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.