After slavery and the slaughter of the Indians, one of the most shameful official acts in American history was the forcible removal during World War Two of Japanese Americans living on the West Coast of the United States to desert relocation camps. Ordered by President Roosevelt, the mass relocation was executed to prevent sabotage of the Allied war effort, under the theory that Japanese Americans might not be loyal citizens. Yet the US military gladly accepted these same potential saboteurs. Many Japanese Americans enlisted and fought with great distinction in Europe. In Hawaii, the location of Japan's preemptive attack on Pearl Harbor (and arguably one of the United States' most vulnerable regions) no Japanese Americans were relocated; they formed too large a percentage of the population. To remove them would have hamstrung the island economy. Nor was there any relocation of America's other enemies-of-the-day: German Americans or Italian Americans.

For Scholastic 's "My Name is America" faux diary, The Journey of Ben Uchida, I was asked to recreate a birds eye view 3-D map of a typical Japanese relocation camp. I based my map on period engineering drawings. The legend is derived from period posters announcing the imminent relocation. The map was created in Dimensions and Illustrator.

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