After 64 years, two octogenarians receive their high school
diplomas
Gilroy – Mineko Sakai and Yuri Okamoto wondered what it all meant.
They are each 82 years and old and past the age where a high school diploma matters in any way, shape or form. But they both sat at Gilroy High School awaiting their diplomas which some say is more than 60 years past due.
But as they sat in their seats, decked out in a black cap and gown with Hawaiian leis hanging around their necks, they were as giddy as schoolgirls.
“We’re as excited as teenagers,” Okamoto said. “Being with young people is always the best. We don’t feel 82.”
As they waited for the ceremony to begin they both took in the sights of the school they were pulled out of 64 years ago.
“Good old Gilroy high. It was so great when we came here,” Okamoto said.
“We were the largest class. 110,” Sakai added as they were surrounded by a senior class of about 550 students.
Jenine Vadillo, a graduating senior who was sitting next to Okamoto, said, “It’s amazing because they get a second chance.”
When the two were finally called up the crowd erupted in a roar of applause as they were given a standing ovation.
“Symbolically this is so important that they get their diplomas. Not just for them but for society too. It’s a very important history lesson,” said Brian Shiroyama, a volunteer for The California Nisei High School Diploma Project, which help facilitate the pair’s graduation.
Shiroyama was able to find nine nisei – children of first generation Japanese immigrants – who attended Gilroy High School before being pulled out of school two weeks before their graduation in 1942. However, most did not want anything to do with it. Some said they were just too old. Some still had bitter feelings.
“How silly for an 82 year old to go up there with 17 and 18 years olds. They’ll think, ‘she’s old,’ ” said Okamoto, whose children were more excited than she was that she would be receiving a diploma.
Shigeharu Yamaguchi, said he wanted to be at the graduation but that he was just too old and not healthy enough to make the trip from Santa Maria.
“I’m at the end of the line now. So I don’t know if it means anything,” said the 83-year-old about the diploma he will be receiving in the mail. “But I guess I can show it off,” he added laughing.
Pearl Harbor was been attacked in December 1941, and as these three students awaited their graduation eight months later in mid-August of 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent out an executive order that removed all people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast.
This order splintered the Japanese-American students across the United States. Sakai left with her mother and siblings to Grand Junction, Colo. Yamaguchi and Okamoto were sent to different internment camps in Arizona.
Okamoto said the Japanese-Americans were rounded up and herded into trains headed east. She remembers looking around and thinking how alike they all looked.
“It was like the Germans rounding up the Jews,” she recollects. “But we were in our Sunday best.”
They each said they had to sell everything. They moved away with almost nothing and once they were let out of the internment caps, they came back with even less.
“You had yourself and maybe a blanket,” Yamaguchi said. “You had to start over. You were born again.”
To try and right some of the wrongs committed upon those of Japanese ancestry, Assemblywoman Sally Lieber (D-San Jose) authored a bill which grants high school diplomas to Japanese-Americans who were uprooted and interned during World war II. The bill was signed into law in 2004.
Okamoto and Sakai both said they were disheartened that they were the only ones to attend the graduation.
“It’s nice, but I feel like so many others deserve it that should be here,” Sakai said.
Whether it was just the two of them who attended or the whole nine who had been found, Shiroyama, who was born in an internment camp, said that this is a gratifying moment.
“We need to do everything we can to recognize them so they can live the rest of their lives in comfort, which they didn’t have when they were younger,” he said.
