Matthew Weisbly, co-president of the Nikkei Student Union, recalled his first time learning about Japanese internment after watching the 1990 film Come See the Paradise.
"I watched it with my parents and after I asked them, 'What was that.' I had never seen anything like it," said Weisbly, a senior majoring in history. "The only thing I could relate it to was the Holocaust, which I had grown up knowing about because my dad's family was in Auschwitz during the war."
The film, which depicts a love story during World War II, was Weisbly's first exposure to the history of Japanese internment camps. These military zones were created in response to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's signing of Executive Order 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942. The order followed the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Seventy-seven years later, on the anniversary of the Executive Order signing, the impact of the forced eviction of approximately 122,000 men, women and children can still be felt by communities all over the West Coast, in Los Angeles and even at USC.
"As a Japanese American … for many of us we see it as a defining moment for the community," Weisbly said. "It was my grandfather's story and it was the story of his family and a lot of our family friends and their families."
While the text of the order did not target one specific ethnic group, the implementation of Order 9066 disproportionately affected members of the Japanese American community.
"The reason Japanese Americans were targeted so heavily was because they could be picked out a little easier from German and Italian Americans who, as far as anyone knew, looked like any other white American," Weisbly said.
"A lot of the infrastructure and communities built up before the war was gone after the four or five years people had left," Weisbly said. "There were several large 'JapanTowns' before the war that fell apart afterwards."
William Deverell, a history professor at the Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, said the impact of internment still lingers in today's Japanese American communities.
"It is a scar on the body of American culture, especially for those victimized, of course," Deverell wrote in an email to Annenberg Media. "But in a real sense, for all of us, too."
Deverell said Roosevelt was motivated to issue the executive order by the "shock" of war and by pre-existing racism.
"It was motivated by the presence of the Japanese-descent population in relatively high numbers on the Pacific Coast," Deverell wrote. "[It was] motivated by the shock of Pearl Harbor, and also in line with decades and decades of anti-Asian thought and behavior in the United States."
For Japanese American students at USC, reminders of anti-Japanese sentiment and memories of internment remain on campus. The Von KleinSmid Center Library for International and Public Affairs, a prominent campus landmark, is tainted with this history.
The building was named after USC's fifth president, Rufus von KleinSmid, who also co-founded the Human Betterment Foundation, a society dedicated to studying the supposedly positive effects of sterilization.
According to reporting done by the Daily Trojan, USC professor George Sanchez, who has previously compiled research about Von KleinSmid. found the former president prevented Japanese American citizens from enrolling at the University during the years after World War II.
Provost Michael Quick announced the creation of a Task Force on University Nomenclature in early February, which will be responsible for establishing a process for students to express concerns and wishes to change names of campus monuments, buildings and symbols.
"I have heard different stories about VKC over the years … and it's been something I have thought about, but never given much thought to changing the name," Weisbly said. "But, it should be something that the students and faculty discuss as a whole, because it is up to all of us to make that change."
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