News
Judges and Judiciary
Feb. 14, 2002
Standing on Shoulders of Giants
LOS ANGELES - The Japanese word for heroism is gamon. "It means to endure," Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Fred Fujioka said recently. Gamon has personal meaning to Fujioka because of the experience of his Japanese-American relatives. Some were interned following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, while others fought as U.S. soldiers during World War II.
PROFILE
Fred Fujioka
Superior Court Judge
Los Angeles
Career highlights: Appointed by Gov. Gray Davis, January 2001; partner, Gomez, Fujioka & Furukawa, 1984-2001; deputy public defender, Los Angeles, 1978-84; staff attorney, San Fernando Valley Neighborhood Legal Services, 1977-78
Law School: Boalt Hall, 1977
Age: 51
By Jeffrey Anderson
Daily Journal Staff Writer
LOS ANGELES - The Japanese word for heroism is gamon.
"It means to endure," Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Fred Fujioka said recently.
Gamon has personal meaning to Fujioka because of the experience of his Japanese-American relatives. Some were interned following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, while others fought as U.S. soldiers during World War II.
"To me, it's the knowledge that you might not change things, but you're going to get through tough times," Fujioka said. "Basically, my definition of heroism is doing your job."
And, like the people who raised him, Fujioka hesitates to take credit for fulfilling his duty, which is to preside over civil commitments in Department 95, the dismal county mental health court on an industrial thoroughfare north of downtown Los Angeles.
It's an assignment that most judges regard as a career killer but which Fujioka requested.
"I know it's not very sexy to be down here among the great unwashed masses," he said of the daily parade of mentally ill defendants who come before him. "But we're like a family here, and everyone works together."
Fujioka was in his chambers, where one of the photographs on the walls is of his father posing with two cousins, all three in uniform. His father was awarded a Bronze Star for service in the U.S. Army, he said, and one of his father's cousins died in battle two weeks after the photo was taken - just one month shy of V-E Day.
"There was a time in this country when no one thought a judge or a lawyer or a soldier could look like us," Fujioka said. "The men I grew up with did heroic things. They trusted that if they served, things would be better if they survived, or for future generations if they didn't."
"I haven't always thought of my family in heroic terms," he said. "I guess we don't always recognize heroes when we meet them."
Fujioka, 51, at first downplayed the psychological and emotional effects of the internment of thousands of Japanese-Americans, including his grandparents and his mother.
"My people have lived in the center of the maelstrom of history," he said. "It's a common, shared experience that my generation grew up hearing about and has taken for granted.
"Every one of us has a story."
Yet he admitted that the commitment of his people to fight as Americans and the dignity of the survivors of the internment camps have shaped him both off and on the bench.
"They bled so I could someday do this job," he said. "I'm conscious every day of that fact, and it motivates me to give back."
For the last year, Fujioka has heard sexually violent predator cases that have challenged him to learn the intricacies of criminal and mental health law. He recently was named senior judge of Department 95.
Attorneys in his court described him as humble, patient, and willing to devote personal time to studying an evolving body of law that often requires him to rule on cases of first impression.
"It's not about me," he said of his elevation to the bench. "It's about a bunch of people.
"Nobody gets here by themselves."
His grandfather, Jiro Fujioka, also known as Fred, already had made a fortune and lost it in the Great Kanto Earthquake that devastated Tokyo in 1923, when he moved to Los Angeles and established the second largest Oldsmobile dealership in Southern California.
On Dec. 7, 1941, just two hours after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, federal agents arrested Jiro Fujioka, confiscated his money, locked him up in Fort Leavenworth for six months and later interned him at Hart Mountain in Wyoming.
"No one knew whether he was dead or alive," Fujioka said.
The events of 1941 led his father, William Fujioka, to enlist in the U.S. Army, on April 1, 1942.
"My dad had grown up a spoiled rich kid and had been having a good time all his life," Fujioka said. "He told people it was an April Fool's Day joke, but he was just being self-deprecating. I know he was making a statement of his loyalty to this country."
Fujioka said his father joined the 442 Regimental Combat Team, which served alongside the 100th Battalion - the Hawaiian National Guard - and together they became the most decorated units in the history of the United States.
He was wounded twice in battle, Fujioka said, pointing to the photo beside his desk of his father and two cousins, Stanley and Howard Hayami, somewhere in Southern France, a month before Berlin fell to the Allied Forces. In the photo, the men are smiling.
