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Susan H. Kamei, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and Duncan Williams, University of Southern California
(THE CONVERSATION) June Aochi Berk, now 92 years old, remembers the trepidation and fear she felt 80 years ago on Jan. 2, 1945. On that date, Berk and her family members were released by military order from the U.S. government detention facility in Rohwer, Arkansas, where they had been imprisoned for three years because of their Japanese heritage.
“We didn’t celebrate the end of our incarceration, because we were more concerned about our future. Since we had lost everything, we didn’t know what would become of us,” Berk recalls.
The Aochis were among the nearly 126,000 people of Japanese ancestry who had been forcibly removed from their West Coast homes and held in desolate inland locations under Executive Order 9066, issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on Feb. 19, 1942.
Approximately 72,000, or two-thirds, of those incarcerated were, like Berk, American-born citizens. Their immigrant parents were legal aliens, precluded by law from becoming naturalized citizens. Roosevelt’s executive order and subsequent military orders excluding them from the West Coast were based on the presumption...
