After the bombing of Pearl Harbor during World War II the federal government ordered over 120,000 Japanese Americans into prison camps across the country. Some of those camps were in the Rocky Mountain West in Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado.
Sam Mihara was nine years old when he was forced from his life as a fourth grader in San Francisco to become a prisoner in the Heart Mountain Camp in rural Wyoming.
Mihara has made it his mission to speak out against this injustice by educating people about its history. He recently spoke at the Moab Museum as part of their current exhibit on the history of Dalton Wells, an incarceration camp that had operated just north of town.
When Mihara returned to his home in San Francisco after his time in Wyoming, the hate in the city, and throughout the country was strong.
“It was worse than when we left. There were signs that said, ‘Don't stop here. Don't come back to your neighborhood,’” Mihara said. “Our parents knew that the best way to solve the problem is to make sure that the children get a good education.”
Mihara attended the University of California, Berkeley, which was just across the bay from his home. He went on to work for Boeing as a rocket scientist and retired after 42 years.
Mihara carried his experiences of Heart Mountain Camp with him throughout his life. Things changed after he received a call from a group of attorneys hosting a conference about internment. They were looking for somebody who was in the camp. They asked Mihara to speak firsthand about what it was like.
“Very few of these attorneys knew what happened, about the injustice that happened during World War II. I enjoyed teaching (them). So that's how I got started. I've gone to over 500 schools, museums, and libraries across the country. I'm a regular lecturer at Harvard and Columbia Law Schools and UCLA,” Mihara said.
Through this work, Mihara hopes people will remember the injustice that was done through wartime incarceration.
“An injustice took place and the cause of that were three things. One is hate. The second is hysteria mostly created by the media at that time. And most important is the third factor, which is the leadership of the country. The leadership of the country in those days ignored the Constitution, ignored civil rights, ignored the rights of our people to be free and go wherever we want, and our rights to equal justice,” explained Mihara.
“It probably will never happen again to Japanese people, but most likely it'll happen to other people,” he said.
“It almost happened to Muslim Americans after 9/11. And today, in a way, it's going on because there are children of immigrants who are being placed in prisons. I've been to some of those in Florida, Texas, and in Arizona. And the conditions are terrible. It doesn't make sense,” he said.
“Mass incarceration of children simply because of lack of adequate leadership and continuing to build more prisons today for these young people. That's not the right answer. There has to be a better solution.”
Mihara’s mission is to educate people about their responsibility in choosing national leaders and evaluating whether these candidates will uphold the Constitution.
“Or would they prefer to ignore it and deny people their civil rights?” he asked.
Moab Museum’s temporary exhibition "A Moab Prison Camp: Japanese American Incarceration in Grand County," is scheduled to conclude on June 29th.
Copyright 2024 KZMU.
This story was shared via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico including KDNK.