Mar 13, 2015

Tue, Mar 13, 1945: “them days”

"Here I am sitting around a table in Smith Hall kitchen with a lot of Sigma mates writing letters to former Delphians and whose name should appear on the list but yours!  Everyone looked over the list and said, 'What's this guy like?  Hey is this guy married?  Is this sailor good looking?' So I said 'Well I'm going to write to this guy because I know he's tops!'… [switch from Norma Harrold writing to Mary Nakahiro writing]
"Norma told me you are studying Japanese at Boulder! Tough I'll bet!!! I know, because I've tried to study that ‘chicken scratch’ once upon a time way back in 'them days' in Pasadena, California (plug!) -- and I have several friends (Nisei) who are studying at Ft. Snelling, Minn."
-- Letter from several women at Southwestern College, Winfield, Kans., to my father, Boulder, Colo., Tuesday, March 13, 1945.  Although I know nothing specifically about Mary Nakahiro, it seems very likely from her letter that she was a Japanese American who living in Pasadena, California, and was incarcerated along with all other West Coast Japanese Americans in early 1942.  Many of these prisoners were allowed to leave the so-called relocation camps in order to attend college or work jobs outside of the West Coast exclusion zone.  By the end of 1944, about one third of the incarcerated Japanese Americans had been allowed to leave the camps under clearance programs. Many Japanese American men, and some women, were already serving in the military when the war began and many more were drafted or  joined while they were incarcerated in relocation camps.  Ft. Snelling, Minnesota, hosted the Military Intelligence Service Language School from 1944 to 1945, where Nisei were trained in Japanese language for intelligence work.
            Many churches, including the Methodist Church, organized programs to help Japanese American student out of the camps by giving them opportunities to attend college. The Japanese American Student Relocation Committee of the Methodist Church decided in December 1942 to focus its aid on Japanese American Methodists seeking to attend Methodist schools (such as Southwestern College, where my father attended.).  They gave second priority to Methodist students wanting to attend non-Methodist schools.  They gave the lowest priority to helping Buddhist students.

Sources: James C. McNaughton, Nisei Linguists p. 300; Allan W. Austin, From Concentration Camp to Campus: Japanese American Students and World War II (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 44.

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