♪♪ (somber music) - Well, I guess the Nisei pretty much knew that they were going to be incarcerated in these camps.

And my father told me once that he didn't do anything wrong and neither did any of us, and he was not gonna spend the duration of the war in a camp.

- And then came this news that you could leave on a voluntary basis if you had a place to go to, if you would not be a burden to the government, and if you could do all this within 72 hours.

- We all migrated, like a caravan, just like "The Grapes of Wrath" going east.

- As I recall, we went directly from Los Angeles to a little, not even a town, called Black Rock, Utah.

- People that went to camp, they went to the mess hall to be fed.

But we had to work, otherwise we do not eat.

And then they would only pay us 25 cents an hour.

- I think I owe it to my parents, my uncles to tell about this experience, 'cause they took it with them to their graves, I know they did.

- Surprisingly, very few people know about this exodus of this group.

- [Evelyn] Okay, well, I'll try to tell that story.

- No, really, yeah.

(pensive music) - [Evelyn] When I was one year old, the United States government forcibly removed my family from our home in San Francisco.

They sent us, along with 120,000 other Japanese Americans, to concentration camps, where we lived for the next three years.

My earliest memories are from life in the camps during the second world war.

Living through the trauma of displacement and incarceration as a young child has informed my work as a scholar of race, gender, and citizenship.

It is only recently that I have learned about a different chapter of the Japanese American experience, that until now has remained untold.

That of a relatively small population of Japanese Americans who took their fate into their own hands and fled the West Coast before the government could forcibly remove and incarcerate them.

Resettling in states such as Colorado, Utah, and Wisconsin, many of these self-evacuees battled poverty, isolation, and racial violence.

While others were welcomed into new communities where they could rebuild their lives.

All became refugees in their own country, on a forced migration into the unknown.

Now, their stories are being told for the first time.

(somber music) (somber music) There was only one major wave of immigration from Japan to the United States.

Starting in 1882, when the Chinese Exclusion Act ended all immigration from China, creating demand for laborers from Japan, and ending with the Immigration Act of 1924, which halted all immigration from Japan and the rest of Asia.

As with many immigrant populations, the growing Japanese American community was increasingly seen as a rival ethnic economy and a threat to White American workers.

An organized and powerful anti-Japanese movement successfully campaigned for a series of laws prohibiting Japanese immigrants from becoming citizens, owning land, sending their children to school with White children, and more.

- What was running throughout this is certainly a kind of racial fear about what were called 'Asiatics' at the time.

That in fact the Japanese soon became seen as indistinguishable from the Chinese that preceded them.

At least in the imaginations of some of the White politicians, labor leaders, etcetera, who believed them to be a significant threat to not only White American labor, but a threat really to the White race more generally.

(pensive music) - [Narrator 1] The fundamental basis of all legislation upon this subject, State and Federal, has been and is, race undesirability.

It seeks to limit their presence by curtailing their privileges.

For they will not come in large numbers and long abide with us if they may not acquire land.

California Attorney General Ulysses Webb, 1913.

(somber music) - [Evelyn] In spite of these restrictive measures, Japanese Americans managed to build their own businesses and establish families.

By 1940, there were more than 120,000 Japanese Americans living in the United States, two-thirds of whom were US-born citizens.

- We were in Oakland.

My folks had a cleaning and dressmaking place on Market Street, which is now a freeway, 7th and Market.

And we lived in the back of the store.

My mother, she was the dressmaker.

And she had a dressmaking school there.

My father ran the cleaning part of it.

- At that time, my father and his brother, a younger brother, they went into the grocery business, and it was in Gilroy.

They carried everything from rubber boots for irrigation and groceries, and then my mother made tofu in the back, fresh tofu.

(somber music) - [Evelyn] Japanese Americans were particularly successful in agriculture.

As of 1940, Japanese were operating fewer than 4% of all California farms, yet they were growing the majority of strawberries, celery, snap peas, and other fruits and vegetables.

