Robert Fukumoto’s origin story starts in prison. That’s where his 18-year-old mother Ritsu Kamoto met her future husband Joe Fukumoto.
Both were removed from their homes to the Tule Lake internment camp in northeastern California. It was 1942 and the American government, via Executive Order 9066, forced 120,000 Japanese Americans living along the West Coast to leave their homes and businesses, in violation of their civil rights. The majority of these internees were American citizens, imprisoned in 10 camps in Arizona, California, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and Arkansas. These were called “Relocation Centers.”
Ritsu met and fell in love with Joe at Tule Lake prison, with its 28 guard towers (with guns pointing in), barbed wire security fences and harsh weather. She miscarried their first child in the camp before giving birth to their son Dennis in 1945. The family was released the next year. They were given a one-way train ticket and $25 to start anew.
The Fukumotos settled in Pasadena, where their five children would grow up. No one would hire Joe, who was “kibei,” having been born in the U.S. but educated in Japan. That’s how so many Japanese Americans were “tracked” into gardening, Fukumoto said.
“I remember meeting the father of a girl I was dating, and he was the produce manager at Hughes,” he said. “He graduated from UCLA and had to work his way after the war. I know of so many Nisseis who owned markets or worked at Caltech, who had to work as gardeners. This was a whole generation.”
Joe Fukumoto persevered. Ritsu, while officially a stay-at-home mom, worked too, often accompanying her husband on his gardening route. Their children accompanied Joe on weekends, quickly learning just how hard the gardening trade could be.
One day, the lady of the house in San Marino called a young Bobby Fukumoto and handed him a check to give to his father. It was for $15.
“Even I knew, back then, a month’s work should have paid in the hundreds,” he said. “When I gave the check to my Dad, he didn’t say anything, but I could tell he was almost embarrassed.”
Then Joe Fukumoto told his son this story.
“My Dad said after the war, he took whatever job he could find,” he said. “But no one would hire him. A man in San Marino told my Dad he’d hire him on one condition, that he would charge $15 month and never raise his price. He said, ‘Bobby, when this man hired me, $15 meant a lot to our family. I had five kids.’”
And so even years later, Joe Fukumoto stood by his promise. Then came the day that San Marino family announced they were moving to another, bigger home. Won’t Joe follow and garden for them there? At the same price, of course.
“You are like family to us,” they told him.
Joe Fukumoto politely declined.
His son, now 72, said he and his wife taught their children the spirit of “gaman,” to endure the unendurable.
“You’ve got to move on,” he said.
Money was so tight there aren’t many photos of Joe and Ritsu, save for later when their children went on to good careers and happy families. Bobby Fukumoto himself would retire as a post office supervisor for vehicle maintenance in L.A.
He remembers his parents taking him to the Pasadena Buddhist Temple and him looking longingly at the cars in the junkyard next door. When her husband’s health forced him to stop gardening, Ritsu went back to school, earning a certificate in electrical assembly and working in aircraft gauge assembly.
Their son still volunteers at their temple, with its “obutsudans,” or home shrines. One wall in a hall is hung with photos of temple members celebrating temple events, their numbers waning with the years. But the solid crew that works there remain the very definition of family.
“It takes time for us to grow older and appreciate what our parents went through,” Fukumoto said.
It takes time to see the stories that comfort us and those we need to hear.
