Some Japanese-Americans Wrongfully Imprisoned During WWII Oppose Census Question

Eileen Okada was 5 years old when the U.S. government forced her and her family to live in a stall made for horses.

"I remember the stench. They cleaned it out, of course, but didn't scrub it down. The smell was still there," says Okada, now 81, a retired elementary school teacher and librarian.

Life for Okada's family was upended months after Japan attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii during World War II. The U.S. government responded to the attack in part by using Census Bureau information to determine where Japanese-Americans lived on the West Coast in order to remove them from their homes and imprison them.

"The most important single source of information prior to the evacuation was the 1940 Census of Population," wrote U.S. Army Lt. Gen. John DeWitt, who advocated for and directed the mass removal of Japanese-Americans from the West Coast, in a 1943 report for the War.