Born: 10 July 1920, United States
Died: 25 September 1994
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Mari Yoriko Sabusawa
The following is republished from the Densho Encyclopedia, in line with the Creative Commons licensing. It was written by Greg Robinson.
Mari Sabusawa Michener (1920–94) was a Japanese American activist and philanthropist.
Early Life and Wartime Incarceration
Mari Yoriko Sabusawa was born in Las Animas, Colorado, one of three children of Sutakichi Sabusawa and Riki Yamagaki. Her parents were Japanese immigrants who owned a melon ranch on the edge of the great western drylands. Her father died when Mary (as she was then known) was 9, and when she was 15, her family moved to Long Beach, California. There she attended Long Beach Polytechnic High School, and was an active member of Long Beach’s Japanese Presbyterian Church, serving as secretary and chairman of the local branch of Christian Endeavor. In 1938, Mary Sabusawa enrolled at Long Beach Junior College. She joined the local JACL and served as an officer. In September 1941, she won the Southern District JACL oratorical contest with a speech, “What is Our Part in the Present Emergency?”
Following President Franklin Roosevelt’s issuing of Executive Order 9066, Sabusawa and her family were confined at Santa Anita (she later claimed to have occupied the stall of the celebrated thoroughbred Equipoise) and then was sent to Camp Amache (which was not very distant, ironically, from her Las Animas birthplace). However, she remained at Amache for only one week before she was selected to leave camp under the auspices of the newly-formed National Japanese American Student Relocation Council. With support from Dr. John W. Thomas of the American Baptist Home Mission Society, whom she would later refer to as her “adopted father,” Sabusawa received a scholarship to study at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Sabusawa spent two years at Antioch, where she chaired Antioch’s College Race Relations Committee.
Sabusawa helped raise scholarship funds to attract the school’s first Black student in the modern age, future author Edythe Scott Backus (who then recruited in turn her sister, future civil rights icon Coretta Scott King). As a student representative, Sabusawa spent a great deal of her time traveling to local forums to deliver talks in support of Japanese American resettlement.
As part of Antioch’s famed cooperative work program, she was assigned to Washington DC as an analyst for the Analysis Division of the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service, where she used her knowledge of Japanese to translate and study Japanese broadcasts. (She later remarked on the ironic nature of her wartime leap from camp to work at a secret defense agency).
Post-Incarceration Career and Marriage
After leaving Antioch, Sabusawa moved to Chicago, where she lived with her mother and enrolled in graduate work in sociology at the University of Chicago. She meanwhile was hired by the fledgling American Council on Race Relations, a lobbying and information group, to serve as an assistant to its director Robert Weaver (who would later become the first U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development). During Sabusawa’s tenure, the Council hired Nisei activist Setsuko Matsunaga Nishi, a fellow Chicago sociology student, to compile the widely circulated pamphlet, “Facts About Japanese Americans.” After the Council folded, Sabusawa took a position as assistant editor of the official publication of the American Library Association.
Although her activism was informed by concern for diverse minority groups, Sabusawa also worked heavily in Japanese communities, especially through the JACL. In 1947, she became the first chair of the new JACL Midwest District Council. A year later, she was elected as the first woman president of the Chicago chapter of the JACL. Meanwhile, she was elected to the JACL’s National Board, where she served as national secretary for two years. She also worked with a Chicago-based committee that assisted with the integration of Japanese “war brides” who met and married American soldiers.
In late 1954, Sabusawa and other Chicago JACL leaders were invited to a lunch sponsored by LIFE magazine, whose editors had commissioned a story on Japanese “war brides” in the Chicago area. There Sabusawa met the popular novelist James A. Michener, whom LIFE had commissioned to write the story. Sabusawa forthrightly told Michener she objected to his novel Sayonara, set in US-occupied Japan, because it suggested that white-Asian romances would inevitably meet with tragedy. The two hit it off nonetheless, and soon began seeing each other. Within a year, on October 23, 1955, the couple were married.
Following her marriage, Mari Sabusawa Michener left the workplace and moved to Bucks County, Pennsylvania with her husband. She devoted her time to caring for Michener’s health and managing his career. The couple traveled around the world together and did research for Michener’s books. In 1960 the two performed in a New Jersey summer stock production of the musical South Pacific (whose book had been adapted from Michener’s novel Tales of the South Pacific). Mari Michener played a cameo role in the 1978 TV miniseries Centennial, also adapted from a Michener novel, on the history of her home state of Colorado.
Later Life and Philanthropy
Throughout her later years, Mari Sabusawa Michener threw herself into philanthropy, both in her and her husband’s names. One center of their interest was art. In the 1950s, the couple gifted a valuable collection of 19th Century Japanese woodblock prints to the Honolulu Academy of Art, to whom they eventually donated $20 million. In later years they gave the University of Texas the “Michener Art Collection,” which included almost 400 artworks, predominantly 20th-century American paintings. The main center of the couple’s promotion of American art was the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. In addition to choosing the pieces to donate to the museum (especially Pennsylvania artists and Abstract Expressionist art), from the beginning, Mari Sabusawa Michener played a foundational role with establishing programs for docents. She also lobbied Museum trustees to create the George Nakashima Memorial Reading Room, which featured furniture designed by the renowned Nisei woodworker and designer. Her most significant gift to the Michener Museum was a $1.5 million legacy which the museum received following her death. It made possible the creation of the Mari Sabusawa Michener Wing, a two-story addition that housed a gallery celebrating local Bucks County artists.
Another area where James and Mari Sabusawa Michener offered massive financial support was higher education. Their joint charitable donations totaled more than $100 million. In particular, the Micheners donated $67 million to the University of Texas, which created the Michener Center for Writers and endowed a Mari Sabusawa Michener Chair of Creative Writing.
Beyond her partnership with her husband, Mari Sabusawa Michener made extensive donations in her own name at Antioch College, her alma mater, and at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, Colorado, which created the Mari Michener Gallery in her name. To offer financial assistance to racial and ethnic minority students, she created the Mari Sabusawa Scholarship Fund at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida. Finally, Michener established a fund in the name of John W. Thomas, her “adopted father,” to assist the American Baptists in attending seminars, conferences, and continuing education programs, and to promote diversity.
Although Mari Sabusawa Michener retreated from active involvement with Japanese Americans after her marriage, her wartime experience fueled her and her husband’s continuing interest in social justice. She remained a semiofficial roving JACL goodwill ambassador. Sometime before 1983, she endowed the JACL’s Mari and James Michener Scholarship for college students. She also spoke out about the impact of her wartime experience, although she did not publicly participate in Japanese American redress movements. In 1969, when she reviewed Bill Hosokawa ‘s historical study Nisei for the Chicago Tribune, she stated frankly that on “Easter Sunday 1942 my family and I were sent to a concentration camp. In spite of our citizenship, we were treated as enemy aliens because of our Japanese ancestry.” Eckard College Vice president Bruce L. Robinson, who knew her well, said that wartime confinement had “scarred her life very deeply.”
Mari Sabusawa Michener died of pancreatic cancer on September 25, 1994, three years before her husband.