That year, the value of crops grown by Japanese in California was more than $32 million.

- There was a Burpee seed company in Lompoc, which is pretty big, and many of the Japanese worked growing flowers for the Burpee seed company.

And so the competition was pretty keen, and so there were a lot of problems even before the war.

So when the war came, that was a good reason to just do their best to send us away.

Of course, they wanted our land.

(foreboding music) (menacing music) - I distinctly remember, because we had one of our cousins living with us, and he got married that day, December 7, 1941.

So later on in the wedding ceremony, and it was a family-type ceremony, people were invited to the Chinese restaurant place, it was later in the afternoon that we heard bombs were exploding in Hawaii.

Well, I was a kid of seven or eight years old, so I didn't really get the impact of it on a grand scale.

But that's when to me the war started, was at my cousin's wedding.

- During the school year there, I was pretty popular.

And I was one of the main guys.

Generally, when I would get on my bike and I'd ride around, all the younger kids used to kind of look up to me and say, "Hey, Shige, hey, Shige, hey, Shige!"

But this particular Sunday, I was riding around, and I wasn't getting the same response.

A couple of times, (indistinct), I heard that "Dirty Jap" word.

And it didn't make sense to me.

But I didn't think that much about it until the next day, which was Monday, December 8, we went to school, and then that's when the principal called an assembly.

And he notified all of us that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and we were involved in World War II.

And then the principal said, telling the kids, don't blame us, the kids either, the Japanese kids.

Because we had nothing to do with it.

And I remember I felt real bad.

And I remember tears flowing down my eyes, hearing that news, and the principal telling the other kids do not blame us.

- My mother and Dad were out of town at the time, they were in LA.

Because my mother was in very fragile health at that time.

And she left us, the children, with a family friend to look after us.

Because every Sunday, we used to go to church on Terminal Island.

In order to go to Terminal Island, you had to ride the ferry across the channel.

Well, coming back from church, there was a cage built on the landing of the ferry.

And after we paid our passage, they put us in this cage.

They wouldn't allow us to leave, to go home because of the war.

They said, "The war broke out and you cannot leave."

Finally, the Sunday School teacher came to our rescue.

She saw us still in there, so she explained to them that these are American citizens, they have rights.

So, it was around eight o'clock at night that they finally let us go home.

That's when I found out it was December 7 and the war broke out.

And we were scared to death.

(dramatic music) - [Evelyn] In the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor, more than 2,000 Issei, or Japanese immigrants, were arrested without legal charges and sent to prison camps in Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, and elsewhere.

The men taken away were community leaders, including language school teachers and Buddhist ministers.

- They came after my dad, and he was taken.

And they told him that he had a weapon on the farm, so they have to take him away.

That was their reasoning for taking him.

But what we had was those huge knives that we used to cut the cauliflowers.

And that was just farm equipment.

- Well, my grandfather was taken away.

He was kind of a Japanese leader in the South Park area.

And so, when the war started, the FBI came, and, of course, the family didn't know where he was for many years.

(foreboding music) - [Evelyn] On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which led to the establishment of military areas in the states of Washington, Oregon, California, and Arizona, from which all persons of Japanese heritage were excluded.

Being Japanese on the West Coast was now a crime.

- [Narrator 2] The Japanese race is an enemy race.

And while many second and third-generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become 'Americanized,' the racial strains are undiluted.

The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken.

General John DeWitt, 1942.

(pensive music) - [Evelyn] The forced removal of Japanese Americans cleared the way for a coordinated land grab by White agricultural interests.

To enable non-Japanese operators to take over Japanese farms, the United States Government partnered with growers' leagues to create farm corporations, and awarded millions of dollars in loans.

Together, these interests took control of more than 6,000 Japanese farms.

(unsettling music) To relocate the Japanese American population away from the West Coast, the government constructed ten concentration camps, many built on tribal reservations.

