For decades, the tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans who were sent to internment camps in the wake of Pearl Harbor spoke little of their traumatic World War II experience.

The internment of 120,000 Issei and Nisei -- Japanese immigrants and their American-born offspring -- in 10 wartime camps was the end product of years of government-sanctioned racism. Many lost everything they had slowly accumulated during years of grinding poverty.

In the war's aftermath, they resolved to quietly get on with their lives. Those interned lived the refrain they had adopted in the camps to rationalize their experience -- shi-kata-nai or "can't help it."

"No one talked about those things, nor did they teach them in schools," said Diane Tanaka, 37, of Torrance, a fourth generation Japanese-American. "They didn't think about what happened to them. They didn't tell anybody. It was shameful."

They sought to avoid provoking renewed prejudice for the sake of succeeding generations, shielding them from the unpleasantness they had suffered.

They rushed to assimilate into a culture that had singled them out merely because of the way they looked, bestowing American names on their children and impressing upon them the value of education as the way to get ahead.

It was the younger generation that yearned to know more.

Among them was Al Muratsuchi, 40, former president of the South Bay Japanese American Citizens League.

"I've always been curious as to why there's such a large Japanese-American community in the South Bay, especially in cities like Gardena and Torrance," said the third generation Japanese-American. "I wanted to learn more about the history and gain a greater appreciation for my own community."

The result was the South Bay Historical Project, an effort to document and place into historical context the experience of early Japanese-American immigrants in the area.

Armed with a $1,500 grant from the Pacific Southwest District of the JACL and $12,000 from the state-funded California Civil Liberties Public Education Program, volunteers interviewed local residents willing to share their experiences.

The grants paid for oral interviews with 23 people, all but one of whom were Nisei.

While the intent was not to expressly focus on internment, that was the defining experience for the generation of Japanese-Americans who lived through it, Muratsuchi said.

It's not difficult to see why from a glance at the pages of the then Redondo Beach-based Daily Breeze during March and April 1942 that reported on "the greatest forced migration in American history."

• A "strange caravan" of 1,000 Japanese headed to an internment camp in desolate Owens Valley on March 23 so "that Uncle Sam might carry on with his war effort undisturbed." That same day, two farming experts leased 1,320 acres of land on the Palos Verdes Peninsula "vacated" by Japanese farmers and pledged to show that "Americans can grow just as good vegetables as the Japs if given half a chance."

• Two days later federal employment officials in Torrance fretted over a worker shortage, saying "there are more Japanese with farms than Americans willing to take them over." That same week a Japanese flower grower was arrested in Redondo Beach for violating curfew and accused of "making apparent signals with a flashlight" during an initial test blackout. The man said he was holding a flashlight while loading flowers into a truck.

• A March 30 directive gave 3,000 "alien and native born Japs" six days to get out of the militarily sensitive Long Beach, San Pedro and Redondo Beach areas. However, "without exception, the evacuees seemed philosophically happy" the newspaper reported the next day.

The experience shaped not only how Japanese-Americans saw themselves, but also affected how they related to the community around them.

In many cases, so formative were the years of internment, it had lasting consequences for those who endured it.

"One of the goals of the project is to institutionalize that memory," Muratsuchi said.

"Even though a lot of people who lived through the internment experience are passing on, it's important we capture those stories so they can be handed on to future generations," he said

Last week, a Web site containing the oral interviews went live, allowing access to the material.

"What's beautiful about oral history is you're getting first-hand accounts of things that happened to ordinary people," Tanaka said.

"This is their opportunity to share -- and they've never done that before."

Here are four of those stories.

Midori Kamei, 81, Rancho Palos Verdes

A twice-married vivacious octogenarian with immaculately applied makeup and a ready giggle, Kamei has done well for herself since being born into poverty in rural Redondo Beach.

A comfortable $900,000 home has replaced the crumbling Gardena farmhouse where she grew up and stuffed newspapers in its dilapidated walls to keep out the cold winter wind. A shiny BMW sits in her garage, a reaction, she concedes, to the old Model T her father would drive, much to her embarrassment.

Her bubbly personality belies the resentment and despair she felt as a teenager.

Overt racism accompanied poverty outside the Japanese-American enclave where she grew up, near Normandie Avenue and Artesia Boulevard.

Kamei remembers when she was first called a "Jap" while attending Gardena High School. She recalls being prohibited to swim with other children in a Torrance pool, ostensibly because Japanese had some sort of infectious eye disease.

