10093: Minority Interned Program…?

From The Los Angeles Times…

USC to award degrees to Japanese interned during WWII

USC is awarding degrees to Japanese students who were forced out during World War II, but some say the school hasn’t corrected all past wrongs.

By Matt Stevens, Los Angeles Times

Friday morning, the USC campus will be filled with smiling students posing for pictures next to the most important people in their lives. For Hitoshi Sameshima, however, graduation comes a little too late.

It’s been 70 years since Sameshima attended USC, and he has longed for this day. But his wife and daughter didn’t live long enough to see it.

Commencement will be bittersweet for Nisei alumni like Sameshima, 91, whose educations were interrupted by internment during World War II and who will finally receive degrees from their alma mater. Nine former students will take part, school officials said.

Although they will cross the stage and shake hands with President C.L. Max Nikias, other Asian Americans are planning a morning rally against the private university.

Sameshima will stop by the demonstration too. He said he is grateful to get a diploma but sad that many of his peers won’t be recognized at all. He also wishes USC had acted earlier, before his wife and daughter died.

“We were going to go as a family,” he said. “My daughter would have had her camera and everything.”

The Nisei students — children of Japanese immigrants — were swept up with their families in 1942 and forcibly relocated to internment camps, halting their college education. In recent years, universities across the West Coast have handed out honorary degrees to help repair the wounds.

A 2009 state law led California public schools to award those degrees to both living and deceased students as part of the California Nisei College Diploma Project. The action came after the University of Washington and University of Oregon also granted honorary degrees in 2008.

Private schools, however, were not obligated to award degrees, and USC did not, offering honorary alumni status in 2008 instead. That will change Friday, but to many, the school’s renewed effort is not enough.

Among their complaints: USC has refused to issue the honorary degrees posthumously to the families of Nisei who have died, and the school has yet to formally apologize for being the only West Coast university to actively withhold transcripts from Nisei students.

All of this disappoints Joanne Kumamoto, whose father, Jiro Oishi, died in 2003 and will get no mention on Friday. Oishi was a senior when he was removed from campus, and when he returned in the 1960s to get his transcripts, Kumamoto said school officials told her father the records were lost. He ultimately got his degree at UC Riverside.

“It’s almost like they’re not even acknowledging that they were even there,” Kumamoto said. “USC talks about the Trojan family…. These children have been the step-children in that family for many years.”

Scott Mory, USC Alumni Assn. chief executive who spoke for the school, declined to comment specifically on USC’s past practices, but he pointed to policy posted on the school’s website explaining USC’s stance on posthumous degrees. The policy states that “honorary degrees are conferred only upon individuals who are present at the commencement exercises.”

But a posting about Friday’s ceremony contradicts that policy, saying that if Nisei students “indicate that [they] will not be able to attend the ceremony in person … the honorary degree will be mailed.”

“USC has its policies,” Kumamoto said, “but policies can be reviewed.”

The university announced that it would offer the honorary degrees to living Nisei students in March. Mory said that a new president and new provost along with a “very impassioned nomination” from the USC Asian American community gave the school an “opportunity to revisit the issue.”

Jonathan Kaji, former Asian Pacific Alumni Assn. president, is not satisfied.

“Either you honor all or none,” Kaji said. “How can you draw a line based on survivability? They’ve effectively eliminated 95% of all the affected students.”

School officials also said that the issue of USC’s past treatment of the Nisei was addressed by a former vice president in a 2008 speech. The administrator retold Oishi’s story, and acknowledged that “decisions were made that were hurtful and unjust.”

But that talk made no reference to what one professor said made the university “stick out like a sore thumb.” Roger Daniels, history professor emeritus at the University of Cincinnati, said that former USC President Rufus B. von KleinSmid, who ran the school from 1921 to 1947, believed that issuing a transcript would constitute “giving aid and comfort to the enemy.”

Daniels and other historians say USC is the only documented school on the West Coast that resisted providing transcripts to Nisei students who were granted permission to attend schools in the Midwest and on the East Coast in the fall of 1942.

Despite the swirling controversy, Sameshima maintains that he has always been an “SC man.” He earned a degree from the University of Denver and worked his way up to become a supervising deputy purchasing agent for Los Angeles County. He sent his daughter, Linda, to USC.

She died in early 2011. Sameshima’s wife of 64 years, Utako, died in March, just days after getting word that her husband would finally get his USC diploma.

“If they could have done this back when they made us alumni,” Sameshima said, “oh, what a difference it would have made.”

