My father played the shakuhachi and my mother played the koto. There were several stacks of shakuhachi sheet music. Then he went into the parlor and opened the glass cases where our most treasured things were. As I watched, he looked under the sink and he looked into the oven. I was twelve.Ī black car came right into the driveway. My three sisters, my mother, and myself were at home doing the chores. The war became real for me when the two FBI agents came to our home in Long Beach. See also Asian Americans Internment, Wartime Japanese-American Incarceration Japanese Americans World War II. In the selection here, a young girl narrates her family's experience of being thrown out of their house and moved into a horse stable in Santa Anita before being transported to a camp in Jerome, Arkansas. It is now believed that racism and hysteria, rather than actual threat, led to the internment of the Japanese. Basic issues of constitutional liberty and due process were blatantly violated by this order, which forcefully detained American citizens who had neither broken any laws nor shown any signs of disloyalty. These Japanese-Americans, a majority being American citizens, were confined in makeshift rural camps for up to four years before being allowed to resettle. In 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt, citing concerns about wartime security, issued executive order 9066 which forced upwards of 110,000 Japanese-Americans to relocate to a number of "relocation centers," or concentration camps, on the West Coast.