Tetsu Sugi

Aided the Japanese community devastated by internment camps, supported troubled youth, and developed housing for older Japanese Americans

Tetsu Sugi fought discrimination against Japanese Americans and served the community by becoming a professional social worker. Despite earning a degree and teaching credential from UCLA in 1936, she was told she could only teach as a substitute due to her race.

Instead, she worked in her parents’ grocery store until the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack. Determined to avoid the relocation and incarceration of Japanese Americans, she decided to leave her family and move to Little Rock, Arkansas to stay with a friend. She wanted to teach at the two internment camps that were being built nearby. However, anticipating that she would not be allowed to teach but would indeed be interned, she moved to Chicago where she found work at the Christopher Settlement House.

It was there that she learned of professional social work from a University of Pittsburg MSW alumnus. Receiving her MSW in 1946, she worked in a Pittsburgh settlement house but returned to Los Angeles to help her family resettle after their internment. There, she joined the Church Welfare Bureau of the Church Federation of Los Angeles as a youth group worker.

In 1950, Sugi passed the state exam and became registered in the newly formed state social work registry, the first in the nation and the precursor to licensure in California. For the next decade, Sugi pioneered transcultural work with Japanese youth and parents in Los Angeles as they struggled with a fast-evolving American youth culture and its clashes with traditional conservative Japanese values. When the young people she worked with became adults and had children of their own, she developed interventions around these issues of cultural conflict that spanned three generations through group work and community education.

In the 1960s, recognizing her work on intergenerational cultural conflict, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) funded a research project on youth and delinquency at UCLA and a research practice project with the Campfire Girls called Operation Bluebird, working on juvenile delinquency prevention with young girls. Sugi was recruited by both projects as a consultant. She would apply this experience and knowledge to the broader community when she entered public service with the Los Angeles County Probation Department and then the Los Angeles County Bureau of Public Assistance. In 1970, Sugi utilized her community organization skills to develop senior citizens’ residences in the Little Tokyo neighborhood, with the first residence built in 1975.

In 1978, Sugi retired from the County and was recruited by San Diego State University to work on statewide implementation of the Lau vs. Nichols Supreme Court decision requiring that non-English speaking students receive supplemental instruction. She also joined the Employee Assistance Program with the Los Angeles Unified School District. After retirement, Sugi continued her community service by volunteering at the seniors’ residence that she helped establish in Little Tokyo. Sugi passed away in 1997 at the age of 82.