The Chula Vista School District near San Diego has voted to name a local elementary school after a Japanese American farmer and former internee in Crystal City, Texas, reports the San Diego Union-Trib.
The $47.5 million Saburo Muraoka Elementary School is being built near the field Muraoka was forced to abandon while imprisoned in a World War II incarceration camp.
Muraoka returned to Chula Vista after the war determined to help patch the tense relationship between Japan and the United States. He helped establish the San Diego-Yokohama Sister City Program.
“He said that if the Japanese had known the Americans and the Americans had known the Japanese, there would have been no war,” said Saburo’s grandson, Roy Muraoka,48, said.
Muraoka was also a local force in farming and is responsible for several innovations in agriculture.
He died in 1983.
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