Their paths here differed, but the four men from California share a common story of being spared from the Japanese internment camps of World War II by finding a spot at a university willing to take them in.

In the spring of 1942, Gyo Obata was a promising young architecture student at the University of California-Berkeley when he saw fliers go up on utility poles announcing the detention of people of Japanese descent along the West Coast. Hoping to avoid that fate, he wrote a letter to the best architecture school he could find outside the evacuation area. The school's response came back in a telegram.

Friends Ted Ono and Richard Henmi thought they had found a safe harbor at the University of Colorado. They received permission to leave a temporary detention center in Fresno to go to Boulder. But once they arrived, they were told the school had already filled its quota for Japanese-American students. At the last minute, they found another school that accepted them.

And Yoshio Matsumoto, a third-year engineering student at Berkeley, was sent to a makeshift camp at an old horse racetrack when he could find no college to take him in. Then, just days before he would have been sent to a permanent camp in the desert of Utah, he got word a school would enroll him.

So the four college students boarded trains for Union Station in St. Louis. From there, they made their way to the campus of Washington University, unsure of what to expect from a school that offered a rare beacon of light for students like them.

They were among more than 30 Japanese-American students who found refuge at Washington U. in the fall of 1942, even as their families had to abandon homes and businesses to live behind barbed wire.

Now, these former students' stories have somewhat unexpectedly bubbled to the surface of the campus's conscience. This semester, the university has sponsored a host of programs related to Japanese internment, including its freshman reading program, an art exhibit and lectures.

As the school planned these events, it has dug through its archives, rediscovered old letters and documents, and reconnected with some of its alumni who came to the university under these unusual circumstances.

Many of the graduates went on to become prominent architects, doctors, engineers and professors. Some returned to the West Coast after the war.

Others made St. Louis their home. Among them is Obata, 86, a world-renowned architect and one of the founders of the firm HOK. His name graces the St. Louis Walk of Fame, and many of his designs dot the city's skyline.

Dr. George Sato, 87, is a retired pediatrician who practiced here for four decades. And Henmi, 85, is another noted architect who has designed a number of downtown St. Louis hotels and other area buildings.

During the war, more than 5,500 Japanese-Americans from the West Coast left the internment camps — or avoided them altogether — by coming to the Midwest and East Coast to attend college. Some found the colleges on their own. Others were assigned to schools through the National Japanese American Student Relocation Council.

But not all schools were as hospitable as Washington U. Some universities ignored the inquiries from students, while others opened their doors to only a handful of students. And some — such as the University of Kansas — denied them altogether.

With anti-Asian tension building on the West Coast, especially after the attack on Pearl Harbor, many of the students were nervous about what sort of a reception they would receive in St. Louis.

What they found surprised them.

"I didn't feel any prejudice in the St. Louis area at all," said Obata. "It was night and day. Everyone was really friendly."

SNOWBALL EFFECT

The school didn't set out this year to unearth this mostly forgotten footnote of its history. Instead, the idea for one event triggered interest in another, leading to questions about the university's role in it all.

For example, the school happened to choose Julie Otsuka's "When the Emperor was Divine," a novel about Japanese internment, for its annual freshman reading program. The selection struck a chord with the family of Andy Matsumoto, one of the members of the freshman class. Matsumoto's family told the school that Andy's grandfather — Yoshio — had come to the university six decades ago to avoid the internment camps.

"We actually discovered the Wash U. connection after we had chosen the book," said Alicia Schnell, coordinator of the Freshman Reading Program. "We had all been vaguely aware of the Obata connection, but we didn't know there had been a pretty significant number of Japanese-Americans who studied here during the war."

So when Yoshio Matsumoto visited his grandson this fall — his first time back on campus since he graduated — he received a special meeting with Chancellor Mark Wrighton.

Washington U.'s Center for Ethics & Human Values also happened to have planned an art exhibit this semester focusing on depictions of Japanese internment in the works of two artists — Chiura Obata and Ansel Adams. The two friends would go on family camping trips to Yosemite before the war, and both of their sons later attended Washington U.

Wanting to learn more about this piece of university history, the school's archivists dug up letters from the files of George Throop, the university's chancellor during World War II.

In one letter dated April 1942, Throop said the university had no objection to accepting Japanese-American students, provided the military and FBI were OK with it.

"The attitude of the University is that these students, if citizens, have exactly the same rights as other students who decide to register in the University," he wrote, "but it is possible that situations might arise which would be beyond our control, and for which we could not be responsible."

While Throop said the university took in all Japanese-American students who inquired that year, there appeared to be some limit to the university's benevolence.

"I am not sure that it is desirable that a large number should attend this University, but we have no objection to accepting a reasonable number of registrations of Japanese," he wrote in another letter dated July 24.

The school received at least one protest about the policy. Throop wrote to a woman from Clayton who was apparently upset because she mistakenly thought that a Japanese-American student had taken the place of another student.

Yet, while the school was a welcoming place to Japanese-American students — as it had been for women and Jewish students since the turn of the century — it continued to bar black students.

The school admitted its first African-American student in 1881, and a handful more followed after that. But the school ended the practice by the turn of century and later denied that it had ever admitted black students.

Washington U. did not start enrolling black students again until the late 1940s and early 1950s.

"The truth is that Washington University's record on diversity is mixed," said Leah Merrified, the special assistant to the chancellor for diversity initiatives.

'HOUSEBOY' DUTIES

By most accounts, the Japanese-American students became active parts of campus life at Washington University.

Obata was president of the Architectural Society, a member of the Student Senate and art editor for the yearbook, according to school yearbooks. And in the 1945 yearbook, under a picture of George Kazuto Shimizu, who was dressed in a baseball uniform, it was noted that he was the team's "number two hurler" with a 3-3 record.

The Campus Y (or YMCA) was a welcoming place for many of the students and became the hub of their social lives. The alumni recall being invited to many people's homes for dinner and parties.

The Christ Church Cathedral downtown had weekly socials for the students and other Japanese-Americans who were relocated to St. Louis during the war, Henmi recalled.

While most of the students initially lived in dorms, many soon moved into rooms in nearby homes to save money.

"We were barely able to scrape enough for tuition," said Ono, who moved to Berkeley after he graduated and operated a gift shop there for many years. "So many of us — not all of us — were 'houseboys,' which meant working as domestics for families in St. Louis."

Tuition at Washington University was $200 a semester at the time. Had the students been able to attend the University of California, they would have paid far less for their education.

Now, the University of California is honoring Japanese-American students whose education was interrupted by the evacuation order. Next month, the school will award honorary degrees to Matsumoto, Ono, Obata and other Washington U. alumni.

While Matsumoto will finally get a degree of sorts from Berkeley, he says he still feels a special affection for Washington University.

But as welcoming as the school was to students like Matsumoto, the gesture did not erase the injustice of the internment camps.

During the war, the students were reminded of their precarious situation over one Christmas break, when they visited and stayed with their families in the internment camps.

Henmi, who visited his parents at a camp in Jerome, Ark., recalled the surreal situation of having to pay for meals there as a "visitor" while his family received them for free. Obata, who also stayed with his family in the camps, recalls a similar experience.

"It was just crazy," he said. "I was a free person, and they were like prisoners."