even after attesting to their loyalty, there was no path back to their homes in the exclusion zone.

-"A Jap's a Jap whether he's an American citizen or not.

I don't want any of them."

-Those leaving camp were instead encouraged to resettle in the midwest, the south, and on the east coast.

-My father got a job with the federal government, the OSS, which is now the CIA.

One minute, we're possible saboteurs and the next minute, my father passes the highest clearance and we end up in Washington, D.C.

So my parents and the three of us kids, we got we got to go.

My grandma had to stay at Minidoka until October of 1945, over two years after we had -- we had gone.

-By December 1944, there were still almost 8,000 people incarcerated at Minidoka.

-The exclusion order that kept Japanese Americans off the West Coast was lifted in January 1945.

-We were given $25 and a ticket back to Portland or wherever we came from.

-My grandfather, like many of the Isseis, lost their homes, their businesses, everything.

It was extremely traumatic for him.

-My mother used to tell me, "They took us there and we didn't want to go, and then they let us go, and we had nowhere to go."

-Even at the time that we were released, there was no declaration that there had been a mistake, that these were innocent people that the government had violated.

-People were afraid to go back out into a world where they knew that they would be discriminated against, that they would be hated in many ways.

-My teacher hated Japanese.

"Erase the blackboard, throw out the garbage, wipe up the dust."

27 students in the class, I did all the dirty work.

We faced overt racial prejudice.

-There were bullets fired into houses in Seattle.

On Vashon Island, someone burned down a Japanese farmhouse.

-Some people were greeted with men armed with their rifles blocking the road.

So the terror was palpable for people.

-There were isolated communities, like Bainbridge Island, Washington, and Juneau, Alaska, where Japanese Americans were welcomed home.

-When we returned to Juneau after the war, the Tanners, who are a Finnish family, offered us a place to stay until our house was in order.

The grocer supplied my dad unlimited credit.

People didn't fear us.

We were known to them.

We lived among them.

My father was really happy when he opened the restaurant and the customers came back.

-You really see in many ways the character of our country in how an individual, a family, a community really can make a difference in terms of people like Japanese Americans how they feel welcome or not in their own community.

-But in most places on the West Coast, anti-Japanese racism was widespread and persistent.

-We got married in 1955.

We went to rent an apartment.

The manager took one look at us and said, "Sorry, we don't rent to Japs" and bang went the door.

That was 10 years after the war ended.

-My father was this businessman who was quite successful who now could only become a janitor.

-We should have had an economic base coming out of World War II, of Nisei farmers, businessmen, political leaders.

Instead that wealth was lost.

And the Issei were broken emotionally, spiritually, and financially.

-And now the community was splintered from within.

-Many of those who were 442nd military, they hated the No-No Boys or anybody who resisted.

They never forgave them for saying no.

-When people left, this was a unified community of people who were all pulling together, who had aspirations, who had dreams and goals.

Coming back, people found themselves divided.

And these divisions were created by the government's demands for proof of loyalty.

-After the war, the No-No families were really shunned.

They were considered un-loyal people.

-The same was true for the families of draft resisters.

-Sure, they gave me a lot of silent treatment, well, to me, that doesn't hurt.

My mother was really picked on.

She said, "I can't even go to church anymore."

Because the Issei women, they said, "We don't want you here."

And it was shortly thereafter, she took her life.

-When I listen to the stories of the No-No families, what I see is people who often were incredibly persecuted for standing up for what was right.

It makes me really sad that this community could be pitted against each other by the racism of the United States government.

-It was like a rape, a rape of a community, and we behaved like victims.

We were in denial, we were silent, we were angry, we committed suicide.

-The Nisei tried to protect my generation from bitterness by not talking about it.

-What my father had to endure, he endured himself.

He never let us know the extent of what he went through.

-It's been only recently that people have even used the word "trauma" to describe what happened to us.

For the very young child being held in the arms of a mother who's anxious and fearful every day, there's this preverbal, unspoken communication that the child feels, that it's not a safe place to be.

For children with developing brains, they're developing their nervous system, trauma means that your body is producing stress hormones every day.

And the continuous flow of stress hormones as a result of chronic trauma, uh, has an effect on the actual physiology of the brain, making people prone to depression and anxiety in their lifetime.

-There was a sense that we could be taken again.

So do not call attention to ourselves, do not do bad things, or we all could be taken again.

-The underlying, uh, subtext of many of the conversations I had was, "You better be good, you know, you mustn't call attention to yourself, you must always do well in school because you never know what can happen to you."

It was only until I was much older that I understood why I felt so anxious as a child growing up.

-When there is no narrative that explains why Mother was so fearful and why you might feel some of that anxiety, then, um, the person will internalize it as something that they're responsible for.

It may not be conscious, but then that gets passed on to the next generation.

-The trauma is intergenerational.

And for my generation, I didn't live through that.

But I lived with people who... ...they were dehumanized.

And they carried that trauma for their -- their whole lives.

You know, my mother was a beautiful, courageous woman who... She was a homeless advocate for most of her life.

And...

I have this memory of being about 4.

And she would sit there at the table in her bathrobe and... ...the tears would just silently stream down her face.

And I remember "Captain Kangaroo" being on [chuckles] TV in the background.

I remember looking at her and saying, "Mommy, what's wrong?"

And she'd say, "Oh, nothing.

I'm just tired."

-The price of silence was felt throughout the community.

-Many Nisei died early as a result of the suppressed rage and hypertension they suffered as a result of this.

-I had this faint feeling in me through all the years I went to school wishing I was white.

-I think even as an adult, I was denying my culture in a way or trying to minimize it.

-My youngest daughter, it was on December 7th, and she says, "I hate Pearl Harbor Day because everybody turns around and looks at me like I'm the enemy."

