Author Kiyo Sato has lived most of her life in the Rosemont area, since the days when the area was just farms and vineyards. As a child she went to school at the historic Edward Kelley School on Bradshaw Road.

"I got my best education of my whole 87 years [there]," she said.

But during World War II, when Sato was 19 years old, her family, and all Americans of Japanese ancestry, were rounded up and shipped off to internment camps. They lived in cramped quarters in tar-papered buildings with no insulation against a blistering summer sun and the howling winds and bitter cold of winter. Click on the video to the right to watch Sato recall memories from the internment camp.

Luckily, Sato, who now lives in Rosemont, was able to get out after nine months to attend college. Others weren't so fortunate.

Sato's memoir, "Kiyo's Story: A Japanese-American Family's Quest for the American Dream," (Soho Press) tells of those terrible years. It offers a firsthand look at the effect that period had on her and the 120,000 Japanese-Americans who shared the injustice of being imprisoned for the crime of looking like the enemy.

Sato said she harbors no anger over being uprooted from her rural home in the Mather area on orders from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in the form of Executive Order 9066.  

"Shikataga nai" is a common Japanese phrase, she said. "It means we just let go of what can't be fixed and work hard for what can. Where would you get if you were bitter? If you do that, you set yourself backward."

Rather, she wants to keep the real story alive so it doesn't happen again. There are few witnesses still living, and the number decreases every year.

Sato makes presentations at schools and civic organizations to increase awareness of the internment. Her book even attracted the attention of the Smithsonian Institution and she was invited to give a talk in Washington, D.C. 

Even as their families were held in guarded camps back home, Japanese-American soldiers were serving gallantly in the U.S. Army in the European and South Pacific theaters during World War II. "My brother was one of them," Sato said. "The Japanese-American U.S. Army 442nd Regimental Combat Team had the highest number of purple hearts and medals of honor of any combat unit," she said.

Back home, one of Sato's neighbors was arrested and imprisoned as a spy, although he was never tried and there was no evidence that he or any other Japanese-American ever acted against the United States.

"Not one," Sato said. "Not a single case."

As the Japanese-American internees struggled for normalcy in the camps, they focused on the children, determined not to let it be a traumatic experience for them.

"We took care of the children so they would grow up happy and secure," Sato said. They even had a school with some credentialed teachers.

Sato served as a teacher's assistant. When the war ended and the internees were released and the children went to regular schools, "they were on a par with the others," she said.

She had been sent to two camps, one in northern California, another on an Arizona Indian reservation with conditions she said made it nearly uninhabitable. The Native Americans learned that the Japanese-American internees were able to grow vegetables in the hostile soil and began doing the same for themselves. It is a skill that continues today among the tribes.

When they were released, each person was given $25 and a train ticket to anywhere they wanted to go. Many had nothing to go back to because their belongings had been looted and their properties seized. All they could do was start over again, using the same attitude they used to keep their hopes alive in the camps.

Sato doesn't want to simply assume nothing like this will ever happen again.

"We need to keep on being vigilant," Sato said. "I think we owe it to the next generation [to talk about] what we have learned here."

"Kiyo's Story: A Japanese-American Family's Quest for the American Dream," originally titled, "Dandelion Through the Crack," is available at Barnes and Noble and Borders bookstores, and on Amazon.com. Locally, it is sold at The Market Place, 11395 Folsom Blvd. in Rancho Cordova.