After Pearl Harbor, animosity escalated into outright hostility.

So it almost came as a relief when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Feb. 19, 1942, executive order giving the military the authority to confine Japanese-Americans along the West Coast to internment camps.

Kamei and her family were initially housed that April in a hurriedly built camp at Santa Anita racetrack surrounded by armed guards.

"I'll never forget the hatred," she said. "I felt safe, would you believe it, behind those barbed-wire fences. It was an escape."

During her five months at Santa Anita she talked herself into a teaching job. While there Kamei learned she had won a two-year scholarship to the private Colorado Women's College that fall.

Moving on after graduating from the two-year college to pursue a degree and teaching credential in New York, she vowed never to return to California.

"Once I went to New York, no matter how strange I looked, there was always someone strange," Kamei said, laughing. "That was the first time I felt like an American."

But nine years after she had left, Kamei returned to the state, married to her childhood sweetheart.

She got a job in 1967 teaching psychology at El Camino College, where she worked until her 1990 retirement more than a quarter century later.

Over the years, Kamei became politically active, starting several Democratic clubs, including the South Bay Asian Democrats.

Her activism was no accident.

"When we were evacuated, the average Japanese-American was 18 years of age," she said. "We had no political clout, no influence.

"We got involved in the political process because we knew what it was like to be totally helpless. I hope it never happens again to any other group. I wouldn't want anyone to go through what we went through."

Jibo Satow, 90, Torrance

In contrast to Kamei, Satow accepted the government's explanation for interning his family after Pearl Harbor.

"I think it was proper for the government to do that -- I've got no qualms about it," he said matter of factly in the north Torrance home he shares with his wife of 65 years, Fumi. "They deprived us of making a living. But at the time I don't think the government had a choice."

The practical perspective was learned from his parents.

Instead of fighting discrimination, they worked around it.

His father, who as a young man was drafted into the Japanese navy and fought against Russia and China, was among the first Japanese farmers in the South Bay.

In 1911, he purchased 2˝ acres of land at the corner of El Segundo Boulevard and Kornblum Avenue in what is now Hawthorne.

Satow, the oldest of nine children, was born on the flower farm three years later and lived there almost continuously until 1995. He was among the first Japanese-Americans to attend Leuzinger High School.

"Our folks told us when we were kids 'you're a minority and you have to behave a little differently,' " he said. "My sister and I were the only two Japanese going to Leuzinger High School. ... They accepted us -- we tried to blend in."

Satow joined the track team and student council. He never bothered to learn to speak, read or write Japanese.

Luck and planning allowed his father to successfully exploit legal loopholes in a succession of discriminatory laws and prosper.

His father purchased the farm before the 1913 passage of the California Alien Land Law, which prohibited noncitizens from owning land and was designed to stop the influx of Japanese.

He invested in real estate.

He co-founded the Southern California Flower Market, which still exists today.

And the modest farm grew to 15 acres, becoming the basis for Satow Floral, with operations in Hawthorne and Carpinteria and employing 50 workers at its peak.

The family leased their land after the outbreak of war.

Upon their release from internment, the family simply moved back in, their land, vehicles and property intact.

Still, they were not immune from hardship.

Because of his father's military service, by noon Dec. 7, 1941, FBI agents had picked him up; he spent time in a Montana prisoner-of-war camp before rejoining his family in an Arkansas internment camp.

Satow's second daughter was born on Sea Biscuit Road at Santa Anita and has the birth certificate to prove it.

And three brothers were drafted, serving the nation that had confined them.

"I have no problems," said Satow, who now lives about 4 miles from where he was born. "This country has been good to me."

Alice Uyeda, 84, Torrance

When the United States entered World War II, Uyeda's immigrant parents had a contract to purchase 10 acres of farmland.

Living in Baldwin Park in the San Gabriel Valley, they had rented a succession of tracts to farm over the years. State law prohibited them from leasing the same parcel for more than three years.

But after Pearl Harbor her parents put most of their possessions in storage -- which were eventually lost -- and never acquired the land of their own they had long wanted.

"We didn't understand," Uyeda recalled. "We wondered why. We were stunned. My parents took it very hard."

Uyeda managed to avoid internment, thanks to the foresight of her husband-to-be, Kenny Uyeda. They voluntarily moved to Utah before they could be ordered into camps.

Along with six other families, who were all related, Uyeda and the man she married in 1943 sharecropped there until 1947 when the couple saw a newspaper advertisement for a Torrance nursery to rent.

