Housework had been done by maids in their mother’s Hiroshima home (when Mr. Sasaki died at age 84 in 1974, Ms. Sasaki still didn’t know how to do laundry), but a friend taught her to cook. In Japantown, she would have been able to find familiar ingredients and seasonings for osechi — if not fresh, then at least canned or dried. She put her daughters to work in the kitchen, peeling sato-imo (taro) and renkon (lotus root) for nishime, vegetables simmered in sweet shoyu-seasoned dashi, and boiling black beans in syrup with an iron nail to give them color.

In those years, Oshogatsu was a roving party in Seattle. On New Year’s Day, men and children traveled from house to house visiting relatives and friends, while women hosted. Even after Yemi and Yoshiko grew up and had children of their own, their mother called them back home to help cook osechi.

Yemi Mary Catherine Sasaki was newly wed to Noboru Nakagawa when President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, two months after the Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor. The order, prompted by fears that Japanese-Americans would aid that country’s war effort, led to the mass detainment.

“My mother was six months pregnant, and they didn’t know where they were going,” Ms. Gooden said. They were moved about 35 miles south of the city, to a swiftly constructed detention center on the Puyallup fairgrounds — which the government, she pointed out with a sardonic laugh, preferred to call Camp Harmony. “They were there for six months, living in animal stalls.”

As Yemi Nakagawa’s belly swelled, she was forced to use group showers and a latrine dug in the ground. She was taken to a Tacoma hospital for the birth of their first daughter, Sherry, then returned to Camp Harmony.