Immigrant Detention Centers Recall an Earlier Era

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Perspectives

United Methodist Focus | May 7, 2026

May is Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Heritage Month. This observance began in Jimmy Carter’s presidency and has had various names over the years. It began as a week and was extended to a month by George H. W. Bush. May was selected because it is the month when the first Japanese immigrants came to the United States in 1843 and also when the transcontinental railroad, largely built by Chinese workers, was completed in 1869.

This heritage celebrated in May represents a rich diversity of people from over 70 different ethnic and national groups that speak a multitude of languages. This year in the United States, many people remember one of the heartbreaking chapters in our history with Asian Americans. We recall that history as it is being repeated in the news each day when immigrants, based on their ethnicity, are arrested and sent to detention centers to await their deportation.

Japanese Americans Become Targets after Pearl Harbor

Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the U.S. entry into World War II, about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry living on the Pacific Coast were forcibly relocated to concentration camps* in other parts of the country. Their legal rights were ignored, and many lost their property and possessions. Over half of those relocated were American-born second and third generation U.S. citizens.

Early in my ministry I came to know Perry Saito, a United Methodist pastor in Wisconsin, who was sent to one of the concentration camps as a young adult. Later I would know Bishop Roy Sano, the first Japanese American United Methodist bishop, who went to the Poston Relocation Center in Arizona at the age of 11. Only years later did I come to know about Toshiko Nagamori Ito, whose connections with Methodist institutions helped shape her life and that of her family.

Church response to Franklin Roosevelt’s executive order forcing the relocation of people with Japanese ancestry was generally muted. Church leaders reflected the national support for the war effort. In this respect, church leaders shared perspectives of public leaders now remembered as some of the most progressive of the twentieth century. In addition to President Roosevelt, the relocation was supported by Earl Warren, California attorney general and governor and later chief justice of the Supreme Court; Tom Clark, later on the Supreme Court; civil-libertarian Supreme Court justice Hugo Black; and New York Times columnist Walter Lippman. Later there would be more criticism by church leaders about both the policy and the treatment of the Japanese Americans.

National Japanese American Student Relocation Council

There were, however, many church networks emerging to provide support for those suffering from the war effort, including for those relocated from their homes. Methodists were deeply involved in a number of them. A leader in organizing such religious response was the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), an organization established in 1917 by the Quakers. They continue to be a dependable and steadfast voice for justice and peace. Vanderbilt historian James Hudnut-Beumler says that “Quakers have a voice, which they exercise rarely but consistently, and with integrity.” One of their early initiatives was to gain release from the concentration camps for college-age students to pursue or continue their college education.

Within three months of the president’s executive order, the AFSC received permission from Milton Eisenhower, head of the War Relocation Authority, to establish the National Japanese American Student Relocation Council. The chair of the group was John W. Nason, a Quaker scholar who at the time was president of Swarthmore College. Governing council members were primarily denominational and college leaders. The religious traditions represented captured the mainline Protestant dominance of the time with inclusion of some other Protestant groups. There were single Catholic and Jewish representatives. Methodists included were John O. Gross from the Board of Education and Edward D. Kohlstedt and Lenore E. Porter from the Board of Missions and Church Extension. Theodore H. Jack, president of Methodist-related Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, was also a member. The original planning conference had included one Methodist, Ruthella F. Rodeheaver, from the Woman’s Division of Christian Service.

Methodist Colleges Respond

Methodist colleges outside the West Coast exclusionary zone were frequently found among those willing to receive Japanese students from the concentration camps. Some examples cited in reports include Adrian, Albion, Boston, Dakota Wesleyan, DePauw, Drew, Hamline, Morningside, Ohio Wesleyan, Otterbein, Southwestern (KS), and Nebraska Wesleyan. There were probably many more. One Japanese American student, Sayoko Nakata, became the first female to graduate with an undergraduate degree at Drew University as the undergraduate school became coeducational due to limited male enrollment because of the war. Most of the schools faced some community resistance. DePauw accepted one student but then reported strong local opposition that led to the student leaving and no more being received. Southwestern in Kansas reported that community pressure led to a Japanese American student, who had been elected student body president, resigning from that position.

A public university seen as a leader in receiving Japanese American students had a strong Methodist connection to their efforts. The University of Nebraska decided two months after the college placement agency was established to take students. One of the main reasons for their success with students from the concentration camps was the work of Methodist minister Robert Drew, who headed the local relocation committee and worked with the students and the community throughout the process.

