Alumni Gazette

Remembering a ‘New Start’

When John Fuyuume ’48E, ’50E (MM) remembers the painful disruption caused to him and his family six decades ago when they were interned in a camp for Japanese Americans, he likes to think instead about life on a “farm.”

The farm was Seabrook Farms, once one of the largest and most prosperous frozen food companies in the world. With its headquarters and chief growing region in southern New Jersey, Seabrook was a continent away from the bleak “relocation center” in Gila Valley, Arizona, where Fuyuume’s family had been sent from Los Angeles in 1942.

In an improbable meeting of the economic necessity and the social improvisation of wartime, the Fuyuumes joined other families of former internees who flocked to Seabrook after President Franklin Roosevelt’s executive order interning more than 120,000 Japanese Americans came under court scrutiny.

By 1947, nearly 500 Japanese-American families had accepted an offer from company founder Charles F. Seabrook, who promised them work and a place to live. In the following years, Seabrook employed as many as 30 different ethnic groups—many of them refugees from other countries—on its 20,000–acre complex before the company’s demise in the 1970s.

“We were a multicultural community long before those words were used,” says Fuyuume.

Today, 60 years after his release under a program that sent him to the Eastman School of Music just before his family took refuge at Seabrook, Fuyuume is the director of the Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center in Upper Deerfield Township, New Jersey.

He credits company founder Seabrook with helping thousands of refugees get a new start in life at a time when hatred and racism against them ran high. Seabrook faced a labor shortage during and after World War II, but he had other motives as well, Fuyuume says.

“All of the people who came here have very fond memories of Mr. Seabrook,” he says. “He invited people to work here for business reasons, but I know for a fact that he made sure all the surrounding communities didn’t discriminate against us. He was altruistic in that way.”

Among those who took Seabrook up on his offer were Fuyuume’s parents, who moved to New Jersey after their release in 1945. The younger Fuyuume had been allowed to leave the camp for Eastman in 1944 under the sponsorship of the Presbyterian Church.

Fuyuume, who played the organ in the camp’s church but who had not had supervised lessons in more than two years, was encouraged to apply to Eastman. He stayed to get a bachelor’s and a master’s degree and was planning to go on for a Ph.D. in music.

During the summers between school years, he visited his parents at Seabrook, working on the farms to offset college expenses. He met company founder Seabrook, who encouraged him to return to the company full time after graduation.

Fuyuume eventually rose to the executive ranks of Seabrook, and in 1979 he was named vice president and secretary of Gotaas-Larsen Shipping Corporation, a company owned by a conglomerate created by Seabrook’s sons.

In those jobs, he traveled the world, with assignments in London and the Bahamas. But he and his family never moved back to California, where his parents had been forced to give up their small grocery store in Los Angeles.
Fuyuume, who had grown up playing the piano, also had to leave behind the family’s Steinway grand piano, giving it to his first music teacher.

Faced with the injustice of internment, the families did their best to get on with their lives, Fuyuume says. “One has to remember that not a single act of espionage happened before, during, or after Pearl Harbor,” he says. “The internment can’t be justified.”

In 1988, Congress authorized a $20,000 reparation to the internees. Not enough, Fuyuume once noted, to buy back his family’s piano, much less to compensate for the damage caused to the lives of those displaced.

After retiring in 1990, Fuyuume returned to Seabrook, where he helped establish the museum.

Visitors have come from as far away as Japan, Great Britain, and Kazakhstan, and the museum’s story has been featured in The New York Times, the Washington Post, and other newspapers. A Philadelphia public television station produced a documentary about it in 1994 on the 50th anniversary of the release of the internees.

Most recently, the museum was selected for a Rutgers University project to use a new statewide “digital highway” to give schools across New Jersey (and elsewhere) high-speed access to the museum, including its trove of photographs.

“It’s a tiny museum, but it’s received worldwide attention,” Fuyuume says. “This tiny town has become famous.”

—Scott Hauser