Yuki Okinaga Hayakawa Llewellyn died aged 80 in March
Los Angeles:
Yuki Okinaga Hayakawa Llewellyn, who has come to symbolize one of America’s darkest chapters, has died nearly eight decades after being sent to a US internment camp during World War II.
A 1942 photo of her sitting alone on a suitcase at a Los Angeles train station epitomized the cruelty of America’s policy of confining Japanese Americans, who officials said posed a threat of war.
More than 120,000 people like her were forced to settle in camps in the western states and Arkansas during the war, an act for which the US government later apologized and paid reparations.
She died aged 80 in March, but her death was largely overshadowed by the coronavirus pandemic until a family friend contacted the Los Angeles Times.
Yuki, looking lost and uncertain, was photographed as she and her mother, both U.S. citizens, made their way to one of the barbed-wire camps in California.
Yuki Okinaga Hayakawa Llewellyn, in a 1942 photo of herself sitting alone on a suitcase at a train station in Los Angeles
There was no due process for deciding who would be confined, just a presidential order after Japanese forces attacked the US military installation at Pearl Harbor in December 1942.
Yuki ended up in the famous Manzanar Camp, a desolate site at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California. She and her mother were among the first to be confined and the last to be released from the site.
His family settled far away in the Midwestern American city of Cleveland. She then attended college, married and had a son, according to her obituary in The News Gazette.
(With the exception of the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