Uyeda's husband died in 1986, but she still lives there today, sharing the house with a small menagerie of animals at 184th Street and Western Avenue.

The couple worked hard to become part of the community.

She, for instance, started working as a poll worker in 1957 and still does so.

Uyeda's husband was appointed to the Torrance Planning Commission in 1956, the first Asian-American on a municipal advisory panel.

He served for 28 years, their lives revolving around meetings on the first and third Wednesdays of every month. He never missed a meeting until stepping down in 1984 after term limits were implemented.

At the time of his death, her husband planned a Japanese garden at the civic center. After it was built, city officials posthumously dedicated it to him.

Uyeda remains active in the community she and her husband helped build, volunteering for Meals on Wheels and other organizations.

"Because of him everyone is good to me," Uyeda said. "I feel I'm reaping the best of his accomplishments."

Frank Endo, 81, Gardena

A devout Christian and member of the Gardena Valley Baptist Church for 35 years, Endo's favorite Bible verse is Proverbs 3:5-6.

"Trust in the Lord with all thy heart and lean not on your own understanding and in all your ways acknowledge him and he will make your path straight," he recites.

The verse encapsulates the philosophy of someone who had little control over his life as a young man and who relied on his faith to sustain him. And who like other Japanese-Americans shrugged and said, "shi-kata-nai."

Born in Wilmington the son of a fisherman, Endo spent his teenage years in the wooden cannery-owned homes on Terminal Island in a community of 6,000 Japanese-Americans. His life revolved around sports, especially gymnastics.

But the war would permanently rend his family asunder. Just before Pearl Harbor, his father returned to Japan to take over the family business from his ill father, taking two of Endo's siblings with him.

None ever came back to the United States; a younger brother served in the Japanese army during the war.

But Endo and a brother considered themselves Americans, with no desire no live in an alien land. Their mother stayed behind with them.

The repercussions of Pearl Harbor came as a shock to Endo.

On Dec. 7, 18-year-old Endo decided to see a movie in San Pedro, but was stopped by a military police officer. He was detained for several hours that day, his picture appearing in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner.

"I said, 'we're Americans,' " Endo recalled. " 'I don't know Japan.' Why would they do this to me?

"It changed our life. But I can understand that we became the enemy."

The three were shipped off first to Santa Anita and then the Amache internment camp in Colorado.

During his detention he taught gymnastics and other subjects. In 1943, he volunteered to join the military over his mother's objections.

He served as an interpreter during the war crimes trials in Japan, briefly meeting his father again while there.

His time in Japan influenced the rest of his life.

It was there he fell in love and married. Endo was able to get a private members' bill passed in Congress that allowed him to become the first American to bring back a Japanese wife to the United States.

And it was there he continued his involvement in gymnastics.

Endo eventually became a top international gymnastics judge -- he judged the vaulting competition in the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles -- and still owns a gymnastics supply company.

Yet post-war discrimination persisted in the United States.

After attending college for two years on the GI Bill, Endo was shocked that Japanese-Americans were barred from buying homes in many cities, including predominantly black north Gardena.

"I was bitter," he said. "But who was I going to tell?"

The Japanese-American population in the United States and South Bay -- where the latest Census figures show the Japanese-American population has dropped 5.5 percent since 1990 -- is declining.

Yet the stories of their contributions to the South Bay -- today dotted with the head offices of such companies as Honda and Toyota who wanted to be close to a Japanese-American population base -- have just begun to emerge.

The South Bay Historical Project is one of several local efforts to record that oral history.

Tanaka, who coordinated the project, is also associate director of the Torrance-based Go For Broke Foundation.

That nonprofit group, which has a resource center open to the public, has collected more than 500 oral histories of Japanese-Americans who served in the American military. It is perhaps the largest repository of such material in the nation.

And the Palos Verdes Library District has started to do the same for the descendents of Japanese-American farmers who once lived on The Hill.

It is the younger generation spearheading the moves, educating their own community in the process, Tanaka said.

And it is that generation for whom the struggles of those who came before them should resonate the most, said Muratsuchi, who initiated the project.

"At the very least I feel those in the Japanese-American community owe it to our ancestors and our parents to know our history so we don't take the good life in the South Bay for granted," he said.

"(The project) hopefully will not just have relevance for Japanese-Americans who live in the South Bay, but for everyone to appreciate the diversity in the South Bay and the unique history in their back yard."