Amy Uno Ishii

Following are excerpts from an interview of former evacuee Amy Uno Ishii conducted by Betty E. Mitson and Kristin Mitchell for the California State University at Fullerton Japanese American World War II Evacuation Oral History Project. In the interview, Ishii recalls how she came home after learning of the attack on Pearl Harbor to find the FBI ransacking her California home. When the agents were finished, they took her father into custody and left. It was weeks before the Ishii family learned that their father was being held in an old Civilian Conservation Corps camp in Griffith Park in Los Angeles. He was eventually sent to a camp for enemy aliens in Missoula, Montana. Ishii also relates how difficult it was for her family to adjust to life without her father, who was the backbone of...