During World War II, 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry were forcibly removed from their homes and incarcerated in American prison camps. Two-thirds of the prisoners were American-born US citizens. Half were children.

The camps were constructed in remote, desolate locations, where prisoners lived up to four years in substandard housing, often with inadequate nutrition. Some prisoners died due to insufficient medical care. Several were killed by military guards. Almost all lost their homes, lands, and businesses.

At the time, 93 percent of Americans polled supported the forced evacuation of Japanese immigrants. In the case of Japanese Americans who were born in the United States and held US citizenship, 59 percent of those polled still supported their forced evacuation. Toward the end of the war, 13 percent of Americans polled favored “killing all the Japanese.”

My great-grandparents, grandparents, great-aunts, and great-uncles were among those removed from their homes on the West Coast. They were sent first to temporary “assembly centers,” including a racetrack where they lived in horse stalls, and then to a permanent prison camp at Heart Mountain, Wyoming. My father was born in the camp hospital.

In the 1980s, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians found that the internment was “motivated largely by racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” Historians also recognize the role economic rivalry played, motivating Caucasian farmers to lobby for the removal of Japanese farmers, whom they saw as competition.

Yet there were also people who acted as allies to Japanese Americans. Some neighbors spoke against mass incarceration. Some offered to store things or help settle affairs. A few even maintained farms or businesses until their Japanese American friends returned.

In this book, I mention one real-life ally. Sam’s hero, Dorothea Lange, was a documentary photographer and photojournalist. In 1942, Lange was hired by the US government to make a record of the evacuation. Though she opposed mass incarceration, she took the commission because she believed a “true record” was necessary.

Military commanders soon found that Lange’s gritty and powerful photos reflected her opposition. They seized her photos for the duration of the war. Others were hired to take glossier, “happier” pictures that eased the public’s conscience. For years, Lange’s photos were impounded, forcibly kept from public view during the war, and then quietly slipped into the National Archives without notice.

But decades later, Lange’s work was rediscovered, and on a visit to the Smithsonian, my relatives saw a photograph Lange had taken. It portrayed my great-grandfather on the eve of the family’s removal. A collection of Lange’s photos of the evacuation has now been published. Her record is also available to the public through the National Archives.

Japanese Americans fought to create their own records, as well. While cameras were banned and confiscated, an imprisoned photographer named Tōyō Miyatake brought a lens into the Manzanar prison camp. He then had a wooden camera constructed and film smuggled in so that he could secretly take photos of camp life. At the Topaz camp, Dave Tatsuno carried around a video camera disguised in a shoebox. And other Japanese Americans also found ways to photodocument the incarceration, particularly in the later years when restrictions were lifted. These photos are now important evidence of how a society can hurt its own. More importantly, they are a record of the lives individuals continued to build, even when stripped of their rights.

Unfortunately, racism, hysteria, failing political leadership, and economic competition all still exist in our society today. I chose to write about the time before the internment because in a way we’re always at a point before injustice. The question of how we will act, and of how we will define our society, is always before us. Are we a people willing to commit great injustices out of greed and fear? Are we a people who quietly let injustice happen around us? Or do we speak up? Do we act?

This book is my exploration of those questions. Samantha Sakamoto chooses to document her experience, finding her voice even as she faces certain incarceration. In doing so, I hope she reflects the courage and perseverance characteristic of the many Japanese Americans interned during WWII—and with which we still must fight to live up to the American experiment and its ideals.