Carole’s dog plays in front of the farmhouse where Mas and Nikiko’s mother, Marcy, live.

Racism was not the sole incentive for Executive Order 9066—there were economic motivations as well. Despite race-based barriers to land ownership in the Central Valley, Japanese farmers had found success where many white farmers hadn’t, with their labor intensive, high-yield methods. Soon Japanese American–run farms in California alone produced 9 percent of America’s truck crops. When all of these families were incarcerated, many of their businesses were sold off, or left to ruin; the government had listened to corporate agribusiness interests that wanted less competition. “That loss is almost incomprehensible . . . . In the wake of this history,” says Nikiko, “the few remaining Japanese-American farms now become that much more important as sites of healing and resistance.”

All of California was declared to be inside the military “exclusion zone” in the executive order, which meant that every first-generation Japanese (issei) and second-generation Japanese-American (nisei) resident faced “relocation.” Today, it is difficult for many to imagine that House Speaker and Trump foe Nancy Pelosi’s adopted home state would have rallied in support of incarceration (a Los Angeles Times editorial argued at the time that “a viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched.”) But for survivors and their descendants, the trauma of incarceration remains in pockmarks of destruction and loss up and down the Golden State coast—dispersed families, severed community networks, former sites of internment. Still, Japanese heritage thrives in these communities, where remembrance is made official every February. Photographer Katsu Naito, a Japanese native who immigrated to New York City in 1983, set out to capture a diverse group of these nikkei living in the Bay Area and Central Valley for Vogue a few weeks before this year’s Day of Remembrance, on February 19.

“I know the story of my grandfather’s internment through the women in my family,” says Sita Bhaumik, an artist, writer, and educator based in Oakland, whom Naito photographed in her kitchen. As emotional stewards in their families, mothers, grandmothers, and daughters in particular have traditionally carried the weight of cultural memory. These women are artists, creatives, writers, educators, activists, nurses. One was born in incarceration; one was a teenager; many of them are sansei and yonsei, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of incarcerated parents and grandparents. For many in this younger generation, remembering and healing is part of larger feminist and anti-colonialist political work. Two of them now helm their family farms, part of a tradition of Japanese agriculture in the Central Valley that was hugely disrupted by incarceration. Six of them are docents at Wakamatsu, a tea and silk colony outside Sacramento that contains the gravesite of the first known Japanese woman buried on American soil.