Ceremony Recalls Internment of Japanese-Americans : Tribute: UCLA event is a prelude to 50th anniversary of order that confined some U. S. citizens to camps.

Hitoshi (Mo) Yonemura was the head yell leader at UCLA and a student body officer when he left campus suddenly in 1942. The Daily Bruin, the student newspaper, explained the campus leader’s abrupt departure simply by saying “his government had called him elsewhere.”

“Elsewhere” was an internment camp where Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast were forcibly relocated after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed executive order 9066, making thousands of American citizens of Japanese ancestry in effect prisoners of war.

Yonemura was one of about 175 Japanese-American UCLA students whose college educations were interrupted by the order. He ultimately enlisted in the U. S. Army from the internment camp and was killed while fighting in Italy in 1945.

On Sunday, Yonemura and two other UCLA students who died for their country--the United States of America--were honored in a tribute called “Back to UCLA with Pride.” The tribute, attended by about 225 people, was a prelude to a yearlong commemoration of the internment’s 50th anniversary, which begins in February.

But another 50th anniversary was also on people’s minds--the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7 and the fear of a backlash against Japanese-Americans.

“We want to counter this bashing of Asian-Americans because of what the Japanese did in Japan,” said Harold Harada, chairman of the event.

Harada, a Culver City dentist who grew up in Riverside, had both of his parents die in the camps. Harada said he spent 20 months in relocation camps in Utah and Arizona before enlisting in the U. S. Army.

Harada and Yonemura served in the fabled “Go for Broke” 442nd Regimental Combat Team, nicknamed the “Purple Heart Battalion,” the most decorated U. S. Army unit in World War II.

Aki Hirashiki Yamazaki was a senior--and president of her sorority--when she was sent to Santa Anita race track, where internees were processed before being relocated to camps.

Yamazaki said she volunteered to be a dietitian at Santa Anita and was able to get out of the camp by finding a sponsor and moving to New York. Japanese-Americans were released if they could find a sponsor who would swear to their loyalty, and who lived away from the West Coast.

Yamazaki painfully remembered Sunday that when her husband returned wearing his Army uniform after being a prisoner of war in Germany, a man on the street told him: “Why don’t you go back where you came from?”