Longtime Morgan Hill resident Ted Kubota, 79, will receive his
Live Oak High School diploma Friday night.
Longtime Morgan Hill resident Ted Kubota, 79, will receive his Live Oak High School diploma Friday night.
He’ll join approximately 500 graduating seniors during commencement exercises at Live Oak High School through a program called California Nisei High School Project. It is a state-mandated effort to award honorary high school diplomas to Japanese-Americans who were attending high schools in California but could not graduate because of the forced evacuation in 1942.
“It is a real honor to get a diploma from Live Oak High School,” Kubota said.
Kubota will be joined by his wife, Tamako Kubota, sons Ted Kubota Jr. and James Kubota and his daughter Mary Wakatsuki. Their other two sons, Dave Kubota and Dick Kubota, will be at home preparing a post-graduation barbecue for family and friends.
Dick Kubota, who graduated from Live Oak in 1975, said he was blown away when his father told him of the graduation plans.
“I never thought I would see or experience that,” Kubota said. “I am just really happy that they are giving him a diploma.”
Wakatsuki, a third-grade teacher at San Martin/Gwinn Elementary School, said the entire family is proud for Kubota. She added that he’s not making a big deal out of it.
“I am extremely excited that he is receiving his diploma,” Wakatsuki said. “It goes to show that education is the very important.”
Kubota is one of three who live in South County who will receive diplomas through the program.
Morgan Hill’s Yoshie Yokoi, 78, and Gilroy’s Takeshi Ota, 81, will receive their honors Thursday afternoon at Salinas High School.
Kubota was a junior at Live Oak High School when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in 1942, forcing Japanese-Americans on the West Coast to move to internment camps during World War II.
Kubota, his mother, two brothers and a sister sold their 40-acre property on the site of the former Flying Lady Restaurant and were taken to Sanger in Fresno County for a brief stay before heading to the Gila River internment camp near Casa Grande, Ariz.
Kubota graduated from high school in the camp and worked for the Army Air Corps as a civilian with the 8054th Air Sea Rescue stationed in Yokohama, Japan. During the Korean War, he was sent to Yodan Poo in Korea with the U.S. Army’s 1st Calvary Division where he acted as an interpreter and translator.
After two months there, he went to Yokohama for a month before being transferred in August 1950 to the Fuchu Air base in Japan. He stayed there until 1953 before returning to the United States.
Kubota said he was treated well by the Air Corps and knew he had a special role to play.
“My Colonel, Colonel O’Conner told me ‘you are supposed to be an ambassador between the U.S. and Japan.’”
While stationed in Japan, Kubota met his wife to be.
In 1953, Kubota returned to Morgan Hill where he began raising strawberries on Llagas Avenue.
Kubota said he holds no resentment toward the U.S. government for interning his family.
“War is war,” Kubota said. “There was a lot of hysteria. I have no remorse for something that happened in a time of war.”
Yokoi and Takeshi were both forced to leave their homes and move to a camp in Poston, Ariz., in Yuma County, where they finished high school in 1944.
Takeshi said his family convinced him to get the diploma as a personal memento to his history.
Yokoi shared a similar desire to get a little piece of her past.
“That is why we’re going,” Yokoi said. “It’s a part of our history. It’s sort of nostalgic.”
Takeshi was drafted into the U.S. Army the following August and was sent to boot camp in Florida. The Army then sent him to Minnesota for six months of intensive Japanese language training.
Takeshi was assigned to the Pacific Theater in August 1945 just before the war’s end. He went to Tokyo with a translator group where he stayed until 1946.
After the war, Takeshi lived in Morgan Hill raising strawberries off Cochrane Road. In 2001 he moved to Gilroy.
Yokoi in 1944 went from the internment camp to Chicago where she became a housekeeper. She moved to Morgan Hill at the end of the war with her husband, Paul.
Cheeto Barrera is an intern at the Morgan Hill Times. He can be reached at cb******@mo*************.com.
