HARRY UENO / 1907-2004

Internee fought for
Japanese-Americans’ rights

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. » Harry Ueno, long considered a hero for taking a courageous stand against the corruption of guards during the World War II internment of Japanese Americans, has died. He was 97.

Ueno, who died of pneumonia Tuesday in Mountain View, also supported a campaign to win reparations for the 120,000 Japanese Americans forced into the internment camps.

"He fought for what he believed in," said U.S. Rep. Mike Honda, D-Calif. "My thoughts and prayers are with his family."

Born in Hawaii in 1907, Ueno took a job on a merchant ship as a teenager, abandoning the ship when it reached the United States.

He settled in Los Angeles, where he married and raised three sons while selling produce. But that life was interrupted in 1941 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

Ueno and his family were taken to the Manzanar internment camp, located at the base of Mount Whitney, which eventually housed 10,000 men, women and children.

While working in the mess hall, Ueno realized that camp operators were selling sugar intended for his fellow internees on the wartime black market. He confronted them and was arrested.

Two young internees were shot and killed by guards in the uprising that ensued.

For more than three years, Ueno was carted to various jails around the West, spending a year in solitary confinement in Tule Lake, though he was never charged with a crime or given a hearing.

After the war he received $15 and a train ticket to San Jose. He began a new life there, raising strawberries and cherries and retiring in 1972.

His story has been included in an oral history titled "Manzanar Martyr"; "And Justice for All," a book about the internment; and "Rabbit in the Moon," a documentary film by fellow internee Emiko Omori.