Licensing

Notice of Relocation

This was the notice posted all over the West Coast preceding the immediate removal of over 110,000 Japanese Americans from their homes and into internment camps. They had only a few weeks to pack what they could carry, most often in one or two suitcases, and find a way to either sell, or place in someone else's care, the rest of their property.

Cherry Kinoshita, Sox Kitashima, and Aiko Yoshinaga Herzig all recalled painful memories of having to leave everything behind for a life in barracks that had no decent accommodations. For Sox, it was especially painful to succumb to inedible foods, when earlier in the day, she had just had a wonderful, home-cooked meal. Aiko similarly remembers the terrible mess hall foods they were served, where camps even competed to see who could spend the least on expenses for internees. These “costs” went as low as $.35 per person!

An indication of the real struggles to come after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, this picture is representative of the hardships that not only these women, but the entire Japanese American community faced in this wartime era.

Sources: Densho Digital Archive, http://archive.densho.org/main.aspx. Visual History Collections: Densho Visual History Collection, Aiko Yoshinaga Herzig Interviews; Kitashima, Tsuyako Sox and Morimoto, Joy K., The Birth of an Activist: The Sox Kitashima Story. San Mateo: Asian American Curriculum Project, 2003.

Photo: Densho Digital Archive, http://archive.densho.org/main.aspx. Photo/Document Collections: The Manuscripts, Special collections, University Archives Division, University of Washington Libraries Collection.