by Diane Yuen
…by signing their names, (they) sent a message for the ages: “We were here.”
It’s just the kind of thing that a quietly mischievous 17-year-old might do: steal a sign and get all his friends to sign it.
Except that this 17-year-old, Kazuo Takahashi, was in a detention center, about to be transferred to a concentration camp in the Utah desert.
Just a few months earlier, Kaz had been a high-school kid in San Francisco. His father, Yonezo, and uncle, Shigetaro, had a store on Grant Avenue. His mother and two sisters were in Japan, visiting relatives.
With FDR’s signing of Executive Order 9066, Kaz and his dad were incarcerated in Tanforan Assembly Center with his uncle’s family along with thousands of other Bay Area Japanese Americans, where they spent over five months while “permanent” camps were built in remote areas inland. Kaz’s mother and sisters were trapped in Japan, unable to return to the US.