Written by Jeff Suzuki & Nigel Chandler. Edited by members of the Los Gatos Anti-Racism Coalition.
PUBLISHED OCTOBER 1, 2025
Foreigners in Their Own Country
February 19th, 1942 was a fateful day for five members of the Inouye Family in Los Gatos–President Franklin D. Roosevelt had signed Executive Order 9066, which ordered their forced incarceration, along with over 120,000 other Japanese Americans. They were herded into assembly centers, then shipped to concentration camps.1 They did not know when, or even if, they could return home. There are many other current and former residents of our Town who either personally remember the Incarceration, or have family members who survived it.
And yet, many people are unaware that the expulsion of Japanese Americans happened on the ground that became our neighborhoods and streets. There is no Remembrance Day in Los Gatos, nor has it been universally taught in Los Gatos schools that the mass expulsion of Japanese residents occurred here.2 In the years leading up to their removal, the Inouye family home was a respected residence, and their wooden barn a favorite subject for local Los Gatos painters. While this family of five was crowded into the Heart Mountain concentration camp in Wyoming, strangers occupied their home–and years later, upon the release of the Inouye family, they found their home vandalized, looted, and neglected.
While people with German and Italian names like “Eisenhower”3 and “Basilone”4 were entrusted with saving the nation and covered themselves in glory during the war, the Inouyes were identified as enemies of that nation, despite being its citizens, alongside over a hundred thousand other people that shared only their racial identity in common.
In California classrooms, the Japanese Incarceration is often framed as something that happened far away to people who died a long time ago. Perhaps this history is taught as a single regrettable decision in an otherwise glorious moment of American history. But what is often omitted from the history lesson is that it was carried out locally. It happened here in Los Gatos. Los Gatos residents experienced the Japanese American Incarceration, and the impacts of incarceration continue to this day. They were forced out of their farms and schools under the threat of violence. Their homes and belongings were looted, and their businesses were destroyed. Incarcerated students from Los Gatos High School were confined in open-air prisons, their classmates graduating without them. And years later, when they were released, those same Americans were forced to rebuild again as if nothing had happened.
History Does Not End
Gordon Yamate, a current resident of Los Gatos and the first Chair of the town’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Commission has shared his family’s story to provide context for future generations to learn more about this time in our town’s history. Following Executive Order 9066, Gordon’s mother, Kikuye Inouye, and grandmother, Asa Inouye, were uprooted from their home in Los Gatos and re-located to the Heart Mountain Concentration Camp. A full account of his family’s experiences before, during, and after Executive Order 9066 and Japanese American Incarceration can be read in full here.
One member of the Inouye family, Mamoru Inouye, was incarcerated with the rest of his family at Heart Mountain Concentration Camp when he was just 12 years old. He remarked that “the evacuation was just a culmination of what had been going on for 40 years on the West Coast, beginning with Alien Land Law and the Chinese Exclusion Act.”11 In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the so-called “Yellow Peril” gripped white American society, making a target of all Asians regardless of nationality.12 Furthermore, recent academic scholarship has proposed that the roots of this discrimination extend much further into the past. By the time Japanese Americans were expelled from their homes, the United States had hundreds of years of institutional experience forcibly displacing and relocating non-white populations.
This included the genocide of California Indians during the California Gold Rush and their subsequent deportation to the Indian Reservations, and the litany of laws and court decisions that stripped Chinese and other Asian Americans of their equal rights decades before 1900. The next article in this series will explore the direct historical precedents that paved the way for Japanese Internment in the 1940s.
With this narrative series on the Japanese American Incarceration in Los Gatos, we hope to contribute in small part in honoring their memory. We hope that this series can be used as a resource for educators, students, and the people of Los Gatos.
It is not enough to understand the simple fact that the Japanese American Incarceration happened–it is just as important to understand how and why it took place. For better or for worse, each generation inherits attitudes and institutions from those who came before it. Each generation is a product of its time. We are no exception. The value of history lies in studying how each generation grapples with the issues of its time. By and large, the leaders who committed the Japanese American Incarceration sincerely believed that they were shoring up national security by targeting a population they believed was high-risk. They had their reasons, and their reasons were wrong.
To understand the how and the why of the Japanese American Incarceration, the second article in this narrative series will describe the historical conditions that made the Japanese Incarceration even conceivable as a domestic policy in the United States. It would be a mistake to characterize this event as the sole result of geopolitical necessity or xenophobia.
By passing Executive Order 9066, the American government entrusted people with names like “Eisenhower” and “Basilone” with saving the nation while simultaneously identifying people with names like “Inouyes”—and over a hundred thousand people with a shared racial identity–as enemies of the nation. The crucial element that turned Japanese Americans like the Inouyes into outsiders, even as it made Italian and German Americans like the Basilones and the Eisenhowers into insiders, was an ideological framework of race that had permeated American culture, society, and government long before the incarceration had commenced.
And now, the survivors of the Incarceration and their descendants are observing numerous parallels between their own experiences and the immigration policies of our current administration.14,15 A little more than a month before this article’s publication, Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas is designated to become the largest immigrant detention site in the United States. Many Japanese Americans have protested this decision, remembering that the same facility was used to detain Japanese Americans eighty years ago. Regardless of one’s views on the current political situation, their experiences cannot be denied nor forgotten. The memories of these survivors make up a part of our own heritage as Americans, and we have much to learn from them.
Footnotes
1 We choose to use the term “concentration camp” over other terms, such as “internment camp,” “evacuation,” and “assembly centers” to be consistent with the Japanese American National Museum’s terminology when describing the Japanese American Incarceration. The term “concentration camp” was used by contemporaries, including President FDR. As the Japanese American National Museum notes, “[we use] “concentration camp” not in an effort to bear comparisons to the atrocities of the Holocaust, but to express the veritable magnitude of what was done to Japanese Americans.”
2 Several members of the Los Gatos Anti-Racism Coalition attended Los Gatos High School. None were taught that the Japanese Incarceration actually occurred in the town.
3 A surname derived from the German surname “Eisenhauer.” Most famously, during World War II, Dwight D. Eisenhower was entrusted with the role of Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe. After the war, he served as president of the United States.
4 An Italian surname. A prominent example of an Italian American is John Basilone, a marine serving in the Pacific. Basilone’s father, for instance, was an Italian immigrant, while his mother was born in America to two Italian immigrants. He won the Medal of Honor at Guadalcanal. He was killed in action at the Battle of Iwo Jima.
5 PBS. “How Japanese American Incarceration Was Entangled With Indigenous Dispossession”
6 EJI. “California’s Alien Land Laws”
7 NBER. “How the 1942 Japanese Exclusion Impacted U.S. Agriculture” Page 9.
8 Los Gatos Times, August 21st, 1942.
9 For example, in Denver, Colorado, while racial hatred simmered, Japanese were required to register and to give up certain possessions such as ham radios, cameras and dynamite (an essential for farmers). They had to contact local authorities if they wanted to leave their home area.
12 PBS. “How Japanese American Incarceration Was Entangled With Indigenous Dispossession.” Same source as Footnote 5.
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