Ruiko Moritsugu, retired medical library clerk from Garden City, dies at 92

Garden City’s Ruiko Moritsugu was a tiny, soft-spoken woman. And while her husband, Henry Moritsugu, a Newsday editor for some 50 years before retiring in 2019, was vocal and extroverted, her voice rang loudly in well-crafted letters to the editor.

One 1983 missive about reparations paid to Japanese American citizens shipped to armed camps during World War II noted the United States "was also at war with Italy and Germany. I would ask ... why all Italian-American and German-American families were not also subjected to sudden, forced removal, leaving behind homes, business, careers ... to be put into concentration camps. The only answer can be that these were white Americans, that this was a racist policy."

"She wasn’t really an activist, but she would write letters when she saw something about Japanese Americans or Asian Americans in general that she thought was racist or inaccurate," said her son Ken Moritsugu, a Beijing-based Associated Press correspondent and former Newsday reporter.

She wrote from experience. As a Japanese Canadian child, she and her family had been banished to a farm camp in her home country to work as laborers. But in her day-to-day life, Ruiko Moritsugu betrayed no bitterness, only grace.

"Any time I spent with her was special because she was a good listener — intelligent and just unassuming. A quiet elegance," said retired Newsday editor Gwen Young, of Huntington, who worked for decades with Henry Moritsugu. "She never tried to dominate a conversation. Even though she knew a lot, she wasn't boastful about it. You know how some people try to show you how much they know? She was never like that. Just a lovely person."

Ruiko (pronounced REE-koh) Moritsugu died May 22 at The Grand Pavilion for Rehabilitation and Nursing at Rockville Centre, following a short battle with cancer. She was 92.

Until retiring in 2015, she had worked 26 years as a clerk at the Winthrop University Hospital medical library in Mineola, now the William C. Hollis Health Sciences Library at NYU Langone Hospital – Long Island.

"Ruiko cataloged books and she was very meticulous about that," said her retired co-worker and Garden City neighbor Carole Bennett, now of Pennsylvania. How meticulous? "She would argue with the Library of Congress," Bennett said, chuckling.

Born in Canada

Born Ruiko Nakashima in Mission, British Columbia, Canada, on June 29, 1933, she was the fifth of six children of Japanese immigrants and naturalized Canadian citizens Teizo Nakashima, a Baptist fruit-farm owner, and Tsutayo Kiuchi Nakashima, a Protestant United Church of Canada homemaker.

Although Canada entered World War II in 1939, days after Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland, it did not incarcerate its Japanese citizens until sometime after Japan’s bombing of the U.S. Hawaiian naval base Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, which drew the United States into the war. The following month, Canada began its forced relocation of citizens of Japanese heritage. (U.S. incarcerations began a month later.)

"In Canada," said Princeton graduate Ken Moritsugu, "you could keep your family together if you agreed to be farmworkers somewhere in the interior. So that's what my mom's family did. They moved to Alberta to work on someone's farm. So she went through that forced relocation experience."

After the war, the family settled in Montreal. There Ruiko attended William Dawson High School and graduated from McGill University in 1953. At a Japanese Canadian social event she met Montreal Star journalist Henry Moritsugu, and they married in December 1960.

The family immigrated to the United States in 1965 under fortuitous circumstances. Henry had been offered a job with The Philadelphia Inquirer. But the United States had already reached its annual immigration quota of 185 people of Japanese heritage. As the Toronto Star reported, it took the intervention of Pennsylvania Sen. Hugh Scott to help secure special status allowing him, his wife and their two sons to come here and later become naturalized citizens.

Moved to Long Island

They later moved to West Hempstead when Newsday recruited Henry, and finally settled in Garden City in 1972. Ruiko worked as a homemaker and, when her children were grown, took the job at the medical library.

Ken Moritsugu recalls one yearly ritual in particular. "Every year she made Thanksgiving dinner — it was an all-day thing. And after my brother and I left, my dad would invite single young reporters or editors from Newsday to come over for Thanksgiving. He enjoyed mentoring young journalists. They always had eight to 10 people for dinner."

Bennett remembers those holiday meals as well. "For the last five years that I lived in Garden City, I would have Thanksgiving dinner with her, and her Thanksgiving dinner was perfect," she said. "It wasn't like a big stomach-churning spread. It was just ... perfect."

In addition to her husband, Henry, and son Ken, she is survived by her son Jim Moritsugu, a financial adviser and former symphony clarinetist, of Jackson, Mississippi; and several nieces, nephews, grandnieces and grandnephews from her late siblings.

A visitation will be held Saturday from 4 to 6 p.m. at Cassidy Funeral Home in Mineola. She was cremated, and her remains will be buried at Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto, the site of Henry Moritsugu's family's graves.