Local Opinion: Personal justice reconciled

Eighty years ago, my U.S. citizen father of Japanese ancestry was expelled from the University of Southern California without any due process of law.

Pearl Harbor in his home, the Trust Territory of Hawaii, had been bombed, and Executive Order 9066 had been signed by President Franklin Roosevelt on Feb. 19, 1942, which turned California, Oregon, Washington and part of Arizona into military exclusion zones. This meant that all Japanese Americans were to be excluded from these states.

My father, Francis Sueo Sugiyama, was the youngest of eight children, all born in the Trust Territory of Hawaii to impoverished indentured servants of an Hawaiian sugar plantation. In 1942 he was a first-year dental student in Los Angeles, after he had attended the University of Hawaii at Manoa, as a first-generation student, having had to work for years after high school to earn college tuition.

Dad had to flee Los Angeles for Chicago by train, but he was one of the “lucky ones“ who had acquired a voluntary pass from the military authorities, as the rest of the 120,00 innocent Japanese Americans were rounded up and imprisoned in relocation camps for up to 3 years. Two-thirds were U.S. citizens, one-fourth were children. Only 500 voluntary passes had been issued.

Dad lost his credits as a first-year dental student at USC but took classes at Loyola University in Chicago, worked as a postal clerk there for a year and a half. Then he was admitted to dental school at the University of Maryland, and finished his DDS in 1945. He did not encounter any racism in either city.

Dad practiced dentistry for 30 years back in our village on the Big Island of Hawaii; he passed away at age 81 in 1996. He had never heard again from USC.

Finally, on April 1, 2022, USC apologized to the 120 students whom they had expelled, and awarded 37 honorary bachelor’s degrees, dedicating a lovely tribute rock garden on campus. In 2012, USC had already awarded honorary degrees to 11 former Japanese American students who were still alive then.

Was this enough to reconcile this past wrong? It was a moving day for us descendants to see this garden dedication, and to receive these honorary degrees at USC. For these nisei — second-generation Japanese Americans — their personal justice had been denied, but it was now finally remedied. For some who were unable to continue their college studies after 1942, that summary action by USC had been the end of their dreams.

I had met the grandson of one such dental student who couldn’t continue his studies, while I was a legislative aide to U.S. Sen. Dan Inouye. I was instrumental in passage of the federal bill that created the National Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (my formulation) which later investigated this wrong by our U.S. government. My father’s history had helped fuel my passion as a young attorney not to give up fighting for this legislation. Based on the 1982 report “Personal Justice Denied” of this commission, in 1988 President Ronald Reagan apologized and awarded monetary redress.

Many of our friends had said that this action by California colleges to award honorary degrees was not enough to make up for the harm they had done to these nisei students. Our family disliked USC for decades but now has found a sense of closure for what had happened to our father and other innocent nisei like him. Let us remember these types of past wrongs, and move forward in the understanding of past actions by college institutions and governmental entities to avoid similar wrongdoings in the future.