She Was Japanese American During WWII, but Her Story Was Very Different

On this episode of Our American Stories, while her parents were among the many unjustly sent to internment camps during World War II, Mary Mikami and her siblings remained free. Mary rose to the top of her class, earned a doctorate from Yale, and built a life marked by quiet strength and achievement. Historian Preston Jones shares her powerful story.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people,
and we love to hear your story. Send them to
our American Stories dot com. They're some of our favorites.
The surge of children's books, school curricula, films, websites, plays
and exhibitions about the wartime forced removal and incarceration of

(00:34):
Japanese Americans has for the most part, been a good thing.
There is generally one simple narrative that gets told. Our
next story comes to us from Preston Jones, who is
the professor of history at John Brown University and is
also a Jack Miller Center Fellow. The Jack Miller Center
is a nationwide network of scholars and teachers dedicated to

(00:57):
educating the next generation about America's family principles and history.
To learn more of visit Jackmillercenter dot org. Let's take
a listen to the story.

Speaker 2 (01:08):
Mary mccamie arrived in Anchorage, Alaska with her immigrant parents
soon after the town was founded in nineteen fourteen. Her father,
who in the US went by George, had studied English
before emigrating from Japan to the US, but he never
mastered it. Mary's mother, Minnie, never became comfortable in English.

(01:30):
I first saw a photo of Marymakami in an Anchorage
School annual for nineteen twenty nine, after starting research into
the city's history from its founding to the beginning of
the Second World War. Given Japan's attacks on Alaskan Islands
and the town of Dutch Harbor during that war, I
wanted to track what Anchorage's residents thought about Japan and

(01:50):
the Japanese up to December nineteen forty one. When I
first saw a photo of Mary, I felt sorry for her.
After everything I'd about the experience of Japanese Americans in
the years before and during World War Two, I assumed
that she must have had a very difficult time. But
then I learned that Mary made the honor roll as

(02:11):
a first grader in Anchorage. I learned that as a
ten year old, she won an essay contest sponsored by
the Bank of Alaska. Over the next months, I saw
many photographs of Mary in Anchorage school publications and elsewhere,
and I noticed that she had a lot of friends,
as did her three younger siblings, Harry, Alice, and Flora.

(02:33):
In various archives, I found short notes Mary had written
to classmates. One was addressed to Louise, whom Mary called
the best of girls and a sweet friend. I learned
that Mary graduated in nineteen thirty from Anchorage's school as
valedictorian of her class, the first of the former Kami
children to do so. Then she went to what would

(02:56):
later be called the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, where
she graduated in nineteen thirty four with the highest grades
of any student at the college to that time. The
school's newspaper reported that Mary had eclipsed all rivals by
nearly a seven percent margin. After graduating, Mary went on
an anthropological research trip to Saint Lawrence Island. She wrote

(03:20):
articles about the expedition. The student newspaper in Fairbanks noted
that Mary was the only woman on the expedition. It
said nothing about her Japanese ancestry. People liked Mary and
her sisters and brother. They didn't care where their parents
were from. Having a keen interest in anthropology, Mary worked
at the University of Alaska Museum, which was directed by

(03:42):
a graduate of Yale University. She was inspired by what
he told her, and she applied to Yale and was
accepted for graduate study. Traveling alone, she took a steamer
to Seattle and a train across the country to Connecticut.
As before Mary thrived and gained friends, her Japanese ancestry

(04:06):
seemed not to be a barrier. This held through the
Second World War. While Mary's parents, who had moved to
California by late nineteen forty one, were interned along with
thousands of other Japanese Americans living in the Western US
and Canada, none of the maccamie children were. In turn, Flora,

(04:26):
married to a Canadian, lived out the war in British Columbia.
Mary and her brother Harry, attending Yale University, lived in Connecticut.
Alice stayed in the Alaskan town of Palmer, where she
lived well into her nineties. I had the privilege of
speaking with Alice a few times. I asked if the

(04:47):
day after Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese Navy
she felt any animosity directed against her. She said that
if there was any animosity, she wasn't aware of it.
It didn't take long for me to stop feeling sorry
for Mary McCamy. There was no reason to soon. I
came to admire her, though not because she had successfully

(05:08):
struggled against forces that intended to keep any particular group down.
There's nothing in the surviving documents that suggests she ever
faced such pressures. I came to admire Mary because she
had succeeded the old fashioned way. She took advantage of
her smarts and the motivation her parents provided. She worked hard.

(05:30):
She was decent. She didn't step on other people. She
succeeded with grace. She earned her rewards. When Alaska Senator
Frank Murkowski spoke about Mary after she passed away in
August nineteen ninety nine, he used words like tenacity and extraordinary.
Growing up in Alaska, Mary lost much of the Japanese

(05:52):
she had spoken as a child. She spoke only English
with her siblings. She made up for this later in
life with reais search and trips to Japan to learn
about her family's history and culture. She remastered Japanese as
an adult. Her language abilities shaped much of her work
as a researcher, editor, and teacher at Yale. She edited translations,

(06:17):
worked with the Institute of Oriental Languages, and contributed to
the production of academic archaeological journals. History, like the news,
focuses on the negative. This is easy to do because
history is about people, and people are complicated and do
bad things, but people also do admirable things, and it's

(06:40):
useful to see goodness where it exists. It's good to
remember that there really is something to the American dream.
Certainly Mary Makami would say so. Mary earned a doctorate
degree in anthropology at Yale and married fellow graduate student
Irving Rauss, came a professor of anthropology there. Their son

(07:04):
Peter became a senior advisor to President Obama.

Speaker 1 (07:10):
And a terrific job on the production editing and storytelling
by our own Greg Hengler. A special thanks to Preston Jones,
Professor of History at John Brown University, for sharing the
story of Mary mccami, one Japanese American story here on
Our American Stories. Here are at our American Stories. We

(07:32):
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(07:53):
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