It's funny how I remember like I you know I remember the store.

There's a picture where we lived.

It was like a well it was an apartment so to speak.

Anyway it was a big building and they turned that into a motel after we left.

I'm Karen Gregg's Debates and this is a code switch podcast extra.

During World War II Japanese Americans on the West Coast, the coast closest to Japan,

were rounded up and sent away to what the American government called internment camps.

Some 120,000 Japanese Americans were detained for four years.

It was a shameful episode in American history and the people who lived it are dying out.

What a lot of people don't know is that some Japanese Americans avoided these camps entirely.

One of the voices you heard at the top of this podcast extra was Diana Sushida,

whose project Tessaku documents the experiences of some of those Japanese Americans.

Welcome Diana.

Thank you.

Tell us a little bit more about this tape we just heard.

Where were you? Who were you talking to?

And do you remember any of the pictures this gentleman showed you?

I do so I was speaking with Howard Yamamoto, who is now 80 years old and living in the East Bay in California.

And he was four when his family left California to go to Utah to a place called Keatley.

And in Keatley there was a colony of Japanese Americans who avoided the camps by getting out within the three weeks

which they were allowed to leave before there was a freeze order on the West Coast.

So in these photos that Howard showed me was where they lived for about three years, 1942 to 45.

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