Internee Hopes Gift Brings Goodwill for ‘All Peoples’

He is not wealthy. Still, Akira Suzuki figures he is a rich man.

That accounts for what the former World War II Japanese-American detention camp resident did the other day when his government reparation check showed up in the mail.

Suzuki turned the $20,000 check over to a community center near downtown Los Angeles that serves a mixed neighborhood of African-Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans.

Delighted operators of the All Peoples Christian Center plan to use the cash to create a nonprofit fund that they hope will finance activities into the next century.

Suzuki hopes so, too.

“There’s a need for people of different ethnic groups to communicate,” said the retired city worker. “If we’d had places like this before World War II, what I went through would never have happened.”

Suzuki, 73, was one of 112,000 Japanese-Americans who were rounded up as security risks and herded into barbed-wire enclosed detention camps after Japan’s Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor.

The United States has since admitted what it did was wrong. As part of the apology, Congress four years ago authorized payments of $20,000 apiece to the 60,000 Japanese-American internees still living.

Suzuki was born in San Gabriel. He grew up on 22nd Street, at the edge of South-Central Los Angeles. He was an engineering student at UC Berkeley at the outbreak of the war.

In mid-1942 he was sent with about 10,000 other Japanese-Americans to a remote detention camp at Heart Mountain, Wyo.

When the Japanese-Americans were released in 1945, Suzuki discovered that his favorite neighborhood hangout, a 20th Street meeting hall called the Japanese Christian Institute, had disappeared. In its place was the All People’s Christian Church. It was being run by the Christian Church, Disciples of Christ--which for 30 years had sponsored the Japanese institute.

“As a kid this had been my neighborhood,” he said. “I’d been going to the Japanese Christian Institute since the late ‘20s. But when I returned, the new place was practically empty.

“After the war, very few Japanese moved back here. The neighborhood had become predominantly black.”

But something about the new place was intriguing.

“The name ‘All Peoples’ got to me,” he said. “It occurred to me that if we’d had All Peoples before World War II, a lot of what had happened could have been avoided.”

So Suzuki joined the new church and stayed.

He did not have money to return to UC Berkeley. So he landed a job with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power as an engineering aide. “I remember my first day. It was Dec. 7, 1945. They were still selling War Bonds then. On my first day on the job, I had to go to a bond drive rally.”

When Suzuki retired as a DWP mechanical engineering associate in 1981, he stepped up his volunteer work at All Peoples. By that time it had been expanded into a center that offered children’s day care, after-school youth activities, family social services and hot meals and special activities for senior citizens. Its $500,000-a-year program is financed by donations from the Christian Church, along with various grants and money from United Way.

These days, Suzuki lives with his wife, Martha, in Inglewood. But he travels weekly to the center to teach English to elderly Spanish-speaking residents of his old neighborhood.

But Suzuki’s unusual cash donation caught the center’s staff by surprise.

“He took what was a tragedy and used it to provide better lives for people in the future,” said Saundra Bryant, All Peoples executive director.

Officials plan to honor Suzuki at a May 9 dinner marking the center’s 50th anniversary.

Suzuki said that that is unnecessary, adding that the community center has given enough to him already.