During World War II, the U.S. government invoked the Alien Enemies Act, ultimately incarcerating more than 125,000 people of Japanese descent — including many American citizens. The act uprooted and split families, causing them to abandon their homes, businesses, and communities.
It has been 80 years since the war ended and they were released. In these testimonies, nine of the last survivors of Japanese American incarceration reflect on their stolen youth and how this injustice impacted the rest of their lives.
It’s November 2023 in the Koreatown neighborhood of Los Angeles, and Mia Yamamoto has arrived at the house that her late mother lived in for more than forty years, which she’s preparing to sell. Still dressed in a skirt and blazer, the then-80-year-old criminal defense attorney has just come from work. Her trailblazing California law career spans decades, and even out of the courtroom, surrounded by cardboard boxes, she speaks in eloquent paragraphs. When asked about the purpose of a life in law, she says, “The whole point is to do justice.”
“If we are not doing anything else in this work, in this profession, in this practice, making sure that we do justice is at the top of the list,” she tells me. “The only way it’s done is when we see injustice — to act, to speak, to march, to hold protest signs, to vote, to do these things to support a community — is to do the right thing.”
Yamamoto was born at a site of injustice — a World War II Japanese American incarceration camp in Poston, Arizona — so hearing her speak about fairness and the rule of law is especially powerful. Although many of her family photographs have already been packed away, several black-and-whites of herself as a toddler wearing overalls sit unboxed and available to view.
“I don’t remember the camp at all,” she says. “I have no recollection. I guess I got out of there when I was two or something, 1945. So I do have a recollection of the resettlement, where all of us were getting out of camp at the same time, and many of us tried to go back to the same places along the West Coast and try to rebuild [our] lives from there.”
Yamamoto has spent much of her life rebuilding from her family’s wartime experience. She grew up in postwar Los Angeles, an actively hostile environment for Japanese Americans. She learned from her mother that her father, the first Asian American graduate of Loyola Law School, had called the camps unconstitutional. The incarceration’s aftermath manifested within her a deep desire to help others fight injustice.
Yamamoto represents the dwindling last generation of Japanese American camp survivors — people now age 80 and older who were children, toddlers, or infants during this often-neglected chapter of American history.