With forced removal and incarceration looming, Japanese Americans were given a seemingly impossible choice.

If they could immediately self-evacuate and leave the western states on their own, with no assistance of any kind from the government, they could avoid being sent to the camps.

- To have then something like this happen must have felt like this grand betrayal of trust and of faith in your country.

To then have to then choose what's going to happen to you, right, do you then flee, or then do you elect to be in a camp where you don't know what the conditions are going to be like at all, and you don't know anything about how long you're going to be there, or how you're gonna be treated.

I probably would have self-evacuated.

- Everybody was kind of scared, you know?

Like when we got the word that we had to go to camp, we had to evacuate the West Coast.

Oh, my mom was really scared.

She said, "They're going to send us "to the concentration camp, "and they're gonna feed us pork and beans.

"and we're gonna all die of starvation."

And everything, you know (chuckles).

- Well, I guess the Nisei pretty much knew that they were going to be incarcerated in these camps.

And my father told me once that he didn't do anything wrong and neither did any of us, and he was not gonna spend the duration of the war in a camp.

- Actually, the decision was my father's.

First of all, he didn't want the family to be behind barbed wire, basically in a prison environment.

And I also think he was afraid that if we were in the camps, there was a possibility we could be exterminated.

I mean, that's just what I think.

- My mother at that time was pregnant.

And we were hearing all kinds of stories about what kind of treatment we would be subject to.

And one thing that concerned my dad was that my mother would have to have a baby right in the middle of wherever they might be.

And he did not like that idea at all.

And then came this news that you could leave on a voluntary basis if you had a place to go to, if you would not be a burden to the government, and if you could do all this within 72 hours.

- And so, at the time that we had to evacuate or go to the internment camps, well then they, I guess my mom and dad, all of 'em were instructed to start cleaning out your belongings, and you won't have very much to take with you.

So we took the evacuation.

And we had to be out of California by March 27, as I recall, 1942.

So, in doing so, with just my family, my mom took care of the store and all the belongings, and of course we were so limited, 'cause we were gonna move to Spokane, the four children, my mom and dad, in a 1936 Chrysler.

And we just had a couple of suitcases with just a few pots and pans, and a few favorite clothing, and that was it.

(menacing music) - [Evelyn] Japanese Americans seeking to self-evacuate from the West Coast were met with hostility and outright rejection from most other states.

- [Narrator 3] A good solution to the Jap problem in Idaho, and the nation, would be to send them all back to Japan and then sink the island.

They live like rats, breed like rats, and act like rats.

We don't want them buying or leasing land and becoming permanently located in our state.

Chase Clark, Governor of Idaho, 1942.

- [Narrator 4] All Japanese must be in concentration camps for the remainder of the war.

We want to keep this a white man's country.

Bert Miller, Attorney General of Idaho, 1942.

- [Narrator 5] The people of Wyoming have a dislike for any Orientals, and simply will not stand for being California's dumping ground.

If you bring Japanese into my state, I promise you they will be hanging from every tree.

Nels Smith, Governor of Wyoming, 1942.

- [Evelyn] The Governor of Colorado, Ralph Carr, was alone in expressing his state's willingness to accept Japanese American refugees from the West Coast.

- [Narrator 6] America is made up of men and women from the four corners of the Earth, of every racial origin and nationality.

It is truly the melting pot of the world.

There is no place here for the man who thinks that his people or those who speak his language are in turn entitled to preference over any others.

Ralph Carr, Governor of Colorado, 1942.

(menacing music continues) (menacing music continues) (pensive music) - [Evelyn] During a brief window of three weeks, 5,000 men, women, and children undertook the Herculean task of rapidly packing up their lives and fleeing from the western states.

By the end of March, the US government halted all voluntary self-evacuation.

The remaining 120,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast were forcibly removed and sent to concentration camps.

- Because Japanese Americans were rounded up and incarcerated just because they were of Japanese ancestry.

