Honoring Dreams of Education
By Steven Carter, The Oregonian, Portland, Ore.
Mar. 31–It’s been more than 65 years, but Alice Y. Sumida remembers the day clearly — the outrage she felt when imperial Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and the nagging fear that it meant she would not be able to continue her education.
In December 1941, Sumida was an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Oregon. The first in her family to go college, she had her sights set on becoming a nurse. Then World War II interrupted.
“I cried on my house mother’s shoulder,” she recalls. “I didn’t know what was going to happen.”
What happened was that Sumida, like other Japanese Americans on Oregon campuses at the time, could not continue at the schools. Some were ordered to internment camps; others were able to transfer to universities away from the West Coast.
Now, a bill up for a vote Monday on the floor of the Oregon House of Representatives would grant honorary degrees to Japanese Americans who were in college in the state and forced to relocation camps because of the war. The bill has widespread support, including from the Oregon University System, and is expected to become law.
Jim Azumano, who testified at a hearing on the bill, says no one knows for sure how many former students might qualify for the degrees, or how many are still alive.
Among the most prominent is Portland businessman Sam Naito, who pleaded — to no avail — with the University of Oregon administration to be allowed to finish the spring term in 1942. He transferred and graduated from the University of Utah.
Plans for college
Sumida grew up in Portland as Alice Y. Kawasaki. Her father was often away as a railroad worker, her mother ran the Tokio Sukiyaki House in Old Town with her uncle. She went to the old Atkinson Grade School in Northwest Portland. Vic Atiyeh, who later became Oregon’s governor, was her classmate and neighbor.
After school and on Saturday mornings, she and her sisters attended Japanese school to learn to read and write Japanese. Her mother and father encouraged her to follow her dreams, and they set aside money for college.
She remembers how big the University of Oregon campus seemed when she arrived in September 1941.
When the United States entered the war three months later, Atiyeh, also a freshman, gave her a ride back to Portland, she said. She never went back to Eugene.
“Everything was so uncertain,” she remembers. “People’s attitudes changed. We had the restaurant business, but we had to close it, because the customers stopped coming.”
Sumida, her mother and father and two sisters eventually wound up at the Minidoka internment camp in Idaho. Sumida packed only what would fit in the matching set of luggage her parents had given her for high school graduation.
Sumida vowed to get away from Minidoka’s barbed wire and watchtowers. Through a friend, she landed a job taking care of an elderly woman in Chicago, getting permission to travel to Illinois. After 30 rejections, she was accepted in a hospital-based nursing program in Rochester, N.Y. She finished her training in 1947, after the war had ended, and came back to Portland.
Sumida, a widow now, lives in Southeast Portland, not far from the home where she raised four children. She turned 84 Friday, and is retired from a 45-year career in nursing. She got a bachelor of arts degree from Linfield College in 1976, attending classes at night and on weekends. She has six grandchildren, exercises regularly and occasionally speaks to civic groups and schoolchildren about her life.
Naito, president of the company that operates the Made in Oregon stores, says he won’t apply for an honorary degree from UO if the bill becomes law. The experience of being booted off campus was too painful.
Sumida says she will.
“It means a lot to me. It was a time in my life when I was looking forward to getting a college degree. It would give me an opportunity to finish what I wanted to do.”
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Copyright (c) 2007, The Oregonian, Portland, Ore.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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