Marii Hasegawa
Marii Hasegawa was a peace activist, known for her fifty years of work with the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, including serving as its president during the Vietnam War.
Hasegawa was born in Hiroshima, Japan. Her family moved to the United States in 1919, after her father, a Buddhist priest, was assigned to serve Buddhists in California. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a BA in home economics in 1938.
In 1942, Hasegawa and her family were interned at the Topaz War Relocation Center by the U.S. Government. They were forcibly confined there for three years, and in 1945 the family was released and moved to Philadelphia.
While in Philadelphia, Hasegawa began work with the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, a peace-seeking non-governmental organization that had vehemently opposed the internment of Japanese Americans and helped to relocate and readjust freed Japanese. She would hold varying roles within WILPF for the next fifty years, such as the chair of its Membership and Extension Committee from 1960 to 1965, its consultant to committees from 1965 to 1968, and its national president from 1971 to 1975. Her presidency of the organization was during the Vietnam War. Hasegawa organized protests against the war and led a peace delegation to North Vietnam.
Hawegawa received the Niwano Peace Prize in 1996. She moved to South Hadley, Massachusetts in 2001, where she continued to be active in working for peace and inter-religious cooperation until her death on July 1, 2012. She was named one of the Library of Virginia's Virginia Women in History in 2018.
