Sig Kagawa - How Scouting Changed My Life

Sig Kagawa is a board member and past president of the Aloha Council in Honolulu, Hawaii. He currently serves on the National Advisory Council and is the retired chairman and CEO of Occidental Underwriters of Hawaii. His enthusiasm for Scouting began as a boy in a Japanese internment camp during World War II. Following is Sig's own account of his experience and its consequences, written for inclusion in an Aloha Council time capsule.

Shortly after the United States entered World War II in December of 1941, my father was arrested and confined in an internment camp at Sand Island in Honolulu. Soon after that, he was moved to a camp in California, then to another one in the Midwest. He was a natural born American citizen who had committed no crime, but since we were at war with Japan and he was of Japanese ancestry, he was considered to be a disloyal American. For that reason, he was removed from his home, arrested, and imprisoned. Toward the end of 1942, my mother, sisters, and I were still living at home in Honolulu when my mother suddenly told us that we were to be evacuated from Hawaii and taken to join my father in the camps. She sold everything that she could, gathered up as much warm clothing as she could find, and packed us all up for the journey into an unknown future.

Meanwhile, my father had been shipped back to the immigration station in Honolulu, and we joined him there to board a ship back to California and then a train to Camp Jerome in Arkansas. For us, it was a frightening place, a concentration camp of prison barracks, barbed wire, and armed guards. We were forced to live there until 1944 when the government decided they must begin relocating the imprisoned Japanese-Americans back into society.

My father was one of the first to be released from Camp Jerome and was moved to Des Moines, Iowa, where he was put to work for the War Relocation Authority, a government agency responsible for arranging and coordinating the relocation of the Japanese-Americans who were being released from the concentration camps.

There in Des Moines, I went to a school that was located about a mile from where we lived, and I walked to and from school each day. The United States was still at war with Japan, and the country's anti-Japanese propaganda inflamed hateful passions against all Japanese, even loyal American citizens of Japanese ancestry. So it was not uncommon for gangs of boys to confront me on my walks to and from school and to scream nasty epithets at me, throw rocks at me, kick me, and spit at me. It was the most difficult time of my life.

Then one day, a group of young boys came to me and said they were going to escort me to and from school to protect me. And they did that for many weeks until the harassment came to an end. Those boys who became my protectors were Boy Scouts from a troop at nearby Hanawalt School who had learned of my plight and had decided to protect me as their daily good deed. You cannot imagine how liberating it was to have that daily dread removed from my life, and I appreciated it so much that I said that someday I would find a way to express my appreciation by doing whatever I could to help the Boy Scouts.

When I got out of college, I returned home to Hawaii and offered to become a volunteer for the Aloha Council of the Boy Scouts of America. I have been a volunteer ever since.

Throughout my service with the Boy Scouts, I have met many good people who give of themselves for the betterment of our young people and who, at the same time, reap wonderful personal rewards for themselves. They are much like those boys in Iowa who helped me in my most difficult times.

Many years from the time of this writing, when this time capsule is opened, I hope the people who read this, and our country itself, will have long transcended the passions and prejudices that resulted in the kinds of events that I have described. Whether or not we get there, I am sure that the people involved in Scouting will be as good as those I have met and worked with, and as good as those Iowa Boy Scouts of so many years ago.