Mitsuye Yamada was still huddled around the radio listening to the crackling reports of death and destruction near Hawaii when FBI agents came to the door looking for her father. He was an interpreter for the Immigration Service, but his fluency in Japanese and English made him a suspect, an enemy of the people, on a Sunday afternoon more than 50 years ago.

Within hours, her father was accused of being a spy, and incarcerated as a prisoner of war.

It was Dec. 7, 1941. And this was how life would be for thousands of Japanese Americans in a nation gone mad with fear and mistrust in a world at war. “The world hit us immediately. We were still reeling from the news about Pearl Harbor in the morning,” Yamada said. “And in the afternoon, just a few hours after, the FBI came to take my father away. Immediately we were aware of the impact of the war on our lives.”

Eventually, Yamada's family, along with tens of thousands of other Japanese Americans, were forced from their homes and carted to internment camps, where many of them remained for the duration of World War II. Yamada, then 18, recorded her experiences in diaries that years later spawned Camp Notes and Other Poems, her 1976 book of poetry rereleased for the 50th anniversary of the internment.

“They were simple notes I kept, recording little incidents and fragments. I never really thought about them as poems until later,” said Yamada, now 69. “I was just trying to make sense of what was happening.”

What happened between December 1941 and August 1945 was the detainment—or, as the government preferred to call it, the “relocation”—of 120,000 Japanese Americans, mostly on the West Coast. The surprise bombing of Pearl Harbor plunged the nation not only into war, but into fierce uncertainty and hysteria. Every shadow on the ocean resembled a submarine, every Asian a perceived threat.

After Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered all Japanese Americans sent to internment camps. At the time, Yamada, who was born in Kyushu, Japan, lived in Seattle with her parents and her three brothers. Five months after her father's arrest, Yamada's family was sent to Minidoka, Idaho, along with 18,000 others.

“There were no explanations. There was a general announcement that we all had to appear at various places, and we were told we could take two suitcases with our belongings,” said Yamada, who now lives in California. “We all obeyed. If nothing else, we Japanese are obedient people.”

Yamada and her oldest brother, Mike, were allowed to leave the camp in 1943 to attend the University of Cincinnati. Her brother Tosh also left and joined the 442d Infantry. Her mother and brother Joe were reunited with her father at a family prisoner of war camp in Crystal City, Texas, where they remained until 1945.

“When Japanese Americans were evacuated, there was absolute silence in white America. There were no human rights organizations that investigated our human rights,” said Yamada, who until recently served on the national board of Amnesty International. “Human rights consciousness must always be kept alive.”

Though it has been 50 years since the internment, little has been said or written about this dark chapter in American history. Only recently have schools begun to discuss it. Even Hollywood has produced only one major release concerning the internment—Alan Parker's 1991 film Come See the Paradise.

“The basic thing is that this was a violation of civil rights, but it's been really played down or totally ignored in the schoolbooks and in American history,” Yamada said. “I think the whole episode has been a source of great embarrassment to the United States government.”

Likewise, Japanese Americans have also grappled with this tainted legacy. For decades, many who survived the camps simply refused to discuss what happened to them, shielding their children—and sometimes themselves—from the truth.

“There was a great deal of pain, but there was a need to be accepted again. There was a great push right after the war to put the incident in the past, get an education, work hard and assimilate,” said Yamada, who has four children. “Psychologically, we're like the abused child or battered wife. You don't talk about it. You internalized it. It wasn't something you sat down and talked to your children about.”

In fact it was the sansei—the children of those detained—who first brought the injustices done to their families into public consciousness. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed legislation to issue official apologies and ＄20,000 tax-free payments to survivors of the internment camps.

Now retired from teaching English, literature and writing courses at Cypress Community College in Orange County, Calif., Yamada is planning a book with other Asian-American artists, and an anthology by the Multicultural Women Writers, a group she founded.

She continues to recite her poems at readings across the country, as well as educate new generations about what happened five decades ago to those living in a nation suddenly at war with their native homeland.

“As Asian writers, part of our struggle is telling the truth. We have a lot of problems with disclosure. Disclosure doesn't mean you're airing dirty laundry. It just makes the Asian-American culture more rich, more diverse, more complex, and we have to be seen as complex human beings,” Yamada said. “Sometimes we censor ourselves and try only to say things palatable to white America. You simply have to write about what's happening. In camp, I was simply recording things that were going on—the truth. And that's so much more powerful.”