Gripped by fear of further Japanese attacks on the Pacific Coast, community leaders in California, Oregon and Washington pressured the U.S. government to move Japanese residents out of their homes and into isolated inland areas.

The outcry prompted then-President Franklin Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, authorizing the U.S. military to secure borders of the U.S. against possible enemy assault. The order also enabled the military to uproot Japanese-Americans from West Coast communities and place them under armed guard.

With the executive order in hand, the Western Defense Command imposed a curfew and travel restrictions on all people of Japanese ancestry in a newly created military zone that included the states of California, Oregon, Washington and the western half of Arizona.

Two months later, the same military group ordered all those of Japanese ancestry to report for evacuation to military camps, a move that resulted in more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans -- two-thirds of them U.S. citizens -- being held at U.S. detention camps.

"My brother was actually three weeks old when the call came for all Japanese-Americans to report to a relocation center. And they were taken out of their homes and sent first to a racetrack in the Bay Area in San Francisco," Tani said.

"They literally lived in horse stables for a couple of months and then were put on trains -- not knowing where they were going -- and ended up in Utah."

The racetrack was one of 16 temporary assembly centers that served as a first stop for the Japanese-Americans until the newly established War Relocation Authority could ready permanent internment camps.

Living conditions were unsanitary at best, particularly the horse stalls that housed the internees. "The stall was about ten-by-twenty feet and empty except for three folded Army cots lying on the floor," author Yoshiko Uchida wrote in Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese American Family.

"Dust, dirt and wood shavings covered the linoleum that had been laid over manure-covered boards, the smell of horses hung in the air, and the whitened corpses of many insects still clung to the hastily white-washed walls."

Next stop for the Tani family: Topaz, Utah, the site of one of 10 internment camps in seven states that had been turned into "relocation centers."

Patterned after military facilities, the camps all were surrounded by barbed wire and watched over by heavily armed military police in guard towers. Those detained were housed in barracks with tarpaper walls and no amenities. They ate rice, macaroni and potatoes in mess halls. Beef brains, tongue, kidneys and liver were staples in camp kitchens.

But life went on.

Deprived of basic constitutional rights, the Japanese-Americans nevertheless strove to create communities inside the fenced-in confines of the concentration camps.

All the camps operated farms, and internees also were encouraged to put their skills to work as physicians, dentists, among other jobs. U.S. government pay ranged from $12 to $19 a month for 48-hour workweeks.

Small school districts were set up in each of the camps. First-grade through high school classes were taught, and Parent Teacher Associations were established along with Boy Scout troops and civic organizations.

Dances were held, small theater companies staged performances and athletic teams took part in competitions.

"Even with the hardship of living in camp, I think, from the stories my Mom tells me, they tried to make life as normal as possible," Tani said. "They set up high schools. They set up stores. They set up sports teams. They thrived in that sort of very restrained, closed environment."

The beginning of the end for the mass imprisonment came Dec. 17, 1944, as the federal government issued a public proclamation that led to the release of those confined in the concentration camps.

A day later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that claims of military necessity could not justify holding American citizens against their will.

And while it wasn't until 1988 that the U.S. Congress offered an official apology, the wartime struggle of the Japanese ultimately paved the way to limitless opportunities for Tani and others in American society.

"I guess the amazing part of my story, when I think about it, is that here's a country that chose to take my family out of their homes strictly because of a racial connection -- not citizenship; my parents were born U.S. citizens -- and restrain them for years, and then learn the lesson, realize that that was not the right thing to do, and apologize for that," Tani said.

Just as amazing is that the citizens of the same country that imprisoned so many now routinely elect Japanese-Americans to key local, state and federal government posts, and that one of their own now is an astronaut headed for orbit.

"It says great things about our nation and about my family. It's great that one generation later the same government can send me into space," Tani said.

"I've very proud of that, both for my family and my nation," he added. "And I feel lucky to reap the benefits gained by those people that really came early on and had a struggle and made a difference."