HISTORY ALONG THE GREAT AMERICAN RAIL-TRAIL
Back at the family’s three-story Victorian home, Mihara’s parents agonized about leaving. While his father, the editor of a popular bilingual newspaper, raced to find someone who might care for the home for however long the family would be gone, his mother packed a suitcase for each of her two boys. But since no details had been provided about where they were going, she wrestled with indecision: Would her sons need snow boots or short-sleeved shirts? On April 7, 1942, the Miharas reported to the Civil Control Station in downtown San Francisco and boarded the buses that would take them to the trains that would take them away from everything the Mihara children had ever known. “The train was surrounded by soldiers carrying weapons,” Mihara remembers 83 years later, “standing shoulder to shoulder to make sure none of us escaped the train.”
This Story Starts With Hate
The first Japanese immigrants to the United States, known as Issei, or “first generation,” arrived in the second half of the 19th century, finding jobs in mines and on farms, in factories and on the railroad. They worked hard to buy homes and land, to open their own stores and start their own farms. They married and had children, “Nisei,” or second generation. But not everyone welcomed these new Americans. Some white people felt that Asian immigrants would take their jobs; some farmers resented the competition they now faced from highly skilled Japanese farmers. During the early 20th century,
“It was a very, very difficult
time,” he said.
Sam and his family were among the 15,000 incarcerees who were held against their will at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center (today more accurately known as the Heart Mountain Confinement Site) in Powell, Wyoming, and numbered among the 120,000 Japanese Americans—the majority of them U.S. citizens—who were imprisoned in 10 prison camps spread across the West during World War II. Today, at the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center (heartmountain.org), visitors can learn about what life was like for incarcerees like the Miharas, what led to this shameful chapter in America’s history, and what can be done to prevent it from happen- ing again.
Congress passed a series of restrictive laws prohibiting
Japanese people from owning land and becoming naturalized citizens. Eventually, the Immigration Act of 1924 essentially banned all Japanese immigration for the next three decades. “This story starts with hate,” said Mihara. “That hate culminated in 1942 after the Pearl Harbor attack.”
Heart Mountain Interpretive Center is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is a National Historic Landmark. Learn more at heartmountain.org.
For three days and three nights,
the family sat on hard benches as the train crawled through the interior West, stopping to let freight and passenger trains go by. Finally, the cars screeched to a halt in a rugged Wyoming valley filled with low-slung, tar-paper barracks surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers. Inside one of the barracks, the Miharas found the 20-by-20-foot room where they would live for the next three years. It had no bathroom, no running water and no insulation. Sam shivered in his California clothes.
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