Now an octogenarian, he looks back on decades of speaking out - demanding redress for Japanese Americans and fighting to protect the civil liberties of other marginalised American communities.

Now, he eats a light sandwich and salad at Mitsuru Sushi & Grill, a restaurant in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo, where he and other Japanese American community leaders often met when they were founding Nikkei Civil Rights and Redress (NCRR). It is an advocacy organisation that has demanded reparations for what was found to have been the unlawful incarceration of Japanese Americans during the war.

In search of lost marbles

At Mitsuru, Matsuoka tells a younger Japanese American social justice activist and multimedia artist, Kyoko Nakamaru, of his life at the camp, one of many across the country - and of hislost marbles.

"At first, they were taking all my marbles. I was getting cleaned out," he explains of his marble-playing game at the internment camp. But Matsuoka was never one to be defeated. "I got pretty good," he says.

"You were a marble hustler," laughs 36-year-old Nakamaru.

Matsuoka is now a spoken-word poet and a potter at an east LA kiln. Nakamaru is one of many in the Japanese American community in Los Angeles who have been demonstrating against Trump's executive order banning people from seven Muslim-majority nations and his advisers' calls to register Muslim Americans that harken back to the events leading to her ancestors' unconstitutional incarceration.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1942, then US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued decrees ordering that Japanese Americans - considered "enemy