New Diplomas Seek to Correct 1942 Injustice : Internees: Japanese-Americans, denied honors when World War II began, will return for a delayed commencement.

Forty-seven years late, Japanese-American classmates from Los Angeles High School are set to receive their rightful diplomas this weekend in a ceremony intended to correct a historical injustice.

World War II internment interrupted the education of those Los Angeles High students, who were only a few weeks away from graduation in 1942. To make matters worse, the school apparently bucked policy and did not send diplomas to the detention camps.

“Our rights were denied us all these years,” said Hayao Shishino, a retired cook who lives in Cerritos. “We want to be on the rolls of the Class of 1942.”

Most of the 15 Japanese-Americans from that senior class eventually obtained diplomas through correspondence courses or night classes after leaving the camps. The others finally received degrees through a 25th anniversary class reunion in 1967. But Shishino and others did not want diplomas dated 1943, 1944 or, in his case, 1967.

Shishino wrote about the matter earlier this year to Warren Furutani, the Los Angeles school board member whose mother-in-law is among the 14 classmates still living. The first Japanese-American on the board, Furutani requested what turned into a painstaking search of old school records. As a result, Shishino will get his wish Saturday morning at his alma mater on Olympic Boulevard.

Eleven of the now senior citizens, accompanied by their children and grandchildren, are expected to participate in the commencement ceremony they say was denied them by anti-Japanese sentiment during the war. Their new diplomas are dated June 26, 1942, although signed by current officials of the Los Angeles Unified School Board.

“The most important part of this episode is that it is a living history lesson. We have an opportunity to go back and set the record straight,” Furutani said.

The former students blame Paul Webb, the wartime principal at Los Angeles High, for their difficulties. They contend that Webb, who died in 1982, brought them to his office just before the evacuation of Japanese-Americans from Los Angeles in late April, 1942, and told them he would deny them diplomas. They say he did not change his mind even though the Los Angeles School Board in June, 1942, declared that all Japanese-American seniors in good academic standing before the internments should be sent their degrees. A communal graduation was held at the relocation center at the Santa Anita race track but the Los Angeles High students were excluded, they said.

“I was really upset. But we didn’t speak up,” recalled Fumiko Matsumura Wakamatsu of Mar Vista. “In those days, you didn’t talk back to a teacher, you didn’t talk back to a principal. . . . And when we found out that the students from the other schools received their diplomas without all this hassle, it was even more bitter.” She received a diploma in 1943 after course work by mail.

Dan Isaacs, the school district’s current assistant superintendent for senior high schools, said there is no way to confirm the former students’ allegations that Webb was the only principal in Los Angeles who took such a position and that Webb purposely disobeyed board policy out of wartime passions. But, Isaacs added, it is clear that the Los Angeles High alumni should have gotten their diplomas 47 years ago.

“To me, it’s a very touching thing to be supportive of people who should have been supported many decades ago,” he said.

Webb’s former Japanese-American students say they find it ironic that he worked as an educational consultant to Gen. Douglas MacArthur in Japan for two years after World War II and helped revise the school curriculum there.

The awarding of the diplomas is another symbol that the nation now recognizes the mistreatment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, said Aiko Yoshinaga, Furutani’s mother-in-law, who is flying in from her Virginia home for the reunion.

She is widely known in the Japanese-American community for her discovery in government archives of documents purportedly showing that the U.S. military trusted no Japanese-Americans. That contradicted the official argument that internment was necessary to separate the loyal from disloyal after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Her discovery was crucial evidence in the 1986 federal trial that overturned the convictions of three internment resisters. It also helped in last year’s commitment by Congress to award about $20,000 apiece to the estimated 60,000 survivors of the camps--although payment is held up by budget squabbles.

“Some people just don’t believe there were such things as concentration camps in this country. Just the fact that it is happening,” Yoshinaga said of the high school event, “will educate people that this kind of thing did happen here.”

In interviews this week, she and her classmates recounted how they remain affected by their wartime experiences, even though many went on to successful lives after the war.

Yoshinaga had to abandon her dreams of studying music and art in college, enrolled in a night high school in New York and was drawn into political activism. But she still has her Los Angeles High School yearbook and plans to bring it Saturday so classmates can write messages over their youthful photos as they should have in 1942.

Wakamatsu ruefully recalled the difficulty of sending school projects by mail for the diploma she obtained a year later. In one assignment, a nursing class teacher required her to produce a hypothetical household budget. Wakamatsu wrote back that her budget would be zero since she and her family were trapped in a camp, all expenses paid by the government. Today, she still bristles at her resulting grade: a C.

After living in Chicago and New York, Wakamatsu returned to Los Angeles and was accepted at UCLA in 1947. But because she had voted in an election in New York, the University of California wanted her to pay tuition as an out-of-stater, something she could not afford. Life moved on with marriage, children and work as an office manager. Now, retirement is near and she is contemplating enrolling at Santa Monica College. “Everybody in the family has a college degree except me,” she said. “It would be nice and my kids are all for it.”

Shishino also planned to go to UCLA. After the camps, he worked in Minnesota as a cook and moved back to California. Family responsibilities precluded further education, he said. That is why receiving the proper high school degree is so important to him.

“Even if it takes 47 years for justice to run its course,” he said.