It didn't matter that they were citizens.

They were born in this country or they were naturalized citizens, and they were still rounded up.

They were blamed for what had happened, for another country's attack on the US.

- Yeah, just the great unknown must have been so stressful.

Which is why again, I chalk it up to the bravery of the Issei and the Nisei at the time, who then faced what was coming, bravely.

I think they stood up to it.

And the fact that they took their best clothes with them, and they dressed in their best suits and dresses to be carted away.

I mean, that to me is, that to me I think was their way of saying, "Whatever happens, happens.

"We're going to face it in the best, "we're gonna put on the best face that we can.

"And take it as it comes."

Yeah.

(lively music) - [Evelyn] From the files of the War Relocation Authority.

"Those who attempted to cross over into the interior states "ran into all kinds of trouble.

"Some were turned back by armed posses "at the border of Nevada.

"Others were clapped into jail and held overnight "by panicky local peace officers.

"Nearly all had difficulties in buying gasoline.

"Many were greeted by 'No Japs Wanted' signs "on the main streets of the interior communities.

"And a few were threatened with possibilities "of mob violence."

- We all migrated, like a caravan, just like "The Grapes of Wrath" going east (chuckles).

- Car was packed?

- Oh, yes, uh-huh.

In fact, my dad had chickens on the pickup (laughs).

- First we got to the border of California and Nevada, and there was a sentry guarding.

I don't know if it's guarding the bridge or whatever, but he said, "You know I've seen so many "Japanese going here.

"What's going on?"

He didn't know that there was an evacuation.

But he went through our things and then he let us go through.

But then we stopped at a little cafe, in the desert there's this little cafe that the local people go to and eat.

Well, we had to go and eat, so we walked in there, and of course we got stared down, and everything.

And we thought, well, we're not gonna get fed.

But we said, "Oh, the heck with it."

So we sat down and they didn't feed us for a long time.

But finally, they took our order.

And we had heard that a lot of time, they'll spit in your food, but we didn't know the difference, so.

But the thing that happened during that time, they used to have jukeboxes at each, along the counter.

So this guy, one guy had put "Let's Remember Pearl Harbor."

And I know that was aimed at us.

♪ Let's remember Pearl Harbor ♪ ♪ As we go to meet the foe ♪ But you know what we did?

We said we're not gonna let them get us down, so we just kept in time with the music to let 'em know it wasn't bothering us.

So they let us finish and eat, and then we walked out of that restaurant.

♪ Let's remember Pearl Harbor ♪ ♪ And go on to victory ♪ - Yeah, I remember.

And part of it through my mother is that, driving to Utah we did not stay at any hotels or motels.

She said they wouldn't allow us, so we slept in the car.

She said it wasn't that easy finding a place where they would feed us, restaurants you know, no Japs and such.

But every so often they'd find a restaurant that would take us in.

- There were so much rumors, it was so frightful that we did not want to drive on the highway, so we all took the train.

And when we got on the train, and then the porter came, and in the evening he would draw all the shades so that the people could not see that it was Japanese people in there.

And there was all kinds of rumors going around that they're gonna stop the train in the middle of the desert, and they're gonna march all of you out, and they're gonna shoot you all.

It was so frightful.

(dramatic music) - Oh, we went to Longmont, and we stayed at actually a little two-room building, or maybe a three.

It had kind of a large bedroom, a living room, and a kitchen, and an outhouse.

- As I recall, we went directly from Los Angeles to a little, not even a town, called Black Rock, Utah, which I think is in central Utah.

And I Googled it recently, it's now a ghost town.

- I know my dad once went to a bar to have a drink, and he was drinking, and the other guys looked at him, and said, "You're Chinese, aren't ya?"

And my dad said, "Yeah, I'm Chinese."

(Don laughing) Just to keep things calm.

