I spotted this in the New York Times Magazine of November 17, 2019. It is one of the saddest, most infuriating, most shameful notebook pages I’ve featured, as it was drawn by a young man who was incarcerated in a Japanese internment camp during World War II, and then ended up serving in the military and dying in combat in 1945.

The Japanese-American concentration camps — more commonly called internment camps, though many Japanese-Americans today reject such euphemistic language — were effectively established in February 1942, when President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. The act authorized the military to set up zones “from which any or all persons may be excluded”; 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry (two-thirds of whom were United States citizens) living across the West Coast were stripped of their possessions, forcibly removed from their homes and imprisoned.

Unfortunately, we don’t learn anything more about Stanley Hayami or his diary, as the article focuses on a novel called No-No Boy and other literature capturing the experience of Japanese-Americans in the camps, a horrifying episode in American history that has long been downplayed.

Read the full article: The Story of the Great Japanese-American Novel