Another Day of Infamy

Order 9066 changed the lives of thousands,including a number of Pomona students.

Sixty years ago, at the height of anti-Japanese hysteria following the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the now-infamous Executive Order 9066, calling for the relocation of persons of Japanese descent in the Western states. The months and years that followed would see the detention and eventual internment of some 110,000 American citizens and legal residents. Among the Japanese Americans whose lives were changed were a number of young people who had chosen--or would later choose--to attend Pomona College.

By the dubious virtue of its location near the Los Angeles harbor and vital wartime industry, Pomona College fell within a zone where no persons of Japanese ancestry were to be allowed to reside. For young Japanese Americans at Pomona, this left few options. Some faced internment. Others were forced to complete their educations at colleges far from home. Still others, as an alternative to the camps, chose service in the U.S. military.

For all, the events of those years would be forever tinged with pain and sadness.

During a February 1992 symposium titled "Another Day of Infamy: Remembering the Japanese-American Internment," three Japanese-American Pomona alumnae told of their wartime experiences. Those stories, along with others not previously shared with the Pomona community, provide a glimpse into this shameful chapter in American history.

One of the most moving stories from that era involves Itsue "Sue" Hisanaga Yamaguchi '43, a junior at Pomona in 1942.

Between the order and the evacuation two months later, Yamaguchi recalled in her 1992 remarks, the government gave Japanese-American students an 8 p.m. curfew and restricted them from traveling more than five miles off campus. "The faculty and students were most supportive," she said. "They really tried to boost my morale." They would go as a group to afternoon rather than evening movies, for instance, so that Sue could attend.

On a Monday afternoon in April, Sue was summoned to the office of Dean of Women Jessie Gibson, who informed her that she had to leave Pomona quickly. By the following afternoon, Pomona President E. Wilson Lyon and President Ernest Wilkins of Oberlin College in Ohio had reached an agreement permitting her to transfer. The next day, she boarded a train east. President Lyon, Dean of Men William Nicholl, and a crowd of Pomona students accompanied her and her brother, Kazuo "Casey" Hisanaga '42--who would be allowed to graduate in May despite his April departure--to the train station. Even the band was there to play for them. "Everybody cried," one student later told Dean Gibson.

Days later, all Japanese Americans in the Claremont area were interned.

After concluding her work at Oberlin in 1943, Sue was awarded her degree from Pomona in absentia during Oberlin's commencement. In a letter to Wilkins, read at that ceremony, Lyon wrote, "It is on the part of Pomona and Oberlin an assurance to our loyal Japanese citizens that we believe in democracy and tolerance. May this ceremony ... serve as a pledge of faith and goodwill on the part of American higher education."

The editors of Pomona's student newspaper apparently agreed, entitling their story "We Think It's Pretty Fine."

Another Hisanaga sibling, Kazuma "Benny" Hisanaga '41, had finished his degree before the war. Benny, now honored in the Pomona Athletic Hall of Fame for his prowess in both football and baseball, had completed military training through campus ROTC and was made sergeant soon after induction into the Army. During service in France, Italy, and North Africa, he was awarded numerous badges and medals, including the silver and bronze stars, the cluster, and the purple heart. In a letter to a friend in 1942, he wrote, "We of Japanese descent are in a very ticklish position. ... I'm trying my best to prove to all that we are just as loyal or even more than others of different racial descents. I know one thing--I won't let Uncle Sam or Pomona down."

For Mary Ochiai '41 and her sister Alice '50, the war would bring very different experiences. Mary, who had finished her degree before the internment order, spent the war years at the Yale School of Nursing, where she earned a master's degree in 1945. Alice, who had been scheduled to transfer to Pomona from Riverside Junior College in fall 1942, instead spent two years in an internment camp in Arizona with the rest of her family. It wasn't until 1947 that Alice was finally able to begin her studies at Pomona.

Both Ochiai sisters still find those years painful to discuss. In fact, the period is one that Alice "tried never to think about," as she said in the 1992 symposium. Referring to the camp experience, she simply stated, "Life was not easy." For Mary, studying at Yale while her family was relocated, the memories are also difficult. "I had mixed feelings," she told the syposium audience. "Here I was, free to do what I wanted, while my family was interned."

At least two other Japanese American students were also at Pomona when the internment order took effect.

Stanley Shikuma, then a freshman, got assistance from Dean Nicholl in transferring to Colorado College, where he graduated in 1945, going on to a distinguished career in the Hawaii judiciary.

Kobe Shoji '47, a native of Upland, California, had transferred to Pomona from Chaffey College for his junior year in fall 1941. Although Shoji was unable to complete the spring semester, the faculty awarded him full credit for his courses, and when the evacuation order came, he elected to go with his family "with nothing more than what we could put in a suitcase" to an Arizona internment camp. Since he had been living at home, he did not receive the dramatic send-off given the Hisanagas. "I said goodbye to my faculty and fellow classmates and just disappeared from the campus."

A teacher in the camp, Shoji soon decided to enlist in the Army. He became a pilot and served in Europe, where he was wounded twice. When he returned to complete his Pomona studies in 1946, he recalls being treated "like nothing happened ... except we were all much more mature due to the wartime experience. We all had the feeling we must do something to make the world a better place to live."

Unlike other alumni affected by Order 9066, all of whom were "nisei," born on U.S. soil, Yoshio "Victor" Muramatsu '48 was a "kibei," meaning that while born in the United States, he had lived in Japan for a time. While the treatment of "nisei" was sometimes harsh, the treatment of "kibei" had an extra dimension of cruelty.

Born in California, he returned with his family to Japan after his parents were denied U.S. citizenship or the right to buy land. He lived in Japan from age 3 to age 20 and earned high school teaching credentials there. Never feeling completely accepted in Japan, where he was labeled "American," he returned to California in 1939.

Struggling to learn English, he joined the U.S. Army in 1941, hoping to become a pilot. When war broke out, however, the Army moved him from active duty to the reserves. Wishing to serve, he volunteered to go to the internment camp at Manzanar, located in the California high desert. In an absorbing autobiography titled The Rose and the Chrysanthemum, he tells of his years there. As one of the first to arrive, he helped build, organize, and run the camp, becoming the de facto president of a cooperative of some 6,000 residents. His adventures included witnessing the fatal aftermath of a food riot and matching wits with martial artists of various stripes.

Though he received an honorable discharge in 1943, the FBI remained suspicious. An individual exclusion order was placed on him by the War Relocation Authority until June 1945, when he was finally allowed to leave Manzanar. Adopting the American name of "Victor," he was accepted at Pomona, with the proviso that he first take courses elsewhere to bring up his English ability.

When his father died in January 1948, Victor wanted to return to Japan but was short of credits for graduation. Dean Nicholl, however, agreed to accept his credits from Yamanashi Teachers College toward his degree, and he was awarded his diploma the following month.

Of his Pomona years, Muramatsu writes, "Through a close association with my fraternity brothers and the civic leaders of Claremont community, I learned more about American friendship, cooperation, and society. I was deeply moved by the brotherly, sisterly, and motherly assistance they generously gave in solving daily problems."

In the post-war years, the violations of civil liberties of Japanese-American legal residents and citizens during the war were brought to light and the U.S. government made formal apologies. Partial financial restitution payments were made to the 60,000 survivors alive in 1988. For many of Pomona's alumni whose lives were affected by Order 9066, the memories remain painful and difficult to discuss. For the rest of Americans, however, their story remains an important cautionary tale.

--Holly Byers Ochoa is an editor and historian living in Claremont.