(somber music) - [Evelyn] Several families from the San Francisco Bay Area self-evacuated as a group to Keetley, Utah to lease a ranch from the mayor of Keetley, George Fisher.

Arriving in winter, the group of 140 people did not realize at first that the land was full of rocks and sagebrush, and was not farmable.

- [Narrator 7] What is your advice about hiring Japanese help on our farms this summer?

We must have cheap help or the work goes undone.

Some of the best and most dependable help I ever had was Japs.

I asked my neighbor what he thought people would say if they see a Jap running my farm this summer.

"Well," said he, "I would be afraid to hire them.

"I am afraid someone will blow me up."

Of course in my business, I cannot afford to have anybody talking unfavorably about me, let alone blow me up.

Personally, I think it is better to put these people to productive labor on our farms, than to put them in some concentration camp where they will need a lot of supervision and produce nothing.

OJ Henderson, farmer, in a letter to Utah Governor Herbert Maw, March 1942.

- It was just kind of like to scare them.

But what was interesting was, my father's bookkeeper, he's the kind that wherever he goes, he organizes a baseball team, and so this one Mormon boy came and joined, and he finally confessed that he was the one that threw the bomb.

But they got along.

He was happy to be part of the team, I guess.

- [Evelyn] One of the leaders of the Keetley Colony, Fred Wada, organized a non-profit, cooperative enterprise, Keetley Farms.

The colony toiled long hours to convert as much of the land as possible into food-producing soil.

Although the colony struggled to sustain itself, and many members had to leave to pursue employment elsewhere, eventually they were able to produce enough fruits and vegetables to contribute to the war effort.

Fred Wada's promotion of the seeming success of the Keetley Colony led to a notable shift in local media coverage of the refugees from the West Coast.

- [Narrator 8] At Keetley, a group of Japanese Americans are staking their future on 3,800 acres of leased land, on their labor and on the spirit of fair play, which has made the United States the world's number one democracy.

Clearing the land is a back-breaking job.

The men, ranging in age from 17 to 70, are working 16 to 18 hours a day, every day.

There's an American flag flying atop a 30-foot pole.

On either side at the base is a freshly painted sign, "Food for Freedom".

Salt Lake Telegram, June 1942.

- [Narrator 9] These transplanted farmers and businessmen aren't receiving a cent of financial subsidy from the federal government, or from any other outside source.

The average Utah farmer would rather chop trees, build fence, break rock, or do almost any other chore than clear sagebrush land.

It ranks as one of the most difficult of western farm activities.

But these new citizens have persisted at the work because they know they must.

Ogden Standard-Examiner, 1942.

- [Evelyn] The colony even sent a box of produce to Governor Herbert Maw, who had been hostile to the idea of Japanese Americans settling in Utah.

- [Narrator 10] I am writing to thank you for the box of delicious vegetables which you and Mr. Fisher were kind enough to deliver to my home.

The beets, lettuce, peas, turnips, and onions were as fine as any I have ever tasted.

You and your people are certainly to be congratulated on the fine work you are doing in Keetley.

We are all very proud to know that you are making such splendid headway during the period of time when the odds are against you.

Herbert Maw, Governor of Utah, July 1942.

(lively music) - [Evelyn] Many other self-evacuees also went into farming, whether they had an agricultural background or not.

- My Dad started farming.

And they raised sugar beets there, you know?

He had never even heard of sugar beets.

And my sister and I were like 12 and 11.

We had never been on a farm before, and never worked on a farm.

So, when they told us (chuckles) to thin sugar beets, I said, "Well, we'll take a stab at it."

So we did that, and then 20 minutes later, my aunt comes running up and says, "You know, you're cutting the beets and leaving the weeds."

We didn't know the difference between the weed or the beet.

- They went into vegetable farming.

From California's two, three acres of flower business to hundreds of acres of vegetable farming.

And there, my mother and my aunt, in the mid-seasons of crop, would carry this backpack that contained spray, powdered spray to kill aphids on plants.

