Setting the Record Straight--After 60 Years

Weeks before she was to graduate from Oxnard High in 1942, Yoshie Fujita Hagiya learned she was in the running for class valedictorian.

But in late April, the 17-year-old Japanese American girl was forced from her home and sent to an internment camp. As World War II raged abroad, she spent graduation day surrounded by armed soldiers and barbed wire fences.

Last month, Hagiya got the phone call she had been awaiting for 60 years. A school district official who dug through the old records told Hagiya she had the highest grades in her class and should, indeed, have been valedictorian.

On June 14, the 77-year-old Culver City grandmother will don cap and gown and receive the honors due her.

“I think,” she said, “it will go a long way toward healing an old wound.”

Though exact figures are unavailable, Japanese American advocates estimate there were hundreds of students like Hagiya who missed out on graduation when they essentially became prisoners of war.

In the last 15 years, at high schools from inner-city Los Angeles to rural Gilroy, dozens of them have been recognized and, decades later, handed diplomas. But as these survivors reach their 80s, this effort to fix an old injustice has taken on added urgency.

“For many of them, it’s frankly way too late,” said Chris Komai, spokesman for the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. “You are in a race against time if there is a desire to rectify what happened a long time ago.”

At Oxnard High, 11 seniors were sent to relocation camps in 1942. School officials say they have tried to reach all of them for this month’s recognition ceremony, which is a first for the school. At least one has died and another can’t be found. Others, including one from Wisconsin, plan to attend.

Wearing black gowns and mortarboards, they will sit among the 2002 Oxnard High graduates. When their names are called, they will walk across the stage, shake the principal’s hand and soak up the crowd’s applause, just as they would have six decades ago.

“It’s a sense of completion for what many consider to be an important rite of passage into adulthood,” said Oxnard High Assistant Principal Gary Mayeda, whose 79-year-old father, Seiichi, will be among those honored. “This is one small way I can contribute to my father and his generation.”

A Tense Time

Hagiya doesn’t recall hostility from her peers or teachers at Oxnard High School, where she started as a freshman in 1939. But there were segregated movie theaters and swimming pools. And laws prevented Asian immigrants from owning land or marrying outside their race.

“We were the kind of people who knew our place--we didn’t push things,” Hagiya said.

After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, the climate grew especially tense.

There were signs at stores that screamed “No Japanese!” The family’s cameras and radios were confiscated as contraband. Hagiya’s older brother, Nagao Fujita, had to leave UC Berkeley because of orders that all people of Japanese ancestry stay within five miles of their homes.

“We didn’t talk about it, but somehow we knew what was planned,” Hagiya said.

The following April, by order of President Franklin Roosevelt, she and her family were forced to sell or give away most of their belongings. They packed what little they could and said goodbye to their friends, their two-story farmhouse and their springer spaniel, Goro.

Escorted by soldiers, the family boarded buses headed for a racetrack in Tulare, where they lived for months, first in a horse stall and then in a crowded barracks, while they waited to be transported to the Gila River Relocation Center in Arizona. That was one of 10 internment camps that, from 1942 to 1947, housed 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry from Washington, Oregon, California and Arizona.

In Tulare, Hagiya met the boy who would become her husband, Paul Hagiya. In the evenings they would linger by the fence that surrounded the assembly center. They peered out at a drive-in hamburger place across the street.

“We would drool,” she said. “It smelled so good. We would have loved to go there.”

In June, while Hagiya was still in Tulare, her Oxnard High diploma came in the mail. School officials had sent the lone document in a brown envelope, with no explanation or calculation of her final GPA.

After about a year in the Arizona camp, Hagiya got permission to leave early and attend Southwestern College in Kansas, a United Methodist school where Paul Hagiya had gone to study to be a minister.

Her mother gave her $500 in cash and told her to go as far as she could. Hagiya finished college in three years with a sociology degree.

She and Paul married in 1945, the night before he left to fight in the European theater under Gen. George Patton. Like many Japanese American men who wanted to prove their loyalty to the United States despite having been treated as prisoners, he enlisted in the Army immediately after finishing college.

After the war, the couple often moved as her husband served in different communities as a minister. They spent 16 years in Denver, where Hagiya earned her master’s degree in education from the University of Colorado.

Taught for 20 Years

She worked for 20 years as an elementary school teacher in Denver and Los Angeles, where the family settled. She raised three children, one of whom died in a car accident at 23.

Hagiya’s husband died in 1983. Her mother and brother, who returned to Oxnard after the war, and her father also have died.

She now lives alone in a Culver City townhome. She plays bridge, line dances and visits her 13-year-old grandson Tyler, who lives nearby.

Hagiya will not be alone when she accepts her long-awaited valedictorian honors. Her daughter, Jan Haruta, and son, Mark Hagiya, will be with her in the stands, as will her sister-in-law, Lillie.

Top of Her Class

Hagiya rarely talks about life at Tulare and Gila River. She kept most of the details from her own children. Throughout her life she has followed an old Japanese philosophy: shikata ganai. If it can’t be helped, make the best of it and press forward.

But in February, Hagiya heard it was the 60th anniversary of Executive Order 9066, which authorized the Japanese internment. The date jogged a memory of a wish her brother expressed before his 1989 death: that she find out, at last, where she had stood in her Oxnard class.

She called Nao Takasugi, a former Oxnard mayor and state assemblyman, with whom she had grown up in Oxnard and been interned in Arizona, to see if he could help. He asked a friend in the Oxnard Union High School District to check into the matter.

The friend tapped Judy Warner, an assistant superintendent in the school district, to help. She dug out the 1942 yearbook from a vault and found a picture of the top three scholars, Hagiya among them. In archives at the school, she found 1942 transcripts for all three students and computed the GPAs. Hagiya’s was the highest, 3.8.

Warner called Hagiya immediately.

“When she told me, it was shock,” Hagiya said--”shock because I did not expect them to follow through that soon. When I hung up the phone, I sat down and the tears would not stop. It was just overwhelming.”

Until then, Hagiya had never heard a word from any school official. Knowing she is finally to receive her valedictorian honors, said Takasugi, “brings closure to this part of her life.”

In some ways, closure still eludes Marjorie Rodgers Fitzgerald. She and Hagiya were friends in school and carried on a friendly academic rivalry. When Hagiya left for the internment camp, Fitzgerald and another student, who tied for the second-highest grades in the class, shared the valedictorian title.

“I wrote to Yoshie at the time and told her I knew she would’ve been valedictorian,” said Fitzgerald, who now lives in Santa Maria. “I knew in my own mind she had higher grades than I. She was a sharp cookie.”

Some Lingering Regrets

Even now, Fitzgerald struggles with the award she won because the war took her friend away.

The former classmates have stayed in touch and plan to get together soon. A couple of weeks ago, Fitzgerald said, she sent Hagiya a package of things she had saved in an old memory book, including Hagiya’s wedding announcement and letters from the camp.

Fitzgerald said she has often thought of giving Hagiya the gold valedictorian medal she received that day, but it has her own name engraved on the back.

Hagiya, touched by her old friend’s kindness, said she would never accept such a gift.

“I don’t want to take away from any of her glory,” Hagiya said. “Just knowing this is enough.”