Toshiko Nagamori Ito

Another school accepting these students no longer exists: the National College for Christian Workers in Kansas City, Missouri. National College was part of the deaconess and home missionary training school movement, one of the most innovative educational ventures of the late nineteenth century. Methodists led in this effort with the Chicago Training School for City, Home, and Foreign Missions established in 1885. There were two schools established in Kansas City--the Scarritt Bible and Training School begun in 1892 by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and the National Training School for Deaconesses and Missionaries in 1900 by the Methodist Episcopal Church. Scarritt moved to Nashville in 1924.

One Japanese American student welcomed at National College during World War II was Toshiko Nagamori. Born in Los Angeles, she along with her family were forced to leave their home in the months after Pearl Harbor for a temporary concentration camp at Santa Anita racetrack in Arcadia; stables and makeshift barracks were used for housing. She graduated from high school a few months later, and her high school principal delivered her diploma to her while she was living at the Arcadia camp. She and her family were then moved to Heart Mountain, a concentration camp in Wyoming.

Once at Heart Mountain, Toshi, as she was known, applied to National College after seeing a notice that students would be allowed to leave the camp if accepted by a college in the Midwest or East that had housing available. She met her future husband, Jim Ito, when he processed the paperwork allowing her to leave the camp. All this was made possible by the non-governmental National Japanese American Student Relocation Council and the colleges.

In a memoir, she speaks warmly of her time at National College despite having to be away from family and in a place and climate so different from what she had known in California. After the war ended, she and Jim Ito married. They had two children, and she taught young children in public schools for nearly three decades. She and her family received unexpected attention during the trial of O. J. Simpson at which their son, Judge Lance Ito, presided. It was in those years that she and her husband returned to Kansas City to visit the site of National College. Though the college closed in 1964, the campus was then occupied by another United Methodist school, Saint Paul School of Theology. While the two buildings most central to her time there were no longer standing, she was pleased to see how the legacy and artifacts of National College had been preserved.

But her ties to Methodism went much further back. Her mother finished high school in Japan and then attended a Methodist college in Tokyo, now Aoyama Gakuin University. In her sophomore year, Toshi’s mother became a Christian and was baptized. Majoring in English, upon graduation she taught English to American missionaries. Then the Women’s Foreign Missionary Society asked her to go to Los Angeles as director of the Jane Couch Home whose mission was to care for abandoned Japanese “picture brides” and their orphaned children. Picture brides came to the United States to marry Japanese laborers, often after only exchanging pictures.

Her parents, then both in the U.S., met at the Japanese Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles. In retirement Toshi and Jim Ito were members of Laguna Country United Methodist Church in Laguna Woods, California. She died at the age of 93 in 2018.

Note

*“Concentration camps” is typically the term used by historians since it refers to a location where people are placed without trials and typically because of their group identity, such as racial or ethnic. It is also the term used by most who lived in these facilities.

Further Resources

Betrayed: Surviving an American Concentration Camp is a PBS documentary showing this month on most PBS stations.

An Emmy Award-winning documentary, “The Legacy of Heart Mountain,” is available on YouTube and Vimeo.

George Takei (actor and Star Trek cast member) was 5 years old when his family was taken to a concentration camp. He has a 16-minute Ted Talk on his experience, “Why I Love a Country that Once Betrayed Me.”

Japanese American National Museum (currently closed for renovations until late 2026)

References

Photograph: Instructions to all persons of Japanese ancestry. 1942. Yamano Japanese Internment Collection. Special Collections, The Claremont Colleges Library, Claremont, California. jai00092. https://cdm15831.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15831coll18/id/500.

“Quakers have a voice….” James Hudnut-Beumler, “The Quakerization of Mainline Protestantism” in The Future of Mainline Protestantism in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 179.

From Concentration Camp to Campus: Japanese American Students and World War II by Allan W. Austin (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004).

Memoirs of Toshi Ito by Toshi Nagamori Ito, AuthorHouse, 2009.

United Methodist Focus is the Substack blog of the Rev. Dr. Lovett H. Weems, Jr., distinguished professor of church leadership emeritus at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC. He came to Wesley in 2003 as the founding director of the Wesley’s Lewis Center for Church Leadership after eighteen years as president of Saint Paul School of Theology in Kansas City. Previously he was a pastor in Mississippi for many years. He is the author of many books on church leadership that have had a broad appeal to a large constituency of leaders in both the public and private sectors.