Life in a Japanese-American Internment Camp

In 1942, following Pearl Harbor, members of Sarah Okner’s family along with more than 120,000 other people of Japanese heritage living on the west coast were forcibly removed from their homes and relocated to remote camps where they would spend the rest of the war. Roughly two-thirds of those incarcerated were second- or third-generation Japanese American citizens, born in the U.S., many of them children.

Okner’s multimedia lecture Life in a Japanese American Internment Camp brings together first-hand accounts from her grandparents with 15 years of research to illustrate the details of daily life in these camps, explore the political climate that led to the executive order that incarcerated thousands of innocent American citizens, and demonstrate the profound effects it had on those living there.