6809: Internees Help Future Interns.

From The Los Angeles Times…

Helped during misfortune, World War II internees now help others

Acting out of a traditional sense of duty, Japanese Americans open college doors for Cambodian refugees.

By Teresa Watanabe

They are complete strangers, born of different cultures nearly eight decades apart.

But a twist of historic fate has bound Fred Hoshiyama, a 94-year-old Japanese American, and Chimchanbo Uk, an 18-year-old Cambodian native: The families of both have experienced displacement amid political turmoil.

Hoshiyama was forcibly removed from his Northern California home and sent to a bleak internment camp in Utah after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. There he languished until the American Friends Service Committee and other groups organized a program to free more than 4,500 Japanese Americans from the camps, place them in colleges and award them scholarships.

Uk’s mother lived through three years of rule by the murderous Khmer Rouge, witnessing killings and starvation as she and her siblings were forced from the cities to toil on the land in rural Cambodia. She made her way to the United States in 1996, bringing her children.

The two communities plan to join their stories today as Hoshiyama and other Japanese Americans present scholarships to Uk and other Southeast Asian students at a ceremony in Long Beach.

The scholarship program reflects the Japanese value of giri, a sense of duty and obligation that compels those who receive benevolence to return it to others, community organizers say.

“We got help so we want to help others,” said Hoshiyama, a Culver City resident. “You have to model something if you believe in it strongly.”

Uk said she is overwhelmed by the kindness of strangers.

“They have no clue who I am,” Uk said. “It is so selfless, and I am so grateful.”

The scholarship program, called the Nisei Student Relocation Commemorative Fund Inc., was started in 1980 by a group of largely West Coast Japanese Americans who ended up in New England after the war.

Two of them were Yosh and Nobu Hibino, Bay Area residents who had attended UC Berkeley at the time war broke out. Both were sent to Topaz internment camp in central Utah, a place fellow internee and Berkeley alumnus Hoshiyama described as a sweltering, shadeless stretch of desert and sagebrush.

Physically, Hoshiyama said, he got used to the dreary routine of communal confinement. The psychological wounds of being targeted and treated as an enemy alien by his own country took longest to heal, he said.

But when word reached him that the American Friends Service Committee, YMCAs and YWCAs and others had put together a college program for young Japanese Americans like himself, he was elated. The National Japanese American Student Relocation Council, formed in 1942, raised funds for scholarships, cut through security protocols and red tape and persuaded at-times reluctant university leaders to accept the students, organizers said.

After four months at Topaz, Hoshiyama became one of the first students to leave for college. He attended Springfield College in Massachusetts, earning a master’s degree in education.

Asked how he felt when he walked out of camp as a free man bound for college, Hoshiyama leaned back in his chair, flung out his arms and let out a long “Ohhhh.”

“It felt like night and day, from being imprisoned to the freedom of being a man again,” he said.

Yosh Hibino, 89, earned a master’s degree in commerce from the University of Texas while his wife, Nobu, graduated from Boston University with an undergraduate degree in psychology, said their daughter, Jean.

The couple stayed in the New England area and began socializing with other Japanese Americans there. As they began to realize that most of them were recipients of the wartime college program, they came up with the idea to give back with a scholarship program for others.

With stories of Vietnamese boat people filling the news at the time, the founders proposed that the fund help Southeast Asians displaced by war rather than their own relatively assimilated and economically comfortable community, said Jean Hibino, whose mother died in 1998.

“The Southeast Asian students reflected their own wartime experience of kids whose lives and educations were disrupted by war,” she said.

So far, the fund has granted scholarships ranging from $500 to $2,000 each to 540 students, with total disbursement at $503,800. The fund rotates among cities; this year the recipients were chosen from Long Beach.

Uk, one of this year’s 30 recipients, has maintained a 3.5 grade-point average despite family troubles and a part-time job at a fast-food restaurant she needs to help supplement the family income.

As she prepares to accept her scholarship today, Uk said she hopes to continue the cycle of giving back. Her dream is to enter college, graduate in international studies and work for the United Nations.

Her sources of inspiration are Oprah Winfrey, for her charitable work in Africa, and her Khmer language teacher, who collects recyclables during the year to buy food and school supplies for Cambodian children each summer.

“Although I myself have struggled a bit in the past, I was fortunately given the opportunity to strive for a better future,” she wrote in her scholarship essay. “I feel every individual should deserve the opportunity that was introduced to me.”