To honor them, De Anza College's Tom Izu began an annual day of remembrance three years ago. The day of remembrance falls on the Feb. 19 anniversary of Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin Roosevelt. The order placed Japanese-Americans, such as Uenaka and Izu's mother, in internment camps. More than 120,000 Japanese-Americans were detained by the order, even those with relatives fighting as a members of the American armed forces.

"It's very important to remember what happened," says Izu, the executive director of the California History Center at De Anza. "It shows how you have to be vigilant and stand up for the constitution, especially if citizen's rights are taken away."

Under the order Japanese-Americans, including citizens, were relocated into camps throughout the western United States. As a part of the forced relocation, many also lost property and their belongings.

Even before the relocation, Uenaka recalls discrimination. His mother, for example, was an American citizen born in Santa Cruz. However, she lost her citizenship in the 1920s when she married Uenaka's father, who immigrated from Japan at age 16. Subsequently, the couple could not own property and had to buy land under their children's names, since the children were American-born citizens.

Such tensions increased after the war began. His parents and their neighbors, became estranged and Uenaka became more of a target for his classmates. "It was not a good thing to be associated with Japanese when the war broke out," he says. "There was also an eight o'clock curfew for anybody of Japanese ancestry, and we could not travel beyond a five mile radius. It was very, very uncomfortable."

This changed in May 1942. Uenaka, his younger brother and his parents were sent to a camp in Topaz, Utah. They also lost touch at that time with another younger brother who was sent to Japan in 1939 to live with relatives. Before they left for Topaz, Uenaka's parents destroyed their collection of Japanese records and other mementos linking them to Japan.

"It was hot, dry and dusty," Uenaka says of Topaz, where his family stayed until September 1945. There, the family lived in a compound enclosed by barbed wire and watched over by guards. He left the camp once in the three years for a Boy Scout outing. Otherwise, Uenaka went to school, played sports or spent time in his family's small room in a barracks building. Each barrack had six units with walls open at the top.

Izu's mother's was relocated with her family from San Jose to a camp in Poston, Arizona just before she began high school. Before they left they had to get rid of most of their possessions, including their car.

"She was at first disappointed by the food," Izu says of his mother's life in the camp. "She also had a problem with the quality of the high school and lack of privacy, especially since she was a teenage girl," he says. The bathrooms, for example, had no stalls separating the toilets. The family hung blankets in the barracks for walls.

Izu's father barely escaped internment, leaving Mountain View High School just short of earning his diploma to move to Utah with his family and work as a migrant laborer.

Such experiences are ones Izu hopes will not happen again in the United States.

Italian-Americans, German-Americans and some Eastern Europeans were also interned during World War II.

"It shouldn't have to happen to anyone else," Izu says. As a result, he founded the De Anza conference to educate people. "We want students to see what happens to people like them or their neighbors. We want them to question such policies, especially given the Patriot Act and the recent suspension of certain civil liberties."

Uenaka has slowly come to terms with the loss of his civil rights during World War II. Officially, Japanese-Americans incarcerated during the war received reparations from the United States government in 1988. Even so, the healing for Uenaka began much earlier.

"We left camp on a Thursday, and I started at San Jose High School the next day," Uenaka says. "After school, I wanted to get home, but my ride had a football game." Instead, Uenaka chose to walk home, and quickly got lost. "I hadn't associated with Anglos for three and a half years," he says, "so I was afraid to stop and ask for directions."

Uenaka says such nervousness made shopping difficult for him for several years.

"I had a tough time adjusting, and still do," he says with a smile. "I was very uncomfortable going into a store and asking for help."

Slowly, life improved. "We were treated well," Uenaka says. "There were 31 Japanese in my class, and students and teachers at San Jose High took us under their wing."

Uenaka, in particular, flourished. After his graduation from San Jose High School in 1948, he moved with his family to Cupertino to open a nursery and landscaping business. Soon after he served in the Army in Japan where he reconnected with his brother. He then returned to Cupertino, graduated from San José State University, raised a family and ran his family's business.

"We had tremendous support from the community," Uenaka says of his family's initial move to Cupertino. "People came and bought stuff, maybe stuff they didn't need, to support our business."

One customer in particular registered with Uenaka. The man was a former American prisoner of war in Japan who became friends with Uenaka's parents. The customer helped alleviate the awkwardness by telling them, "it wasn't you; it was the war."

"That one guy did more to open my mind than anything," Uenaka says now from his office at Cupertino Florist—an office about the size of the barracks room his family once shared. "He didn't bear any resentments, so I asked myself, how can I bear resentments? If a guy like this can embrace us, then I should do the same. Eventually, you start to realize you have a debt to a lot of people, and he helped me realize that."