They would carry this on the back, walk up and down the rows, spraying the infected plants.

And at the end, when they made their rounds, their babies were in the pickup truck.

And so, they would take time to breastfeed them.

That kind of scene, just unforgettable scenes like that.

- We'd get up at 4:00 in the morning, prepare lunch, and go out in the fields, and work 'til dark.

And then my younger sister, who was 9 or 10 years old at the time, she was in charge of all our meals, she had to cook dinner for us and take care of the two younger brothers at home.

- After the first year, my father didn't think we would survive.

And he actually wrote to the federal government to ask to be incarcerated, and they said no, it cannot be done.

I remember that incident, yeah.

So, after that, he resigned to the fact, and they tried their best.

(somber music) - [Evelyn] For the self-evacuee children, many had to change schools repeatedly as their families moved to find work, often in communities where a Japanese presence was unfamiliar and unwanted.

In some public schools, teachers pressured the students to convert to Christianity or Mormonism as a condition for enrollment.

- But here again, it turns out that at the end of the school day, each day, the routine was that we literally ran towards home, which was three miles away.

We walked to school each morning, and we ran because what proceeded was that they would start throwing rocks at us.

And so, therefore, we ran.

At one point, I threw a rock back.

And by chance, it struck a boy's forehead.

He was not seriously injured, but he reported that to his father, and the father happened to be a very prominent farmer in the area.

And that evening, he did confront my father at our place.

And my father knew what happened.

Even if I didn't tell him, he knew what happened.

But he had to profusely apologize for the incident.

And the event ended as such.

- But I remember more than anything that the students and the faculty really did not accept me.

But I went out for football.

And I wasn't accepted.

I remember the coach giving me just a gray sweatshirt, while the others had old number-type shirts, what they call uniforms.

But he didn't give me one of those, he gave me just a gray sweatshirt to put over my shoulder pads.

After a while, I was able to, let's say, climb the ladder.

And by the time the first game came about, I was issued a normal uniform, and I played on the second team.

But I recall, everyone was against me, I felt.

Especially when we played opposing teams.

They would call me names, they would spit on me.

When I got tackled, they would pound on me like this, and things like that.

And call me all kinds of names.

By the end of the season though, I was accepted by the coach and the team.

And when the season ended, the coach said, "I'll see you next year."

- [Evelyn] What was that school experience like?

- Horrible, it was the most miserable time of our lives.

It really was.

Those people in Utah.

I just can't describe how awful it was for the Japanese Americans, especially the fellows, you know?

We were in junior high, seventh graders.

And the boys every day, the bullying-types of boys would grab them by their pants and throw them across the bus, every day.

And the bus driver saw all this going on, and he never made a move to rescue them or to tell them to quit doing that.

It was really hard to watch.

And they always picked on the little guys.

They just throw 'em across the bus, every day.

And then us, the girls, the boys tried to unbutton us and undress us.

And my mother said, I asked my mother, "Would you please make us a coat "that buttons all the way down for me and my sister?"

My mother used to wonder why.

I didn't dare tell her why, because she had so many problems herself, you know?

So she made us a coat, each of us.

And we wore that coat whether it was hot or cold, or whatever, because the boys couldn't unbutton us as easily.

After school, to get on the bus, there would be a line of kids waiting, and for us to get on the bus, and they would all spit on us.

And that happened every day.

That was the most horrible thing.

(pensive music) - [Evelyn] Some self-evacuee families did find welcoming communities in which to rebuild their lives.

- I thought Colorado was very nice in letting Japanese live during the war.

I thought it was very big of them.

Nowhere else would accept, you know?

- Overall to me, it was a more positive experience, than anything.

And I look back now and I think, it opened up a whole new world for us.

- It's a strange thing.

When we purchased the home in Delta, the people that were across the street, that lived across the street, their name was Petty, and their son was killed in the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

And yet, they were very good to us.

