Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

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When Ralph Lazo saw his Japanese-American friends being forced from their homes and into internment camps during World War II, he did something unexpected: He went with them.

In the spring of 1942, Lazo, a 17-year-old high school student in Los Angeles, boarded a train and headed to the Manzanar Relocation Center, one of 10 internment camps authorized to house Japanese-Americans under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s executive order in the wake of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor a few months earlier. The camps, tucked in barren regions of the United States, would incarcerate around 115,000 people living in the West from 1942 to 1946 — two-thirds of them United States citizens.

Unlike the other inmates, Lazo did not have to be there. A Mexican-American, he was the only known person to pretend to be Japanese so he could be willingly interned.

What compelled Lazo to give up his freedom for two and a half years — sleeping in tar-paper-covered barracks, using open latrines and showers and waiting on long lines for meals in mess halls, on grounds surrounded by barbed-wire fencing and watched by guards in towers? He wanted to be with his friends.