The largest American concentration camp during World War II stretched across the Arizona desert so far that authorities considered guard towers unnecessary. At its peak, Poston became the third-largest “city” in Arizona, holding more than 17,000 Japanese Americans.
They turned a racetrack into a prison. Families slept in converted horse stalls at Tanforan Assembly Center, surrounded by the smell of manure.
150 military police guarded fewer than 60 unarmed men at Leupp Isolation Center. Most were never charged with a crime. No one could explain why they were there, not even the people who ran it.
Gordon Hirabayashi refused curfew and removal orders and turned himself in to force a legal challenge in 1942. When the government wouldn’t take him to prison, he hitchhiked. He believed the Constitution would prove him right.
Before the final frontier, there was barbed wire. George Takei’s story traces a path from incarceration camps to Star Trek and a lifetime of advocacy.
Born in Russia to a Jewish family, A. L. Wirin became one of the fiercest legal defenders of Japanese American civil rights, helping challenge California’s alien land and discriminatory fishing laws in landmark Supreme Court cases.
After California fired Mitsuye Endo in 1942, she became the lead plaintiff in a case challenging the government’s incarceration of Japanese Americans. When officials later offered to release her if she dropped the fight, she refused. It kept her in camp for two extra years.
Gonzo Mimaki’s life spanned the arc of Japanese American history: samurai roots in Kumamoto, railroad labor, California farming, community leadership, and wartime incarceration at Heart Mountain.
On March 27, 1942, Santa Anita Racetrack was converted into a detention site for Japanese Americans. At its peak, more than 18,000 people were held there — over 8,500 lived in horse stalls. It was called “protection.”
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