A Holocaust survivor urged her to write about her concentration camp experience — the one in Arizona.
November 29, 1926: Michi Nishiura Weglyn, activist and author of Years of Infamy, was born.
Michi Nishiura Weglyn grew up in Southern California. When she was fifteen, the U.S. government sent her family first to the Turlock Assembly Center, then to the Gila River War Relocation Center in Arizona, one of America’s ten major concentration camps where more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated.
She spent her late teenage years behind barbed wire, surrounded by dust, heat, surveillance, and the quiet pressure to endure. After the war, most former incarcerees rarely spoke about it. Shame filled the space where memory should’ve been. It unsettled Michi.
She was a gifted student. Gila River officials recommended her for a full scholarship to Mount Holyoke College, and she left the camp in 1944 to begin her studies. But a bout of tuberculosis forced her to withdraw. A few years later, while attending Barnard College, tuberculosis returned. She had to leave school again, but she never stopped learning.
A Survivor Meets a Survivor
In 1950, while living in New York, Michi met and married Walter Matthys Weglyn, a German Jewish refugee who had escaped the Nazis by hiding in the Netherlands. Walter understood persecution and displacement in a way few Americans could.
When he learned Michi had been imprisoned by her own country, he asked the question she had spent years avoiding:
Why isn’t this history written down? Why doesn’t America know what it did to you?
Walter had seen firsthand how denial corrodes a society. He told Michi that telling the truth was not an act of anger — it was an act of responsibility. According to Michi, Walter became her most exacting critic and mentor.
The Book That Exposed Hidden Truths
After establishing herself as one of the most successful Japanese American costume designers of her time, Weglyn dedicated herself to uncovering the truth about the camps. She spent years digging through archives, interviewing former incarcerees, and digging up documents buried by the government.
In 1976, she published Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps — the first major incarceration history written by a Nisei. The book challenged false claims of “military necessity,” and exposed political fearmongering and deliberate violations of civil rights.
She highlighted the Munson Report, which concluded Japanese Americans posed minimal security risk, a report the government buried. She documented the secret plan to use Japanese Latin Americans as bargaining chips in prisoner exchanges with Japan. She gave the public the history it had been denied.
Michi’s Legacy
Her book embarrassed officials. It unsettled communities. And it energized a generation of Japanese Americans who were beginning to demand redress.
Her work transformed private memories into public testimony and helped lay the foundation for the movement that culminated in the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, the formal apology and reparations signed by President Reagan.
Although she never completed a college degree, Weglyn received honorary doctorates from Hunter College, Mount Holyoke College, and Cal Poly Pomona for her groundbreaking work in revealing hidden history.
She continued advocating for Japanese Latin Americans until her death on April 25, 1999. Her legacy lives in every survivor’s story that is told, and in every silence that is finally broken.