Delayed Recognition
A Western student’s education was interrupted when he was sent to an internment camp in 1942. He later became an American hero
By Emily Mueller
Nobuyo Okubo grips the arm of a uniformed service member as he guides her across the stage inside a tent on the South Lawn of the White House. She releases his arm and turns to face President Bill Clinton, who stands in the middle of the dais. They listen to the citation being read, her hand in a loose fist at her side against her white dress suit. President Clinton holds a box made of dark wood in both hands. Through its glass front shines the deep gold star of the Medal of Honor inside.
It’s June 21, 2000, and Nobuyo Okubo is at the Asian-American Congressional Medal of Honor Ceremony, accepting the medal in place of her husband James K. Okubo.
James “Jim” Okubo was born May 30, 1920 in Anacortes, Washington. Okubo grew up in Bellingham and attended Bellingham High School, where he played football. His parents Kenzo and Fuyu Okubo first appear in the Bellingham city directory in 1928. They worked at the Holly Tea Parlor, then the Sunrise Cafe in 1931. Okubo graduated in 1938 and enrolled in Western Washington College of Education, where he was a member of the ski club and a pre-dental major.
All this changed on Dec. 7, 1941 when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
Two months later, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the “evacuation” and relocation of people who were decided to be a threat to national security. Okubo was Nisei, or second-generation Japanese American. Japanese and Japanese Americans on the West Coast were ordered to assembly centers, then imprisoned in internment camps.
“It wasn’t just because the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor,” professor of sociology Glenn Tsunokai said. “There was already animosity against the Japanese, both in the mainland and Hawaii. So this was a catalyst to go ahead and engage in this blatant discrimination and frame it as a wartime necessity, that you had these Japanese individuals who couldn’t be trusted living in these strategic areas.”
Other laws included alien land laws prohibiting Japanese people ineligible for citizenship from owning land, and the Immigration Act of 1924, which put a quota on the number of immigrants from each country allowed into the U.S.
Asian countries were excluded entirely, said David Neiwert, a journalist and author of “Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community.”
Okubo’s zoology classmates threw him an “evacuation party” before he left for the camp, detailed in the Western Washington Collegian. Okubo gave his classmates gifts left over from his family’s packing, including a Japanese newspaper, blackout paint and a piece of rubber to make a bracelet. The newspaper reported he thought the rubber would “someday be of great value.”
Thirty-three Japanese and Japanese American residents gathered outside the Okubo home on H Street to be evacuated from Bellingham. After the war none of them returned said Carole Teshima, a Western employee and Sansei (third-generation Japanese American), who researches the incarceration of Japanese Americans in Bellingham.
The Okubo family was first sent to the Tule Lake internment camp in California, the largest of the inland centers, then Heart Mountain.
The Collegian published an update from Jim Okubo at Tule Lake, describing the living conditions and his work assisting in the hospital ward there. He hoped to continue his education at a university in the “Middle West,” saying the doctors and nurses were “very helpful to medical students.”
Okubo tried to be cheery with his update, saying the camp is “nice,” but “he longs for some good Washington rain, and every time he sees a scorpion it makes him hungry for shrimp.”
In 1943 the military organized the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a segregated unit of Japanese Americans to be sent to fight in Europe. Okubo volunteered for service and joined the 442nd as a medic.
“His father was not entirely pleased about it, but his mother was very much for it,” Nobuyo Okubo said in an interview for “America at its Best,” a celebration for Washington Medal of Honor recipients. “She was very supportive, but many of her friends were quite hostile to her and made life very difficult for her when they found out.”
This wasn’t an isolated occurrence. According to Neiwart, the whole camp was divided over the conscription process. In the camps, Japanese Americans had to fill out a loyalty questionnaire. If young men pledged loyalty to the U.S. they were eligible to be drafted.
“The guys who joined the Army from within the camp were actually frequently considered sort of traitors,” Neiwert said.
Some young men were “making major sacrifices in their own futures and their careers,” Neiwert said, by renouncing their citizenship and refusing to go through the draft process as protest. They did not agree with their counterparts who made themselves eligible.
Those who did join wanted to serve a country they were born in and believed was theirs, even if they didn’t have full protection under the Constitution. Their country had been attacked and they wanted to help, Tsunokai said.
“I think for many of them, they just wanted to prove they were an American,” Tsunokai said. “That’s an idea. You believe you are and you believe in the goals and values of society.”
In October 1944 a battalion from Texas, which would come to be known as the “Lost Battalion,” was surrounded and trapped by German forces in France. The 442nd was sent in to rescue the men, eventually succeeding in pushing through the German line to reach the battalion.
On Oct. 28, Okubo crawled 150 yards through enemy fire and grenades to carry back wounded men who were within 40 yards of the enemy line. He treated 17 wounded men under fire that day. The next day, he treated eight more. On November 4 he ran 75 yards through machine gun fire to pull a soldier from a burning tank, getting him out and treating him while being fired at.
The 442nd would come to be the most decorated unit in U.S. military history, and Okubo’s bravery as a medic did not go unnoticed. However, he was only awarded a Silver Star, supposedly because it was thought that medics could not be recommended for a higher honor.
“He rarely spoke of anything about what he did. Which seems to be the tradition of the 442nd men,” Nobuyo Okubo said in the video interview.
Okubo’s family left the internment camps and moved to the Detroit area. After the war he joined them and attended Wayne State University, where he met Nobuyo. They married and had three children. He went to dental school at the University of Detroit and began teaching at the University of Detroit Dental School while maintaining a part-time practice.
Discrimination didn’t vanish after the war. Jim’s daughter Anne Okubo recalls hearing of a quota of one Japanese American per year at the dental school her father attended.
“The prejudice and discrimination associated with internment, I think people would understand and get,” Anne Okubo said. “But I don’t think people understood how segregated society was and how that impacted specifically Japanese Americans.”
The Japanese word “gaman” means internal strength — to focus on the future and not dwell on the past. Many Japanese and Japanese Americans adopted the gaman mindset after the war, Tsunokai said. Some say the younger generation were pushed to assimilate more quickly even though they were U.S. citizens.
“You had people muting the expressions of their culture because the fear was you would make yourself stand out, and not in a positive way,” Tsunokai said.
In 1988 President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, which granted a redress of $20,000 and a formal apology to the surviving people of Japanese descent who had been incarcerated during the war.
Many of the older ones died and some argued people were dragging their feet in granting the reparations because of this, Tsunokai said.
Anne Okubo believes it was a small amount of money that didn’t represent the economic loss, or loss of possessions and jobs when families had to pack up and move away so quickly.
“It was a symbolic gesture,” she said.
Jim Okubo didn’t live to see much of this happen. He died in a car accident on the way to a family ski trip in 1967.
In the late 1990s, Senator Daniel Akaka of Hawaii sponsored a review of Asian-American honors during World War II. Okubo’s name was added last minute to the list of 22 Asian-American recipients of the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military decoration.
“Rarely has a nation been so well-served by a people it had so ill-treated,” President Clinton said in his speech on stage that day in June.
Clinton and Nobuyo Okubo stand motionless as the citation is read, the only movement from the flags behind them swaying in the breeze. President Clinton passes Okubo the box and shakes her hand. They smile and exchange words.
And Jim Okubo at long last receives the recognition he deserves, 55 years too late.
