On April 11, 1943, James Hatsuaki Wakasa was shot and killed by a guard at Topaz while walking his dog. Witnesses and evidence placed him 20 feet inside the fence, but the military claimed he was trying to escape, and the guard was acquitted.
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The horror of the Bataan Death March did not end in the Philippines. In the United States, it intensified anti-Japanese hysteria and helped justify the forced removal of 120,000 Japanese Americans.
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Hired to make forced removal look humane, Dorothea Lange instead documented the heartbreak of Japanese American families given six days to leave San Francisco.
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On National Go For Broke Day, we honor the Japanese American soldiers of the 100th, 442nd, and MIS who fought for a country that once doubted their loyalty.
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It took decades for Japanese fishermen and their families to build Terminal Island into one of the West Coast’s most productive fishing villages. After Pearl Harbor, Civilian Exclusion Order No. 4 gave 3,000 residents only days to leave everything behind.
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In 1942, the California DMV fired 400 employees because they were “Japanese.” And you thought your DMV was bad.
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Japanese Americans fighting the Japanese in Japan sounded like an April Fool’s joke in 1945. But on Okinawa, Nisei soldiers of the MIS were intercepting radio traffic, translating captured documents, and persuading soldiers and civilians to surrender.
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At Manzanar, some Japanese Americans slipped out at night to fish in the streams beyond the camp. They escaped the camp. But only for a few hours at a time. The Manzanar Fishing Club (2012) tells this story.
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On March 28, 1942, Minoru Yasui deliberately violated a military curfew to challenge its legality. He walked the streets of Portland for hours, trying to get arrested. When no one stopped him, he turned himself in.
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