Office of the Chancellor NEWS RELEASE Contact: Julie Funasaki Yuen, (808) 454-4870 Dec. 7, 2011
[email protected] Public Information Officer UH WEST O‘AHU’S FIRST DISTINGUISHED VISITING SCHOLAR DR. FRANKLIN ODO SPEAKS WITH ASIAN AMERICAN HISTORY CLASS ABOUT WORLD WAR II INTERNMENT CAMPS ON THE EVE OF THE 70TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE PEARL HARBOR ATTACKS PEARL CITY --- UH West O‘ahu’s first Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Dr. Franklin Odo returned home to Hawai‘i to speak with students in Dr. Christen Sasaki’s Asian American History class about World War II Japanese internment camps, including the Honouliuli Internment and Prisoner of War Camp in West O‘ahu, the largest and longest lived of the internment sites in Hawai‘i. Dr. Odo’s discussion about Japanese immigrants and the Japanese American population in Hawai‘i was especially timely on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the attacks on Pearl Harbor. Dr. Odo also spoke about the our national institutions including the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress and about holehole bushi, the folk songs sung by workers in the cane fields that reveal so much about the cultural lives and daily hardships of the Japanese immigrant population who traveled to find work in Hawai‘i and found themselves in the midst of war following the events of Dec. 7, 1941. Odo, a Kaimuki High School graduate and the first-ever to attend Princeton University from the school, was the founding director of the Smithsonian Institute’s Asian Pacific American Program since 1997. He was responsible for numerous exhibits highlighting the experiences of Chinese Americans, Native Hawaiians, Japanese Americans, Filipino Americans, Vietnamese Americans, Korean Americans, and Indian Americans.