The Life and Times of Julie Otsuka 3

Jo Reed: Did people, when they were released from the camps, where did they choose to return to? I would assume some would go back to home, whatever that meant, and others would probably want to just start anew someplace else. Gary Okihiro: There is actually no detailed study of what happened to Japanese Americans following their return from the camps into private civilian life again. One thing for sure is that the U.S. government encouraged them not to return to the West Coast. The U.S. government wanted the Japanese to be scattered throughout the nation so many Japanese actually moved to places like Chicago and New York after the war. In my study of several counties in California, it’s remarkable that about half of the former residents chose not to return to their places of former residence. And one can easily understand that because of the embarrassment that these Japanese carried with them because they were deemed to be disloyal to the U.S. government and thus their internment so they would not like to face again their neighbors and former friends. So most of the Japanese, I would say, chose to move to other places of the country that they had lived prior to the war.