“I Would Have Just Lived”: Surviving Japanese Internment During WWII (Part 1)

“‘I would have just lived’: Surviving Japanese internment during WWII” (Part 1) is the first of a two-part series that features the oral history testimony of Mitsue Salador and was written, researched, and recorded by Tatiana Bryant, with the support of The Pedagogy Lab. Listeners should note in advance that this audio Open Educational Resource includes themes of grief, xenophobia, racism, and war. In Part 1, Mitsue Salador of Long Island, NY via Hood River, OR, talks about her lived experience as a college student and daughter of Japanese immigrants before the attack on Pearl Harbor. In the early 1940s, Japanese American teenager Mitsue Salador was directed to go to college for nursing because Japanese women weren’t hired as teachers at white schools. Dismayed, she entered college in Portland, OR to study nursing briefly, before she was forced into an urban detention center for people of Japanese heritage after Pearl Harbor. Mitsue organized a loophole escape from the detention center by applying to a college in the Midwest where she would be deemed as less of a potential threat away from active war theaters. Isolated from her family, she continued her education while her parents and youngest sibling survived an internment camp and older siblings navigated college and active military service.