Charles Kikuchi was an American-born citizen of Japanese descent who was moved to a government relocation center in 1942. Kikuchi was a twenty-six-year-old graduate student when he was ordered to relocate to the Tanforan Race Track in San Bruno, California, where he and his family lived in a converted horse stable. He kept a vivid diary during his detainment.

There was a terrific rainstorm last night and we have had to wade through the “slush alleys” again. Everyone sinks up to the ankles in mud. Some trucks came in today with lumber to build new barracks, but the earth was so soft that the truck sank over the hubs and they had a hell of a time pulling it out. The Army certainly is rushing things. About half of the Japanese have already been evacuated from the restricted areas in this state. Manzanar, Santa Anita, and Tanforan will be the three biggest centers. Now that S.F. [San Francisco] has been almost cleared the American Legion, the Native Sons of the Golden West, and the California Joint Immigration Committee are filing charges that the Nisei [children born in America to Japanese parents] should be disfranchised because we have obtained citizenship under false pretenses and that “we are loyal subjects of Japan” and therefore never should have been allowed to obtain citizenship. This sort of thing will gain momentum and we are not in a very advantageous position to combat it. I get fearful sometimes because this sort of hysteria will gain momentum.

The S.F. Registrar has made a statement that we will be sent absentee ballots to which Mr. James Fisk of the Joint Immigration Committee protests greatly. Tomorrow I am going to carry a petition around to protest against their protests. I think that they are stabbing us in the back and that there should be a separate concentration camp for these so-called Americans. They are a lot more dangerous than the Japanese in the U.S. ever will or have been.

Source: John Modell, ed., The Kikuchi Diary: Chronicle from an American Concentration Camp (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 73.