Japanese Internment: Personal Stories of Mass Imprisonment

Sam Mihara

Warren Auditorium of Ives Hall on the SSU campus
4:00 PM - 6:00 PM

Please join us on Tuesday, February 11th for the fourth lecture in the 2020 series on the Holocaust and Genocide at Sonoma State University from 4-5:50 p.m. in Warren Auditorium of Ives Hall on the SSU campus. Sam Mihara will be speaking about his family’s internment by the U.S. government during the Second World War.

Mr. Mihara is a second-generation Japanese American. His parents were born in Japan and immigrated to the U.S. in the 1920’s. Sam was born in the early 1930’s and raised in San Francisco. When World War II broke out, the United States government forced Sam and his family to move to a detention camp in Pomona, California. They then went to the remote Heart Mountain prison camp in Northern Wyoming where they stayed for three years. Together 10 camps in the United States housed 120,000 West Coast residents of Japanese ancestry, most of them U.S.-born American citizens. Sam’s family lived in a single room, measuring 20 feet by 20 feet, for their entire imprisonment.

Sam developed his Memories of Heart Mountain presentation to educate people and help ensure such civil rights violations don’t happen again. In it, he tells the story of his family and what happened to them, why the camps were created, and the important lessons learned from this experience.