President Franklin Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 set into motion the expulsion of 110,000 Japanese Americans from West Coast cities. Some 7,500 people from the Seattle-Tacoma area were forced to move to the Puyallup Assembly Center, euphemistically named "Camp Harmony," beginning in March 1942. From this temporary facility, they were transferred to permanent "relocation centers" (inland incarceration camps).

In this letter, a young Japanese American woman, Mary Inouye, incarcerated at "Camp Harmony," writes to Mrs. J.C. (Dorothy) Baldwin of Seattle. Ms. Inouye describes conditions at the camp ("better than I expected"), where she lives in the compound ("right near the west barbed wire fence"), the logistics of meals ("about three to four hundred people lined up for meals in front of each [of four] mess hall "), and her father ("eating and sleeping all day long"). She also mentions someone named "Mits" to Mrs. Baldwin, "the girl who worked in your home," now working as a waitress in one of the mess halls.