Credit: Arianna Shang

Wayland High School Principal Allyson Mizoguchi discusses the internment of Japanese Americans and how language was used to downplay their forced removal into prison-like camps. “I think it’s worth thinking about how this language has evolved and how the language was used back then,” Mizoguchi said. “And how we’ve learned to reconcile [with] how those words sort of hid actual meaning back in the past.”

On Thursday, Jan. 29, Wayland High School Principal Allyson Mizoguchi shared her family’s history of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

The presentation took place in the lecture hall, where students had the opportunity to view it as part of the annual Winter Week.

Mizoguchi shared a brief history of the internment of Japanese Americans, including her own family’s experience. She described her father’s birth at the Minidoka internment camp in Idaho.

“[People of Japanese descent] were given about a week to get their belongings, to gather your forks and your spoons and your linens and pack them in a bag and then come to this assembly center,” Mizoguchi said. “[They were] going to be put on the bus, [and they were] not going to tell you where you’re going. Folks had to sell their property. They had to sell their companies and off they went.”

Among the stories Mizoguchi shared were her aunt’s perspective as a child and her grandmother’s experience as an adult living in the internment camp. Mizoguchi said her grandmother felt camp was easier in some ways. Having someone cook for her and not having to work on her farm back home were among the reasons she described camp as “less hard.”

“Things were taken away, but things were gained as well,” Mizoguchi said.

Mizoguchi also explained the historical context of anti-Asian sentiment in the U.S. that made the internment possible. After the Attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, historic anti-Asian racism, wartime hysteria and failure of leadership all led to the internment of Japanese-Americans without due process. Two-thirds of those incarcerated in the internment camps were American citizens.

Mizoguchi said terms such as “camp” and “evacuation” can gloss over the reality of the incarceration of about 120,000 Japanese Americans.

“They called it an evacuation,” Mizoguchi said. “What does an evacuation insinuate? I’d like to suggest for the person’s own protection, right? ‘You’re in danger. We’re going to evacuate you.’ As opposed to, ‘We’re going to forcibly remove you.’”

The presentation included a video featuring interviews with Japanese Americans who were incarcerated. The interviewees described prison-like conditions in detention centers, with camps in remote areas of desert or swampland.

For some who experienced it firsthand, the memories can be too “raw” and “difficult” to recall, Mizoguchi said, including for her father and grandfather. Because of this, she said she only learned about her family’s history as a teenager while working on a school history project.

“So in talking with [my father] more, he didn’t intentionally hide [the story],” Mizoguchi said. “I think it was more such a source of sadness and shame that it wasn’t something he was ready to talk about.”

For some students, hearing individual stories helped them learn more about the internment of Japanese Americans. Instead of reading statistics or facts in a textbook, they heard firsthand accounts of what the experience was like for those who were incarcerated.

“It was very interesting to get to listen to the different stories of her family because in school, we only got broad information on the Japanese internment camps,” junior Ryan Frutman said. “And [we] didn’t get to get more personal with the subject and really learn to understand what it was like.”

Now in his 80s, Mizoguchi described her father as a “social justice warrior” who wants to share his story and have these conversations. She emphasized the importance of looking back and remembering history to better understand events today.

“[My father] has become, through his kids [and] his grandkids, more interested in sharing his story and finding the points of relevance to today’s events to help us understand what’s happening now as well,” Mizoguchi said.

History Department Head David Schmirer also emphasized the importance of sharing stories and teaching history in order for students to have not only a better understanding of the past, but a better understanding of present events and issues.

With tens of thousands of people detained or deported by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in recent months, some are drawing connections between past events and today. Amid reports of racial profiling, due process concerns, abuse and the use of a former Japanese American internment site as an ICE detention center, some say the parallels feel familiar.

“We, as a community here, should be concerned that this same presentation could be happening 30 years from now, with a different group of people in this country that have been forcibly removed from their homes,” Schmirer said. “And I know that wasn’t the direct purpose of Dr. Mizoguchi’s presentation, but this is why we teach history. We do this so that we do not repeat the mistakes that we’ve made in the past.”