After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, 127,000 Japanese-American citizens were ordered to relocate to Japanese internment camps. When my grandma was my age, she was forcefully removed from her home in Reedly, California, and sent to a Japanese internment camp in Posrton, Arizona along with her parents and siblings. After years of processing that trauma, my grandma chronicled her stories in journal entries, speeches, and letters that were shared with our family and middle schools and high schools. I revisited these writings, I knew that these stories needed to be told to a bigger and broader audience.  

My grandma often wrote about how it is the responsibility of future generations to keep the history of their ancestors alive so an injustice like this will never happen again. Michi Weglyn in the preface to her book Years of Infamy writes, “I hope this uniquely American story will serve as a reminder to all those who cherish their liberties of the fragility of their rights against the exploding passions of their more numerous fellow citizens and as a warning that those who say it will never happen again are probably wrong.”