120,000 Japanese Americans spent the war years as hostages, forcibly relocated to so-called “internment camps” by a xenophobic and unconstitutional federal policy after the attack on Pearl Harbor.  “Evacuees” were unable to work or to grow their own food, so they ate according to the dictates of the federal government — meager and culturally unfamiliar mainstays of the Standard American Diet. A few Issei (first generation Japanese immigrants) staged hunger strikes, but for the most part, experiences in the camps accelerated trends of culinary assimilation for Nisei (Japanese Americans born in the U.S.).