Amemiya shared about her time in a Japanese Internment camp during World War II.
Chris Louscher, PEO member, had the idea to ask Amemiya to speak for the local PEO branch after reading an article in the PEO newsletter last February.
"I just thought how interesting this program could be," Louscher said. "A lot of phone calls and scheduling later, and here we are."
Amemiya was 21 and a nursing student at the University of California, when Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese during World War II. Following that event, anti-Japanese sentiment spread across the United States, forcing over 126,000 Japanese Americans to be detained at interment camps for the remainder of the war. Seventy percent of those detained were American citizens. Amemiya was one of those who was detained in an interment camp.
"Some people are not aware that this happened to American citizens during the war," Amemiya said. "We didn't do anything wrong, besides being of Asian descent."
Amemiya described the efforts taken by the F.B.I. against Japanese Americans included surrendering all fire arms, radios, cameras and knives.
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed executive order IO66 removing undesirables from the general public, including anyone of German, Italian or Japanese heritage, Amemiya and her family were detained to Gila Interment Camp in Las Vegas, Nevada.
"German blood doesn't show up like Asian features," Amemiya said. "We were more likely to be detained than those of German descent in these camps."
Japanese-American citizens were asked to leave their home, friends, pets, businesses and possessions behind.
"We left a lot of our mementos and possessions at the Methodist church we were members at for safekeeping," Amemiya said. "A lot of those things were vandalized while we were away."
Amemiya explained to members there that they didn't know where they were going or what was going to happen to them.
"We were only allowed two suitcases to carry what we thought was important," Amemiya said. "How do you pack for a journey when you don't know where you're going?"
The barracks they stayed at in the interment camp were split into six units, each 20 feet by 20 feet.
"There was one overhead light, no running water or bathrooms, and cots and mattresses enough for the members of your family," Amemiya said. "You heard everything that went on throughout every barrack building."
Interment camps were surrounded by barbed wire fences and guard towers, with machine guns pointing inward and spotlights shining all through the night. There were 250 barracks in the camp.
"We had no curtains or stalls in our showers or partitions in the bathrooms," Amemiya said. "There was very little privacy."
Amemiya's stay at the interment camp ended a year later, when she was accepted for work outside of the camp, and later at a school to finish her training as a nurse at the United States Nurse Corps at Saint Mary's School of Nursing.
"We were not proven guilty in any court of laws," Amemiya said. "We were American citizens, whose rights were stripped away with the stroke of a pen."
Following her schooling as a nurse, she worked in an army hospital in Clinton. Amemiya then was a nurse in Columbus, Ohio, while her husband finished schooling, before moving to several other hospitals and finally settling in Ames.
In 1990, nearly 50 years after being interned during World War II, Amemiya and her family received an apology penned by President George Bush as well as restitution for the inconvenience and breaking of their Constitutional freedoms.
Amemiya was recently honored at the University of California with an honorary degree. The school is currently trying to track down the 700 Japanese American students who were placed in the interment camp to honor them.
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