"They were ready to get out of there," he said. "Stanley went back to the front, though, and was killed two weeks later.
"He knew one of them had to go, so he volunteered. My dad dug out his body."
After the war, Fujioka's father suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, he said. He rarely talked about the war, never left the house and took six baths a day.
"Sometimes he would think that I was his partner and that the FBI was out to get him," Fujioka said.
"My dad never pulled it back together," he continued. "We didn't learn about the Bronze Star until he threw out his medals and my mother contacted the Army for replacements.
"I had to come to appreciate what he had done."
Fujioka's mother, who had been interned at Manzanar, in Central California, supported the family by working in a flower shop.
"After my brother and I graduated from college, my mother got her degree and became a teacher," he said.
A graduate of Montebello High School in the class of 1969, Fujioka said life at home was "not exactly 'Father Knows Best'" when he was growing up but that his extended family was always there for him.
His uncles, who lived down the street, also served in World War II, he said.
One uncle had been on his way to Paris and was passing through occupied territory when he came across a band of Germans shooting up a French village. He killed two Germans and captured 15 others, and France awarded him the Crosse de Guerre, Fujioka said. The U.S. Army later awarded him a Bronze Star.
"My other uncle is a kibei, which means born in the United States and raised in Japan," Fujioka said. "He had a black belt in judo and karate and used to jump out of airplanes behind enemy lines dressed as a Japanese soldier.
"Those guys were real cowboys."
Like his father, his uncles rarely talked about the war, Fujioka said.
"They thought they were ordinary people," he said. "If you looked them in the eye and called them a hero they'd walk away from you without saying anything.
"I've been blessed to grow up around guys like that. It's like standing on the shoulders of giants. There was a price to be paid, and it wasn't paid by me.
"They were a generation of guys who were smarter than us but who ended up with nothing."
Fujioka said his family's legacy in part motivated him to attend the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He had received a senior appointment to the academy but blew out his knee in a high school wrestling match. Instead of West Point, Fujioka attended the University of Southern California on an academic scholarship, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1973.
He credits academic success to effort, not ability.
"I studied a lot, worked, coached youth sports and practiced martial arts," he said, noting that he has a fourth-degree black belt in aikido.
Fujioka spent his sophomore year in Waseda University in Tokyo, and he speaks fluent Japanese as well as fluent Spanish.
He graduated from Boalt Hall School of Law in 1977.
Fujioka worked as a staff attorney with San Fernando Valley Neighborhood Legal Services from 1977 to 1978 and then joined the Los Angeles County public defender's office, where he worked until 1984, assigned mostly to Department 95.
He then went into private practice as a partner with Gomez, Fujioka & Furukawa and continued to do criminal defense work in the mental health court.
Fujioka said the years he spent as a deputy public defender and the time he served as a panel attorney in Department 95 while in private practice prepared him for the work he does now. In January 2001, when Gov. Gray Davis swore him in, he asked to be assigned to the mental health court.
After five months as a judge in the Criminal Courts Building, he got his wish.
"I knew that I wanted to be here," he said.
"Fred cares about the legal system, and he cares about people," Leslie Furukawa, his former law partner, said. "Litigators always want to go before a judge who treats people with respect and who shows compassion, and that's what he does."
A high school letterman in both football and wrestling, Fujioka has a broad chest and walks with the swagger of an ex-jock, although with a slight limp.
"My knees are fine," he said, as he made his way through a crowded waiting area and into Department 95B, a cramped room with white, cinder block walls. "It's my back that bothers me now."
Fujioka slipped on his black robe and took the bench, swiftly dispensing with a number of preliminary matters, often turning to the defendants to afford them opportunity to speak.
"Judge Fujioka is patient with counsel and inmates and especially clients who represent themselves," defense attorney Todd Melnik said. "He obviously devotes personal time to learning the issues, because the issues are complex, and you can't just pick everything up in court."
One prosecutor said, "He hasn't been around very long, and he's always dealing with new law, yet he has the courage to make decisions when there is no precedent to guide him.
"He's willing to acknowledge that he doesn't know everything, so he doesn't let his ego get in the way. At the same time, he never gets pushed around."
Fujioka secured a seat on the Superior Court bench in an uncontested election in 2001. He will take over the civil commitment calendar from Judge Harold Shabo, who retired in January.
