Arthur Kamii, 74; Polio Victim Made News in ’47

Arthur Kamii, a longtime Los Angeles Unified School District educator whose post-World War II arrival in Los Angeles from Japan for treatment as a 17-year-old polio victim made headlines, has died. He was 74.

Kamii, who spent 42 years as a teacher and counselor, died of heart failure Dec. 21 at his home in Encino, said his daughter, Carolyn Kamii.

In what was described in the Los Angeles Examiner in 1947 as “a 6,000-mile mercy trip arranged by Gen. Douglas MacArthur,” Kamii arrived at Union Station on a stretcher in June 1947.

Paralyzed from the waist down, the once-athletic teenager had been stricken in Tokyo five months earlier with poliomyelitis, or infantile paralysis, a rare disease in Japan at the time. Japanese doctors, according to a 1947 Los Angeles Times account of Kamii’s arrival, knew little about the acute infectious viral disease and were helpless as the boy’s condition became critical.

When Kamii’s uncle, Paul Aiso of Los Angeles, learned of his nephew’s illness, he contacted Dr. Albert Bower, an L.A. authority on polio, for advice. Bower prescribed various initial treatments, and Aiso cabled the instructions to his nephew’s doctors in Japan.

Carolyn Kamii said her father’s mother, a Japanese American, was told that the only possible treatment for her son was in America. She urged her Japanese-born husband, who was working as an interpreter in MacArthur’s headquarters in Tokyo, to get permission for their son to go to the United States.

Their request was twice denied before MacArthur personally cleared the boy’s trip with the State Department.

“Without the aid of the general, we never could have got him here,” Kamii’s uncle told the Examiner.

Once he arrived in Los Angeles with his mother and young sister, Kamii began undergoing a series of experimental surgeries at Orthopaedic Hospital. Between 1947 and 1950, his daughter said, he underwent five major surgeries involving transplants of healthy muscle tissue from unaffected areas of his body into his paralyzed legs.

“With this treatment and months of grueling therapy,” Carolyn Kamii said, her father, who wore a short brace on his left leg, was able to walk with a cane, swim and drive a car.

“He led his life very independently,” she said. “He was really a fighter.”

Born in Geneva in 1930, when his father was a member of Japan’s delegation to the International Labor Organization, an affiliate of the League of Nations, Kamii spoke only French and Japanese when he arrived in Los Angeles.

But he quickly learned English and graduated from Hollywood High School in 1952. He then studied pre-med at Caltech from 1952 to 1956 and attended two years of medical school at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore before dropping out and returning to Los Angeles, where he obtained a teaching credential.

Kamii, who became a citizen in 1953, spent most of his career in adult eduction. He was head counselor at Kennedy-San Fernando Community Adult School when he retired in 2002 because of illness.

Carolyn Kamii said her father was always grateful for everyone who helped him come to America and receive treatment.

“He felt very fortunate,” she said.

In addition to his daughter, Kamii is survived by his wife, Kiyoko; his son, Andrew; and two sisters, Constance and Mieko.