Suma Sugi

Suma Sugi was born on March 20, 1906, in San Jose, California, the first child of Sadajiro and Haru Sugi, new immigrants from Japan. The family moved to Los Angeles when Suma was a child, and opened a store near Little Tokyo. In 1920, Sugi enrolled in Lincoln High School, where she was one of the few Japanese American students. Even at a young age, Sugi excelled as a writer; in December 1922, at age 14, she submitted an advertisement for handkerchiefs that was printed in the Los Angeles Evening Express .

Upon graduation in 1924, she enrolled at UCLA, where she majored in commerce. As a graduation gift, Sugi's parents paid for her to take a three-month trip to Japan. When she returned, she participated in a series of speaking engagements on Japan.

Over the next months, Sugi searched for work as a teacher. She found that no school districts wanted to hire her due to her race. Eventually she became a clerk for the Terminal Island School district, often working with grammar school children. She meanwhile became active in Los Angeles politics. In 1934, Sugi was appointed by the City of Los Angeles to serve on the election board for Precinct 1491.

Starting in 1930, Sugi became active in forming a Los Angeles chapter of the new Japanese American Citizens League. That year, Sugi travelled to Seattle along with Charles Kamayatsu, to represent the Los Angeles chapter at the group's first national convention. There, the delegates adopted two resolutions to present to Congress. The first called for a bill to revise the Cable Act to extend to "American women citizens of oriental ancestry" who had married noncitizen Issei. The second resolution called for Congress to pass legislation that would correct "the injustice done to the Japanese residents of America who fought in the army and navy of the United States under the inducement of citizenship, which later was denied them." Since the newly-formed JACL lacked a unified structure, individual chapters organized their own initiatives. In the case of the Cable Act campaign, the Los Angeles chapter took up the cause. The Los Angeles chapter's president, Clarence Yamagata, decided that Sugi should lead the lobbying efforts. ^[1]

On February 24, 1931, the Los Angeles JACL sent Sugi to be its representative in Washington D.C. for promoting the interests of the Japanese American community during the Cable Act hearings. Sugi was an effective lobbyist who made several connections with members of Congress to show that the Cable Act produced more harm than good. Upon witnessing Cable conferring with Senators Royal Copeland, the sponsor of the corresponding Senate legislation, and Hiram Johnson , she watched with anticipation as the bill passed the Senate. The next day, March 3rd, Congressman Cable informed Sugi that President Herbert Hoover had signed the new bill, and congratulated Sugi with the successful passage of her amendment. She then ran to the telegraph office to wire the Los Angeles JACL of the good news, reminding them that the bill's signing coincided with the Japanese holiday Hina Matsuri , or Girls' Day.

The bill saved many Nisei women who, because of their marriage to Issei men who were ineligible to naturalize due to immigration laws, would lose their citizenship. In her trip report for the Rafu Shimpo , Sugi explained to readers the usefulness of working with Congress:

If approached properly, people are seldom relentless. To Congressmen Crail and Cable, I explained how the existing Act affected me, for instance. They immediately saw the injustice of the Act of 1922. After they realized what should be done, they knew how to do it. ^[2]

Even after her initial victory, Sugi's work on the Cable Act did not end in 1931. In 1935, Sugi joined with the League of Women Voters to repeal the Cable Act altogether. On June 25, 1936, the Cable Act was formally repealed. Although the final bill repealed the Cable Act, it did not prevent women from losing their citizenship through marriage.

On January 27, 1936, Sugi married Hitoshi Yokotake, an ice salesman and sumo wrestler. The couple had two children: a son, Makoto, and daughter, Shizuye. Although Suma reduced her involvement in the JACL around this time, she remained active in several social clubs, namely the Hawaii Club, and occasionally contributed to the Rafu Shimpo. ^[3]

On December 22, 1939, Suma Yokotake penned an article for the Rafu decrying the inability of several qualified Nisei women to find jobs as teachers in the Los Angeles school system. She argued in her article that "the nisei has one strike against him with physical difference when he is being introduced or interviewed." Suma pointed out that among the five Nisei who worked for the LA school system, all worked in secretarial or custodial positions despite having the qualifications to be teachers. She promised readers that "one of these days there will be a nisei employed as a teacher in the Los Angeles School system." ^[4]

Following the declaration of Executive Order 9066 on February 19th, 1942, Suma was fired from her job with the Los Angeles Board of Education. In April 1942, the army sent Suma and her family to the Pomona Assembly Center . At Pomona, Suma worked for the camp school staff. Her husband Hitoshi served as a sumo instructor and organized wrestling matches. A few months later in September 1942, the Yokotake family was transferred to the Heart Mountain concentration camp in Wyoming.

At Heart Mountain, Suma continued her work in education even as Hitoshi became a police officer in Internal Security. In February 1943, Hitoshi became assistant chief of police at Heart Mountain. In October 1943, Suma left Heart Mountain for Tule Lake to work as a research assistant to Dr. Marvin Opler in the camp's Community Analysis Section, where she studied the effects of segregation on the community. Suma and Hitoshi left Tule Lake in October 1944, where they then travelled to Hawaii.

In 1945, the Yokotakes returned to Southern California. Suma Yokotake remained active in local politics in Los Angeles. In March 1947, the African American newspaper The Los Angeles Tribune reported that she had been appointed as a board member for the Los Angeles chapter of the National Urban League. In July 1962, the JACL honored Suma Sugi Yokotake with a special commendation for her work as the JACL's first lobbyist. Although Suma's name occasionally appeared in the Japanese American press in reference to her 1931 lobbying campaign, she largely disappeared from the public eye. In July 1962, Saburo Kido wrote in the Shin Nichibei a piece lauding the accomplishments of Suma and Tokie Slocum :

It was a coincidence, that Slocum and Miss Sugi added glamour to our life during those days because they were the first lobbyists to go to Washington to espouse the cause for persons of Japanese ancestry without any official status as a government representative. They were plain citizens who had a message to present to Congress." ^[5]

Even in retirement, Suma remained a lobbyist. In October 1967, Suma worked with the California State Assembly to pass a bill, AB 1607, that would allow Nisei state employees who worked before the war to claim retirement benefits in the form of "war relocation leave" credits. Suma was included as a recipient for her work for the Los Angeles City School system from before and after the war.

Suma Sugi Yokotake died on November 26, 1980, in Los Angeles. Among the Nisei who helped found the Japanese American Citizens League, few had as much impact as Suma Sugi. Through her work with Congress, she demonstrated the importance of lobbying as a means of enacting legislation that benefited the community and established a pattern that was repeated by Tokutaro Nishimura Slocum in 1935 with his bill for Issei veterans, and by Mike Masaoka in the postwar years.

Matsumoto, Valerie J. City Girls : The Nisei Social World in Los Angeles, 1920-1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

van Harmelen, Jonathan. "Suma Sugi Yokotake – The Woman Who Became The First Japanese American Lobbyist - Part 1." Discover Nikkei, Mar. 7, 2024.

———. "Suma Sugi Yokotake – The Woman Who Became The First Japanese American Lobbyist - Part 2." Discover Nikkei, Mar. 8, 2024.