Man who helped inspire ceremony may not attend

Even though he helped inspire the event, Ryo Kumasaka isn't sure he will attend a University of Washington ceremony this month that would award him an honorary degree. He says his health is failing. And he has mixed feelings about the honor.

Kumasaka, 88, was in the final quarter of his senior year at the UW in 1942 when he and his family were forcibly moved to an internment camp. He never finished his education.

When Kumasaka told UW professor Gail Nomura his story several years ago, she vowed to help arrange for him and other UW Japanese-American students to get their degrees. Nomura helped set in motion a process that will end with a ceremony later this month.

But Kumasaka remains ambivalent.

"I can take it or leave it. It doesn't matter one way or the other. It's too late for that to have any effect on my life. I went most of my life without it, so I got used to it," he said. "I have waited 66 years."

Kumasaka, who grew up near what is now Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, is a big fan of Husky football and has closely followed UW sports for almost 80 years. Even now, he knows who's hot on the crew team and predicts football coach Tyrone Willingham will win at least six games come fall.

He remembers that Sunday in 1941 when Pearl Harbor was bombed. He was playing football with his friends when his brother came running over to tell him.

At the time, his parents owned a family business, Angle Lake Greenhouse, growing vegetables and flowers. When it became clear they would not be allowed to stay, they turned over their home, car and business to German and Italian neighbors.

"I was one of those persons who sincerely believed that since I was a citizen of these United States, that this internment camp, or concentration camp, would never occur," Kumasaka said. "So down to the last day, I said to myself that this would not occur. I was so surprised. Psychologically, I didn't accept that our government would chase us out of our homes."

But in April 1942, a government truck arrived at their house to take away Kumasaka, his youngest brother and their parents. The family dog, Teddy, jumped aboard.

"He wanted to go with us, you know. But we had to kick him off, and that was the last we heard of him," Kumasaka said. "I still remember that moment."

The family ended up at the Tule Lake camp in California — the highest-security internment camp, with barbed wire and armed patrols.

After seven months, Kumasaka's other brother, who was living in Chicago, helped get him out by arranging a fake job. Once in Chicago, Kumasaka found a real job as an elevator operator. With anti-Japanese sentiment strong, he had few other prospects.

The following year, in 1943, he moved to the Denver area. He lived in a converted chicken house and worked 60 hours a week on a vegetable farm, for 60 cents an hour. He managed to find work for his parents nearby. He helped look after his younger brother, and was, by then, considered head of the family.

At the end of the war, the family decided to come back to the Pacific Northwest, where Kumasaka got the family greenhouse up and running again.

Kumasaka married and had a son. Ten years after the war, he signed up for two university courses to try to finish his degree. But he found he had little time for study between his job and family, so he dropped out.

The younger brother he helped support through the war went on to get a medical degree from the UW and became a family doctor. Kumasaka's son also graduated from the UW.

He said it's hard to know whether his life might have turned out differently with a degree.

"You can't know destiny," he said. "You have to go forward in life. You plow forward and do the best you can."