At the event hosted by Yale’s Japanese American Student Union, Sam Mihara spoke about his childhood in the Heart Mountain internment camp during World War II.

Nora Moses

10:53 pm, Feb 20, 2025

Staff Reporter

Nora Moses, Contributing Photographer

For the national day of remembrance for Japanese internment during World War Two, a survivor of the Heart Mountain internment camp spoke about his firsthand experiences growing up in this camp.

Sam Mihara was born in San Francisco in 1933. When he was 9 years old, he was sent to the Heart Mountain internment camp along with his family as the United States had decided to imprison Japanese Americans during World War II. Mihara has since become a prominent educator on the oft-forgotten history of Japanese internment.

At the event hosted by Yale’s Japanese American Student Union, or JASU, on Thursday night, Mihara shared his experiences of childhood at Heart Mountain and his journey since then.

“To commemorate the Day of Remembrance, we wanted to invite someone who had experienced this in person,” said Ryne Hisada ’27, an organizer of the JASU event. “It’s also important because, and this is true of Holocaust survivors too, this is the last decade we can actually speak to these survivors. So I’m really glad we got to invite him.”

Mihara detailed the impact the Pearl Harbor attack had on the Japanese American community living in the Western United States. He showed slides of racialized cartoons, including one illustrated by Dr. Seuss, to illustrate the rise of discrimination against Japanese Americans.

The American government relocated Japanese families to internment camps. Mihara and his family were placed in the Heart Mountain camp in Wyoming. The camp, Misada said, had a vast population, with thousands of barracks enclosed by barbed wire fences and guard towers. Armed soldiers were ordered to shoot anyone who attempted to escape.

When they arrived at the camp, the government gave him two numbers: a barrack number and a prisoner number.

 “I still have that number. It’s in the National Archives. There’s a file on me, as well as every one of the 120,000 people,” Mihara said.

Mihara continued to describe the harsh conditions in the camps: toilets were communal and lacked privacy, the initial food rations were unappetizing and unfamiliar to Japanese Americans and during the winter, the lack of insulation on buildings left residents unprotected from the freezing temperatures.

The medical treatment camp was also substandard. This left a detrimental effect on Mihara’s family. Mihara’s father lost his eyesight in the internment camp due to untreated glaucoma, as there were no specialists available and the government refused to let him seek medical care. Mihara’s grandfather became severely emaciated before passing away in the camp under inadequate medical care.

“It was a horrible death. He was down to skimming bones before he passed,” Mihara remembered. 

Mihara also detailed how he and others who had been interned received some reparations from the American Civil Liberties Act of 1988, signed by President Ronald Reagan.

He also explained that he helped turn the location of the Heart Mountain internment camp into a museum and educational facility. People, mostly school kids, come there all year round to learn about the history of Japanese internment.

Mihara ended with the question of whether the internment of entire racial groups and denial of their constitutional rights could happen again in America.

“If you have a situation where you have hatred, where you have hysteria and we have some leaders who fail to honor the Constitution, I think it could happen again,” Mihara said. “I think everyone needs to be in their regard to do what they can to make sure that future leaders don’t do this again to anyone.”

Attendees also had the chance to ask Mihara questions about his experiences. Students asked about what school was like at the camp, how Mihara adjusted to life after the interment, and if there were any attempts to escape.

Tyler Norsworthy ’25, a student who attended the talk, said that he learned a lot from Mihara. While he knew that there had been internment camps for Japanese Americans during World War II, he never realized how harsh the conditions were.

“Getting to hear about some of the conditions was really harrowing,” Norsworthy said. “I also was glad to also hear his comments on what to look to in the future, the importance of educating future generations on this historical time.”

In 1875, the first Japanese graduate, Kenjiro Yamakawa, received his doctorate from Yale.