His new docket will consist of insanity pleas, competency hearings and defendants who have served the maximum time in mental hospitals - matters full of clinical jargon that require him to grasp the maze of social services integrated into the court system.
For most judges, it is the opposite of a plum assignment. "The mental health court is not a job that's going to propel your career upward," one judge said.
Shabo, a recognized expert in the field, left Fujioka with a guidebook to assist him in his new assignment.
"Fred is going to make an excellent judge," Shabo said of his former colleague.
Of the new legal challenges Fujioka faces, he said, "I'm comfortable with my job, but still learning. If you feel as though you are always in command, then you're deluded and it's time to reassess.
"You start working with the system rather than working on the system."
In his spare time, Fujioka continues to coach sports and teach aikido. He got the urge to work with children in the early 1970s.
"It was an extension of the '60s," he said. "Everyone was trying to do something positive. I've always spent a lot of time in community centers."
As he goes through life, Fujioka said, the hardships his parents and grandparents faced will always live within him. Their dignity in the face of those hardships and their endurance has humbled him. Their example reminds him that neither doing his job nor working with kids guarantee that he will ever know if he is making a difference - yet he said that does not matter.
The point is to continue.
"I was thinking about this connection with my family the other day," Fujioka said. He had been helping students to prepare the dojo - the martial arts studio - for the arrival of a visiting aikido master. "There we were, all together, like a family, down on the floor on our hands and knees scrubbing the mats. It was kind of nice."
Here are some of Judge Fujioka's recent cases and the lawyers involved:
• People v. Faith, ZM002359
Prosecution: Andrea Bouas, deputy district attorney, Los Angeles
Defense: James Vitek, deputy public defender, Los Angeles
• People v. Thompson, ZM003038
Prosecution: Carlos Vasquez, deputy district attorney, Los Angeles
Defense: Michael Suzuki, deputy public defender, Los Angeles
•People v. Trenier, ZM003427
Prosecution: Joanne Baeza, deputy district attorney, Los Angeles
Defense: Joseph Gibbons, Sante Fe Springs
• People v. Swick, ZM004381
Prosecution: Carlos Vasquez, deputy district attorney, Los Angeles
Defense: Ken Fang, deputy public defender, Los Angeles
• People v. Irvin, ZM003676
Prosecution: Joanne Baeza, deputy district attorney, Los Angeles
Defense: Jennifer Peabody, Pasadena
Fred Fujioka
Superior Court Judge
Los Angeles
Career highlights: Appointed by Gov. Gray Davis, January 2001; partner, Gomez, Fujioka & Furukawa, 1984-2001; deputy public defender, Los Angeles, 1978-84; staff attorney, San Fernando Valley Neighborhood Legal Services, 1977-78
Law School: Boalt Hall, 1977
Age: 51
"It means to endure," Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Fred Fujioka said recently.
Gamon has personal meaning to Fujioka because of the experience of his Japanese-American relatives. Some were interned following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, while others fought as U.S. soldiers during World War II.
"To me, it's the knowledge that you might not change things, but you're going to get through tough times," Fujioka said. "Basically, my definition of heroism is doing your job."
And, like the people who raised him, Fujioka hesitates to take credit for fulfilling his duty, which is to preside over civil commitments in Department 95, the dismal county mental health court on an industrial thoroughfare north of downtown Los Angeles.
It's an assignment that most judges regard as a career killer but which Fujioka requested.
"I know it's not very sexy to be down here among the great unwashed masses," he said of the daily parade of mentally ill defendants who come before him. "But we're like a family here, and everyone works together."
Fujioka was in his chambers, where one of the photographs on the walls is of his father posing with two cousins, all three in uniform. His father was awarded a Bronze Star for service in the U.S. Army, he said, and one of his father's cousins died in battle two weeks after the photo was taken - just one month shy of V-E Day.
"There was a time in this country when no one thought a judge or a lawyer or a soldier could look like us," Fujioka said. "The men I grew up with did heroic things. They trusted that if they served, things would be better if they survived, or for future generations if they didn't."
"I haven't always thought of my family in heroic terms," he said. "I guess we don't always recognize heroes when we meet them."
Fujioka, 51, at first downplayed the psychological and emotional effects of the internment of thousands of Japanese-Americans, including his grandparents and his mother.
"My people have lived in the center of the maelstrom of history," he said. "It's a common, shared experience that my generation grew up hearing about and has taken for granted.
