Incarcerated for nothing, educated for life
Japanese-American couple who met at CU shuns bitterness
By Clint Talbott
Nannette Fujimoto and Masahito Okada were just two of legions of Americans harmed by Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066, which mandated the incarceration or forced evacuation of more than 120,000 people, most of them U.S. citizens, who met two conditions: living near the West Coast and being of Japanese descent.
Fujimoto and Okada, still years away from meeting each other, were Californians. They were Japanese-Americans. And neither they nor their families were accused of any crime. But with the stroke of a president's pen, their lives were immediately constrained and forever changed.
Via different routes, each littered with anguish, sacrifice and deprivation, they met as students at the University of Colorado. Here, their paths merged for good.
Nannette Fujimoto was 4 and her sister Yvonne was 2 years old in February 1942, when FDR signed the infamous executive order. It was two months after Imperial Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.
Shortly after FDR's order, the FBI arrested Nannette's father, a second-generation Japanese-American; however, he was soon released when his identity was confirmed. The girls and their parents had one week to gather what possessions they could carry. They had to sell or give away the rest.
The U.S. military corralled them into an “assembly center, the Merced racetrack, where groups of Japanese-Americans were herded first into dirty horse stalls, then onto dilapidated trains and off to internment camps.
The U.S. government incarcerated Nannette's family in an internment camp called Amache, about 140 miles east of Pueblo near the town of Granada. They lived in a tar-paper barrack with no flooring. She remembers eating a lot of rice, Spam and C-rations.
The Naval Language Training Center at CU, meanwhile, needed teachers who were fluent in Japanese and English to train Navy personnel including intelligence officers. They began searching for qualified teachers confined in internment camps. Nannette's father was recruited by the training center and volunteered to teach at the Naval Training Center. This allowed Nannette's family to leave Amache.
Eight months after losing their liberty and most of their property, the girl's family found themselves in Boulder, and Nannette was enrolled as a kindergartner at University Hill Elementary School. Racial tension was high. "I remember kids calling me a dirty Jap," Nannette recalls.
The taunts affected her. In kindergarten one day, Nannette refused to salute the flag, which then was compulsory. The principal summoned her mother and the girl to his office. Nannette had a rationale: "If they're going to call me a 'dirty Jap,' I'm not going to salute the flag."
Up until this time, Japanese was the only language spoken in the Fujimoto household. After Nannette's incident at school, her mother decreed that English—and only English—would be spoken in the Fujimoto home. "My mother made it a point to prove to Americans that she was a good citizen of the United States," Nannette said. "She did everything she could. She even had us attend the Methodist Church every Sunday."
So did other members of her extended family. Her two uncles volunteered to serve in the 442nd Infantry Regiment, which was composed of Japanese-Americans and was the most highly decorated unit in U.S. history.
Despite the fact that her uncles fought for the United States and that her father helped the U.S. Navy by training U.S. naval personnel, Nannette Fujimoto's family spent the war years confined to the city of Boulder. Her younger brother Michael was born in Boulder in 1944.
After the war, Nannette's father established a radio shop on University Hill. Nannette attended local schools, including Boulder High School, before the family returned to San Francisco in 1953.
When the time came to go to college, Nannette Fujimoto chose CU. Despite the prejudice she faced in Boulder, she liked the city and still had relatives here. “By the time I was a college student, I didn't feel overt discrimination,” she said.
Some 40 years after the war had ended, Nannette's father was recognized by the U.S. Navy for his service to the country at the Naval Language Training Center. Nannette's mother received the posthumous award for her husband, who had passed away 25 years earlier.
At CU, Nannette Fujimoto met Masahito Okada. She lived in Libby Hall, he in Baker Hall. They fell in love. He earned his bachelor’s degree in 1958. She followed in 1959, graduating from the College of Arts and Sciences with a degree in medical technology. Soon after, they married, and their union is 51 years old and counting.
Masahito Okada came to the university via a different path. His grandfather and father were early pioneers who settled in the city of Salinas, California. Before the war, Okada’s father was a successful farmer. His father was arrested by the FBI but was released on the recommendation of Mrs. Kletts, a wealthy landowner and prominent citizen in Salinas.
Masahito's father leased the farm he operated from Mrs. Kletts. His father decided to voluntarily evacuate his family from California to Colorado. He had less than a week to liquidate or abandon his farming equipment and his crops as well as his household goods and leave the state of California. Masahito recalls a truckload of belongings that sold for $5. “I was upset because my brother’s bicycle was on top of it, and I thought that was not fair,” Okada said.
Masahito's father had invested heavily in Japanese banks and stocks with the expectation that he would return to Japan with his family. Because of the war, his stocks became worthless and the money that he had invested in Japanese banks in the United States was taken over by the United States government. After the war, he was reimbursed for less than a penny for each dollar that he had invested in the banks.
The formerly prosperous Okadas moved to Colorado and settled near Fort Morgan. In California, the family had employed Filipino workers and their children had the time and freedom to play; in Colorado, Masahito and his two brothers, 11and 7, all worked alongside their mother and father as farm laborers.
