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Experiencing Incarceration December , . I don’t recall anything about the immediate effects of Pearl Harbor, such as the radio broadcast or the panic and confusion. I learned later that on December seventh, a few thousand Japanese Americans were locked up, though they committed no crime. They all were loyal citizens—ministers , teachers, community leaders, and businesspeople. The irony of it is that those who championed the hardest for assimilation were often the first ones rounded up. Then on February , , President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order , ordering , West Coast Japanese Americans to be interned in concentration camps.1 At the time of our evacuation in spring , my parents, my younger brother, and I were living in Berkeley, renting a house a couple of blocks down from my maternal grandparents. My father was working as laundry help and my mother by that time, having two kids, was a stay-at-home mom. I was three years old.2 My earliest memory of this period was when we were walking from the bus into the Tanforan Racetrack. You could take only what you could carry, so my father was loaded down, my mother was loaded down, and I had my baby brother. David had just turned two. My first lesson about the responsibilities of being the oldest child was learned in Tanforan. My baby brother and I went running around the track and my brother fell. To the day he died, he had a scar on his forehead, between his eyes. Of course, because a facial vascular wound is much bloodier, it looked worse than it really was. So I’m dragging my brother home. He’s got blood streaming down his face and I’m terrified. I thought he was going to die. After they cleaned him up, I got a lesson in responsibility from my father: “You are responsible for your younger brother. Even if he does wrong, you are the oldest. Therefore you are responsible.” My protests   “Protecting the Japanese” fell on deaf ears: “He ran, he fell. What am I getting the lecture for?” That first lesson I learned in life: I was responsible for my baby brother. Come hell or high water. I’ve carried this lesson with me throughout my life. After about six months of living in the horse stables at the Tanforan Racetrack just south of San Francisco, all of us internees were moved to long-term housing. Most of us, including my extended family, were sent to the Topaz, Utah, concentration camp. My first memory of Topaz was of pulling into the camp. The topography was flat, just a vast wasteland. The conditions of the camp weren’t that hot—I’m being punny here, because of the weather. In the desert, during the day it got really hot, but at night, it got cold. In the summertime, it was like  degrees and we didn’t have air-conditioning, unless you called opening up all the doors and the windows of the barracks air-conditioning. In the wintertime, it got cold, like  degrees below. But being that young, I probably rolled with the punches. My parents were with me and they were probably reassuring me that everything’s going to be okay.3 Topaz was a desolate place situated on the edge of the desert,  miles south of Salt Lake City. The nearest town is Delta. There was another town called Provo, which was the site of the state mental institution. My father thought it was funny that they put the concentration camp near the mental hospital.4 I’m looking at a calendar featuring Mine Okubo’s artwork produced for a Topaz reunion by activists. It reads: “The maximum population was , inmates, which made Topaz the fifth largest community in Utah. Five-eighths of the internees were American citizens. Each family was assigned to an empty room, complete with one ceiling.”5 This scene here in the calendar is what I remember the most about the camps—snow everywhere. Snowdrifts were taller than me. And we had no indoor plumbing and the communal bathrooms were situated a ways away. Chamber pots were the solution to that. One of my few memories of Topaz was when I was at home alone. I was so cold that I put coals into the black potbelly stove until it turned cherry red. As I was standing there warming myself, the teenage next-door neighbor started banging on the door. He felt the heat and...

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