My name is Yoshiko

Everything changed for Yoshiko Kawaguchi on December 7, 1941, the day Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, plunging the United States into World War II. Until then, Yoshiko had lived with her parents and three siblings in rural Downey, California, where her parents had been farm workers for nearly 20 years. Four months after the bombing, the Kawaguchi family and 120,000 other Japanese Americans across the country, found themselves imprisoned, perceived by the U.S. as threats to national security, solely because of their Japanese ancestry. Now 94 years old, Yoshiko Susan Kawaguchi Matsumoto looks back at the five months that she and her family were forced to live in a horse stall at the Santa Anita Racetrack in Southern California, and the two years they were imprisoned in a second internment camp, in the desert of Rohwer, Arkansas. Eventually Yoshiko and her family were released. From then on, Yoshiko’s life began to unfold in a series of events more fortuitous and beautiful than she could have ever imagined.