Were All Japanese Americans In Internment Camps? One Woman's Story

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They're some of our favorites. The surge of children's books, school curricula, films, websites, plays, and exhibitions about the wartime forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans has, for the most part, been a good thing. There is generally one simple narrative that gets told. Our next story comes to us from Preston Jones, who is a professor of history at John Brown University and is also a Jack Miller Center Fellow. The Jack Miller Center is a nationwide network of scholars and teachers dedicated to educating the next generation about America's founding principles and history.

To learn more, visit JackMillerCenter.org. Let's take a listen to the story. Mary McCamey arrived in Anchorage, Alaska with her immigrant parents soon after the town was founded in 1914. Her father, who in the US went by George, had studied English before emigrating from Japan to the US, but he never mastered it.

Mary's mother, Minnie, never became comfortable in English. I first saw a photo of Mary McCamey in an Anchorage school annual for 1929, after starting research into the city's history from its founding to the beginning of the Second World War. Given Japan's attacks on Alaskan islands and the town of Dutch Harbor during that war, I wanted to track what Anchorage's residents thought about Japan and the Japanese up to December 1941. When I first saw a photo of Mary, I felt sorry for her. After everything I'd read about the experience of Japanese Americans in the years before and during World War II, I assumed that she must have had a very difficult time. But then I learned that Mary made the honor roll as a first grader in Anchorage. I learned that, as a 10-year-old, she won an essay contest sponsored by the Bank of Alaska. Over the next months, I saw many photographs of Mary in Anchorage school publications and elsewhere, and I noticed that she had a lot of friends, as did her three younger siblings, Harry, Alice, and Flora. In various archives, I found short notes Mary had written to classmates.

One was addressed to Louise, whom Mary called the best of girls and a sweet friend. I learned that Mary graduated in 1930 from Anchorage's school as valedictorian of her class, the first of the four Mikami children to do so. Then she went to what would later be called the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, where she graduated in 1934 with the highest grades of any student at the college to that time.

The school's newspaper reported that Mary had eclipsed all rivals by nearly a 7% margin. After graduating, Mary went on an anthropological research trip to St. Lawrence Island. She wrote articles about the expedition. The student newspaper in Fairbanks noted that Mary was the only woman on the expedition. It said nothing about her Japanese ancestry. People liked Mary and her sisters and brother.

They didn't care where their parents were from. Having a keen interest in anthropology, Mary worked at the University of Alaska Museum, which was directed by a graduate of Yale University. She was inspired by what he told her, and she applied to Yale and was accepted for graduate study.

Traveling alone, she took a steamer to Seattle and a train across the country to Connecticut. As before, Mary thrived and gained friends. Her Japanese ancestry seemed not to be a barrier.

This held through the Second World War. While Mary's parents, who had moved to California by late 1941, were interned, along with thousands of other Japanese Americans living in the western U.S. and Canada, none of the Mikami children were interned. Flora, married to a Canadian, lived out the war in British Columbia. Mary and her brother Harry, attending Yale University, lived in Connecticut.

Alice stayed in the Alaskan town of Palmer, where she lived well into her 90s. I had the privilege of speaking with Alice a few times. I asked if, the day after Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese Navy, she felt any animosity directed against her. She said that if there was any animosity, she wasn't. She said that if there was any animosity, she wasn't aware of it. It didn't take long for me to stop feeling sorry for Mary Mikami.

There was no reason to. Soon I came to admire her, though not because she had successfully struggled against forces that intended to keep any particular group down. There's nothing in the surviving documents that suggests she ever faced such pressures. I came to admire Mary because she had succeeded the old-fashioned way. She took advantage of her smarts and the motivation her parents provided. She worked hard. She was decent. She didn't step on other people. She succeeded with grace.

She earned her rewards. When Alaska Senator Frank Murkowski spoke about Mary after she passed away in August 1999, he used words like tenacity and extraordinary. Growing up in Alaska, Mary lost much of the Japanese she had spoken as a child. She spoke only English with her siblings. She made up for this later in life with research and trips to Japan to learn about her family's history and culture. She remastered Japanese as an adult. Her language abilities shaped much of her work as a researcher, editor, and teacher at Yale.

She edited translations, worked with the Institute of Oriental Languages, and contributed to the production of academic archaeological journals. History, like the news, focuses on the negative. This is easy to do because history is about people and people are complicated and do bad things.

But people also do admirable things, and it's useful to see goodness where it exists. It's good to remember that there really is something to the American Dream. Certainly, Mary McCamey would say so. Mary earned a doctorate degree in anthropology at Yale and married fellow graduate student Irving Rouse, who became a professor of anthropology there.

Their son, Peter, became a senior advisor to President Obama. And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler. A special thanks to Preston Jones, professor of history at John Brown University, for sharing the story of Mary McCamey. One Japanese American story here on Our American Stories. Click the Donate button. Give a little. Give a lot. Help us keep the great American stories coming.

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