"Every one of us has a story."
Yet he admitted that the commitment of his people to fight as Americans and the dignity of the survivors of the internment camps have shaped him both off and on the bench.
"They bled so I could someday do this job," he said. "I'm conscious every day of that fact, and it motivates me to give back."
For the last year, Fujioka has heard sexually violent predator cases that have challenged him to learn the intricacies of criminal and mental health law. He recently was named senior judge of Department 95.
Attorneys in his court described him as humble, patient, and willing to devote personal time to studying an evolving body of law that often requires him to rule on cases of first impression.
"It's not about me," he said of his elevation to the bench. "It's about a bunch of people.
"Nobody gets here by themselves."
His grandfather, Jiro Fujioka, also known as Fred, already had made a fortune and lost it in the Great Kanto Earthquake that devastated Tokyo in 1923, when he moved to Los Angeles and established the second largest Oldsmobile dealership in Southern California.
On Dec. 7, 1941, just two hours after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, federal agents arrested Jiro Fujioka, confiscated his money, locked him up in Fort Leavenworth for six months and later interned him at Hart Mountain in Wyoming.
"No one knew whether he was dead or alive," Fujioka said.
The events of 1941 led his father, William Fujioka, to enlist in the U.S. Army, on April 1, 1942.
"My dad had grown up a spoiled rich kid and had been having a good time all his life," Fujioka said. "He told people it was an April Fool's Day joke, but he was just being self-deprecating. I know he was making a statement of his loyalty to this country."
Fujioka said his father joined the 442 Regimental Combat Team, which served alongside the 100th Battalion - the Hawaiian National Guard - and together they became the most decorated units in the history of the United States.
He was wounded twice in battle, Fujioka said, pointing to the photo beside his desk of his father and two cousins, Stanley and Howard Hayami, somewhere in Southern France, a month before Berlin fell to the Allied Forces. In the photo, the men are smiling.
"They were ready to get out of there," he said. "Stanley went back to the front, though, and was killed two weeks later.
"He knew one of them had to go, so he volunteered. My dad dug out his body."
After the war, Fujioka's father suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, he said. He rarely talked about the war, never left the house and took six baths a day.
"Sometimes he would think that I was his partner and that the FBI was out to get him," Fujioka said.
"My dad never pulled it back together," he continued. "We didn't learn about the Bronze Star until he threw out his medals and my mother contacted the Army for replacements.
"I had to come to appreciate what he had done."
Fujioka's mother, who had been interned at Manzanar, in Central California, supported the family by working in a flower shop.
"After my brother and I graduated from college, my mother got her degree and became a teacher," he said.
A graduate of Montebello High School in the class of 1969, Fujioka said life at home was "not exactly 'Father Knows Best'" when he was growing up but that his extended family was always there for him.
His uncles, who lived down the street, also served in World War II, he said.
One uncle had been on his way to Paris and was passing through occupied territory when he came across a band of Germans shooting up a French village. He killed two Germans and captured 15 others, and France awarded him the Crosse de Guerre, Fujioka said. The U.S. Army later awarded him a Bronze Star.
"My other uncle is a kibei, which means born in the United States and raised in Japan," Fujioka said. "He had a black belt in judo and karate and used to jump out of airplanes behind enemy lines dressed as a Japanese soldier.
"Those guys were real cowboys."
Like his father, his uncles rarely talked about the war, Fujioka said.
"They thought they were ordinary people," he said. "If you looked them in the eye and called them a hero they'd walk away from you without saying anything.
"I've been blessed to grow up around guys like that. It's like standing on the shoulders of giants. There was a price to be paid, and it wasn't paid by me.
"They were a generation of guys who were smarter than us but who ended up with nothing."
Fujioka said his family's legacy in part motivated him to attend the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He had received a senior appointment to the academy but blew out his knee in a high school wrestling match. Instead of West Point, Fujioka attended the University of Southern California on an academic scholarship, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1973.
He credits academic success to effort, not ability.
"I studied a lot, worked, coached youth sports and practiced martial arts," he said, noting that he has a fourth-degree black belt in aikido.
Fujioka spent his sophomore year in Waseda University in Tokyo, and he speaks fluent Japanese as well as fluent Spanish.
He graduated from Boalt Hall School of Law in 1977.
