Exhibit recounts courage and caring in the face of wartime injustice

Stephen Kagawa was 25 years old when he first learned that his father’s family had been sent to an internment camp during the war.

“My parents kept it away from me,” Kagawa said. “I was from the community that was affected and I didn’t know.”

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government ordered over 120,000 American citizens of Japanese ancestry into internment camps. Kagawa’s grandfather was a business leader in the Japanese community in Hawaii, and because of this, he was targeted. He and his family were taken into custody at Sand Island and eventually sent to a camp in Jerome, Ark.

“I was standing on the shoulders of those who were so courageous, and I never knew,” Kagawa said.

Kagawa now serves as chairman of the Go For Broke National Education Center, which is bringing the traveling exhibit “Courage and Compassion” to Hawaii as part of a multi-city tour. The exhibit, which opens today, is of the Japanese-American World War II experience and the people who saw prejudice and injustice and had the courage to step forward in support of their neighbors.

It is a familiar story in Hawaii, though told here with a wide lens and with the context of current politics. Even the words used to describe what happened grow in meaning over time.

During the war, the government called it an “evacuation.”

“But that’s something that’s done to rescue the victims of a fire or a flood,” said Carole Hayashino, president and executive director of the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii. “These were American citizens who were locked up without trial and without cause.” The relocation centers are now sometimes called “concentration camps.” In this exhibit, the term used is “incarceration camps.”

No matter how many times you’ve heard about the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the 100th Infantry Battalion and the Japanese internment, even now, there are stories that rise up out of the dust of time and serve as reminders of our better values.

The exhibit just closed in Willamette, Ore. — where, in the days after Pearl Harbor, a group of white clergymen stood together on the steps of a Japanese Christian church to turn away an angry mob intent on setting the building on fire. “The groups going through the exhibit in Willamette were mesmerized,” Kagawa said. “So few really knew the story.”

In Hawaii, McKinley High School principal Miles Cary was so troubled by what was happening that he volunteered to go to the Poston incarceration camp in southwestern Arizona and run a school for Japanese-American children. Riley Allen, editor of the Star Bulletin, refused to use the slur “Japs” in his newspaper despite political pressure to do so. All across America are stories of people who didn’t just sit quietly while fear and bigotry whipped into a terrible frenzy. This exhibit makes the point that this isn’t a Japanese-American story. It’s a shared experience.

“These stories really show the greatness in people,” Kagawa said.

The exhibit will be in Honolulu through Dec. 9 before continuing on to cities across the country.

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.