When Jeanne Sakata was growing up near Watsonville, California, her parents never talked about what happened to them during World War II. Like thousands of other Japanese-Americans on the West Coast, Sakata’s family had been forcibly removed from their home and sent to an armed camp.

“In my own family, there was no talk of the camps. I think my father, my aunts and uncles, were traumatized by being teenagers and being ripped out of their homes and put behind barbed wire," she says.

Although people she knew were silent about this chapter in their lives, Sakata learned more about it in the 1960s and 70s, when a younger generation of Asian-Americans grew more assertive about their ethnic and cultural identity and history.

As California residents, Sakata's family experience during the 1940s was like that of most every other West Coast Asian Americans she knew.

So Sakata was surprised one day when she flipped on the television to a PBS documentary about a second-generation Japanese American man named Gordon Hirabayashi.