I said to her, "Honey, your daddy was a World War II hero."

And she said... "I thought he fought for Japan."

So, that was kind of a revelation to us that we were not doing them a favor by keeping quiet.

-The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s inspired a call for justice, especially as the Sansei, or third-generation Japanese Americans, discovered what their elders had endured.

-The Sansei particularly were saying that the government needed to recognize that what occurred was wrong, that they wanted restitution and an apology.

-The Redress Movement gave us our voices back.

It gave us our pride back.

And the Sansei were instrumental in that.

In our community, sometimes we are reserved emotionally with each other.

But that fight for redress was the Sansei telling their parents how much they appreciated and loved them.

-Jimmy Carter, in his final year in office as President, started a bipartisan commission to look into this, 40 years after the fact.

-I was jailed on a trumped-up charge.

I was betrayed.

Not by individuals, but by our United States of America.

-I had experienced the hate expressed on a daily basis through the newspapers and the radio, as a death wish upon us.

When I was herded into camp and saw the barbed-wire enclosures and the guns, I lost hope.

My citizenship had meant nothing.

-Their findings from this commission was that, one, there was no military necessity, that the causes of the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans was war hysteria, racial prejudice, and a failure of political leadership.

-My fellow Americans, we gather here today to right a grave wrong.

We must recognize that the internment of Japanese Americans was just that -- a mistake.

-Ronald Reagan in 1988 signed into law the Civil Liberties Act and it was the official apology and first step toward reparations to survivors only of this tragedy.

-Three Presidents signed letters of apology and we got $20,000 each if you were alive when the act was passed.

-When that came out, all our parents had died.

They're the ones that should have got that money, but most of them all died and we benefited by it, which is not right because they're the ones that suffered.

-Some people actually burned their checks.

"I'm not accepting this blood money," one person said.

But for most, the money wasn't even the issue.

The apology was much more valuable.

-It really helped me, uh, heal.

It was like we were finally part of history.

-Those are fine gestures, but when we spent four years behind barbed wires, it's something you do not forget.

The injury is done.

You don't suddenly erase a scar of that nature.

-Some people, they say, "Can't you get over this?"

No, I can't get over it.

And the reason why is that when someone does a wrong to you, they need to stop throwing rocks.

In other words, they need to stop doing what they're doing, otherwise their apology is no good.

And so from my perspective, my question is, "Has the government stopped throwing rocks?"

-When 9/11 happened, I remember standing on my roof in Brooklyn and I saw the towers collapse.

I saw the people walking home through the streets of Park Slope.

Um, coming up the street covered in, um... ...like white dust.

And it was one of the most, uh, sobering moments of my life.

That night we were holding signs saying, "Japanese Americans say 'do not scapegoat Muslim Americans for this.'"

Because we knew the racism would come, and it did.

It came very quickly, actually.

That shifted a consciousness in the Japanese American community.

We had to start speaking up for people.

-The eviction and incarceration was not an experience that anyone asked for, but having lived it, our community now has a certain moral authority to talk about it.

And with that moral authority comes the moral responsibility to stand with others who are now being targeted on the basis of race, religion, and immigration status.

-When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best.

They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us.

They're bringing drugs.

They're bringing crime.

They're rapists.

-I would say days after the election, in 2016, there was this rousing of the Japanese American community, hearing the rhetoric that was almost word-for-word rhetoric that was used that eventually led to our incarceration.

Instead of criminals and rapists, we were saboteurs and spies, that we were a threat to the economy of the country, that we were a national security risk.

-There are things that are going on in this country that parallel the scapegoating, the racism, the rounding up of people in numbers that we haven't seen since World War II when our community was targeted.

-We the Japanese are not going to be taken again, that's done with.

But some other group will be taken for a different reason to a different place that's essentially the same.

-We are here today to speak out; to protest the unjust incarceration of innocent people seeking refuge in this country.

We stand with them, and we are saying stop repeating history.

-As the government enacted increasingly harsh immigration policies, including the separation of families, Japanese Americans stepped forward to protest.

-Obviously some people have not learned from past history.

Yes, it happened 77 years ago, but it's happening again.

It's wrong!

It's cruel.

It's inhuman.

And in many ways, worse!

-When you see the injustice happening, you need to stand up.

When you see someone being called names in public, you need to stand up.

-You need to move, today, now!

Right now!

Move!

-Let us talk.

-You got two minutes.

-Cool.

That's all we need.

Thank you, sir.

-Thank you.

-So as we discussed, we are here to make a statement.

Some people here are prepared to make that statement and be arrested.

We, once again, have children who are in great distress.

They are being taken from their families at the border.

These are people who are fleeing extreme violence and now they're being stripped away from their parents.

Our survivors, who were children in camps, are outraged.

And so, we went to Fort Sill where they're planning to imprison 1,400 children.

-...protest the incarceration of children here at Fort Sill?

-Yes.

If that's -- -What don't you people understand?!

-We will stay here.

And, uh... -What don't you people understand?!

-We understand the whole history of this country, and we aren't going to let it happen again.

-Many of the Japanese Americans often speak about the pain they suffered because no one stood up for us.

There was no organized protest.

There were no petitions signed.

There were no marches.

And people looked away.

And so, today with all this disastrous violation of human rights, everybody has a responsibility, I feel, uh, to look into what's happening.

-Now that I've told you my story, you have a piece of that legacy to stand up.

You have a piece and should it happen again, you cannot claim ignorance.

You can either say, "Yeah, I'm for that" or "No, I'm not."

And I'm hoping that reason will rule, and they will see that injustices hurt us all.

-We are not gonna stand by.

We -- we will speak out.

We will stand with.

We will get arrested for.

We will commit civil disobedience, uh, as a way of upholding our values, of, uh, loving and caring about our brothers and sisters.