5 Decades Later, a Degree of Justice

When the war came home to San Pedro, Frank Endo was a high school senior preparing to graduate with the class of ’42.

He was well-known as a top school gymnast and one of the students who led the cheering at the San Pedro High School football games. Every night, he caught the ferry home to Terminal Island, where he and his family lived in a fishing village that he calls “Fish Harbor.”

All that changed overnight in early 1942, when the U.S. government rounded up thousands of Japanese Americans on the West Coast and sent them to internment camps.

Endo left so abruptly that he could not say goodby to his teachers. When his class was awarded diplomas just a few months later, he and his Japanese American classmates were missing.

But this week, 52 years after that graduation, Endo is at last receiving his San Pedro diploma. In all, about 30 Japanese American students from the San Pedro classes of 1942 and 1943 were scheduled to be honored Wednesday afternoon at a special ceremony in the school cafeteria.

“We were mostly a forgotten group until now,” said Endo, of Gardena. “Most of us are all 70 years old. I’m 71.” But despite their ages and the decades separating them from high school, this ceremony is still a milestone. Endo received a high school diploma at the Colorado internment camp where he spent most of the war, but he said it never carried the significance of a San Pedro degree.

“Some of us still want the official diploma,” he said.

Now they are getting them, complete with the signatures of school dignitaries, said San Pedro High Principal Joseph Viola, who was to officiate at this week’s graduation, organized by members of the two classes, some Japanese American, some not.

“They’re asking for something they’ve wanted for over 50 years,” Viola said.

The ceremony was to be simple, without caps and gowns (“Those are for the kids,” Endo said), but with a few speeches and refreshments afterward.

Many in the classes of 1942 and ’43 had been together since elementary school, and about 10% were Japanese American.

Some say that the mood at the school changed immediately after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

“Some of the students we knew since seventh grade, they wouldn’t talk to us,” recalled Miyo Higashi Shundo, 69, of San Pedro, who would have graduated in 1943. She said the principal at the time held a special assembly for Japanese American students, advising them not to speak Japanese or to “huddle” together, but to mix with other students.

Shundo and her family were sent to a relocation camp in Poston, Ariz., where she remembers crying bitterly from homesickness. “I said, ‘I want to go home--but where is home?’ It was just a desert. No sidewalk. No street. Just dry.”

After the war, she returned to San Pedro, where her son, Don, graduated from San Pedro High in 1976.

Endo served as a U.S. military interpreter before returning to Southern California, where he runs a gymnastics supply company with his sons. He credits San Pedro High with introducing him to gymnastics and his future occupation.

Although he has attended reunions of his high school class, something didn’t feel right. “We felt . . . not a part of the class, because we did not receive our diplomas. We felt a little bit outsiders.”

Now that could change.

Among the expected guests at this week’s ceremony are some who did graduate in the cap-and-gown ceremony in the school auditorium 52 years ago, including class President Richard Reese, 69, of Rancho Palos Verdes.

“I think, golly, why didn’t we think about this earlier?” Reese said. “This was long overdue.”