She Was Japanese American During WWII, but Her Story Was Very Different
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 8 January 2026
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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. Preston Jones, professor of history at John Brown University, shares her powerful and often overlooked story.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:14.2 | This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories, |
| 0:18.6 | the show where America is the star and the American people. And we'd love to |
| 0:23.6 | hear your stories. Send them to Our American Stories.com. They're some of our favorites. |
| 0:29.9 | The surge of children's books, school curricula films, websites, plays, and exhibitions about the |
| 0:35.4 | wartime forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans |
| 0:40.2 | has, for the most part, been a good thing. There is generally one simple narrative that gets told. |
| 0:47.3 | Our next story comes to us from Preston Jones, who is a professor of history at John Brown |
| 0:52.4 | University and is also a Jack Miller Center Fellow. The Jack Miller Center is a professor of history at John Brown University and is also a Jack Miller Center fellow. |
| 0:56.8 | The Jack Miller Center is a nationwide network of scholars and teachers |
| 1:00.1 | dedicated to educating the next generation about America's founding principles and history. |
| 1:06.3 | To learn more, visit jackmiller center.org. |
| 1:09.7 | Let's take a listen to the story. |
| 1:13.1 | Mary McCami arrived in Anchorage, Alaska, with her immigrant parents, soon after the town was founded in 1914. |
| 1:20.6 | Her father, who in the U.S., went by George, had studied English before emigrating from Japan to the U.S., but he never mastered it. |
| 1:29.1 | Mary's mother, Minnie, never became comfortable in English. |
| 1:34.2 | I first saw a photo of Mary McCami in an Anchorage school annual for 1929, |
| 1:39.6 | after starting research into the city's history from its founding to the beginning of the Second World |
| 1:44.6 | War. Given Japan's attacks on Alaskan Islands and the town of Dutch Harbor during that war, |
| 1:51.6 | I wanted to track what Anchorage's residents thought about Japan and the Japanese up to December |
| 1:56.8 | 1941. When I first saw a photo of Mary, I felt sorry for her. |
... |
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