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• 1 media/image16-new.jpg 2021-08-26T11:46:32-07:00 1945 - Two Japanese American students come to UNC after internment camps 4 Kei Kaneda (c. 1923 - 1998) and Shizuko Hayashi (born c. 1922) were the first two Japanese American students known to matriculate at UNC, both having come from internment camps during WWII. During her time at UNC, Kei Kaneda took English 53: Creative Writing, and English 81, which was an American Literature class (Courtesy of the Kaneda Family and Heidi Kim). plain 2021-09-02T07:38:27-07:00 10/01/1945 Kei Kaneda (known then as Kay or Kayelise) (c. 1923 - 1998) and Shizuko Hayashi (born c. 1922) were the first two Japanese American students known to matriculate at UNC. During WWII, ”wartime hysteria and longstanding racial prejudices on the West Coast led to the forcible removal of nearly the entire population of Japanese Americans—men, women, and children—from their homes in 1942,” and to the mass incarceration of over 120,000 Japanese Americans without evidence or trial (Kim 187). The National Japanese American Student Relocation Council (NJASRC) and various religious groups led an effort to place and support Japanese American college students. Despite opposition by the military leadership residing at UNC and some members of the UNC administration, efforts lead by history professor Howard Beale, who had taken a leave of absence to work with the NJASRC, UNC President Frank Porter Graham, and local minister Charles M. Jones placed two students at UNC: undergraduate Kei Kaneda, from Stockton, California and incarcerated in the Rohwer camp in Arkansas, and graduate student Shizuko Hayashi, from Yakima, Washington and incarcerated first in Oregon then Wyoming. During her time at UNC, Kei Kaneda took English 53: Creative Writing, and English 81, which was an American Literature class (Courtesy of the Kaneda Family and Heidi Kim).
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  SOURCES
  
  Kim, Heidi. “UNC’s Fight to Admit Japanese American Students during World War II.” The North Carolina Historical Review, vol. XCVI, no. 2, Apr. 2019, pp. 182–205.
  
  “1945: Two Japanese American Students Come to UNC After Incarceration Camps” in “THE Asian American Student Experience.” The Carolina Story: A Virtual Museum of University History. 2019. Carolina Digital Library and Archives, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, https://museum.unc.edu/exhibits/show/asian-american-unc/1945.