Okuda, Kojima and Company

Whatever trouble alien Japanese may cause in the U.S., government officials seem relatively calm about most Nisei--American-born U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry. At Camp Shelby, Miss, last week an all-Nisei group was training for U.S. Army combat service. More than 1,000 young Nisei were enrolled in about 125 colleges in 37 states, finishing educations interrupted when they were evacuated from the West Coast in 1942.

A typical evacuated Nisei student is Oberlin College's lanky, 20-year-old, bespectacled Kenji Okuda. Son of a former Seattle expressman, he was raised as a Protestant, stood second in his high-school class of 500. At the University of Washington he was Y.M.C.A. vice president. Hustled into a Colorado relocation project (his parents are still there) after Pearl Harbor, he was released early this year. At Oberlin, Kenji heeled the college paper, made a hit, became student-council president. Declared the paper: "He was elected primarily on the basis of merit. ... A lesser point ... he was a man."

Says Okuda: "I have met people who not only were interested but were going so far out of their way to help others that I felt small and cheap. Such contacts cannot but broaden one's perspective."

Responsible for placing Nisei in colleges is the Quaker-inspired, interdenominational National Japanese American Student Relocation Council of Philadelphia. Clerics and educators set up the Council at the request of ex-Director Milton Stover Eisenhower (brother of the General) of the U.S. War Relocation Authority. Council finances come from private sources. Council director is white-haired, 66-year-old Carlisle V. Hibbard, who has Japanese lore (he spent a decade in Tokyo, a year in Jap-held Manchuria) and relocation experience (he worked with World War I prisoners of war). Assistant Secretary of War John Jay McCloy sees in the Council a way to "compensate loyal citizens of Japanese ancestry for the dislocation ... by reason of military necessity." Some citizens thus compensated:

> Southern California's Phi Beta Kappa student Setsuko Matsunaga, now at Washington University in St. Louis. Miss Matsunaga studies sociology, has addressed civic and church groups in the St. Louis area.

> Masamori Kojima, relocated from U.C.L.A. to Pennsylvania's Haverford College, where he and two Chinese students speak to community groups as a panel on democracy.

> Identical twins Eva and Hannah Sakamoto, studying nursing at the University of Colorado. Former University of California students and high-school glee clubbers, they got scholarships from their church (Methodist) education board to finance their Colorado studies.

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