Marie Namba (later Marie Asai) was born in 1923 and grew up in Fairview, Oregon. She graduated from Gresham High School as valedictorian in 1941. In 1942, she and her family were among more than 120,000 Japanese Americans to be forcibly incarcerated by the U.S. government. They were sent first to the Portland Assembly Center and then the Minidoka incarceration camp. After the war, Namba moved to Portland, Oregon, where she worked as a live-in domestic worker and then at Jacoby Jewelers. In 1950, she married Taro "Tot" Asai; the couple lived in Hood River, Oregon, and had four children. She died in 2012.

Source: Obituary (accessed March 19, 2025), https://www.andersonstributecenter.com/memorials/marie-asai/1222899/obituary.php

June Juliann Clark (later June Burke) was born in 1917 in Pendleton, Oregon, and grew up in the Montavilla neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. She studied at Oregon State College (now Oregon State University) in Corvallis, graduating in 1939 with a degree in education. She worked as a teacher and in the food service business. In 1943, she married Delbert W. Burke, a Marine pilot who was killed the following year during a training mission in the South Pacific. She never remarried. She died in 2018.

Sources: Obituary in the Oregonian, May 13, 2018, page D12; information provided by Julie Brands in February 2025.

Following the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, by Japan, and the entry of the United States into World War II, the U.S. federal government began placing restrictions on Japanese Americans. In February 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the secretary of war to prescribe areas in the United States from which people might be excluded. Following this, Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, who viewed Japanese people as an "enemy race," created military zones on the western coast of the United States from which all people of Japanese ancestry were to be forcibly removed to incarceration camps away from the coast.

In May 1942, Japanese Americans living in Oregon were compelled by military order to relocate to assembly centers either at the site of the Portland International Livestock Exposition Center or in California's San Joaquin Valley. That summer, they were transferred to incarceration centers further inland that were officially named "relocation centers." Most of those from Oregon were incarcerated either at Tule Lake in California or at Minidoka in Idaho. Over the course of the war, some incarcerated people were permitted to leave the camps either to provide agricultural labor or to serve in the United States armed forces, most notably in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team.

In December 1944, the U.S. War Department declared that Japanese Americans were free to leave the incarceration camps starting January 2, 1945. However, due to efforts by white Oregonians to prevent the return of Japanese Americans and Japanese Americans' fears of violence against them, many of those from Oregon who had been incarcerated only gradually moved back to the state over a period of time. Most of those who had been incarcerated had lost most of what land and property they had owned prior to the war. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed legislation that provided $20,000 as compensation for any surviving Japanese Americans who had been incarcerated.

Source: "Japanese American Wartime Incarceration in Oregon," by Craig Collisson, Oregon Encyclopedia, https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/japanese_internment/