Revisiting Japanese Internment Of WWII

Little Rock --- When Glenn Nomura was a child, he never felt a part of any community. A Japanese-American, he grew up amid hushed murmurs about an era when his parents and grandparents lived in internment camps in southeastern Arkansas. He never quite grasped the entire story --- until this past weekend.

"I never felt part of the American fabric," said Nomura, now a chemistry professor at Georgia Perimeter College."And I certainly have never been with this many Japanese-Americans before now. This is a rare moment when so many of us are learning a lot about a part of history we never knew."

Nomura was among more than 1,200 Japanese-Americans who gathered in Little Rock for Life Interrupted, a four-day conference about the Arkansas internment camps during World War II. It was one of the largest such conferences ever held in the United States.

"We wanted to bring people together to discuss the Japanese-American internment experience during World War II and to also talk about how such issues play a role in today's world," said Johanna Miller Lewis, chairwoman of the history department at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and Life Interrupted project director.

The idea came from Sybil Jordan Hampton, president of the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, which gave $4 million to the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the Japanese-American National Museum in Los Angeles to fund the project.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, which brought the United States into World War II, the U.S. government placed more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans from the West Coast and Hawaii into 10 relocation camps, surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers. Most families took few belongings and lost their homes and businesses. Two camps, Jerome and Rowher, were in rural southeastern Arkansas, in the Mississippi Delta --- the only ones in the South. Nearly 17,000 people lived there.

Last weekend, conference attendees went to the Arkansas campsites. The internment camps were dismantled after the war; now only cemeteries and crumbling monuments remain. One is in honor of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a highly decorated military unit that was made up of segregated Japanese-Americans.

Nomura's father, Kenji Nomura of Chicago, and his late mother, Jane, met in the Jerome camp. Six months after he arrived there, the Army drafted Nomura. He stayed in touch with Jane and married her after he was discharged.

Like many interned families, the Nomuras never returned to California. They settled in Ohio and then Chicago. Glenn Nomura moved to Georgia in 1980 to attend graduate school. He is married to Birgit Gerdes Normura, an Atlanta immigration lawyer.