Michi Nishiura Weglyn (1926-1999) was a successful costume designer for the popular Perry Como Show from 1957 until 1966. She left this glamorous career to write, Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps, a book that set the record straight about the forced incarceration of more than 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent during World War II. Weglyn’s interest in the subject was personal.
Born in Stockton, California in 1926, she was the daughter of immigrant farmers of Japanese descent. When she was a teenager war broke out, and she and all of her family was sent to the Turlock Assembly Center in 1942, and subsequently to the Gila River concentration camp in Arizona. Michi and her sibling, Tomi, graduated from Butte High School while incarcerated. She later received a full scholarship to Mt. Holyoke College, and continued her education at Barnard College (1947), and the Fashion Institute (1948) in New York City. There she met and married Walter Weglyn, a German Jew, who had narrowly escaped Hitler’s Holocaust.
With the encouragement of her husband and influenced by the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, she spent seven years researching and writing Years of Infamy. The book, published to critical acclaim in 1975, refuted the Roosevelt Administration’s claim that the incarceration was due to “military necessity.” The book helped relieve the guilt suffered by postwar Japanese Americans and led the way to the movement for redress and reparations. Michi became a well-known activist in the Japanese American community while based in New York City.
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