A Special Diploma in the Class of 1990

Nineteen-year-old Mitsuko Yasukochi Funakoshi was just two months shy of graduation in the spring of 1942, full of hope and ambition, when her world was torn in two.

With anti-Japanese hysteria fanned by the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government ordered all people of Japanese ancestry to leave the West Coast. Funakoshi, a community college student, was forced to abandon her textbooks and flee California with her family, prosperous Norwalk grocers who could take only what they could carry.

Now, 48 years later, the 66-year-old secretary who commutes daily from Oceanside to Los Angeles City Hall, is about to see her dream of a college diploma come true. Next week, Fullerton College will award Funakoshi an associate of arts degree for the 3 1/2 semesters of work that ended abruptly that April so many years ago, when she and 110,000 others of Japanese descent were forced to evacuate.

“Nothing makes my life more complete,” said Funakoshi, an executive secretary in Los Angeles City Controller Rick Tuttle’s office. “I feel a little like Rip Van Winkle . . . coming back to Fullerton (College) after all these years.”

Funakoshi, once a business and arts major, will join 1,100 other graduates in full regalia at Fullerton College’s commencement June 1 and will deliver a speech to the class of 1990.

She plans to tell them what happened to her family and the lives of 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry who were uprooted when President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered them out of California, Oregon and Washington in 1942.

She and her parents were lucky because they had friends in Colorado who welcomed them. Others were forced into “relocation camps” where most of them remained until 1945.

In Colorado, the girl worked alongside her mother, father and brothers picking sugar beets and onions.

“It was a really strange feeling,” she said. “But here we were, American citizens (who) didn’t know any other country and we were being treated like enemies.”

Even as she labored, Funakoshi said, she thought about finishing school. She wrote to her college adviser, who sent an open-book test for credit toward an associate of arts degree.

But the books she needed had been left behind in California.

“I figured, this is it, this is the end of all my ambition. What’s the use?”

Years passed. She married, moved back to California, had a son and a daughter and a comfortable life with her husband, a furniture maker and garage door installer. But the elusive diploma was never far from her mind.

Not long ago, she mentioned the diploma while talking with the city controller. Tuttle’s advice: Why not write to the college president?

Two weeks later, she received a response from President Philip W. Borst of Fullerton College.

After reviewing her grades of mostly As and Bs, Borst concluded that had Funakoshi not been forced to leave in 1942, she would have graduated with her class that June. He invited her to attend this year’s commencement exercises--a little late, but most welcome.

Is she bitter about what she missed?

“If this hadn’t happened, you know, I probably would have gotten my degree and done something else with my life,” Funakoshi said. “But these things have happened and I’ve gotten stronger. You’ve got to keep going. You can’t be bitter about things.”