Although, they had lived in a modern spacious house in California, they often found themselves in small “labor houses” without running water and only a coal stove for heating and cooking.
Within a couple of years after arriving in Colorado, Masahito's father began share-cropping. The first ventures were on small farms, and the income was limited. In 1948, when his eldest son entered CU, he was forced to cash in his life-insurance policies to pay for the son’s education.
Shortly after, his father moved to a much larger farm and was able to provide for the education of all of his children. His father received many awards from the local sugar-beet company and he was once recognized by two national farm magazines for the extremely high yield of sugar from each acre of sugar beets under cultivation.
All four children graduated from CU. The eldest, Tsuyoshi, graduated magna cum laude and went on to become a physician. Masahito's younger brother, Isamu, became a pharmacist, and his younger sister, Mary Jane, became a teacher.
Like Fujimoto, Okada did not sense overt racial prejudice at CU in the 1950s. After graduating, he attended a Baptist seminary. He returned to CU and completed both a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in the school of education in 1969.
Okada was a teacher and the first Head Start Director for the Boulder Valley School District. After completing a fellowship in educational psychology at CU, he worked for 16 years as a senior project manager for the Southwest Regional Laboratory for Educational Research and Development in Southern California. He later served for two decades as director of education for a Japanese Presbyterian church.
Masahito emphasizes the debt he owes his father, who toiled tirelessly in the field by day despite a severe case of asthma and hay fever that made him cough throughout the night in the fall months. “I never heard my father complain about his misfortunes or struggles in life. Not once.”
Nannette and Masahito Okada say that their parents’ generation suffered much more than they did, but that the elders did so quietly.
Under the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, signed by President Reagan, each person incarcerated in a Japanese-American internment camp became entitled to reparations of $20,000 each. President Clinton formally apologized for the internment in 1993.
Nannette and Masahito Okada, who returned to CU in May for the 50th reunion of the class of 1959, do not recall their early lives with bitterness. Nannette does admit having “a lot of mixed emotions when you talk about these things.”
They do speak of the fond memories they have of Boulder, the pride they feel in their five children, the value they place on higher education and their lives as American citizens.
Their parents would, no doubt, be quietly proud.
Although they cannot speak for the many thousands of others who were forcibly uprooted from their homes and placed in relocation centers or who voluntarily evacuated as a result of Presidential Order 9066, as devout Christians, they feel that in spite of the hardships they endured that God was watching over them. To this end, they quote Romans 8:28: "All things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose."
Nannette Fujimoto and Masahito Okada are native Californians who met at the University of Colorado as students in the 1950s. As a child, she had been incarcerated in the Amache internment camp in Colorado, but the family was later sent to CU, where her father taught Japanese at the Naval Language Training Center at CU. His family also came to Colorado, but as voluntary evacuees who lost most of their assets and became sharecroppers.
By Clint Talbott
Nannette Fujimoto and Masahito Okada were just two of legions of Americans harmed by Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066, which mandated the incarceration or forced evacuation of more than 120,000 people, most of them U.S. citizens, who met two conditions: living near the West Coast and being of Japanese descent.
Fujimoto and Okada, still years away from meeting each other, were Californians. They were Japanese-Americans. And neither they nor their families were accused of any crime. But with the stroke of a president's pen, their lives were immediately constrained and forever changed.
Via different routes, each littered with anguish, sacrifice and deprivation, they met as students at the University of Colorado. Here, their paths merged for good.
Nannette Fujimoto was 4 and her sister Yvonne was 2 years old in February 1942, when FDR signed the infamous executive order. It was two months after Imperial Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.
Shortly after FDR's order, the FBI arrested Nannette's father, a second-generation Japanese-American; however, he was soon released when his identity was confirmed. The girls and their parents had one week to gather what possessions they could carry. They had to sell or give away the rest.
The U.S. military corralled them into an “assembly center, the Merced racetrack, where groups of Japanese-Americans were herded first into dirty horse stalls, then onto dilapidated trains and off to internment camps.
The U.S. government incarcerated Nannette's family in an internment camp called Amache, about 140 miles east of Pueblo near the town of Granada. They lived in a tar-paper barrack with no flooring. She remembers eating a lot of rice, Spam and C-rations.
The Naval Language Training Center at CU, meanwhile, needed teachers who were fluent in Japanese and English to train Navy personnel including intelligence officers. They began searching for qualified teachers confined in internment camps. Nannette's father was recruited by the training center and volunteered to teach at the Naval Training Center. This allowed Nannette's family to leave Amache.
Eight months after losing their liberty and most of their property, the girl's family found themselves in Boulder, and Nannette was enrolled as a kindergartner at University Hill Elementary School. Racial tension was high. "I remember kids calling me a dirty Jap," Nannette recalls.
Nannette Fujimoto gestures while recalling an episode from her childhood.
The taunts affected her. In kindergarten one day, Nannette refused to salute the flag, which then was compulsory. The principal summoned her mother and the girl to his office. Nannette had a rationale: "If they're going to call me a 'dirty Jap,' I'm not going to salute the flag."
