Medicine under Confinement

Improvised services answered a preventable emergency

Executive Order 9066 enabled the removal of people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast without individual evidence of disloyalty. Families lost homes, businesses, privacy, and ordinary access to care.

Tanforan needed a clinic immediately

At the temporary centre built around a former racetrack, Togasaki helped organise medical facilities with other incarcerated professionals. Barracks, crowding, poor sanitation, and inadequate equipment turned routine care into emergency work.

Birth continued inside the camps

She delivered dozens of babies during early confinement and reportedly more than ten thousand across her career. Obstetric care required supplies, nurses, referral, and safe space that camp authorities had failed to provide adequately.

Transfers disrupted continuity

Togasaki was moved among several assembly and incarceration centres, including Stockton, Tule Lake, Poston, Manzanar, and Topaz. Officials could redeploy her expertise while denying her freedom.

Public-health work became coercively visible

Photographs show her vaccinating new arrivals. Immunisation could protect crowded populations, yet the need arose within forced confinement and surveillance; consent and protection operated under profoundly unequal power.

Education and Community

Exclusion shaped her route before the war

Togasaki grew up in San Francisco in a Japanese immigrant family and remembered the improvised relief work surrounding the 1906 earthquake. She studied zoology, nursing, and public health before earning a medical degree from the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania in the 1930s.

Racism and sexism restricted posts available to Japanese American women. She built practice through community need, language, and trust rather than easy entry into elite hospitals.

Released in 1943, she eventually returned to a San Francisco home that had been looted and rebuilt her practice. She continued caring for patients, including those unable to pay, for decades.

Memory and Language

“Internment” can conceal citizens' forced incarceration

Government language called sites relocation centres and evacuees' residences, softening the absence of choice. Togasaki was a US citizen imprisoned because of ancestry, not a volunteer dispatched to a difficult clinic.

Her skill reduced harm but did not validate the system. Remembering both care and coercion prevents medical heroism from becoming an alibi for state violence.

Across the collection

Continue from Togasaki

Military medicine

Examine war, logistics, civilians, confinement, and medical authority.

North America

Connect medicine to citizenship, race, migration, and state power.