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Yoshiharu Kamio is born
Yoshiharu is born in the Kamio Compound in Japan. He is the eldest and only boy of his siblings. In the picture, he is barely six months old, with his grandparents and his mom to the right. -
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Japanese Depression
When the Great Depression hit the US, it caused American purchasing of Japanese exports to drop heavily. This caused massive deflation in the Japanese economy, as nobody had a stable income. As a result, Japan also fell into an economic depression. -
Yoshiharu comes to America
Yoshiharu's father had accumulated a lot of debt from the Japanese Depression. To pay it off, he took Yoshiharu away from college and they both came to America to work as gardeners and pay off the debt. To get into America, Yoshiharu used his cousin Hideo's American passport. Hideo had been born in America by chance during a trip, and so he had American citizenship. -
Pearl Harbor is attacked
The Japanese Navy surprise attacked the American fleet in Pearl Harbor, pulling America into WWII. This event also spurred public distrust and suspicion of Japanese immigrants and citizens. -
Executive Order 9066
FDR gave an executive order which allowed the military to establish zones called "military areas" from which "any and all persons may be excluded." This order was made to give the military the power to remove Japanese-Americans from the West Coast. -
US military marks the West Coast as a military area
The military, using the power given to them by Executive Order 9066, makes the West Coast a military restricted zone. Japanese-Americans like Yoshiharu could be legally removed from this zone. -
Yoshiharu is removed from his home
Sometime between April and August of 1942, Yoshiharu is sent with his father to an assembly center at the San Francisco racetrack. There, he was forced to live in a stable meant for horses. -
Yoshiharu is moved to Topaz
Many of the Japanese-Americans from the San Francisco area were moved out to the Topaz internment camp in the desert in Utah. They arrived to find the camp incomplete and were forced to finish the construction themselves. Since Yoshiharu was still using Hideo's passport, he was admitted to the camp and recorded as Hideo Kamio despite the real Hideo being back in Japan. -
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Internment in Topaz
From 1942 to 1945, Yoshiharu was kept at Topaz with over 9,000 other Japanese-Americans. He worked as a cook for the officers in charge of the camp. In the desert, the temperatures went from over 100 degrees in the summer to below 0 in the winter. Rooms had no running water and were heated by coal stoves. For three years, Topaz was the fifth largest city in Utah, until it closed down on October 31st, 1945. -
Yoshiharu gets married to Tomoye Tamura
In 1943, Yoshiharu married a fellow detainee named Tomoye Tamura. There was no proper church in the camp, so they took a bus into the closest town, Provo, and got married at the city hall. -
Mariko Kamio is born
In 1944, Yoshiharu and Tomoye had a baby in Topaz. This was my aunt, Mariko. This old record taken from the Central Utah Final Accountability Report shows her birthday to be February 9th, a date that had been lost to my family. (The Kamios are the fifth last name from the top) -
Release from Topaz
The US government started releasing families from the internment camps first. Yoshiharu and his family went to Richmond CA, along with many other families from Topaz. There, Yoshiharu restarted his gardening business. He lived there for the rest of his life. -
Michael Kamio is born
Yoshi and Tomo have a second child. This was my dad, Michael Kamio. In the picture, Yoshiharu holds baby Michael in their backyard in Richmond. -
Return to Japan
For the first time since leaving Japan thirty years ago, Yoshiharu comes back to the larger Kamio family. He, Tomoye, and my dad (ten years old) stay at the Kamio compound and reconnect with his family. He was nervous about the return trip, as he was still using Hideo Kamio's passport, but they were able to get back to the States without a problem. -
Reparation from the US government
Every person who had been interned was given $20,000. This included babies who had been born in the camps so even Mariko received reparations. Yoshi and Tomo shared the money with their family. -
Yoshiharu dies at 76
Yoshiharu dies of a heart valve failure. The doctors suspect it was caused by a disease native to Japan.
