Japanese Internment

Internment > Amy Uno Ishii oral history interview Amy Uno Ishii: First we had to dispose of all of our belongings and this is a thing that really, really hurt, because we stood by so helpless when people we thought were our friends and our neighbors would come in and say to my mother, “I’ll give you two dollars for your stove and a dollar and a half for your refrigerator and a dollar for your washing machine and 50 cents for each bed in the house, including the mattress and all the linens you know, and things like that really, really hurt because we knew. I was old enough to realize that they took my mother and father 25 years of hard work and piecing together a few little things, you know, and barely getting together the bare necessities of life, you know, and then to have this kind of a thing happen. So we finally were able to get rid of everything except our—we had a piano, an old-fashioned, upright piano that we were very, very fond of, and there was no way that my mother was gonna let that piano go for two dollars. She just refused. She said she’ll take that piano out in the backyard and take an ax to it. Kristin Mitchell: What were these barracks like at Santa Anita? Were they... Ishii: Well, they were just temporary housing, you know. Mitchell: They would put up... Ishii: They would place.... Well, most of the people that were there before we got there were all in the stables. You know, people were living in Sea Biscuit’s stable and all of the various horses’ stables, and the horses were not there, but the straw was still there, and the smell was still there. We were lucky. We lived in the parking lot area where they had constructed these new pre-fabricated barracks.

Internment > Map of Japanese-American Internment Camps

Internment > “How to Tell Chinese from a Jap,” from an Army manual

Internment > Manzanar Relocation Center, April 1942

Internment > Inside the fence of an internment camp

Internment > Fred Korematsu with a letter of apology from the White House