The year was 1941, Japan had just bombed Pearl Harbor. President Franklin Roosevelt issued an Executive Order requiring the internment of approximately one hundred and twenty thousand Japanese Americans living on the West Coast.
Among them were about one hundred and twenty Japanese American students studying at USC. They were denied their education and forced to leave for the camps. 81 years later this past Friday USC gave late recognition to those students and awarded them honorary degrees. Jocelyn Stone reports.
On Friday, April 1, USC president Carol Folt awarded 33 Japanese American students honorary degrees. Their educations were once taken away due to American hostility towards Japan in WW2.
USC Professor and Managing Director of the Spatial Sciences Institute, Susan Kamei, shares the horrible treatment Japanese American students once faced from the institution.
“What was particularly unfortunate, tragic and mean-spirited was that for those students that were enrolled here at USC, they could have had the opportunity, once they got transferred to detention facilities or voluntarily relocated to other parts of the country outside of these military exclusion zones, to continue their education,” said Kamei.
Former president of USC’s Asian Pacific Alumni Association, Jonathan Kaji, hopes that Friday’s recognition will bring awareness to the injustice many Japanese Americans faced during the war.
“My hope is that this will lead to a movement that will bring about a full inclusion of these stories so that for the next generation, they’ll have a more full and complete understanding of the role and the continuing impacts of these past instances that still reach out and affect us today,” said Kaji.
Kaji applauds USC’s action to make amends, but says that there are still more steps that need to be taken.
“The big takeaway for me is that educating the general public, starting with the public schools, is a great starting point because the the history of of the United States or the history of Asian Americans on the West Coast specifically still remains unknown and unrepresented in public textbook,” said Kaji.
USC professor Susan Kamei is optimistic and hopeful that people will become more aware of Japanese American history, so people will become more accepting and inclusive of all cultures.
“Creating awareness and creating a sense of overcoming that otherness so that if you have more connection with individuals who are very different from ourselves, we can understand more about their life experiences and maybe find that there’s commonality that we didn’t think existed before,” said Kamei.
In 2012 USC began to award degrees to Japanese students it had once forced to leave, but only to those still alive, as it’s USC’s policy for honorary degrees. However, in this case, President Folt made an exception. The University has now recognized all of the wronged Japanese students, both living and deceased.
The former president of USC’s Asian Pacific Alumni Association, Jonathan Kaji, is relieved that the students are finally recognized by the institution.
“It’s the end of a long, 80 year journey for these students and now their families,” said Kaji.
For Annenberg Media I’m Jocelyn Stone.