Life in a Japanese-American Internment Camp, via the Diary of a Young Man

An Ansel Adams photograph of the Manzanar internment camp in California is part of “Out of the Desert,” a show at Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library. CreditAnsel Adams, via Beinecke Library, Yale University

NEW HAVEN — Until recently, Yonekazu Satoda says, he did not recall the diary he had written in neat cursive in the laundry building of an internment camp in Arkansas. He would eke out his entries at night amid the washboards and concrete sinks, the only private space in the camp with light.

Mr. Satoda, who gives his age as “94½,” was 22 when he and his family were uprooted from their home in San Francisco and sent to an assembly center in Fresno, Calif., and then to the Jerome Relocation Center in the mosquito-ridden Arkansas Delta. They were among an estimated 120,000 people of Japanese descent, about two-thirds of them United States citizens, who were regarded as enemy aliens and incarcerated after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

“Today was supposed to be my graduation day at Cal,” Mr. Satoda noted on May 13, 1942, the second day of a confinement that lasted almost three years.

“Got hell from Mom for fooling around with women,” he wrote six days later.

Photo“Hot as hell today,” he reported the following evening. “Ptomaine poisoning in mess hall,” he added. “3 or 4 hundred sick.”

Yonekazu Satoda, 94, at home in San Francisco, with his wedding photograph.CreditRamin Talaie for The New York Times

Mr. Satoda’s fastidious and somewhat irreverent diary is part of “Out of the Desert: Resilience and Memory in Japanese American Internment,” a new exhibition at the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University here that runs through Feb. 26. The exhibition includes materials from Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and features a substantial digital archive, including Mr. Satoda’s diary.

“I was shocked beyond belief,” Mr. Satoda said of learning that the diary — which he had not seen or thought about since 1945, the year he was released from internment and went into the Army — was now at Yale.

The exhibition, curated by Courtney Sato, a 28-year-old doctoral student in American studies, draws on a wealth of archival material: a high school yearbook with photographs of barracks, correspondence between internees and anti-internment activists, government broadsides — including the War Relocation Authority’s original “evacuation” notice — and photographs by Ansel Adams of theManzanar War Relocation Center in California. There are also plenty of euphemisms by journalists — like “evacuees” — that disguised the true nature of the internments, now widely considered a historic injustice.