Fujioka worked as a staff attorney with San Fernando Valley Neighborhood Legal Services from 1977 to 1978 and then joined the Los Angeles County public defender's office, where he worked until 1984, assigned mostly to Department 95.
He then went into private practice as a partner with Gomez, Fujioka & Furukawa and continued to do criminal defense work in the mental health court.
Fujioka said the years he spent as a deputy public defender and the time he served as a panel attorney in Department 95 while in private practice prepared him for the work he does now. In January 2001, when Gov. Gray Davis swore him in, he asked to be assigned to the mental health court.
After five months as a judge in the Criminal Courts Building, he got his wish.
"I knew that I wanted to be here," he said.
"Fred cares about the legal system, and he cares about people," Leslie Furukawa, his former law partner, said. "Litigators always want to go before a judge who treats people with respect and who shows compassion, and that's what he does."
A high school letterman in both football and wrestling, Fujioka has a broad chest and walks with the swagger of an ex-jock, although with a slight limp.
"My knees are fine," he said, as he made his way through a crowded waiting area and into Department 95B, a cramped room with white, cinder block walls. "It's my back that bothers me now."
Fujioka slipped on his black robe and took the bench, swiftly dispensing with a number of preliminary matters, often turning to the defendants to afford them opportunity to speak.
"Judge Fujioka is patient with counsel and inmates and especially clients who represent themselves," defense attorney Todd Melnik said. "He obviously devotes personal time to learning the issues, because the issues are complex, and you can't just pick everything up in court."
One prosecutor said, "He hasn't been around very long, and he's always dealing with new law, yet he has the courage to make decisions when there is no precedent to guide him.
"He's willing to acknowledge that he doesn't know everything, so he doesn't let his ego get in the way. At the same time, he never gets pushed around."
Fujioka secured a seat on the Superior Court bench in an uncontested election in 2001. He will take over the civil commitment calendar from Judge Harold Shabo, who retired in January.
His new docket will consist of insanity pleas, competency hearings and defendants who have served the maximum time in mental hospitals - matters full of clinical jargon that require him to grasp the maze of social services integrated into the court system.
For most judges, it is the opposite of a plum assignment. "The mental health court is not a job that's going to propel your career upward," one judge said.
Shabo, a recognized expert in the field, left Fujioka with a guidebook to assist him in his new assignment.
"Fred is going to make an excellent judge," Shabo said of his former colleague.
Of the new legal challenges Fujioka faces, he said, "I'm comfortable with my job, but still learning. If you feel as though you are always in command, then you're deluded and it's time to reassess.
"You start working with the system rather than working on the system."
In his spare time, Fujioka continues to coach sports and teach aikido. He got the urge to work with children in the early 1970s.
"It was an extension of the '60s," he said. "Everyone was trying to do something positive. I've always spent a lot of time in community centers."
As he goes through life, Fujioka said, the hardships his parents and grandparents faced will always live within him. Their dignity in the face of those hardships and their endurance has humbled him. Their example reminds him that neither doing his job nor working with kids guarantee that he will ever know if he is making a difference - yet he said that does not matter.
The point is to continue.
"I was thinking about this connection with my family the other day," Fujioka said. He had been helping students to prepare the dojo - the martial arts studio - for the arrival of a visiting aikido master. "There we were, all together, like a family, down on the floor on our hands and knees scrubbing the mats. It was kind of nice."
Here are some of Judge Fujioka's recent cases and the lawyers involved:
• People v. Faith, ZM002359
Prosecution: Andrea Bouas, deputy district attorney, Los Angeles
Defense: James Vitek, deputy public defender, Los Angeles
• People v. Thompson, ZM003038
Prosecution: Carlos Vasquez, deputy district attorney, Los Angeles
Defense: Michael Suzuki, deputy public defender, Los Angeles
•People v. Trenier, ZM003427
Prosecution: Joanne Baeza, deputy district attorney, Los Angeles
Defense: Joseph Gibbons, Sante Fe Springs
• People v. Swick, ZM004381
Prosecution: Carlos Vasquez, deputy district attorney, Los Angeles
Defense: Ken Fang, deputy public defender, Los Angeles
• People v. Irvin, ZM003676
Prosecution: Joanne Baeza, deputy district attorney, Los Angeles
Defense: Jennifer Peabody, Pasadena
#337706
Jeffrey Anderson
Daily Journal Staff Writer
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