\o7 "Today is the dawn of the CCC camp of Tujunga\f7 . . . \o7 it is most painful to be cut off from the outside world." \f7 --Daisho Tana's diary Sunday, March 15, 1942

From the day after the Pearl Harbor attack until the end of 1943, the Immigration and Naturalization Service ran a little-known detention center in Tujunga for civilians classed as enemies of the United States.

Daisho Tana, a teacher and Buddhist priest, was among them.

But his is a story that until now has been largely untold. Historians have focused on U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry ordered by presidential proclamation into camps tactfully called "relocation" centers.

Little attention has been given to the thousands of Japanese citizens and the smaller number of Italian and German citizens taken to 10 permanent and 20 temporary detention facilities created by the INS during World War II.

One of them was the Tuna Canyon Detention Station, a former Civilian Conservation Corps camp six miles north of Burbank. The camp, now the site of the Verdugo Hills Golf Course, became the gateway to detention for the judo instructors, bankers, Buddhist priests and community leaders that the U.S. government dubbed dangerous enemy aliens.

Now, a series of recently released documents will help to bring their stories to light.

Federal archivists discovered the Los Angeles area enemy alien files, including 2,625 individual case files, by chance in 1991, but they needed years to organize the material. The documents became publicly accessible just this year, said Paul Wormser, of the National Archives office in Laguna Niguel.

Professional and amateur historians are digging into the documents, which are helping them to fill in gaps of information. Among the first to solve a family mystery is William Hohri of Lomita.

Hohri was a promising gymnast living in North Hollywood in 1941, the Americanized child of Japanese immigrants. His father, Daisuke, 57, was a Methodist minister who served a mostly Japanese congregation that met at an American Legion Hall.

Authorities arrested Daisuke Hohri within hours after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, bringing the nation into World War II.

William Hohri wasn't sure why his father, now dead, was detained--until he discovered the INS file recently in Laguna Niguel. It had been difficult to communicate with his Japanese-speaking father, who did not want to talk about it. He found the government had singled out Daisuke Hohri in part because he was a religious leader.