As a matter of fact, when we moved back to Mountain View, there was a taxicab came down the street, this couple got out, and the cab left, and it was the Petty's.

They came to visit us in Mountain View.

They were so good to us.

(dramatic music) - [Evelyn] The second world war ended in August 1945 with the atomic bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The self-evacuees had spent more than three years as refugees from the West Coast.

They had also been largely isolated from the majority of Japanese Americans, who had spent the war years in the camps.

(somber music) At the end of the war, one-third of the original members of the Keetley colony remained in Utah.

The other two-thirds returned to California.

- [Narrator 11] And here endeth a chapter in a great American drama.

The 140 Japanese Americans who participated in the migration herein recorded have my profound respect.

I feel that if every cross-section of 100,000 souls in the United States could stand the acid test to which these citizens have been put, the safety of this government would be assured.

George Fisher, Mayor of Keetley, Utah, January 1945.

(dramatic music) - [Evelyn] In the post-war years, many Japanese Americans continued to face anti-Japanese hostility and discrimination.

- Of course, when I started school, first grade, some of the kids would come up and say, "I don't like you."

Out of the blue.

I don't know this girl from, wherever she was from, but she said, "I don't like you."

And her attitude was just really mean.

And she said, "Because you killed my uncle."

Well, I felt that I wasn't guilty of doing that, but anyway.

So I went home after school that day, and I asked my mom, and I told her what the girl said to me.

And she said, "Well, don't take it to heart."

She said, "She probably doesn't know what she's saying.

"It's just something that happened during the war."

- I don't like to express this, but I will tell you what really happened.

I was taking a differential equations course, and it was a very important examination, and I thought I did well.

And I got my paper back without any marks on it, but I had a grade of a B.

And I was very disturbed, and I didn't know what to do.

But one of my classmates, a White classmate, he became friends with me.

And we were comparing notes, and he said he was happy, he had got an A. I asked the professor, I met with him and asked the reason why my grade was B and this fellow's grade was A.

And the answers were identical.

This is a mathematical, differential equations course.

And he looked at me and he says, "I don't care how well you do, I don't care how well you do "your work, I don't care how well you do "on your examinations, but you will never get an A "out of my department."

That's what he told me.

- I was working with about 30 civil service employees.

And one day, this blond, blue-eyed woman comes to me and says, "Hmm, I've gotta go a little bit more."

I thought, "What is this woman talking about?"

She was getting suntanned and wanted to be as dark as I am.

And that was a catharsis, let me tell you.

In our language, it was a religious experience.

Finally, somebody liked me for even my darkness.

And that sort of changed my whole life.

I was finally able to accept myself as a Japanese.

(pensive music) - [Evelyn] Eventually, most Japanese Americans, including the self- evacuees, returned to the West Coast.

Despite the disruption of their lives and education, many of the young self-evacuees went on to successful careers, including as engineers, ministers, pharmacists, and mechanics.

(melancholic music) Looking back, the self-evacuees express a range of opinions as to whether they were better or worse off than Japanese Americans who were incarcerated in the camps.

- In retrospect, my mother and father were very, very happy that they chose voluntary evacuation, because my sister, Sumi, who is a year younger than I am, was born premature.

Denver General had incubators, and she is still living today.

It's said that in the camps, the infant mortality rate ran about 40%.

'Cause if there were any problems with the birth, the medical facilities were very primitive.

And so, my dad's younger brother's wife lost a child who was born in camp about the same time Sumi was born.

But being that my parents had access to medical facilities, modern medical facilities at the time, Sumi is still alive, whereas my Cousin Roy only survived maybe three or four days.

- I had a cousin that passed away in camp, in Minidoka.

And he was only about nine years old, 10 years old.

And so, my dad went to the funeral.

And he said when he was on the bus and they were bringing him into Minidoka, he said he had tears in his eyes because he saw these soldiers all the way around camp.

But once he got into Minidoka, he saw a lot of his friends from the Seattle area.

