internment

From Matt O'Brien, "Photos of Dark Historical Event Emerge," Oakland Tribune (16 November 2006), online here:
findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4176/is_20061116/ai_n168...

"I don't even remember the picture being taken," said Satsuki Ward, who was barely 10 years old when she and her family members were uprooted from their East Bay home in May 1942. "It was utter chaos."

Ward, now a 76-year-old Fairfield resident, found out about Lange and her photographs of Japanese-American internment much later. The portrait of the Mochida family wearing identification tags around their necks made the pages of Newsweek magazine and other outlets, and helped expose a dark moment in American history.
....
Miyuki Hirano of Sparks, Nev., another one of the surviving Mochida siblings, remembers seeing her face on that book's cover.

But while they occasionally see reminders of their youth in print, it took many years for Mochida family members to be able to talk frankly about what happened to them, said Kayoko Ikuma, 69, of San Mateo, who was 4 when Lange took her photo.

Ikuma said witnessing the treatment of America's Muslim population has made her try to share her experience more.

Their parents avoided discussing the internment after the war. Their father, who had owned a successful flower-growing business in unincorporated Alameda County, returned from the camps unhappy, spent the rest of his life in domestic labor and took to drinking.

The Lange photographs, and the Mochida children's more vivid memories of years spent in the Utah camp, is all they have left from that time.

Pennylrichardsca, thanks for letting us know about this fascinating article about the Mochida family. This is definitely one of those haunting photographs of children where you wonder whatever happened to them. It's a sad story.

You might be interested in checking out nearly 4,000 photographs taken by the War Relocation Authority of the Japanese American Internment during World War II that are available in our online catalog. We have a webpage that allows you to click on links for search topics within this group of photos:
www.archives.gov/research/arc/topics/japanese-americans/

We hope to get those photos on Flickr at some point, too.

Thank you for sharing these incredibly powerful photographs.

Very moving...

You are welcome! This has been one of the more talked about photographs we've shared on the U.S. National Archives photostream. We recommend that you investigate earlier posts for the image which lead to more information about the young girls in the photograph.

Jerry (U.S. National Archives)

I'm guessing this would have been at a relocation camp for japanese-americans?

You are correct. This image is part of the series: Central Photographic File of the War Relocation Authority, compiled 1942-1945, here at the U.S. National Archives. Jerry (U.S. National Archives)

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