Few people willingly return to their old prison, but 92-year-old Sam Mihara did just that, recently returning to the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in rural Wyoming.
“Our family suffered a lot,” Mihara told CBS News.
He doesn’t want to forget what happened at Heart Mountain. He wants all Americans to remember.
“My father went blind,” Mihara said. “But the worst was my grandfather. He died here.”
It has been about 80 years since the U.S. defeated Japan in World War II, ending a painful chapter in American history when more than 120,000 Japanese Americans were forced from their homes in 1942 and sent to internment camps.
With the U.S. victory, they were finally freed, with the last internment camp closing in March 1946.
Mihara was 9 years old when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Eight months later, the government uprooted his family from San Francisco and forced them to move into prison barracks at Heart Mountain.
“People lost homes,” Mihara said. “…The worst cases were farmers who lost entire farms.”
Mihara said it was “racist” that the government relocated Japanese Americans, but not Italian Americans or German Americans.
Heart Mountain was one of 10 internment camps. More than 10,000 Japanese Americans were imprisoned there for about three years.
“I refer to it as an American concentration camp,” retired Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Lance Ito told CBS News.
Ito’s parents met at Heart Mountain.
“It caused both of our families great anguish,” Ito, who was born in 1950, said of Heart Mountain. “And when they got released from the camp…there was a lot of hatred, a lot of discrimination.”
Ito would become a lawyer before being named a judge. He famously presided over the murder trial of O.J. Simpson in 1995.
“My grandma turned to me and said, ‘You know, when they took us to the camps, there were no lawyers to help us’…And so that’s when I thought, ‘Gee, maybe I ought to be a lawyer,’” Ito said.
In 1988, then-President Ronald Reagan formally apologized to Japanese Americans for the internment camps. Mihara now tours the country, giving lectures.
“The leaders of this country must honor the Constitution,” Mihara said. “We were denied liberty. We were denied justice. It should never happen again.”
Ian Lee is a CBS News correspondent based in London, where he reports for CBS News, CBS Newspath and CBS News 24/7. Lee is a multi-award-winning journalist whose work covering major international stories has earned him some of journalism’s top honors, including an Emmy, Peabody and the Investigative Reporters and Editors’ Tom Renner award.
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