In the early months of 1942 the United States government assembled and shipped off to concentration camps 112,000 men, women, and children, the entire Japanese American population of the three Pacific Coast states of California, Oregon, and Washington. [Introduction]

According to the Census of 1940 there were 126,948 Japanese Americans in the continental United States; they comprised less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the total population. [Chapter 1]