AS A commencement speaker at his high-school graduation in Salinas, Calif., George Ikeda spoke about the importance of civil liberties in the United States.
Three years later, on July 4, 1942 - Independence Day - he became an internment-camp prisoner, taken from his home by the government whose virtues he once extolled.
Ikeda's only crime was his Japanese heritage.
Hirotoshi Nishikawa was 3 when his family was uprooted from their Hollister, Calif., home and taken to an arid desert camp.
He retains few memories of his wretched experience, but the ones that linger are tied to his senses: the heat, the sand, the suicide.
Both men were prisoners of a terror that swept over the United States in the wake of World War II, particularly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
While soldiers abroad fought to liberate concentration camp prisoners, the United States government, in what the American Bar Association deems "one of our country's most tragic constitutional failures," removed more than 120,000 Japanese immigrants and citizens from the West Coast and imprisoned them in 10 internment camps.
"After the attack on Pearl Harbor, rumors were flying every day about what Washington was going to do with us," Ikeda, 85, now of Allentown, said.
While his neighbors recognized the loyalty to America that Ikeda and his family had always exhibited, it was the media, Ikeda said, who quickly turned against those of Japanese heritage.
"There were a lot of false reports like ‘The farmers plowed an arrow in their field that points to strategic targets for enemy planes,'" he said.
On Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the military to remove and imprison anyone who was at least one-eighth Japanese by blood.
It didn't matter that Ikeda and Nishikawa were born American, that citizenship to this country was their birthright. They were ordered to report to assembly centers by April taking only what they could carry.
"We weren't physically removed from our homes; we followed orders," Ikeda said. "There's a typical Japanese term meaning ‘It can't be helped.' But you couldn't think of anything sadder than leaving everything behind."
The men and their families were taken from the assembly centers by train to an internment camp in Poston, Ariz. Although the two did not know each other at the time, they would later become acquainted through the Philadelphia chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League.
Used to the temperate weather of California, the men felt like they were stepping into hell when they disembarked in Arizona, where temperatures soared above 100 degrees.
"On the day we arrived, elderly people were passing out," Ikeda said. "We were so tired and affected by the heat that we didn't have appetites."
Nishikawa, 69, now of Haverford, Delaware County, remembers being greeted by rows and rows of tar-paper-covered barracks - one of which would be his family's new home.
The barracks were 400 square feet and Ikeda's family of seven - his parents and four younger siblings - all lived in one.
"We had to fill canvas sacks with straw and that was our mattress," he said.
Sandstorms were common at the camps and after they blew through, everything was left covered in a fine layer of dust.
"When the sand storm hit the sand came through the roof, the windows, the walls," Nishikawa said. "You see sandstorms in movies but you can't imagine how scary it is for a little kid."
Nishikawa's childhood memories of the camp are of collage of images, sights and words.
He remembers playing under the barracks, surrounded by rattlesnakes, scorpions and Gila monsters. He remembers getting chicken pox. And he remembers hearing the word "suicide" for the first time.
"It was, ‘Mister so-and-so hung himself in another barrack,'" he said. "As an adult, when I began to study the history of all this I learned older men became very despondent because when they got uprooted they lost all their livelihood. They didn't know what was going to happen after camp, so a number of suicides took place."
Ikeda remembers the toll the camp took on his father.
"We felt sad but just imagine what my dad felt," Ikeda said. "He was in his 50s and he had black hair. After the war started, in those few months, he turned all gray."
Family structures in the camp broke down. Discipline became difficult as parental authority became secondary to that of the military. Teenagers hung out in groups by themselves and families had a difficult time eating meals together in overcrowded mess halls.
Nishikawa remembers little kids having to take showers with their parents.
"You can imagine whole families taking baths just like you were in a high school," he said. "There was no privacy or nothing."
Nishikawa's youngest brother, who was born in the camp in 1944, holds a rare distinction - his birth certificate bears the name of a place that no longer exists: "Poston, Arizona camp #1."
After two years in the camp, in June of 1944, Ikeda attempted to join the military as an interpreter, but he was deemed too emaciated. It would be the Quakers - "the only friends we had when we were in the concentration camp" - that eventually helped Ikeda move to Moorestown, N.J., where he worked on a peach and apple farm. His parents and siblings soon followed.
Nishikawa, who spent three years in the camp, left with his family in 1946. They moved back to San Jose, Calif. and lived in a Buddhist temple for a week. His father cashed in some insurance policies, and his parents opened a Chinese restaurant.
Sometimes, when customers would find out his parents were from Japan and not China, they would get upset and leave the restaurant.
"The hysteria persisted far after the war" Nishikawa said. "The prevailing mindset after World War II was to focus on dissolving into the melting pot of America, to move away from your ethnic and cultural identity and become American."
Nishikawa said it wasn't until the Korean war ended that the social milieu of society changed. Japanese- Americans became less harassed as the prosperity in Japan grew from the ashes of World War II, he said.
Readjusting and returning to life outside of the camp was difficult for Ikeda.
"Those were trying days. The betrayal of being accused of being disloyal, that haunted us," he said.
"What we experienced was a loss of self-esteem. I still felt ashamed that the government didn't trust us. That's very devastating, especially when you are born in this country."
It wasn't until nearly four decades later, when President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, offering redress payments and an apology to Japanese-American citizens, that the men felt some semblance of closure.
"People ask me all the time if I'm mad at the U.S. I'm not," Ikeda said.
"It's still my country and I'm proud of my country. Even if it took a long time, Congress and the people had the courage to admit there was a wrong done and to right that wrong.
"What other country would have the courage to do that?"
Nishikawa said the act was an "important, symbolic gesture," but he worries our country has all too soon forgotten its own lessons. In the wake of Sept. 11, Nishikawa said the Japanese American Citizens League became very involved with Muslim communities.
"It was really disheartening to see the federal government act like that again.
"Another big tragedy on the soil of the United States and we go nuts. Within a few months hundreds of people had been jailed without charge," he said. "9/11 reminds us that a lot of people in our institutions forget.
"As we continue to make progress in the defense of civil liberties it's like Sisyphus rolling the boulder up two paces and it rolls back four," he said.
"I think civil-liberties groups like the ACLU would like to go out of business. We've been at this stuff for how many years and it keeps happening."