Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The New York Times.
It was January 1942, and Japanese American civil servants in California were alarmed. Within weeks of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, the state government had sent an invasive questionnaire to its employees of Japanese descent.
Did they speak Japanese? Had they ever visited Japan? Were they members of any Japanese organizations?
Anti-Japanese sentiment was high, and the survey, with its accusatory tone, seemed bent on portraying workers as untrustworthy.
Mitsuye Endo, a 22-year-old typist with the Department of Motor Vehicles, dutifully answered the questions, and that spring she was fired, along with dozens of other Nisei, or second-generation Japanese Americans, who worked for the state.