Sue Okabe, 74; Vocalist, Influential Music Teacher

Sue Okabe, an influential music teacher and vocalist whose earliest performances are part of the history of Japanese Americans’ involvement in popular American music during World War II, died of lung cancer Nov. 28 at her Gardena home. She was 74.

Okabe was a classically trained vocalist who was interned at the Minidoka Relocation Center in central Idaho during the war. Later, as a piano and voice teacher in Gardena for more than four decades, she trained many vocalists and musicians, and supported musical and other arts events in the Asian American community.

In September, about three months after she was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, more than 800 people attended a sold-out tribute to her at the Japan America Theatre in downtown Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo. The musical program was produced by an all-volunteer cast and crew of nearly 100, many of whom were former students.

Okabe was one of a small number of Japanese Americans who made a living performing popular music after the war, when discrimination severely limited their opportunities in most fields. She supported her two children by singing jazz tunes in Los Angeles-area bars and nightclubs for several years in the late 1950s.

“She was one of very few people who used the idiom of jazz and pop singing as an occupational base -- to pay her bills,” said musician and historian George Yoshida, who interviewed Okabe for his book “Reminiscing in Swingtime: Japanese Americans in American Popular Music, 1925-1960,” published in 1997 by the Japanese American Historical Society.

Okabe was born in Seattle and began classical voice training when she was 8. In 1942, a few months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the federal government ordered more than 100,000 Americans of Japanese descent on the West Coast into 10 internment camps. Okabe, then 13, and her family were sent to Minidoka, erected in a desolate desert region northeast of Twin Falls, Idaho.

Her singing talent soon caught the attention of camp administrators. Unlike most internees, Okabe was allowed to regularly venture beyond Minidoka’s barbed-wire confines to perform at local Rotary and Lions clubs, accompanied on piano by her sister, Michi.

Okabe remained at the camp for about a year until a sponsor in Colorado made it possible for her family to leave. While in high school in Denver, she was again singled out for her vocal talent and chosen to join a local USO group. Soon she was performing at war-bond rallies and USO centers in Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska, belting out such hit tunes of the era as “Begin the Beguine” and “Say a Prayer for the Boys Over There.”

She was 15 and too young, her daughter Lisa Joe said, to appreciate the irony of an “enemy alien” entertaining American GIs.

“My teacher thought it was a good idea, especially in my position of being Japanese,” Okabe recently told an interviewer for the Los Angeles Rafu Shimpo newspaper. “I thought nothing of it until that one war-bond rally when people in Wyoming started to yell, ‘Get the Chink off the stage’ or ‘Send the Jap back.’ ”

As the only nonwhite and minor in her USO troupe, Okabe was so unhappy that she ran away from home and took a train back to Minidoka, where she had many friends. (“I’m probably the only person who ran away from home and into camp,” she joked.) But her stay was cut short when her mother arrived to take her home.

After the war, Okabe moved with her family to Los Angeles, where she continued to perform at community events -- mainly funerals for members of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the highly decorated, all-Nisei combat force.

She earned a degree in English from USC and taught school for a few years. After her divorce from her first husband in 1958, she found steady work singing jazz in local nightclubs and restaurants. The high point of her career was landing the lead in a 1963 Long Beach Civic Light Opera production of “Flower Drum Song,” the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical that broke ground with its mainstream portrayals of Asian Americans.

Okabe began teaching music full time at her home in the 1950s, later shifting lessons to a music store she ran in Gardena with her daughter. Her knowledge of the popular music performed and enjoyed by Japanese Americans during the internment years led to her serving as a consultant on several shows about their wartime experiences.

“She was an inspiration to me,” said Scott Nagatani, a musical director for the East-West Players who helped organize the September tribute to Okabe.

“My fondest memory is playing jazz with her at a bar in Chinatown,” he said. “She was singing jazz with us, staying out until 2 in the morning. You don’t see too many Nisei women like that.

“She was very supportive of musicians and singers,” he added. “That’s one reason why 800 people showed up for her tribute.”

Okabe was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer in the spring. Although she was a heavy smoker most of her life, she had a form of the cancer not found in smokers, her daughter said.

In addition to her daughter, of Gardena, and her sister Elsie Michi Dohzen of Torrance, Okabe is survived by her husband of 36 years, Kenichi, of Gardena; a son, Randal of Carlsbad; another sister, Martha Kay Suyetsugu of Los Angeles; and three grandchildren.