Enduring Communities

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Furthermore, on July 6, 1943, the instructors collectively signed a JLS faculty resolution thanking President Stearns and Captain Frank H. Roberts, USN for their efforts on behalf of the instructors and their families. The Silver & Gold also ran several editorials critical of the Denver Post’s hostile campaign against “Americans of Japanese Ancestry” or AJAS. In these editorials, student editorialists depicted EO 9066 as high handed, of doubtful legality, and as a poor portrayal of American democratic ideals, while citing the detention camp inmates in question were loyal American citizens.

While the Navy Language School’s students …

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World War II furthered diversity in the university’s faculty roster, which came to include 165 Japanese American sensei among the 179 recorded instructors of the U.S. Navy Japanese/Oriental Language School. Aside from Japanese American sensei, Japanese American names began or continued to appear in the directories between 1942 and 1945. Japanese American wives of sensei found other work at the labor-short, wartime university. Among those who worked at the Boulder campus were: Mabel Inouye (chemistry, 1943); Ike Tai (bureau of High School visitation), and Fumi Tomita (correspondence instruction, 1944). Likewise, Japanese Americans hired on in …

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Professor Eckhardt brought Boothroyd's plan to the December 8, 1938, meeting of the Faculty Senate. To have described the faculty's response as unenthusiastic would have been an overstatement. The faculty's initial apprehension and skepticism may have had less to do with the question of segregation and more to do with the students' risky plan to address it. Many of the professors might have guessed that the student body would not answer as Boothroyd and his classmates anticipated. A vote denouncing segregation, with accompanying uncontrollable publicity, might have been embarrassing and problematical for minority rights, but a student vote …

Japanese and Japanese American students attended the University of Colorado in very small numbers in the 40 years before World War II. By the late 1930s Japanese American students were attending at an average of 20 students per semester out of a total student population of just under 4,000. As such a small portion of the overall student body, one might anticipate that Japanese Americans would have been an invisible minority; but that would be far from the case. Japanese American students were influential far beyond their numbers. Among that tiny percentage of students and faculty would be honors students, …

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This essay has thus far examined how scholars from varying disciplines have, in recent years, supported a deeper exploration of the Interior West Nikkei experience from pioneering days through World War II. Let us now briefly explore recent scholarship pertaining to the post-World War II experience of Interior West Nikkei. A strategic starting point is a 2006 study done by Joel Tadao Miyasaki.¹ The larger and direct concern of Miyasaki—who describes himself as “the son of a Japanese American father and a white mother”—is Nikkei identity in Utah and Idaho during the World War II exclusion …