For One Grad, Day Still Lives in Infamy

One day after the Pearl Harbor attacks, George I. Fujimoto ’42, a biochemistry concentrator of Japanese descent, was quoted in these pages as saying, “I don’t see how this situation can affect me at all. I am an American like the rest of us, involved in a war.”

Sixty-five years to the date later, Fujimoto acknowledges that the quote he gave to The Crimson turned out to be tragically wrong.

While Harvard proved a safe haven for Fujimoto, back home in Seattle things were not so tranquil for Japanese-Americans. Three months after Pearl Harbor, Fujimoto’s family was given orders to abandon its home and business and prepare to be moved into an internment camp, along with the vast majority of all other Japanese on the West Coast.

“My father had to walk away from his business; he couldn’t own his store anymore because he was an alien,” Fujimoto recalls. “They were given a week’s notice to leave everything behind, and were sent off to live in horse stables for a year at a racetrack in Seattle. After that, they were imprisoned for two years at the Minidoka concentration camp in Idaho. They weren’t even allowed to attend my graduation.”

WAR COMES TO THE WEST

The day the U.S. declared war, he was a senior in Leverett House, active in the Mountaineering Club and involved in the inter-House crew team. He had high hopes for a career in medicine. But those hopes were soon dashed.

“In those days, there was enormous discrimination against any Japanese,” recalls Fujimoto. “Alien Japanese were not allowed to own property and had very little rights. On the West Coast in particular, the discrimination was excited in great part by the ‘Yellow Peril’ propaganda put out by the Hearst newspapers,” Fujimoto says—referring to the chain of papers, including the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the San Francisco Examiner, owned by Harvard dropout William Randolph Hearst.

As an American citizen, Fujimoto evaded the fate of some of his classmates.

Tsurumi Shunsuke ’42, a philosophy concentrator, was interrogated by FBI agents who asked him whether he supported the U.S. or Japan in the war. As Tsurumi later recounted in an interview with the newsletter of the Japan Foundation, he told the FBI agents that he was an “anarchist” who supported neither side. He remained in a detention center in East Boston for several months before choosing to return to Japan, according to the newsletter.

Tsurumi could not be reached for comment.

ALIENATION

Tsurumi came from a family of wealthy politicians in Japan, but Fujimoto hailed from humbler roots.

During the summers off from Harvard, Fujimoto traveled to Alaska to earn “good money” working in salmon canneries. The 1942 edition of the Harvard Album, a class yearbook, noted that Fujimoto received the Edmund Ira Scholarship while he was here.

“I didn’t give a damn about grades,” Fujimoto said. “I came from an immigrant family and had no background in a lot of the subjects I was studying. At high school, they never even taught us the Periodic Table, and there I was, competing with fellows from prep schools who had already taken these things. My A’s in science were balanced by my C’s in everything else, but graduating with honors meant nothing to me then.”

But those A’s couldn’t erase his ancestry. “Here I was, a college graduate from Harvard University, and not a single company or place would offer me a job,” says Fujimoto. “Not only that, but my draft board had the audacity to classify me as an ‘enemy alien.’ When I applied to graduate school at [University of] Illinois, they turned me down on the basis that there was an Army air base right next to the campus. I saved that letter. I saved everything.”

‘COMING HOME’

Fujimoto’s parents were finally allowed to leave Minidoka concentration camp and travel east to Chicago, where they remained for the rest of their lives. Fujimoto, meanwhile, went onto graduate school in chemistry at University of Michigan—an all-expenses fellowship.

“Michigan was unusual in that it went all-out to welcome the Japanese rather than turn them away,” says Fujimoto. “In fact, they were running a Japanese language program for soldiers, so they wanted as many Japanese there as possible in hopes that we might be able to help out.”

But government officials kept close watch on him and pulled him aside for interrogation.

“The U.S. Marshall called us in to quiz us about our loyalty to the United States,” remembers Fujimoto. “I tried quizzing them back, but they never answered me.”

As the war dragged on, some of Fujimoto’s Michigan classmates began to worry about the possibility of being drafted to fight. In desperation, a few of them even went so far as to apply to the mysterious “Manhattan Project.”

“Nobody knew what it was,” says Fujimoto, “but if you didn’t want to fight, that was the best way. Of my friends, I was the only one who applied and was turned down.”

Now, Fujimoto lives in a San Diego retirement home that, he says, “reminds me of my days in Leverett.” “Tiny rooms, light housekeeping, small tables. The average age is 86, which is the same as the average age of my classmates from Harvard. It’s a lot like coming home.”