Japanese-American gets high school diploma 60 years after camp
OAKLAND, CALIF. ? Akira “Ike” Nakamura took 60 years to graduate from Castlemont High School. And when he did, he got two diplomas: one for 2002, one for 1944.
For 1944 was the year he would have graduated had the U.S. government not sent him along with tens of thousands of other Japanese-Americans into desert internment camps after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Thursday night, a 75-year-old Nakamura led the processional at Castlemont High and then sat, stage right, in a purple cap and gown.
It was supposed to be a low-key moment, not listed in the program. Nakamura said he did not expect the teen-agers to grasp the significance.
But once Principal Debbra Lindo explained, “Tonight, we’re going to set it right,” the 205 graduates rose in an ovation of whoops.
“I thank you very much for this honor,” Nakamura said, with a slight bow. His wife of 53 years, Rurie, was in the audience.
They met behind barbed wire at a camp in Utah. More than 100,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans were deemed a security threat and put in such internment camps during World War II.
Last week, Nakamura learned of an unusual offer in a local English-language newspaper for Japanese-Americans. In part to honor Fred Korematsu, a 1937 Castlemont graduate who unsuccessfully challenged the internment to the Supreme Court, the Oakland school district said it would give a diploma to anyone who had been wrenched from school and sent to a camp.
So far, four men have responded three in Northern California and one in Richmond, Va.
Nakamura was a freshman in 1942 when he and his family had to quit their flower business and pack only what they could carry.
He spent two years in Utah, then was drafted into the U.S. Army as a translator in 1944. Eventually, he returned to the San Francisco Bay area and started a successful realty business that he still helps run.
In Nakamura’s day, most Castlemont students were white. Now they are mostly black and Hispanic, with some Southeast Asians, some of them children of parents who fled the Vietnam War. This year’s valedictory speech was delivered in English and Spanish.