Miyoko ( Masada ) Uzaki

From Response magazine: Uzaki ’53 Chooses a Life of Faith and Love, Not Bitterness
When Miyoko Masada Uzaki ’53 came to SPC, she was older than many of her classmates, having spent much of World War II in an internment camp. “I was born in California ,” she says, “but people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast had to leave.”
Miyoko and her family survived in an Arkansas camp, where they spent two and a half years behind barbed-wire fences. “But we were fortunate,” she says. “We didn’t lose our farm. A Christian neighbor did the work until we came back. Many others lost everything.”
After the war, Miyoko enrolled at Seattle Pacific, where she met Jundo Uzaki from Japan . They married following graduation, and Miyoko worked while he attended seminary. A decade later, they moved to Japan so he could begin his ministry, but it was not to be. “He preached only once,” Miyoko remembers, before he succumbed to cancer.
To support their daughter, Keiko, Miyoko taught English in Japan for 12 years, and then returned to California , where she took up a new career in banking. Recently retired, Miyoko cultivates a much-loved vegetable garden and volunteers with the Red Cross.
She also teaches Sunday school at the same church her family attended after the war. Back then, some churchgoers rejected them, but she still found security in her faith. “I learned that we don’t worship people; we worship God.”

Her only daughter teaches at a Christian school and works with a church youth group.

Seattle Pacific University Students,
who were interned in 1942