“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.”

Image Yonekazu Satoda, 94, at home in San Francisco, with his wedding photograph. Credit... Ramin Talaie for The New York Times

Mr. 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 Mr. Satoda’s diary.

“I was shocked beyond belief,” Mr. 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 now 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 Center 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 watercolorist’s painting of a sunset over the Topaz internment camp in Utah.