[2] He returned to the US shortly before the US entered World War II, and as a result he was sent to the Tule Lake internment camp.
[2][3] In the decades after the war, he worked a series of odd jobs until the early 1950s, when he wound up unemployed and homeless in New York City.
When an art professor found him sleeping in the Columbia University library, he referred Mirikitani to the New York Buddhist Church, who provided him with housing.
[3] He eventually became a live-in cook for a wealthy benefactor living on Park Avenue, but when this person died in the late 1980s he again became homeless.
[3] In 2010 his work was featured in an exhibit of Japanese American Internment Camp artwork at the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery.