They were expecting to move 110,000 Japanese in the exclusion zone of the United States to concentration camps.

Seattlites were temporarily held in places like the Puyallup Fairgrounds for many, many months.

The government argued, and the court agreed that there was insufficient time, and so they had to take action without trying to sift the loyal from the disloyal.

These were actually detention centers.

Thrown together holding pens on the way to the larger concentration camps.

From Bainbridge Island, we were the first group to be taken to Manzanar.

They're taking us to Idaho.

They're taking us to Minidoka.

Evacuation.

More than 100,000 men, women and children, all of Japanese ancestry, removed from their homes in the Pacific Coast state, to wartime community, established in out-of-the-way places.

Their, evacuation does not imply individual disloyalty, but was ordered to reduce the military hazard at a time when danger of invasion was great.

I don't think my parents knew where we were going.

You could have been going to your death, or you could have been going to a nice place, but we ended up between death and a nice place.

After several months in the prison camp on the Puyallup Fairgrounds, we were sent to another prison camp that would be more permanent.

And that was going to be in Minidoka, Idaho, near Twin Falls.

Bainbridge Islanders hoped, looking on the map, that going to Idaho would be a better climate because it's in the Pacific Northwest.

Idaho, Washington, Oregon.

But, it turns out Minidoka is very similar to Manzanar.

We found out that the camps were were built in the middle of a desert, and there was layers and layers of very fine volcanic ash.

Kind of remote, dry, dusty, cold in the winter.

It was totally unlike Bainbridge Island.

As a child, I didn't even consider the difference in environment other than it was different, but I'm sure for the adults it was a big adjustment.

But that's what's remarkable.

The adults adjusted and they made do.

And they made a desert land arable.

It's incredible what this barren, barren, awful environment became because the residents were so industrious.

You see these amazing Japanese gardens with fountains in some cases.

You see front doors that have the name, and it's like your own house.

They made it homey.

So what is by nature a very harsh and barren place, the Japanese made much more lush and much more livable.

About half of the evacuated people were farm folk, Skilled producers of vegetable, fruits and other crop.

They had made desert land productive before and around the relocation centers they could, and did do it again.

You see vast farmed land created by the Japanese Americans from the camps where they were able to farm fresh vegetables and raised livestock to get away from the canned meat and so forth.

And their diets got much better, and they really transformed the surrounding areas.

The government had planned that in these remote places, the incarcerated would start to able to farm their own food.

The farmland around Minidoka, was outside of the camp, was someplace that some of the people from the camp could go.

They would get leave to go work and help the Caucasian farmers who owned farmland outside of Minidoka.

So, there were people who actually left camp to go work on those farms.

Only those evacuees whose statements and whose act leave no question of their loyalty to the United States, are permitted to leave.

The "Loyalty Questionnaire," as it came to be known, was a multi-question survey designed to evaluate the so-called loyalty of incarcerees.

The government had a two-step process for letting people leave camp.

First they had to show that they were loyal.

Secondly, they had to show, for example, that they had a means of support on where they were going, that the community would not be hostile to them when they left.

But responders were put in an impossible situation by two questions in particular.

The first asked if responders would be willing to serve in the armed forces whenever called.

There was fear that answering "Yes" could be constituted as volunteering and get them sent away.

The second asked if they swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and forswear any form of allegiance to the Emperor of Japan.

Would answering "Yes" be seen as admitting some allegiance to the Emperor of Japan would "No" be used to keep them indefinitely detained?

Fred Korematsu was a 22-year old welder living in Oakland, California, when he decided to remain after the removal orders came down.

He was convicted at trial and appealed his case up to the U.S.

Supreme Court that decided that the exclusion order was constitutional.

The government argued that 5000 individuals refused to swear unqualified allegiance to the United States after they were put in camp.

So, difficult to understand how the court could use the answers to this "Loyalty Questionnaire" when they were being asked whether they were loyal after they had been incarcerated.

The same day that the court decided "Korematsu v. United States," it wasn't all a bad day for Japanese Americans.

The court also decided, ex parte Endo, which was a case in which Mitsuye Endo argued that once someone was found to be cconcededly loyal, they could not hold concededly loyal Japanese Americans any further than necessary.

That once you decide I'm loyal, I can't be held anymore.

You have no right.

And the court agreed.

The camps began to close after that.

Actually, the government had been talking about closing the camps for a while.

The timing of Endo, though, kind of pushed the matter.

And so the camps began to close.

Important thing about looking at all these decisions together is that the court never, ever decided whether the original incarceration was proper.

So, the court upheld the curfew order, it upheld the removal order, and it said the government couldn't continue to hold people after they were loyal.

But none of the cases addressed the constitutionality of incarcerating Japanese Americans to begin with.

And none of the cases have been explicitly overruled.

We packed up and went to the gate, and then we got on a bus.

We were really still afraid of how we're going to be accepted when we went back.