Preserving Stories from the WWII Japanese American Incarceration to Inspire Empathy for Future Generations.

“You know, before we left, we were like little kids. When you go into camp, you got to grow up. You're aware of other things besides yourself. And you're nobody.”

“You had a week to get ready to go to camp. You could only take what you could wear and what you could carry with two hands. Everything else gets left behind. The United States government is telling them, ‘You have to denounce Japan and pledge allegiance to the United States. On top of that, we want you to fight for us and go to war.’ If I was my dad, I would’ve done the same thing.”

“I remember my mother and I visited the bathroom building and she had fainted. Nothing like that ever happened before so I thought she had died. That was so traumatic, other ladies went to her aide and others tried to console me.”

“They still could do it, which is that they could make farmland out of nothing. That was the ingenuity and the hard work of Japanese.”

“Judo got kind of a bad name because after the war, there were so many people that got injured. They didn’t know how to fall or anything. So we had to correct all that, and make sure they did the right thing.”

“What bothered me was we lost that whole family unit because the children would sit with their friends. You know, that was really lost. I think that was sad because we were a very close knit family and we all of a sudden lost that.”