Addressing the Japanese “Problem”: Liberalism, “Good Middlewestern Colleges,” and Japanese American Student Resettlement, 1942–45

In April 1942, the University of Minnesota’s President W.C. Coffey corresponded with nearby
universities’ administrations to address the ‘problem’ of admitting Japanese-identified students.
Coffey’s anxieties were exacerbated one month later when the National Japanese American
Student Relocation Council (NJASRC), under the purview of the War Relocation Authority
(WRA), approved incarcerated Japanese Americans to continue their collegiate education at
universities in the American interior. As Midwestern universities and colleges scrambled to
establish consistent policies, community members and students shared their concerns to the
school administration. In a town hall held to address questions on whether American citizens of

Japanese ancestry should be able to attend the University of Indiana one Hoosier wrote, “A
university education does not have anything to do with Japan’s policies.”
The ambiguity, and potential double-interpretation, of this student’s response points to a broader
story of how Japanese identified students at Midwestern universities reinvigorated the idea of
the Midwest as the “American heartland” during World War II and the postwar period. The
prioritization of inland universities, I argue, upheld ideals of New Deal liberalism by providing
access to education and reinforcing notions of student welfare for Japanese and Japanese
Americans, while simultaneously promoting the conditions for their erasure and assimilation in
the Midwest. Further, I suggest that the maintenance of American wartime policy at the
university extended into the postwar era through programs such as the Government Aid and
Relief in Occupied Areas (GARIOA), which provided scholarships to Japanese international
students after the termination of the WRA and NJASRC. In other words, by maintaining ideals
that the American heartland was insular, isolated, and central to an unquestioned
“Americanness” (Hoganson 2019), government organizations transformed the wartime national
security project into a postwar assimilation policy by prioritizing Midwestern universities and
colleges for Japanese American relocation.