JACL, CU Host Internment Conference
by Gil Asakawa
April 14, 2002

The Mile-Hi Chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League joined forces with the University of Colorado at Boulder to host a thought-provoking and far-reaching three-day conference April 4-6 on racism, racial profiling and the Japanese American Internment during World War II.

The conference included the display of and reception for a traveling exhibit created by the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, "Alien Enemies in Wartime: Race, Ethnicity and Civil Liberties." But the conference mostly featured a series of panels over its three days.

The even was kicked off with a panel, "The Incarceration of Japanese Americans," which began with a lecture read by University of Cincinnati professor Roger Daniels, the author of "Eexecutive 9066: What We Have Learned 60 Years After." Daniels passionately argued that the internment was a travesty due entirely to American racism. Following Daniels, three survivors of internment who are active in the Denver area JA community – Mariagnes Medrud, Carolyn Takeshita and Marge Taniwaki – each spoke about their first-person camp experiences, making for a much more personal and emotional counterpoint to Daniels’ lecture. The evening closed with an excerpt from an ongoing documentary project by Denver filmmakers David Foxhoven and Irene Rawlings about Colorado’s Camp Amache, featuring interviews with survivors.

The next day’s panels included "A New Look Inside the Camps" that spotlighted the role of Buddhism and the history of health care in the internment camps; "Towards a Better Understanding of U.S. Alien Enemy Policies," which focused on the treatment of enemy aliens during the war; and "Security and Civil Rights," which offered history and background on the US internment of Germans from Latin America and the efforts of a radio talk show host, Norman Thomas, to denounce internment during the war.

The first night’s panel was at the Chautauqua Community House; the full day of panels was held at CU Boulder’s Humanities building. There was a reception with speakers Friday night at CU’s Norlin Library for the JANM exhibit, which was a series of informational panels assembled on a plastic frame and arranged in a hallway of the library. The reception upstairs was followed by speakers from both the university and JANM.

The conference closed with a Saturday panel about the national experiences of Japanese interned in Canada and Australia.

Because of the academic nature of much of the presentations, the event was attended largely by students. But the process of educating the next generation of adults with knowledge of the internment experience is valuable, and both the JACL and CU should be commended for the event.