Survivor shares memories of Heart Mountain, a WWII internment camp
Japanese-American children were interned with their families at 10 "relocation centers" in the United States during World War II.
A guard tower at Heart Mountain Relocation Center, a Wyoming internment camp for Japanese Americans used from 1942 to 1945, is shown. The site east of Cody now features a museum with artifacts, photographs and oral histories.
Sam Miharra, 8, far right, is pictured with his family before they were interned at Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming with other Japanese-Americans during the 1940s.
Sam Mihara, a California resident imprisoned at Wyoming's Heart Mountain Relocation Center during the 1940s, will speak about his experiences March 16 at the Weber County Library in Ogden.
Japanese-Americans were detained at the Tanforan Assembly Center, near San Francisco, before being sent to relocation centers in the United States. At Tanforan, horse stables were used for housing.
Evacuees of Japanese ancestry from San Pedro, California, arrive at the Santa Anita Park assembly center. The evacuees were later moved to various "relocation centers" set up during World War II by executive order of President Franklin Roosevelt after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Sam Mihara was 9 years old when armed guards removed his family from their San Francisco home and later set them on a train bound for remote Wyoming.
The memories of his arrival at Heart Mountain, a Japanese-American internment camp, are still fresh.
The barren desert. The barbed wire fences. The cramped 20-by-20-foot room he shared with his brother and parents.
“You don’t forget that,” Mihara said over and over again as he ticked off memories of three years of incarceration.
Mihara will share his story of internment on Wednesday, March 16, at the Weber County Library’s Pleasant Valley branch in Washington Terrace.
Now a lecturer for UCLA and UC Berkeley, Mihara speaks across the country about the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans by the U.S. government during World War II.
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, fears about national security and fears over anti-Japanese sentiments prompted President Franklin Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 9066, which ordered the “relocation” of citizens of Japanese ancestry into 10 centers in the United States, according to the U.S. National Archives website. Nearly 120,000 people — two-thirds of them native-born American citizens — were forced to live in these centers, which included Heart Mountain, and Topaz, a camp in the Utah desert near Delta.
PREVIEW
• WHAT: Sam Mihara, former WWII internment camp prisoner
• WHEN: 7 p.m. March 16
• WHERE: Weber County Library’s Pleasant Valley branch, 5568 S. Adams Ave., Washington Terrace
• ADMISSION: Free. 801-337-2690; www.weberpl.lib.ut.us
As the years have passed, many former internees have passed away, but Mihara doesn’t want their stories to be lost.
“There aren’t too many of us left. … We’re all in our 80s and 90s now,” said the Huntington Beach, California, resident in a phone interview before his first-ever Utah lecture.
Mihara said his “Memories of Heart Mountain” presentation covers the history of the internment camps, the eventual release of the prisoners and the 1988 Civil Liberties Act, which offered a formal apology and monetary compensation to those who were incarcerated.
And with the help of historic and family photographs, Mihara will show what it was like to live at Heart Mountain until he was 12 years old.
“(Audiences) like to hear from former prisoners what it was like, as opposed to some historian saying this is what it was like in the camps,” said Mihara, a retired rocket scientist for Boeing.
Some young people he meets don’t realize that Japanese-Americans imprisoned in the 1940s camps are still alive. Mihara said. But that isn’t the biggest surprise he encounters on the speaking circuit.
“A lot of people — a lot of people — never heard of these camps,” he explained, because this part of U.S. history isn’t always taught in schools.
Although some internees don’t want to talk about their experiences, Mihara decided it was important to speak up and help Americans prevent such a tragic thing from happening again.
He pointed to recent sentiment toward Muslim-Americans, for example, or the “family residential camps” in Texas where immigrants who cross the border are detained “as we speak right now.”
“You owe it to yourself and to your family and your friends and your relatives to make sure it doesn’t happen,” Mihara said.
After his family was released from Heart Mountain in 1945, Mihara said there was so much hatred against the Japanese that they didn’t go back to San Francisco right away.
“We settled in Salt Lake City for three years. Dad opened up a store right where the Salt Palace exists today,” he said.
Eventually, the Miharas returned to California and “picked up our lives as best we could,” he said. Mihara graduated high school and earned engineering degrees at U.C. Berkeley and UCLA’s graduate school.
Mihara says he had no desire to return to Heart Mountain for many years.
“The people of Wyoming were horrible to us at that time,” he said, noting it was the citizens’ decision to keep the camp locked up like a prison. “Then,” he said, “I found out the people of today are really much different.”
Now Mihara belongs to the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation and has helped open a museum at the site of the camp, located 14 miles east of Cody.
Tours and classes are offered to adults and school children, he said. One of the barracks used to house prisoners has been relocated to the site; on its walls are the signatures of the carpenters who built it in 1942.
“That’s real,” Mihara said. “We’re just trying to rebuild everything so people can remember why it was important.”
The Californian stays in touch with friends and other internees through camp reunions. “We identify ourselves with what block and what barrack and what cell number you were at,” he said.
Mihara said he was once asked by someone at a lecture why he didn’t seem to hold a grudge over how his family was treated.
“The answer is I did for a long time,” he said. Then he realized, “You’re trapped in your mind if you think being upset is going to solve the problem.”
Instead, Mihara decided sharing his story could make a difference.
“My message is it was unconscionable then, and it still is today, and it should not happen to others,” he said.
Contact reporter Becky Cairns at 801-625-4276 or bcairns@standard.net. Follow her on Twitter at @bccairns or like her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/SEbeckycairns.