Takeo Sugimoto didn't know where he was headed when he and his family arrived at the train station in Oceanside 70 years ago. But he wasn't alone.
About 1,000 other Japanese-Americans from North County also were gathered at the station that day, many holding two suitcases filled with as many belongings as they could fit inside.
"I was confused a little bit, but not scared," said the 85-year-old Encinitas resident. "I was with my family. But it was kind of surreal. Why is this happening? Where are we going?"
He and other Japanese-Americans from California, along with others from the western parts of Oregon and Washington and the southern border of Arizona, were told to take only what they could carry in two hands to a local train station, where they would be transported to an undisclosed location.
In San Diego County, which had a population of 2,076 Japanese-Americans in 1940, families were sent to Poston, 12 miles south of Parker, Ariz. Poston was one of 10 internment camps created during World War II after an executive order authorized the Secretary of War to designate specific areas as military zones and excluded certain people from living in them.
President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942.
In San Diego County and other Pacific coast communities, the reverberating terror of the Pearl Harbor attack by the Japanese in 1941 fueled fear of conspiracies, treason and espionage from within.
Historian Gerald Schlenker researched and wrote about the period in his article, "The Internment of the Japanese of San Diego County During the Second World War," published in 1972 in the Journal of San Diego History. In his article, it was clear the county was swift to call for action against the perceived threat.
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