Walter Tsukamoto Was A Japanese American Leader

He was also a U.S. veteran

An American hero

Walter Tsukamoto was a Japanese American who was born in Molokai, Hawaii, on September 15, 1904. He became a lawyer and lobbyist before the years of World War II. He was a national president of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), the largest and oldest continuously operating Asian American civil and human rights organization in the nation. He worked toward enlistment of Japanese Americans into the U.S. Army. He was a Colonel in the army who became a military counsel postwar. He spent his life as a champion for civil rights and fought against racism.

A few months after Tsukamoto was born, the family moved to the Sacramento, California, area. He graduated from Sacramento High School in 1923 after which he attended college at the University of California, Berkeley. He became the first Nisei (second generation Japanese Americans born in the U.S.) to serve in the U.S. Army Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC). He achieved the rank of cadet major.

After earning a B.A. at Cal Berkeley, he entered law school at Boalt Hall (U.C. Berkeley). He graduated from law school in 1929 and was admitted to the California Bar.

Tsukamoto settled in Sacramento, where he established a private law practice, He and his wife Tomoye had six children. He was active with the JACL, which was formed in 1929 as a national organization. He served as the Sacramento chapter president from 1931–1936. In 1937, he was made a captain in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General’s office. He worked against the alien land laws. Tsukamoto was elected national president of the JACL in 1938. He continued to work against discriminatory legislation affecting persons of Japanese ancestry in California. He persuaded his local school board to abolish racially segregated schools.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Tsukamoto petitioned the army to place him on active duty instead of the reserves. He was thirty-seven years old at the time. The War Department barred Japanese Americans from serving in the military in April 1942 as they had been reclassified as non-citizens or enemy aliens. They formally refused Tsukamoto’s request to serve.

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