Acts of True Valor: Dr. Jimmy Hara’ s Lifelong Quest for Truth and Reconciliation
COM Associate Dean and Professor of Family Medicine Dr. Jimmy Hara was born in the Gila River internment camp just outside of Phoenix only two months before the end of World War II. The camp housed Japanese American citizens in the wake of the infamous Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942, in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor bombings and the successive ripples of nationwide outrage, fear, and hysteria.
Roosevelt described the bombing on December 7th, 1941, as a“ day of infamy”. The even greater act of infamy was establishing the internment camps and stigmatizing Japanese American immigrant families as collaborators with the enemy. Not to mention the fusillade of ethnic slurs and anti-Asian propaganda that were constantly regurgitated.
Many thousands of Japanese American men and women enlisted in the US military as a demonstration of their loyalty. It is estimated that as many as 33,000 Japanese American soldiers fought on the American side, 20,000 of them mustered into the US Army. The 442nd Regimental Combat team was a Japanese American outfit that fought in Europe, notably in France. Other Japanese Americans served as translators. These efforts brought the Japanese Americans great renown as being amongst the most decorated units in the military. But still, the slurs and exclusion weighed heavily on a proud and modest selfeffacing people.
The Japanese American show of loyalty did not pave the way for universal esteem for the returnees and their families who, upon leaving the internment camps, had to relocate to the far-flung places where they were welcome, having forfeited life savings and possessions while interned in the camps. The return to the Los Angeles area was a particularly harrowing experience. Pre-WWII, Japanese Americans had established a strong economic base in such cultural enclaves as Little Tokyo in DTLA; as well as communities in Boyle Heights, Gardena, and the Jefferson
Dr. Jimmy Hara
Park area adjoining the city’ s Crenshaw and Leimert Park districts.
As a youth, Dr. Hara’ s family moved around. He attended Miramonte Elementary, on 66th Street, not far from the notorious Pueblo del Rio projects in the eastside Central Avenue-Alameda Street neighborhood. He attended Normandie Avenue School, which brought up a“ 6 Degrees of Separation” moment in our conversation.“ In the 2nd grade at Normandie Avenue School, I was skipped a class,” he offered. My response was that I, too, attended Normandie Avenue School and was also skipped in the 2nd grade a few years later. Go figure.
Dr. Hara’ s family settled in Jefferson Park, and he went to James A. Foshay Junior High School and then Manual Arts High School. This was a time of cultural adjustment, Dr. Hara offered.“ We used to play War, and I was always the bad kid. The Latino, Caucasian, and African American kids always needed a bad guy.” When he was growing up, Dr. Hara also attended a Japanese language school.
Manual Arts signaled a turning point in his intellectual development.“ There was a handful of us Japanese Americans and they kind of treated us especially well, compared to some of the other student body.” He notched all A’ s. Then came a period of awakening as he attended UCLA.“ It was a time of Mario Savio and the Free Speech movement at UC Berkeley,” he remembered.“ Angela Davis. All of a sudden, I became aware of civil rights.” He became a member of an Asian American student group.
A basketball fan, Dr. Hara reminisced about the glory days of 1960s UCLA basketball.“ Walt Hazzard was the point guard, but as time went on, we had the freshman team featuring Lew Alcindor, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The freshman team beat the varsity that year.”
CDU College of Medicine | PG. 30