CLALLAM BAY — The salutatorian of Clallam Bay High School’s class of 1942 finally has received his high school diploma.
Friday evening, 85-year-old Taky Kimura turned the tassel on his mortarboard, along with the 10 seniors of the 11-member class of 2009 who attended the commencement ceremony.
“It is so kind of the school to have me here,” said Kimura, who now operates the Jun Fan Gung Fu Institute in Seattle with his son, Andy.
“I just don’t want to be a distraction from these young people.”
Earlier in the day, in the high school gymnasium, Kimura reunited with old friends, and spoke to seniors about the detour his life had taken when he was 18.
On the day of his graduation in June, he was looking forward to the ceremony, which was to be one step on his journey to become a doctor. He had earned a scholarship to Washington State University.
Instead, at about noon that day, Kimura and his family of nine were placed in an old railroad car and taken to the Tule Lake Internment Camp for Japanese Americans in California, near the Oregon border.
Tule Lake was the largest of the 10 War Relocation Authority camps mandated by Executive Order 9066 issued Feb. 19, 1942, to detain people of Japanese descent in response to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
Tule Lake was opened May 26, 1942. At its peak, it contained 18,700 people. It was closed on March 28, 1946.
Kimura’s family was held for four years.
Released but homeless
“Just as we were suddenly taken into the camps, they released us,” he said. “But we didn’t know where to go or what to do.
“No one would give us a job or rent a place to us.”
He and his family moved to Seattle where they operated a grocery store — in fact, his grocery store was the first to bring Mandarin oranges to the Northwest, he said.
Later Kimura became the best friend and student of the renowned martial arts expert, Bruce Lee, who died in 1973.
But through all the years, Kimura never received his diploma, a fact that the people who gathered to meet him on Friday in Clallam Bay said they had never known.
“I don’t know why it never occurred to me,” said Bob Bowlby, one of Kimura’s classmates, his voice cracking and eyes misting over.
“I should have realized it. I was on the School Board for years, and I should have realized it and done something.”
It was Kimura’s martial arts students who discovered he lacked his diploma.
“We thought it would be so good if we could get him a diploma, so we called the school,” Julie DonTigny, one of Kimura’s longtime students.
Kimura had never considered phoning the school.
“They went behind my back,” he said. “But it was such a kindness that they did for me.
Friends close as family
Although Kimura never sought his diploma, he kept in touch with friends in Clallam Bay who he has described as family.
When Clallam Bay resident Claude Olesen joined the group Friday, Kimura immediately moved to hug him.
“This man was not my friend,” Kimura said. “He was my brother.
“You guys are our family. Those are such precious memories.”
In December 1941, Kimura worried that his friendship with Olesen wouldn’t weather the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
“When Pearl Harbor happened, I was nervous that he would be mad at me or blame me,” he said.
“He picked me up for school every day, and that day after Pearl Harbor, I stood there and wondered if he would come.
“And he came, and kept coming every day after that.”
Kimura said that his friends and classmates had taken him in and become his family.
“I remember one time at the Sol Duc [Hot Springs], I looked at my ticket and it said ‘tub,'” he said.
“But I told [the man in charge of the hot springs] that I didn’t want to go to the tub. I wanted to go with those people there,” he said pointing at his classmates, who were listening intently.
“Everyone got really upset and Bob, or his brother maybe, told that guy that they wanted to talk to the manager.”
Kimura was not allowed into the hot springs with his friends, but it wasn’t for a lack of his friends trying, he said.
As Kimura told this story, the gymnasium was quiet, and Bowlby sadly shook his head.
Bruce Lee
The current graduating class members were more interested in hearing about Lee, Kimura’s teacher and best friend.
Kimura said that he was released from the detention camp “a broken man, mentally and physically,” and that it was Lee, more than any other factor, that returned him to himself.
“I was old enough to be his father, but he became something of a surrogate father to me,” Kimura has said. “I started to study under him, and I began to look in the mirror and think, ‘Maybe I am a human being.’ And I began to reconstruct my whole thinking.”
Kimura met Lee at the University of Washington baseball fields when he was 36 and Lee was 18.
Kimura’s friends challenged him to “do something to” Lee, who was already known for his martial arts abilities.
“Well, I knew it was a set-up, and I figured my life was in danger,” Kimura said.
Nonetheless he lobbed a halfhearted right hook at Lee.
“Bruce had me up in knots so fast you would not believe it,” Kimura said.
“He just was coming at me — bam, bam, bam, bam.”
But it wasn’t long before the two men became friends.
Lee trained Kimura in the school of martial arts that Kimura teaches now.
Kimura later was Lee’s best man at his wedding. He was the pallbearer at his funeral in 1973 and is the current caretaker of his grave.
When Lee was out of the state filming movies, he wrote Kimura letters.
Letters to be published
Those letters are the basis of a book, Letters from the Dragon, which is expected to be released soon, DonTigny said.
The first letter said, “Taky, you are the only one I can trust. You are my best friend,” DonTigny said.
After Lee’s death, Kimura dedicated himself to teach the philosophy of life and martial arts to other young people, he said.
When it was time for Kimura and the others receiving diplomas to practice for Friday’s ceremony, two of Kimura’s students — Michael Hilow and Kevin Carmell — demonstrated several martial arts moves.
One involves one person trying to touch the other’s head while the other attempts to block him.
“Of course no one was ever able to touch him when he steps in,” Hilow said of Kimura.
“And I’m sure he experienced real fear of death when he would do drills with Bruce Lee.”
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Reporter Paige Dickerson can be reached at 360-417-3535 or at paige.dickerson@peninsuladailynews.com.
