The Journal of Ben Uchida: Citizen 13559, Mirror Lake Interment Camp, California, 1942

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, life changed for all Americans. But some might say it changed most for Japanese Americans. Because of their ethnicity, Japanese Americans became targets of racism and discrimination. With no evidence, and without ever holding a trial, President Roosevelt ordered all people of Japanese descent living in on the west coast to be placed in internment camps in remote locations of the country. Many Americans assumed that just because a person had ancestors from Japan, he or she was the enemy. The U.S. was also at war with Germany and Italy, but citizens of German or Italian ancestry were not generally considered the enemy and they were never forced out of their homes and into camps.

Over 120,000 Japanese Americans were forced to sell their possessions, abandon their homes, and live in uncomfortable army barracks surrounded by barbed-wire fences for the remaining three years of the war. Seventy percent of those imprisoned had been born in America, but they were denied the rights of American citizenship. It was not until 1988 that the U.S. government formally apologized for the internment of Japanese Americans and offered all surviving internees $20,000 dollars each in restitution. To many, these measures did little to ease the injustice and harsh treatment suffered during the war.

Meet Ben Uchida

Ben Uchida spent the war years imprisoned, along with his family, in the Mirror Lake camp in California because he and his parents were of Japanese ancestry. He kept a diary recording his experiences. Read his description of his arrival at the camp.

When I got off the train, the first thing I thought was they must have let us off at the wrong stop. This wasn’t even a stop. There was just flatness as far as the eye could see. There was nothing growing anywhere — not a tree a bush or a flower. Nothing.

Then I realized there was something. I thought it must be a mirage, but it wasn’t. It was a town — not a regular town, but about a thousand neat rows of identical army barracks that seemed to go forever.

They were enclosed by a really high fence that had barbed wire on the top. The barbed wire sloped inward so you knew it was to stop people from getting out, not from getting in. There were signs saying: ELECTRIFIED FENCE: STAND BACK.