After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Executive Order 9066 was signed, Hane was forced to live in internment camps along with 120,000 Japanese-Americans. He shared in an interview with Quad-City Times that he was “frightened” he would be punished “for the crimes of my race”. He recalled many rumors surrounding what would be done to the people in the internment camp: “... they were going to put us on trains, take us to camps and machine gun us down … We didn’t know what to do. Two Japanese-American girls in a neighboring community were taken away and raped.”Scott Reeder, “I was frightened I would be punished.” Quad-City Times, 8 Dec 1991. Hane said that he burnt all letters, books, and other documents he possessed written in Japanese for fear of being arrested. This was 6 months before his family was ordered to report to a government detention camp in Poston, Arizona, in the hot Sonoran desert, in May 1942. They, along with 20,000 other Japanese in this camp, lived in old Army barracks stationed in the desert battered by sandstorms. If they did not profess loyalty to the United States, they would be sent to a “high-pressure concentration camp” in Tule Lake, California.“Wartime Internment” by Mikiso Hane, in A Round Table: The Living and Reliving of World War II, The Journal of American History, Vol 77, No 2, September 1990. 573. According to Hane, the worst part of his own experience was a lack of privacy. Hane took the job as a dishwasher in the camp’s kitchen and received $16 per month. Despite the difficult conditions of the hot, surveilled, impoverished camp, Hane was able to attend impromptu classes taught in the style of Socrates by a philosophy student interned in the camp.Mikiso Hane, The Last Lecture, Mortar Board, 1992. 3-4.
