Japanese American Women and the Student Relocation Movement, 1942-1945

Abstract

Michi Nishiura Weglyn' was fifteen when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 in February of 1942. Nishiura's high school education was interrupted and her family's life of farming in rural Brentwood, California, was terminated when the United States government sent the Nishiura family and 120,000 other innocent Japanese Americans to concentration camps and stripped them of their civil liberties. The Nishiuras were incarcerated at Gila Relocation Camp, one of the ten concentration camps in the U.S. interior.2 While in camp for nearly four years, Nishiura's father did stoop labor on a local farm, earning sixteen dollars a month, and her mother worked in the camp mess hall.3 For Nishiura and other Nisei (second-generation Japanese American) students, makeshift high schools were established in the camps that provided minimal public schooling. However, once Nishiura graduated from high school, her future and the option of continuing her education became uncertain. Fortunately, a group of concerned educators, along with religious organizations such as the Quaker-based American Friends Service Committee, had formed the National Japanese American Student Relocation Council (NJASRC). In 1944, she was able to acquire government security clearance to leave the center and was admitted to Mount Holyoke College on a full scholarship. Nishiura's story caught my attention while I was attending Mount Holyoke College. At first, I was merely intrigued by the idea of Michi Nishiura Weglyn, author of Years oflnfamy and one of the most important contributors to Japanese American history, having attended my college. I learned later that three Japanese Americans attended the small women's college in western Massachusetts in the 1940s. As I began research on the history of Japanese American students like Nishiura, I discovered that an entire group of Nisei students left the camps to attend college in the Midwest and East Coast and that their stories were much