And he said, "I really kind of envied them "because they weren't doing anything.

"They were playing Shogi and all these Japanese games, "and they had a real easy life."

Whereas my dad, he really had to work out on the farm, and everything, so he kind of thought at the time that maybe they made a mistake going to Spokane instead of going to camp.

- I do not know what camp life was like.

So when I went to the museum and I saw all those photos, my girlfriends, they were in Poston, and I said, "Oh, I don't think I could've taken the camp life."

They said, "At least you people had your freedom.

"You didn't have the barbed wires around you."

But I said that we could not, nobody fed us, the government did not feed us.

We had to work.

And so, I said that was hard work.

But they still think that we were luckier than they were.

(somber music) - [Evelyn] Even during the second world war, the United States government acknowledged that Japanese Americans had been forcibly removed and incarcerated despite having committed no crimes or wrongdoing.

- [Narrator 12] All evidence available to the War Relocation Authority indicates that the great majority of them are completely loyal to the United States.

War Relocation Authority, May 1943.

- There were significant financial losses, obviously, with respect to the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans.

And these include the direct loss of property, the direct loss of the incomes in which businesses generated during those intervening years.

But the other losses as well, not only the loss of livelihood, but in the loss of say education, not being able to complete degrees, not being able to finish up in schools that they were immersed in, or careers that they were immersed in.

And so, what you have is really the loss of not only financial capital, if you will, but also social capital in terms of education and training, which, they are lost years.

But the other aspect of this is of course the trauma.

That's incalculable, you can't calculate the sort of trauma that was induced by the experiences.

- My sister and I really missed the fact that we weren't able to get our education.

Because that's what we truly wanted.

So I would hope that everybody would have an opportunity to get that education.

I feel really strongly about that.

(dramatic music) - [Evelyn] Experiencing such a significant human rights violation first-hand inspired many in the Japanese American community to fight for social justice, from the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and '60s to the redress movement in the 1980s.

The redress movement successfully secured an official apology from the US government, as well as some token monetary compensation for both the survivors of the camps and the self-evacuees.

- I think the people that are most active, that understand the history that the community had gone through, they've become more active recently, I think especially after 9/11 happened, and Muslims were rounded up, and so Japanese Americans were one of the first to stand by them and really advocate for them, saying that you can't round up Muslims just because of their religion or what they look like.

- I think it has politicized our community in an amazing way, because it has made us identify with the downtrodden.

And even to this day, we organize around other issues based on our understanding of the Internment.

So for example, the current issues at the border that we're seeing with Central and South American immigrants being detained by the United States government and families being separated and held in detention centers and cages, that hits so close to home, that we immediately jump to action.

- You know, when I was at UC Berkeley, and I took speech, I wrote about the evacuation.

So, I researched and this and that.

And I came to the conclusion that actually the evacuation was really not because of the threat of the Japanese Americans for the war effort, but it was economical.

Because the Japanese families, hard-working, were having control of the farming in California.

So anyway, I wrote this paper, I gave the speech.

And you know what surprised me?

No one in my class had even known about the evacuation.

I mean, this was like 1951, 52.

And no one, it was like they never heard about the Japanese being evacuated.

- I'm certainly happy to be able to vent some of the feelings (laughs).

You keep talking about it, talking about it, and hopefully a lot of the pains will go away.

- This opportunity I hope will give me an opportunity to enlighten people about another experience.

I'm sorry for getting emotional here.

I think I owe it to my parents, my uncles, to tell about this experience, because they took it with them to their graves, I know they did, so.

- I would like them to understand, really understand the hardship the parents went through, you know?

Take away all their possessions, or lose their possessions.

One, be shipped to the camps, the other, like us, move out of California.

Although it was voluntarily, but still you lose a lot of stuff.

And ask themselves, could you do it?

If I were to ask myself now, could I do it?

I don't know.

(pensive music)