As a 3-Year-Old, He Was Incarcerated

Now, Joe Okimoto MD, D ’60, MED ’61 Tells His Story.

When Joe Okimoto MD, D ’60, MED ’61 was three years old, he and his family were arrested. Soldiers carrying rifles showed up at their door and ordered him, his pregnant mother, his father, and two older siblings into the back of a military truck.

Okimoto was one of nearly 125,000 Japanese Americans who were forcibly removed from their homes and imprisoned as targets of the U.S. government’s racist policies during World War II. He spent the next three and a half years in an American concentration camp in the Arizona desert—simply for having Japanese ancestry.

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