Episode 10: "The Plan" - Henry Miyatake

Episode 10 of "10 Camps, 10 Stories: Beyond the Barbed Wire"
Henry Miyatake was born in Seattle in 1929, the youngest of three children. He grew up in the family's grocery store. After E.O. 9066 was signed, his family was incarcerated at the Puyallup Detention Center before being moved to the Minidoka concentration camp in Idaho, along with over 13,000 Japanese Americans from the Pacific Northwest. After being released from camp, Henry returned to Seattle. He eventually got a job for the Federal Aviation Administration in Alaska in 1948 and joined the army reserves. In the 1960’s he began to study the wartime incarceration and think about how Japanese Americans might seek redress for what had been done to them by their own government. Miyatake researched the Federal Code in 1975 and discovered that E.O. 9066 was still on the books. Through political connections, he got the issue to the White House, and President Ford used language drafted by Henry to revoke the Executive Order on Feb. 19, 1976. In 1978 he was part of the Evacuation Redress Committee of the Japanese American Citizens League chapter in Seattle and helped organize the first-ever Day of Remembrance, a two-and-a-half-mile car caravan to the former Puyallup detention center to commemorate the incarceration.
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