Perseverance Rewarded Pioneer Teacher : Education: Prof. Janet Matsuyama, newly retired at 70, overcame anti-Japan tensions after WWII.

Janet Matsuyama has been in school for 65 years.

She vowed she would never leave while in the first grade when, after school, her kid brother and friends acted as pupils while she lectured on the finer points of math and English as their teacher.

Since then, the pretend-classroom has been traded in for a succession of real ones, and along the way, the Fullerton College professor of accounting has become a pioneer in education. Matsuyama was among the first Japanese Americans to enter the teaching profession in 1948 and among the first hired at Fullerton High School in 1955 and then Fullerton College in 1958.

On June 3, Matsuyama decided to pack up her textbooks and retire from teaching at age 70.

Overcoming the hurdles of discrimination--which included a six-month stint in an internment camp--that Matsuyama and others have faced was no small feat, experts in Asian American studies say.

Teaching was among the more difficult professions for Asians, especially Japanese Americans, to break into because it involved face-to-face contact with the public, whose anti-Japanese sentiments continued to run strong after World War II ended, said John Liu, associate professor of comparative culture at UC Irvine.

“Here is a Japanese American woman engaged with the public. This was a very important (accomplishment) for her to go out after World War II into a profession with a high level of public interaction,” Liu said.

To Matsuyama, who said she was fortunate to enter the profession during a time when teachers were in demand, it was a necessary hurdle.

“Teaching has been my lifelong goal since I was a little girl,” said Matsuyama.

But she met many naysayers along the way.

While she was studying at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, Matsuyama’s dean once suggested that she change majors from teaching to one more “acceptable” for Asians, like pharmacy.

But their doubts only strengthened her resolve.

“Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” she added, hands crossed neatly across her lap in her Fullerton home.

Her students at Fullerton College didn’t care that she was the first Japanese American teacher hired at their school, said Jim Anderson, dean of the business school where Matsuyama instructed more than 14,000 pupils over 33 years.

They remember a perfectly poised professor who listened to their problems and went out of her way to write recommendations and keep track of their accomplishments.

Students “flock to her,” Anderson said.

“I feel like I have to be positive and set a positive example for my students,” said Matsuyama, seated on an immaculate sofa surrounded by Japanese embroidery, stitched by her 91-year-old mother, who lives with Matsuyama and her husband, Arthur, and son, Randy.

Matsuyama was born in 1924 in Tacoma, Wash., the only daughter of oyster farmers who immigrated in 1919 from Kochi, Japan.

She had spent one quarter at Washington State University when she and her two brothers were called home and ordered to evacuate immediately. It was 1941, shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor and during the height of anti-Japanese sentiment. Her father had died four years earlier.

The 17-year-old Matsuyama, two brothers and their mother--like thousands of Americans of Japanese descent--came under suspicion as possible spies and saboteurs for Japan. They and the one other Japanese American family in Tacoma were sent by bus to Tule Lake, an internment camp in Northern California.

For six months, she taught a typing class in the camp, where her family lived in a one-room barrack. The rooms were barren and rules strict. No one left the camp without permission.

“It could have been worse,” said Matsuyama, not wanting to dwell on the negative.

In fact, Matsuyama added, her mother preferred life in the camp. There, she had time to take art classes and relax, rather than having to worry about the family business, which was in the hands of family friends.

Matsuyama spent much of her time in the camp applying to colleges. She decided to attend one in the Midwest because of the area’s reputation for hospitality, she said.

Her two brothers were able to leave as well, but her mother stayed at Tule Lake and another camp until the war’s end.

“I can still visualize that moment,” she said with tears, recalling the day she left her mother to attend school. “It was understood that I’d never be able to return.”

After graduating at the age of 22, Matsuyama immediately landed a job in Osseo, a small town outside Minneapolis populated largely by Norwegians, Finns and Swedes, where she was an anomaly with black hair and eyes.

After 10 years, she moved to Fullerton with her husband and taught business courses to Fullerton High School students for three years before teaching at the college, where she had stayed for 33 years.

At Anderson’s urging, she is now instructing one more summer school course, Principles of Financial Accounting 101, and is still active on college accreditation committees and other honorary boards.

Perpetually the educator, Matsuyama lectures that there is something to be learned from every experience. That is what she tells her students and what she tells herself.

Although she has experienced discrimination, she said, she does not regret the course of her life.

“If a person keeps looking at the down side, of course it’s going to be miserable,” she said. “You just have to do the best you can no matter how bad the situation.”