When Midori Funatake came here to the University of Oregon in 1940, she never suspected that she would not get her degree until Sunday, April 6, 2008. She had set out from home, on the outskirts of Portland, 100 miles to the north, with a student’s traditional motivation: “It was far enough away from home that I could feel independent,” recalls Mrs. Midori Komoto, as she later became.
Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, during her second year. Fellow students and campus officials expressed sympathy to her, she says, but “the newspapers said anybody of Japanese descent was the enemy.”
She and her fellow nursing students were quickly shipped up to Portland and thrown straight into nursing, as the war effort demanded. “That,” she says, “is where I was when the government said all Japanese had to be moved out of what they called the war area.
“My school didn’t think so. They said, ‘You’re absolutely essential here.’”
But President Franklin D. Roosevelt was insistent: All Americans of Japanese descent on the West Coast would, in the interests of national security, be locked in internment camps. “Everybody adored FDR,” says Mrs. Komoto. “Anything he said, we had to do.”
Fortunately, her older sister, a Reed College graduate, saw Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 coming, so the Funatake sisters took a train to Denver and avoided internment, unlike many family members.
Midori Funatake was happy to go to Colorado. Enthusiasm still registers in her voice as she approaches her 86th birthday: “In my mind, I was always looking for more adventures like that. I hadn’t been east of Portland.”
The train carriages, she recalls, were packed with soldiers.
Soon, for her, the University of Oregon receded, as it did for 19 other Japanese-American students who had been enrolled there when the order was issued.
Redressing a ‘Tragic Legacy’
All of those students—11 of them living—received honorary degrees here on Sunday. In a ceremony of reconciliation, the university awarded 19 bachelor’s degrees and one master’s degree.
The ceremony was part of a day of “serious contemplation but also of celebration,” a step in redressing “the tragic legacy of 1942,” Dave Frohnmayer, president of the university, said in addressing the four new graduates who were able to attend, along with some 60 members from the families of living and deceased former students.
Among those awarded degrees posthumously was Frank Hachiya, of Hood River, Ore. In December 1944, he was mortally wounded at the Battle of Leyte in the Philippines, after he had parachuted behind enemy lines and gathered intelligence that spared hundreds of American soldiers’ lives.
The graduation ceremony is being echoed at other campuses in Oregon, California, and Washington. Next month the University of Washington will recognize 440 Japanese-American students who were expelled in 1942.
The Oregon ceremonies stem from legislation unanimously approved last year giving state universities the authority to award degrees to students whose education was interrupted by Order 9066.
Two students now attending Oregon State University, Joel Fischer and Andy Kiyuna, developed the concept as a class project. They were motivated by a sense that, as Mr. Fischer put it, righting the mistakes of previous generations was particularly important “when the current administration is doing a lot to redefine presidential powers.”
A Doctor and a Dissident
Executive Order 9066 forced about 120,000 American citizens into internment camps. Like Mrs. Komoto, another Oregon student who was awarded his degree here this month, Robert Shu Yasui, avoided internment. He sneaked out of Eugene to Denver on a bus after buying a ticket late at night from a drowsy clerk. Several members of his family were not so lucky. Some spent years in camps surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. It still amuses Dr. Yasui that after FBI agents raided the family home, they interpreted children’s scribbles as blueprints for blowing up the Panama Canal.
Dr. Yasui continued his studies after his plight came to the attention of the dean of the Temple University School of Medicine. “He was willing to take a chance on a lonely student whom he had not even met,” Dr. Yasui recalls.
Dr. Yasui was not alone in finding sympathetic hosts. College officials formed the National Japanese American Student Relocation Council and worked with Quaker and other groups to find new institutions for displaced students. Some of the 20 expelled Eugene students were among the 5,500 Japanese-American students who were enrolled at more than 500 colleges and universities away from the West Coast.
Dr. Yasui retired in 1999 after 48 years of medical practice in Williamsport, Pa. He proved hardly the seditionist FDR feared, although he did spend 45 years working with the Little League World Series in Williamsport, tending to the health of visiting teams, including Japanese ones.
He speaks proudly of raising five children with his wife, a nurse. He also remembers fondly his older brother, Minoru Yasui, a 1939 graduate of the University of Oregon School of Law who famously defied Portland’s race-based curfew that stemmed from Executive Order 9066.
Minoru Yasui, incensed by the government’s affront to the Constitution, insisted on being arrested for refusing the curfew, and spent nine months in solitary confinement. The federal government suspended his citizenship. He took his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he controversially lost.
After the war, working as a lawyer, he became a highly respected resident of Colorado and had his wartime conviction overturned. The University of Oregon’s law school is about to name a chair for him.
Memories and Reunions
Like Robert Yasui, Mrs. Komoto found refuge in Colorado from the anti-Japanese fervor on the West Coast. She later learned that administrators at the University of Colorado, where she again enrolled in nursing, had said to students there: “Seven Japanese-American students are coming. We want to be sure not to mistreat them.”
After the war, Ms. Funatake returned to Oregon. Much to her initial annoyance, she said, her mother had found a potential husband for her, in the camps. She married Joe Komoto in 1947, and they settled in Ontario, Ore., by the Idaho border, where she still lives. She says she recognized barely anything of the Eugene campus, but she does remember her student days here fondly. She was happy to meet another student of 1942, Samuel Naito, who runs a large company called Made in Oregon. “He once asked me to dance,” she says.
Was she upset that it took so long for her to get her degree?
No, she says. She is glad that the university did not seek out the 1942 students until now.
“Forty years ago might have been too soon,” she says. “I’d have said, ‘Why are they dredging up that sort of thing?’”
