NEW HAVEN, Dec 2 — Until recently, Yonekazu Satoda says, he did not recall the diary he had written in neat cursive in the laundry building of an internment camp in Arkansas. He would eke out his entries at night amid the washboards and concrete sinks, the only private space in the camp with light.

Satoda, who gives his age as “94 1/2,” was 22 when he and his family were uprooted from their home in San Francisco and sent to an assembly centre in Fresno, California, and then to the Jerome Relocation Centre in the mosquito-ridden Arkansas Delta. They were among an estimated 120,000 people of Japanese descent, about two-thirds of them US citizens, who were regarded as enemy aliens and incarcerated after the attack on Pearl Harbour.

“Today was supposed to be my graduation at Cal,” Satoda noted on May 13, 1942, the second day of a confinement that lasted almost three years.

“Got hell from Mom for fooling around with women,” he wrote six days later.

“Hot as hell today,” he reported the following evening. “Ptomaine poisoning in mess hall,” he added. “3 or 4 hundred sick.”

Satoda’s fastidious and somewhat irreverent diary is part of “Out of the Desert: Resilience and Memory in Japanese American Internment,” a new exhibition at the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University here that runs through Feb. 26. The exhibition includes materials from Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and features a substantial digital archive, including Satoda’s diary.

“I was shocked beyond belief,” Satoda said of learning that the diary — which he had not seen or thought about since 1945, the year he was released from internment and went into the Army — was at Yale.

The exhibition, curated by Courtney Sato, a 28-year-old doctoral student in American studies, draws on a wealth of archival material: a high school yearbook with photographs of barracks, correspondence between internees and anti-internment activists, government broadsides — including the War Relocation Authority’s original “evacuation” notice — and photographs by Ansel Adams of the Manzanar War Relocation Centre in California. There are also plenty of euphemisms by journalists — like “evacuees” — that disguised the true nature of the internments, now widely considered a historic injustice.

The exhibition focuses on the resilience and creativity that helped many detainees survive the forced removal from their homes and jobs and the harsh conditions in remote camps that were ringed by sentry towers with armed guards. There is poignancy in images like a schoolteacher’s snapshots of internees’ gardens and an unknown water colourist’s painting of a sunset over the Topaz internment camp in Utah.

Much of the material, including student scrapbooks and site plans for the Poston internment camp in Arizona, were donated by Nathan Van Patten, a former director of university libraries at Stanford. In a letter to James Babb, who was Yale’s librarian from 1943 to 1965, Van Patten noted that while some of the items “may seem trivial,” they would be significant sources for future historians.

In the second entry of a confinement that would last three years, Satoda noted ‘Today was supposed to be my graduation at Cal.’ — Handout via The New York Times

Yale acquired Satoda’s diary in 2012 from an antiquarian book dealer. The diary had moved through the antiquarian trade, said George Miles, the curator of Western Americana at the Beinecke. “There is a gap that I don’t think we are ever going to be able to completely document,” he said.

But because of the personal nature of the diary, Miles tried to track down the writer. He even sent a letter that reached Satoda’s home but went unread.

“At Christmastime you get all kinds of mail,” Satoda recalled last week in San Francisco, where he lives with his wife, Daisy. “The letter said ‘Yale.’ I said ‘What the hell’ and ignored it.”

Sato persisted, contacting museums, placing ads with Asian and Japanese-American organisations and eventually reaching Satoda by phone. Soon she received an unexpected package from Satoda: his Berkeley diploma, which had been redirected in the 1940s to the Fresno Assembly Centre with four cents due in postage after it was sent to him by the university.

Satoda and his family were guests of honour at the Yale exhibition, which opened last month. “I’m going to try not to pull a John Boehner on you,” a visibly moved Satoda said as he stepped to the podium, armed with a tissue.

Satoda, who was born and reared in California, said that he wrote the diary, which he kept under his pillow, mostly to calm his mother, who spoke only Japanese and worried about her extroverted son’s getting into trouble. In roughly 1,000 entries, he chronicles late-night “bull sessions” with friends, making furniture, working as a teacher, the simple pleasures of a cold root beer and the monotony of confinement, in which he noted the passage of time by counting full moons.

He said that the last time he saw the diary was while living in Cleveland, where he briefly worked at a steel plant making parts for military vehicles. Before he was drafted, he sent it off to his parents. “I was a single guy, so I threw all my stuff in a box,” he said. He surmises that when the house was sold after his parents died, “instead of junking stuff, they took my box and gave it to some secondhand dealer.”

Satoda spent nearly two years as an intelligence officer in Japan, retiring as a major after 20 years of service in the US Army Reserve. He was the comptroller for a restaurant company before retiring in 1986.

He met his wife at the Japanese American Citizens League in San Francisco, where she was an administrative assistant. (She had been detained at Topaz during the war.) Today they live in an apartment in San Francisco’s Japantown. It is sparingly decorated, with Japanese fans in the living room and imari bowls designed with the couple’s family crests.

Daisy Satoda, who is 88 and was one of 10 siblings, spoke of her family’s incarceration. “I look back at the injustice, but when you’re young, you’re not saddled with those responsibilities,” she said. “It was my parents’ burden.”

When Yonekazu Satoda reflects on his experience at the Jerome centre, he said, he thinks about the strong bonds and shenanigans with other boys.

“You know how you go on vacation and have a flat tyre?” he said. “Fifty years later, you don’t remember the flat tyre.” — The New York Times