“When I was five years old, I was categorized as an enemy alien by my own country: the United States of America. But I wasn’t an enemy, I was a five-year-old kid. And I wasn’t an alien, I was an American born in Los Angeles to a mother who was born in Sacramento, California. My father was born in Japan but he was brought to San Francisco when he was a young boy, and he was reared and educated in San Francisco. And yet, because we looked like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor, we were seen as the enemy and as aliens.

There was war hysteria that swept across the country combined with racism…. [President Roosevelt] was swept up in the fear and hysteria and he signed Executive Order 9066 which ordered all Japanese Americans on the West Coast...to be rounded up and put in barbed-wire prison camps in ten of the most desolate places in the country. I remember that day. It was a terrifying day... 

We saw two soldiers marching up our driveway carrying rifles with shiny bayonets on them and, with their fists, began pounding on the front door… My father answered the door and, literally at gunpoint, we were ordered out of our home… We were taken from our home to the horse stables of Santa Anita Horse Track, and we were assigned a smelly horse stall to live in while the camps were being built. And so that was the beginning of a chapter of American history that I lived through from the age of five until eight years old, the duration of the war... 

Immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Japanese-American young people, like all young Americans, rushed to their recruitment centers to volunteer to serve in the U.S. Military. This was an act of patriotism which was answered with a slap on the face. They were denied military service and categorized as enemy aliens⁠—and they were imprisoned. But a year into imprisonment, the government realized there was a wartime manpower shortage and there were all these young people that they could have had but had been categorized as enemy aliens. They wanted to draft us, but how to justify drafting enemy aliens out of a barbed-wire concentration camp to serve in the U.S. military? Their solution was as outrageous and as cruel as the imprisonment itself. It was a series of questions, but two questions turned all ten camps into turmoil... 

My parents were being asked to...abandon their children and bear arms to defend the nation that was imprisoning their children. It was outrageous and...an ignorantly put together loyalty questionnaire. My parents answered “no”...and, because of that, they were categorized as disloyal…. [We were then sent to] a high-security camp called The Segregation Camp which had three layers of barbed-wire fences and a half a dozen tanks patrolling the perimeter to goad and to terrorize the people who were there…”