Shigeko Uno was seventeen years old and a senior at Garfield High School in Seattle when she learned that her family would be leaving. It was early 1942, three months after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and President Roosevelt had signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the military to remove all persons of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast. It did not matter that Shigeko was an American citizen. It did not matter that her family had lived in Seattle for decades. It did not matter that she had done nothing wrong. She was Japanese, and that was enough.
Across Washington, over twelve thousand people of Japanese descent received orders to report. They were given days, sometimes just forty eight hours, to dispose of their property, close their businesses, and pack whatever they could carry. Homes were sold at a fraction of their value or simply abandoned. Family businesses that had taken generations to build were shuttered overnight. Pets were left behind. Cars were sold for ten or twenty dollars to neighbors who knew the sellers had no choice.
They reported to assembly centers, temporary holding facilities set up at fairgrounds and racetracks. The Puyallup Assembly Center in western Washington was built on the grounds of the Western Washington State Fair. Families lived in converted livestock stalls. The smell had not entirely been cleaned out.
From the assembly centers, they were transferred to permanent relocation camps in remote locations across the interior West. Most of Washington's Japanese Americans were sent to Minidoka, in the Idaho desert. The camp was surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers. Families lived in tar-paper barracks divided into small compartments with no privacy. Summer temperatures reached over a hundred degrees. Winter brought bitter cold and wind that pushed dust through every crack in the walls.
The internment lasted for the duration of the war, roughly three years. When it ended in 1945, the people who had been imprisoned returned to find that much of what they had left behind was gone. Homes had been sold or vandalized. Businesses had been taken over by others. The community they had built in Seattle's Japantown had been hollowed out. Some families tried to rebuild. Others could not.
Not everyone went quietly. Gordon Hirabayashi, a senior at the University of Washington, refused to comply with the curfew order that preceded the removal. He believed the order was unconstitutional, and he was willing to go to prison to prove it. He was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to federal prison. His case went to the Supreme Court, which upheld the conviction in 1943, ruling that military necessity justified the restrictions.
Forty years later, in 1987, Hirabayashi's conviction was overturned when government documents revealed that officials had suppressed evidence showing there was no military necessity for the internment. The entire justification had been built on racial prejudice disguised as national security. The government had known this at the time. They had buried the evidence and let the convictions stand.
Hirabayashi was not the only one who fought. Minoru Yasui, a Portland attorney, deliberately violated the curfew to create a test case. Fred Korematsu in California refused to report for removal and was arrested. All three cases reached the Supreme Court. All three men lost. All three were eventually vindicated decades later when the truth came out.
In 1988, President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, which formally apologized for the internment and authorized reparations of twenty thousand dollars to each surviving internee. The check came with a letter from the president acknowledging that the internment was "motivated largely by racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership."
The money did not bring back the years. It did not rebuild the businesses. It did not undo the humiliation of being told that your citizenship meant nothing because of your ancestry. But for some, the apology mattered. It was the government saying, on the record, that what it had done was wrong.
Shigeko Uno, who had been a high school senior when the order came, spent the rest of her life making sure the story was told. She spoke at schools and community events. She gave testimony for the Densho project, a digital archive that preserves the oral histories of Japanese Americans who lived through the internment. "We want to make sure," she said, "that it never happens again."
The Puyallup fairgrounds where the assembly center stood still host the state fair every September. There is a memorial there now. Most people walk past it on their way to the rides.