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Reflecting On Japanese American Internment Camps, Reparations, And Serving The Nation

Alice Daniel
/
Valley Public Radio
FM89's Laura Tsutsui interviews Walter Imahara, Dale Ikeda, Paul Saito and Allan Inouye. Imahara, Saito and Inouye were all interned with their families in Jerome, Arkansas. Ikeda helped create the Fresno Assembly Center Memorial.

This week, a Japanese-American from Baton Rouge, Louisiana visited Fresno for the first time in 78 years. In 1942, Walter Imahara and his family were ordered to leave their home in Sacramento and come to the Fresno Assembly Center per President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. The family was then sent to an internment camp in Arkansas. 

Imahara visited the Fresno County Historical Museum at the Fresno Fairgrounds, where the Fresno Assembly Center used to be, along with Fresno resident and Shinzen Friendship Garden designer Paul Saito, who was also interned when he was a child. 

Listen to the interview above to hear the two men discuss what it was like to live in the camps, and what their lives were like after their families got out. 

Laura Tsutsui was a reporter and producer for Valley Public Radio. She joined the station in 2017 as a news intern, and later worked as a production assistant and weekend host. Laura covered local issues ranging from politics to housing, and produced the weekly news program Valley Edition. She left the station in November 2020.
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