“WHAT DID YOU SAY? YOU WERE IN A CONCENTRATION CAMP FOR THREE AND A HALF YEARS?” Irma raised her voice in disbelief. The four of us were sitting in a small circle at the first meeting of the San Mateo Elementary School District community advisory committee in 1969. I was embarrassed that this was so surprising. After all it had been 24 years since it had happened. But then again, even amongst many Japanese Americans, it had often been treated like a shameful secret.

“Florence,” Irma said in a more normal voice, “this story must be told to the students—they need to know that racism is more than African American slavery.” The group nodded in agreement.

The major issue was that, aside from the physical experience of being in a concentration camp for 3 ½ years, I knew very little about why it happened. I was thirteen years old when it all started and I spent my high school years in a camp. All the things that happened to us were quite overwhelming. First we were forcefully relocated over 1400 miles away to Amache, Colorado, and then my father became tubercular after six months. He was sent away to a sanitarium outside of our camp. My oldest brother volunteered for the US Army, and my second brother was drafted and served in the Military Intelligence Service.

My first job was to find a book which defined how the evacuation started. I asked a civil rights activist friend of mine, Edison Uno, and he referred me to a paperback book titled American Concentration Camps by Allan Bosworth (1967). After taking care of my five children, one night, I opened the book and began to read the introduction. Suddenly, without any logical reason, tears began to stream down my face. I put the book down for a minute—to wipe my tears—but I had to read this book! So I forced myself to read how this illegal imprisonment of 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry came about.

This book made me very angry. How could the United States government force the internment of citizens without trials? In 1969 every book which told the story found ways to justify this action. Our family lost three ranches—with all of its tools, truck, tractor, and homes—totaling 90 acres, and never received payment for this gigantic loss.

The committee members went out to tell their personal stories of racism. Now I was ready to tell my experiences to elementary grade students. On one occasion, after I told my story, the next day a ten year old boy stood up at the back of the room and yelled “My father told me to tell you that you are a big liar!”

What he said was not an exception. Researching all the books available at that time—the Japanese Americans were described as an imminent danger to the security of the United States and its World War II efforts against Japan. This situation only heightened my determination to tell the truth about the Japanese Americans.

Upon doing a search, I found likeminded Japanese American teachers that agreed with the need to tell our story. We began to meet and talk about working on curriculum materials to tell of our accounts. Soon our group received an offer from a major educational publisher to write an intermediate grade level book about the Japanese American experience. We were an unknown group of educators that were just getting started, but the offer was too tempting to refuse. So we accepted the challenge, and worked day and nights to meet the short ninety day deadline.

And this was how the Japanese American Curriculum Project began. Our original group consisted of Hisako Kawasaki (Yamauchi), Sid Kinoshita, Miyoko Kirita, Astor Mizuhara, Katherine M. Reyes, Donald Y. Sekimura, Stella Takahashi, Shirley Tanaka (Shimada), Rosie Taniguchi (Shimonishi), Edison Uno, Shizue Yoshina, and myself Florence Yoshiwara (Hongo).

After 50 years, most of the names have changed and our group has diversified, but our mission has essentially stayed the same – to educate all Americans about Asian and Pacific Islander American history, culture, and experiences. Education is the key to eliminating the ignorance that causes racism, misunderstanding, and civil injustices.