PORTLAND — A woman raised in Hood River, Ore., and forever aware of the injustices perpetrated against her grandparents during World War II is completing a symbolic circle that began with a dark era in the nation’s history.
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a 1942 executive order that resulted in 120,000 men, women and children of Japanese ancestry being evicted from their homes and imprisoned.
“When my grandfather was in jail in Portland, my grandmother visited him,” said the Rev. Diana Akiyama, 61. “During that visit he told my grandmother to get the kids baptized to show they were American, so she had a Japanese Methodist minister baptize them.”
It did not matter; her grandparents and their children, including a son who would later be Akiyama’s father, were sent from Hood River to a prison camp in Idaho.
And now, more than 75 years later, their granddaughter will be the first Asian American woman in the United States to become a bishop in the Episcopal Church.
Although her grandparents and parents are dead, Akiyama believes they would view her election to bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Oregon as a sign that people can overcome a bitter past.
The family had owned and operated an orchard in Hood River. While their land was not seized during World War II, their home was looted, stripped of everything by neighbors. After their release from the prison camp, the family returned to rebuild their lives, repair the home and restore the orchard.
“My father would be pleased about what has happened to me,” she said. “But he was not a man about power and prestige. And my mother always told me to not become too full of myself, to always be a decent human being.”
This summer, Akiyama was one of four candidates in the running for bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Oregon. She was elected during an online convention, the first ever such convention in the Episcopal church because of social distancing regulations.
She will be consecrated – the formal term – early next year and oversee 70 churches with more than 15,000 congregants in the western half of Oregon.
Akiyama is currently the vicar at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Kapaau, Hawaii, and also the dean of Waiolaihui’ia School for Formation.
She will move to Portland later this year and start the process of making the transition into her new role.
The diocese took more than a year to find a successor for Bishop Michael Hanley, who began his service in the diocese in 2010 and will retire in January. In 2017, Hanley was named in a lawsuit claiming he physically assaulted a female priest and misused money donated by the deceased grandmother of Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler. In April 2019, one of the lawyers reported that the case had been settled and a judge dismissed the lawsuit the following month. Court records didn’t disclose the terms of the settlement.
Akiyama’s path to bishop began years ago when she became the first Asian American woman in the Episcopalian church to be ordained to the priesthood. She said her new role is not considered a promotion in the way those in the secular world may see it.
“It’s an 18-month process of discernment,” she explained. “Just as the way of becoming a priest is. Each is a distinct calling that involves a time to think, discern and pray.”
In 2019, when she learned a new bishop would eventually be selected, Akiyama said she asked what God wanted her to do.
“I had to have a detachment and an absence of ambition,” she said. “It could not be about me. I had to trust in the unknown. It is a reminder that we are not in control.”
Called the priesthood
When the war ended, some semblance of life returned and Akiyama’s father moved from Hood River to Wheeler, Ore. There he met his future wife. Akiyama was born in Wheeler. Her parents later moved to Hood River.
After graduating from the University of Oregon, Akiyama worked as a drug and rehabilitation counselor. She sensed she should do more with her life, and she considered pursuing a doctorate in clinical psychology and becoming a psychotherapist.
“Then I started wondering if it might have something to do with ordained ministry,” she said. “I met with the rector at St. Mark’s in Hood River. After a series of conversations, I finally came to the conclusion I was being called to the priesthood.”
She graduated from the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, Calif. Akiyama said her mother was “very proud,” her father less so.
“He was worried what kind of life it would be for me,” she said. “By the time I was ordained, he was fully supportive. He had watched and reflected. He realized this truly was a calling.”
Growing up, the family attended an Episcopalian church in Hood River. She said her father, while a Christian, was critical of the church because of his frustration with the lack of support from the Hood River religious community when he and his family were swept up in the anti-Japanese sentiment sweeping across the United States.
Akiyama said she will arrive in Oregon at a critical time. The state, as is the nation, is polarized.
“I will step directly into the ongoing protests around Black Lives Matter, and with what’s happened in Portland,” she said. “The southern part of the diocese has a different view about these issues.”
