When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, everything changed for Masuo Yasui, his wife, Shidzuyo, and their seven children.
Leader of the Japanese community in Hood River, Ore., Yasui owned or had invested in nearly 1,000 acres of orchards, was a major apple and vegetable grower, owned a downtown store and belonged to the Hood River Chamber of Commerce and Rotary Club. One son was an attorney, another worked on the family farms, and the other children were in college or high school.
FBI agents detained Yasui as a suspected spy five days after Pearl Harbor. He ended up in New Mexico’s Santa Fe Detention Center.
Yasui’s wife, Shidzuyo, and six other family members were among the 120,000 West Coast ethnic Japanese, two-thirds of them American citizens, forced into internment camps. The family spent the war years under army-imposed martial law at the Tule Lake maximum security center on the California-Oregon border.
The family was released in 1945, and Yasui a year later at age 61. He had lost his home, his business and all but one of his orchards. He and Shidzuyo retired in Portland.
Yasui hanged himself in 1957.
Source: Kessler, Lauren. “Stubborn Twig. Three Generations in the Life of a Japanese American Family.” Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, Ore. 2008. Print; "History." Tule Lake Committee. Tule Lake Committee, 2013. Web. 12 Mar. 2015.
