Patrick Okura, 93; Internment Stirred Passion for Activism

K. Patrick Okura, a onetime Los Angeles city official who turned his anger over his imprisonment in a World War II relocation camp for Japanese Americans into a passion for social justice as a civil rights leader and mental health expert, died Jan. 30 of coronary artery disease at his home in Bethesda, Md. He was 93.

A UCLA-trained psychologist, Okura was a major figure in the history of the Japanese American Citizens League, a 75-year-old civil rights organization that he led as national president during the early 1960s. Among his achievements was prodding the leadership of the group to take a visible stand on the struggle for racial equality by joining the 1963 March on Washington led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Two decades later, Okura and his wife, Lily, were among the 60,000 Japanese American survivors of the wartime internment camps who each received a $20,000 reparation payment from the federal government and a letter of apology from President George H.W. Bush under the 1988 Civil Liberties Act signed into law by President Reagan. The Okuras used their combined $40,000 to fund the Okura Mental Health Leadership Foundation.

Okura belonged to the generation of Japanese Americans who by and large tried to bury their painful memories of the war years, when the federal government uprooted 120,000 of them on the West Coast after Japan’s Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor and sent them to internment camps in 11 states.

But Okura was not inclined to submit passively to discrimination. The Los Angeles native bought his immigrant parents a house when he was 18 after learning that laws barring them from becoming citizens also prevented them from owning their own home. At UCLA, he became the first Japanese American to play varsity baseball.

By 1933 he had earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in psychology from UCLA. By 1938 he was chief personnel examiner for the Los Angeles Civil Service Commission and the city’s highest-ranking Japanese American.

Then came the attack on Pearl Harbor, a shocking assault on American forces that unleashed waves of anti-Japanese hysteria. Syndicated newspaper columnist Drew Pearson alleged that Okura was overseeing a force of 50 Japanese spies who planned to sabotage the city’s Department of Water and Power.

Mayor Fletcher Bowron twice demanded Okura’s resignation, but he refused both times. Okura told the Washington Post years later, after viewing his FBI file through the Freedom of Information Act, that Bowron had branded him the most dangerous Japanese American in Los Angeles.

*

‘A Very Sad Time’

Eventually, 39 municipal employees of Japanese descent were ordered off the job for the duration of the war. Most of them left quickly, but Okura was one of a few who tried -- unsuccessfully -- to resist. A Los Angeles Times article on Jan. 22, 1942, described him as a “holdout” who “delayed stepping out of his job until the last moment.”

Soon afterward, Okura and his bride of barely two months found themselves sleeping on straw mattresses in a rank-smelling 8-by-8-foot tack room at the Santa Anita racetrack in Arcadia, where thousands of Japanese Americans suspected of disloyalty because of their heritage would eventually be detained.

By the end of the war, none of the detainees in any of the camps would have been found guilty of espionage.

“It was a very sad time,” Okura told the Post.

The Okuras lived in the stables for nine months, along with their mothers and siblings. Their fathers were being held at other locations. One of Okura’s brothers was released when he volunteered for the all-Japanese 442nd Regimental Combat team; he was killed in action.

Okura and his wife found another way out. They were among several families that Father Edward Flanagan sponsored for jobs at Boys Town, the integrated orphanage the priest founded in Omaha. Flanagan’s hiring of the Japanese Americans was pragmatic as well as altruistic: Many of his staffers had joined the war effort, leaving him with too few workers with the skills to oversee the 400 troubled youths in his care.

Okura did not care to analyze the priest’s motives. “He was making an offer to help us while everyone else was trying to hide us,” he told the Omaha World Herald in 1997. “Father Flanagan was a saint.”

Okura became Boys Town’s staff psychologist. When the war ended, he and his wife stayed on for 17 years.

He eventually worked for the state as a mental health planner and started five mental health centers. He also helped develop Nebraska’s juvenile court system and became a county chief probation officer.

Okura founded a Nebraska state chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League, and by 1962 had become national president.

The next year, when plans for the March on Washington were taking shape, he decided that the Citizens League should participate in the event and invited the national board to meet in the capital. He led a contingent of board members carrying placards that proclaimed their solidarity with African Americans’ fight for justice.

“When the march took place, there were not a lot of Asians in this country who stood up and supported it. It was pretty remarkable for JACL to have done that,” said national President John Tateishi. “That came largely through Pat’s insistence. It was very courageous ... very visionary.”

*

Government Job

In 1970, Dr. Bertram Brown, a psychiatrist who headed the National Institute of Mental Health, offered Okura a job in Washington as his executive assistant. Okura at first was inclined to turn it down. Why, he thought, should he work for the government that had stripped him of his liberty during World War II?

“There was a part of him that was very angry,” Ford Kuramoto, a former institute colleague and friend of 30 years, recalled in an interview with The Times last week. “It wasn’t something he ever forgot: the injustice of it, the fact that it was a federal decision.”

What won him over, Kuramoto said, was the opportunity Brown outlined to help minorities and members of other underprivileged groups.

Over the next 15 years, Okura tackled a wide range of projects, including an assessment of the mental health needs of Vietnamese refugees in resettlement programs after the fall of Saigon to the communists in 1975.

He also was instrumental in the creation of ethnic task forces and scholarships for minorities who wanted to become mental health professionals. He played a major role in an initiative to establish community-based training programs for Asian American social workers. He later helped launch the Asian American Psychological Assn.

In the 1980s, he founded a Los Angeles-based nonprofit group called National Asian Pacific American Families Against Substance Abuse to provide services and advocate for Asian Americans affected by addiction.

According to Kuramoto, who heads the organization, Okura was concerned that if Asian Americans were not organized to take advantage of federal anti-drug programs sparked by First Lady Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign, “we would just be left behind.”

*

Creating a Foundation

The same impulse drove the creation of the Okura Mental Health Leadership Foundation, which gathers a group of Asian American mental health professionals in the nation’s capital for one week every year to meet top policymakers and develop leadership skills. The foundation has provided leadership development to more than 90 young professionals over the last 14 years.

Okura, who is survived by his wife of 63 years, had no children but was, Kuramoto said, “driven by a sense that he had to do anything he could to make the world a better place for the next generation.”

“He loved to invite people to his home to eat and tell them stories of his experiences in the hope they would catch the fire and pick up the torch.”