They Graduated With Honors--50 Years After Classmates : Community: Japanese-Americans interned during World War II receive diplomas at Roosevelt High’s Class of 1943 reunion.

At age 68, Henry Yoshitake of Montebello finally graduated from high school last weekend.

In an upbeat ceremony at a Class of 1943 reunion, Yoshitake and 46 other Japanese-American sexagenarians received the diplomas they were denied 50 years ago when they were pulled out of Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights during World War II and sent to internment camps because of their ancestry. Other Nisei--second-generation Japanese-American--alumni who could not attend the Oct. 10 reunion in Universal City will receive their diplomas by mail.

“Now we can feel we are really part of the Class of 1943,” said the smiling, white-haired Yoshitake, a semi-retired electrician. “At prior reunions, I didn’t feel quite a part of this class.”

Although most of the students finished high school in the desert relocation camps, “it didn’t mean that much,” said Grace Takahashi Mori, 69. “I felt like I should have graduated from Roosevelt. Most of us were so integrated at Roosevelt . . . all nationalities got along so well there. Most of us hated to leave.”

It was this spirit of kinship that fueled reunion committee co-chairman Richard Tafoya’s idea for the diplomas.

In the early 1940s, the school was a fine example of the racial harmony so desperately sought today in Los Angeles, according to Tafoya and other alumni. Although predominantly Jewish then, Roosevelt had the highest proportion of Japanese-American students in Los Angeles, with 400 enrolled. Japanese-American, Jewish and Latino students coexisted with mutual respect and without conflict, according to alumni accounts.

The athletic team and school club rosters “looked like a roll call for the United Nations,” said Tafoya, who was senior class president and is now a semi-retired real estate agent in Montebello.

So it was devastating when in the spring of 1942, all of the Japanese-American students were abruptly pulled out of school and the community. Tafoya and other alumni recalled the pain and confusion of seeing Japanese-American families selling their furniture on front lawns, closing up their businesses and leaving with little more than a few suitcases.

“We socialized with them, played sports with them. . . . They lived in our neighborhood,” said Dr. Jack Silverstein, a Ladera Heights resident who served as reunion co-chairman. “We were very awe-struck that our friends were taken away, when we knew them personally and knew they weren’t involved in any situation with the war.”

Ruben Zacarias, deputy superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District and a Boyle Heights native, recalled one particularly striking memory. “I was still a little boy,” Zacarias told the Japanese-Americans at the reunion, “but I can remember the dignity your parents carried themselves with.”

In turn, the Nisei students recalled the support they received from non-Japanese friends and teachers who accompanied the families to departing buses, visited them at assembly centers before they were taken to the camps and offered words of encouragement.

“We had sold our belongings, so they brought us food--tortillas, meals,” recalled Mori, now a Whittier resident.

Yoshitake said he had a “good talk” with some of his teachers before he left. “Most of them said: ‘Study hard, because someday you’re going to be back.’ ”

Yoshitake took the advice to heart. He completed high school courses while he was interned at the Rohwer camp in Arkansas during the summer of 1944 and left camp briefly to enroll in a Cleveland engineering school. But when he learned fellow Japanese-Americans were volunteering for the Army, he enlisted and served as a machine-gunner in the highly decorated 442nd Regiment, composed primarily of Japanese-Americans.

Yoshitake and other Nisei Roosevelt alumni said they served to show their loyalty to the United States and in hopes of bettering the Japanese-American community’s future.

Joseph Osamaru Hattori, another 442nd veteran, likened the sentiment to the feelings one holds for family. “Even though my country incarcerated me, it was still my country. You don’t turn your back on them,” said Hattori, a retired produce distribution manager who lives in Walnut. “I was very disappointed (when relocated), but I wasn’t bitter.”

Few Japanese-Americans returned to Boyle Heights after the war. Some, like Hattori, returned for a brief period but moved elsewhere. “My life had changed,” said Hattori, who attended USC and New York University after leaving Heart Mountain camp in Wyoming.

But he still occasionally drives through the old neighborhood, reminiscing about favorite Roosevelt student hangouts such as the now-defunct Mac’s Place at Fourth and Soto streets.

“They had the best tamales, spaghetti, mashed potatoes. . . .,” Hattori said with nostalgic enthusiasm. “The thing I missed most while overseas were tamales, like you wouldn’t believe!”

With similar memories motivating him, Tafoya asked Zacarias, an old friend, to supply the diplomas, which are replicas of those handed out in 1943. The only difference is that the Nisei diplomas bear the signatures of current school district administrators.

Meanwhile, Mori and Hattori tackled the awesome task of finding and contacting 131 Nisei students who would have graduated in 1943. Using personal contacts and perseverance--including calling names cold from telephone books--Mori and Hattori located 105 of the students and learned that 16 had died. Only 10 could not be found.

In his modest manner, Hattori said he was touched and appreciative of Tafoya’s gesture, but initially worried that too much attention would be placed on the diploma ceremony. “This is a reunion for everybody, not only the Japanese people, so why bore non-Japanese with Japanese problems?” Hattori said.

But a standing ovation that roared through the ballroom after the last “new graduate” received her diploma and walked across the stage proved Hattori had nothing to fear. “Even 50 years later, it’s never too late to say we care about each other,” said Zacarias, who presented the diplomas to the students.

Warren Furutani, a fourth-generation Japanese-American who is the only Asian-American member of the Los Angeles Board of Education, expressed appreciation to the reunion crowd of 430 for “a beautiful, eloquent, most gracious act.”

“You have righted a wrong, you have corrected a mistake,” Furutani said. “And I believe you have also helped heal a wound.”