UW to honor Mukilteo native interned during WWII

Published 8:33 pm Saturday, May 17, 2008

SEATTLE — When the bombs dropped, Mas Odoi was in his room at the University of Washington, working on a project for his engineering class.

His roommate ran in and announced that Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor. Odoi laughed, thinking his roommate had mistaken an Orson Welles radio program for an actual newscast.

He continued working. He finished his project.

Then reality hit. He joined the crowd gathered around the radio in the Japanese-American boarding house where he lived.

In a few months, the house would be empty.

Like all Japanese-Americans living near the West Coast, Odoi and his classmates were forced from their homes and into relocation camps.

Odoi eventually joined the Army, settled in Chicago, married and found work as a TV repairman.

He never graduated from college.

Today he will.

Sixty-six years after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the University of Washington is awarding honorary degrees to Japanese-American students who were forced to abandon their studies during the war.

“These people were forced to leave and were incarcerated when there was no cause,” university spokesman Bob Roseth said. “It was simply a matter of justice to award them the degrees.”

Fifty of the 440 UW students who were interned plan to attend the ceremony today. Many have died.

Odoi, now 86 and living in Everett, is the only survivor from Snohomish County who plans to attend.

The Mukilteo native was the first person in his family to attend college. A high school valedictorian along with his twin brother, Hiroshi Odoi, he was on track to be the family’s first graduate when the war interrupted his plans.

While his twin eventually earned a doctorate degree in psychology and taught university classes before his death in the early ’90s, Mas Odoi never finished. After the war he took college courses in philosophy, literature and sociology, but didn’t take enough classes in one area to earn a degree.

He’s grateful for the opportunity to finally get a diploma and says he has no bitterness for the way the relocation was handled.

“I was shocked and disappointed, but I understand that anyone can make mistakes — and they were understandable mistakes, you see,” he said, thinking back.

Others believe the university’s recognition is too little, too late.

Edmonds resident Sondra Oling wishes the university had awarded the degrees decades ago — when they may have actually proved useful to Japanese-Americans looking for jobs.

She plans to attend Sunday to pick up a diploma for her dad, Robert Yamasaki, who lives in California and is too sick to travel.

In 1942, he was just a few credits away from his diploma when he was sent to the Minidoka Relocation Center in Idaho, the same camp as Odoi and his family. At Minidoka, Yamasaki lived in a one-room shack with his parents and two of his brothers. Yet he considers himself lucky because University of Washington professors arranged for him to finish his coursework at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Oling said. Yamasaki graduated in 1943 and worked as an aerospace engineer.

Attending today’s ceremony is part of a healing process for Oling. Her late mother spent years interned and was so scarred by the experience, she refused to discuss it, Oling said.

“I didn’t get to know my mom as well because she kept a lot of things hidden,” she said. “She had this really closed chapter. She said that she didn’t want to pass on the bitterness, so that’s why she never told us very much about the camp. I guess that’s a good legacy — except she didn’t tell me anything.”

Gerald Yorioka is attending the ceremony today for his father, Joshi Yorioka. The elder Yorioka was a freshman engineering student at the University of Washington when he was relocated, first to Puyallup and then to Minidoka. He was drafted into the military and worked as an interpreter and then in intelligence. He eventually was sent to Tokyo, where he earned two bachelor’s degrees.

Joshi Yorioka died in 1986.

His 90-year-old widow, Toshie, thinks the UW ceremony is too late, according to her son. Gerald Yorioka, however, considers his alma mater’s decision to issue diplomas a “fine gesture.”

“It is an apology, which is always better late, than never,” said Yorioka, a physician from Mill Creek. In its 147-year history, the university has only awarded 11 honorary degrees.

Today, around 50 former UW students will don mortarboards and receive the degrees that war and discrimination kept them from completing six decades ago. Around 100 family members will receive diplomas for their loved ones.

Odoi doesn’t know if he’ll hang his diploma in his mobile home or file it away somewhere.

To him, it’s just a document.

In his 86 years, through relocation and hard work, Odoi has learned that the world is full of accomplishments that can’t be measured with a piece of paper.

A diploma will be nice to have, he said, but it won’t change him.

Reporter Kaitlin Manry: 425-339-3292 or kmanry@heraldnet.com.