Forced Out: Internment and the Enduring Damage
to California's Cities and Towns

The date was February 19, 1942. Barely two months after the outbreak of war with Japan, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signs into law Executive Order 9066-a document ordering citizens of Japanese ancestry living along the United States west coast to be rounded up and forcibly moved to internment camps across the country.
The government feared that individuals could collaborate with the enemy.

While some Japanese Americans were given the option of remaining free if they moved to the Midwest or east coast, most were interned: 120,000 of them. Forced to close their businesses, their homes. Forced out, taking with them only what they could carry.

According to Chris Komai at the Japanese American National Museum,
"For a lot of these issei immigrants their entire lives had been spent constructing these businesses and to have this indefinite sentence put upon them, I mean someone who has been convicted of a felony of breaking and entering or stealing or something like that, they know when they're going to get out of prison, but these people never had an idea."

After World War Two ended in 1945, interned Japanese Americans were released from the camps and returned to what was left of their former lives in California. The struggle to rebuild is the focus of this program and web site: personal stories of hope, honor, perseverance.

The cost of internment in terms of dollars lost to Japanese Americans is difficult to assess, say scholars such as Wayne Maeda at Sacramento State University. Professor Maeda says that estimates range from $300 million to $600 million using 1980 valuations (when an initial study was completed). But in today's dollars, the amount lost could total in the billions.

This documentary probes the impact of incarceration of Japanese American business people during World War II.

- CSUS Professor Wayne Maeda and Henry Higashi, a Stockton produce broker who lost his business but went on to become a successful farmer

- Paul Osaki, Executive Director of the Japanese Cultural and Community Center in San Francisco

- Sumi Honnami, whose family started the popular Honnami Taedo department store, which was among the first businesses to open in San Francisco's Japan Town after World War II

- Chris Komai with the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles

- George Takei, chairman of the board of JANM

- East Bay quilters Hatsue Katsura, Bess Kawachi Chin, and Phyllis Mizuhara;

- Roy Kito, owner of the Fugetsu-Do, a Japanese confectionary in LA's Little Tokyo, now owned by Roy's son

- Ellen Endo-Dizon, Editor in Chief of Rafu Shimpo

- Former California Assemblyman and Mayor of Oxnard Nao Takasugi and Ignacio Carmona, the family friend who stepped in to run the Takasugi's store and guard their possessions in their absence.