Fumiko shares a headstone with her husband, Takeshi. This headstone is among many Japanese headstones and also near a Japanese World War II memorial (written in Japanese). I was able to locate a quick bit of info on Fumiko's husband, Takeshi. He fought in World War II and was promoted to the rank of Sergeant during the War in Fort Hayes, OH.
...elderly men and women fought back tears as they grasped in their hands the Navy's Distinguished Public Service Award, an acknowledgment of their work during World War II as Japanese language teachers at the U.S. Navy Language School in Boulder, Colo.
The work of teaching naval intelligence officers how to speak and write Japanese kept the teachers -- who were Japanese American -- out of internment camps. It also provided the students -- who would go on to become politicians, journalists and academics -- with insights into a country that was little understood.
The students were honored by the Navy long ago. But for their teachers -- "forgotten patriots," as Pedro Loureiro of the Pacific Basin Institute dubbed them -- Saturday was a day of recognition. The director of naval intelligence came from Washington, D.C., to pass out the certificates, apologizing for the bureaucracy that kept them from being awarded sooner.
Many of the 138 teachers who worked at the school between August 1941 and July 1946 have died, but they were represented at the ceremony by widows and widowers, children and grandchildren. The 12 who did attend range in age from 89 to 97.
One of them was Fumiko Morita Imai, who will turn 91 on Wednesday. She was recruited by a professor at the University of Washington, where she had minored in Oriental studies. She said her only previous experience was teaching the violin.
By teaching, she managed to avoid the internment camp where her father, mother and brother were taken and spent the war years.
Imai showed off a black-and-white Navy School photo identification card and then another one from the University of Michigan, where she taught Army intelligence officers. Her parents, who had moved from Japan to Seattle before she was born, "were proud of me teaching," she said.
When asked to recall what she remembered best about her time at the language schools, Imai giggled. "It's so long ago," she said. And then she thought for a moment.
"I had a good time with the students."