Degrees to honor former Japaense American students

At a recent meeting in his Long Beach office, Assemblymember Warren Furutani of California's 55th District is clean-shaven, rubbing his chin where a goatee used to reside."I've had the goatee for ages," he said, "but sometimes I feel frustrated and the only thing I can do is shave my hair."

Furutani, it seems, is never one to wait for change. He's used his career, first in education and later in politics, as a catalyst to drive it.

Thanks to a law he authored, honorary degrees will be granted to former Japanese American students whose post-secondary education in California public schools was interrupted (and they themselves forcibly removed to internment camps) during World War II.

PCC is one of the first community colleges to offer the retroactive degrees, and Furutani will be honored at the upcoming graduation ceremony. The college is receiving help from the California Nisei Diploma Project to identify former students who fall in this category. Previously, legislation existed only for high schools to grant such degrees.

"For many immigrant families a college degree was seen as the American Dream," Furutani said. "So I see the this legislation as unfinished business, long overdue."

His drafting of Assembly Bill 37 (AB 37), which passed the California Legislature in October, dovetails with PCC's commencement ceremony in June.

The bill is an answer to Executive Order 9066, issued in 1942 by then-President Franklin Roosevelt that resulted in the forced internment of Japanese Americans.

A fourth-generation Japanese American, Furutani's life and family history is rife with change. A self-described activist who graduated from Gardena High School in 1965, the assemblymember credits both the support he received from his parents and the turmoil of the 1960s as a starting point for his advocacy in civil and constitutional rights.

"I'm of the generation that remembers exactly where they were when Kennedy was assassinated," he said. "I was against the war in Vietnam. I remember seeing the old women on television and thinking they looked exactly like my grandmother."

Susie Ling, a PCC professor who has known Furutani for over 30 years, says that he is a longtime activist for Asian-American issues.

"There were many before-and younger than us-who understand that Asian?Americans must do more than get good grades and earn money," Ling said. "We have to join the political, as well as artistic and social realms of our communities. It isn't passion that drives us, it is a responsibility for better justice and equality."

Furutani's parents, both third-generation Japanese Americans, met while in the same internment camp, and Furutani says the two could not be more different: "My father was a dreamer, a jazz musician who rode motorcycles, while my mom was the Rock of Gibraltar, the anchor, the realist that made everything happen," he said.

He didn't receive his college degree until the early 1980s, when he graduated from Antioch University with a degree in liberal arts. Before then, Furutani attended a number of different community colleges, including Los Angeles City College and El Camino College.

Politics was never an intended career. Furutani had no aspirations to become an elected official when he was younger. Instead, his decision to go into politics was the result of "lifelong travels."

The assemblymember recalls listening to Stokely Carmichael, a Black Power Advocate, at a rally in Watts.

"I remember him saying, 'black people must define themselves on their own terms, define themselves as they see fit, and organize themselves as they see it,'" said Furutani. "I wasn't black so I didn't see the significance, but when I replaced 'black' with 'Oriental,' the term of the day back then, I understood. I needed to redefine myself by finding my history."

Getting reconnected was more difficult than Furutani anticipated. There was an initial reluctance for those who were interned in camps, and there was nothing in the history books back then to help him. The stories, he said, needed to come from the source itself.

Because at first no one would speak openly about their experiences, Furutani and several other activists made their first pilgrimage to Manzanar, in the shadow of Mount Whitney, during the dead of winter.

"As young people we wanted to find out for ourselves so we went to the places where we thought we could find answers," he said.

Though the history of these camps is in many ways the history of the Japanese in America-"It was part of our ethnic identity: families would ask one another, 'Do you know so-and-so? What camp? Which block'?"-Furutani says no one wanted to speak on it.

So Furutani's AB 37 is, above all else, about learning from the past, rather than an exercise in nostalgia. That's perhaps the greatest achievement the assemblymember is looking forward to during the commencement ceremony at PCC: the value behind a teaching moment.