Astronaut Dan Tani gets caught with a piece of cake that was decorated to look like the crew patch.

Astronauts Linda Godwin and Dan Tani train in Houston for their STS-108 mission aboard Endeavour.

The STS-108 and Expedition Four crews arrive at Kennedy Space Center on Nov. 25, 2001 for a planned launch aboard Endeavour four days later.

The STS-108 Endeavour crew along with the Expedition
Three and Expedition Four crews pose for a formal portrait.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. --

Rookie NASA astronaut Dan Tani is to strap into shuttle Endeavour Thursday, aiming to set sail on a round trip to the International Space Station. And when the ship takes off, its thundering ascent will serve as a metaphor for the long climb his race has faced since more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans -- including Tani's parents -- were interned in U.S. detention camps during World War II.

 "I've reaped the benefits of the struggle that my family and other early Japanese-Americans had coming to America and living in the country, surviving through World War II," Tani, 40, said in an interview with SPACE.com. "I'm really reaping the benefits of those pioneers that really blazed the trail for me to have this kind of opportunity." Destined to be only the second Japanese-American to fly into space, Tani was born Feb. 1, 1961, in Ridley Park, Pennsylvania. But two decades before that, his parents and his oldest brother were whisked out of their California home and into a concentration camp. 

 What turned out to be a two-and-a-half-year imprisonment began not long after Japanese warplanes bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. 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.

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.

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."

Japan | Space | W.W.II

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