On Nov. 18, Japanese internment camp survivor Joe Yasutake came to Piedmont High School to speak about his experiences.  

Yasutake is the Vice President of the Japanese American Museum of San Jose and is on the Japantown Community Congress of San Jose.

After the Pearl Harbor bombings at the beginning of World War 2, U.S. General John DeWitt issued Executive Order 9066 which called for the evacuation of Japanese Americans and other “suspicious” figures. Over 100,000 people were sent to camps in various locations like Idaho, Arizona and California, often without any knowledge of where they were going.  

The announcement that people would be relocated came without much warning. These announcements came on posters and in newspapers across the country. People were often given two weeks to prepare for a move to an unknown destination.  When Yasutake was nine years old, he, his mother and his siblings were sent to an internment camp in Idaho.

“I remember sitting on the floor because there was no furniture,” Yasutake said about his school in the camp.

Yasutake’s family lived in the Minidoka Camp in Idaho for two years with over 9,000 other Japanese Americans. The prisoners in the camp did most of the work based on what they had done before imprisonment: former nurses worked in the hospital, former farmers worked in the fields to help provide food and so on.

While Yasutake did not spend much time on his personal story, he did give the students a glimpse into what life was like in the camps.

“[Having speakers come in] is more meaningful than any book or watching a video, it is better to hear it from people who experience [this],” social studies teacher Mark Cowherd said.

Much like Holocaust survivor Gloria Lyon who speaks at Piedmont Middle School about her experiences during the war, Yasutake believes that one of the most important things about speaking to students is that they get to hear the story firsthand from someone whose own personal experiences make the events seem more real than reading from a text book.

Yasutake said that he does not wish for anything like the internment camps to happen again and used the stigma against Muslims as his example. Much like Japanese internment, acts committed by others overseas has had an effect on a specific group here in America.

“We must remember lessons of the past so that it does not happen again,” Yasutake said.