Up until this time, Japanese was the only language spoken in the Fujimoto household. After Nannette's incident at school, her mother decreed that English—and only English—would be spoken in the Fujimoto home. "My mother made it a point to prove to Americans that she was a good citizen of the United States," Nannette said. "She did everything she could. She even had us attend the Methodist Church every Sunday."
So did other members of her extended family. Her two uncles volunteered to serve in the 442nd Infantry Regiment, which was composed of Japanese-Americans and was the most highly decorated unit in U.S. history.
Despite the fact that her uncles fought for the United States and that her father helped the U.S. Navy by training U.S. naval personnel, Nannette Fujimoto's family spent the war years confined to the city of Boulder. Her younger brother Michael was born in Boulder in 1944.
After the war, Nannette's father established a radio shop on University Hill. Nannette attended local schools, including Boulder High School, before the family returned to San Francisco in 1953.
When the time came to go to college, Nannette Fujimoto chose CU. Despite the prejudice she faced in Boulder, she liked the city and still had relatives here. “By the time I was a college student, I didn't feel overt discrimination,” she said.
Some 40 years after the war had ended, Nannette's father was recognized by the U.S. Navy for his service to the country at the Naval Language Training Center. Nannette's mother received the posthumous award for her husband, who had passed away 25 years earlier.
At CU, Nannette Fujimoto met Masahito Okada. She lived in Libby Hall, he in Baker Hall. They fell in love. He earned his bachelor’s degree in 1958. She followed in 1959, graduating from the College of Arts and Sciences with a degree in medical technology. Soon after, they married, and their union is 51 years old and counting.
Masahito Okada came to the university via a different path. His grandfather and father were early pioneers who settled in the city of Salinas, California. Before the war, Okada’s father was a successful farmer. His father was arrested by the FBI but was released on the recommendation of Mrs. Kletts, a wealthy landowner and prominent citizen in Salinas.
Masahito's father leased the farm he operated from Mrs. Kletts. His father decided to voluntarily evacuate his family from California to Colorado. He had less than a week to liquidate or abandon his farming equipment and his crops as well as his household goods and leave the state of California. Masahito recalls a truckload of belongings that sold for $5. “I was upset because my brother’s bicycle was on top of it, and I thought that was not fair,” Okada said.
Masahito's father had invested heavily in Japanese banks and stocks with the expectation that he would return to Japan with his family. Because of the war, his stocks became worthless and the money that he had invested in Japanese banks in the United States was taken over by the United States government. After the war, he was reimbursed for less than a penny for each dollar that he had invested in the banks.
The formerly prosperous Okadas moved to Colorado and settled near Fort Morgan. In California, the family had employed Filipino workers and their children had the time and freedom to play; in Colorado, Masahito and his two brothers, 11and 7, all worked alongside their mother and father as farm laborers.
Although, they had lived in a modern spacious house in California, they often found themselves in small “labor houses” without running water and only a coal stove for heating and cooking.
Within a couple of years after arriving in Colorado, Masahito's father began share-cropping. The first ventures were on small farms, and the income was limited. In 1948, when his eldest son entered CU, he was forced to cash in his life-insurance policies to pay for the son’s education.
Shortly after, his father moved to a much larger farm and was able to provide for the education of all of his children. His father received many awards from the local sugar-beet company and he was once recognized by two national farm magazines for the extremely high yield of sugar from each acre of sugar beets under cultivation.
All four children graduated from CU. The eldest, Tsuyoshi, graduated magna cum laude and went on to become a physician. Masahito's younger brother, Isamu, became a pharmacist, and his younger sister, Mary Jane, became a teacher.
Like Fujimoto, Okada did not sense overt racial prejudice at CU in the 1950s. After graduating, he attended a Baptist seminary. He returned to CU and completed both a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in the school of education in 1969.
Okada was a teacher and the first Head Start Director for the Boulder Valley School District. After completing a fellowship in educational psychology at CU, he worked for 16 years as a senior project manager for the Southwest Regional Laboratory for Educational Research and Development in Southern California. He later served for two decades as director of education for a Japanese Presbyterian church.
Masahito emphasizes the debt he owes his father, who toiled tirelessly in the field by day despite a severe case of asthma and hay fever that made him cough throughout the night in the fall months. “I never heard my father complain about his misfortunes or struggles in life. Not once.”
Nannette and Masahito Okada say that their parents’ generation suffered much more than they did, but that the elders did so quietly.
Under the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, signed by President Reagan, each person incarcerated in a Japanese-American internment camp became entitled to reparations of $20,000 each. President Clinton formally apologized for the internment in 1993.
Nannette and Masahito Okada, who returned to CU in May for the 50th reunion of the class of 1959, do not recall their early lives with bitterness. Nannette does admit having “a lot of mixed emotions when you talk about these things.”
They do speak of the fond memories they have of Boulder, the pride they feel in their five children, the value they place on higher education and their lives as American citizens.
Their parents would, no doubt, be quietly proud.
Although they cannot speak for the many thousands of others who were forcibly uprooted from their homes and placed in relocation centers or who voluntarily evacuated as a result of Presidential Order 9066, as devout Christians, they feel that in spite of the hardships they endured that God was watching over them. To this end, they quote Romans 8:28: "All things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose."