02/18/2026
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They told her Japanese women couldn't be doctors. She became one anyway. Then her own government imprisoned her—and she delivered 50 babies in her first month behind barbed wire.
Kazue Togasaki was nine years old when San Francisco burned.
On April 18, 1906, a massive earthquake shattered the city. Gas lines ruptured. Fires erupted. For three days, the city she loved was consumed by flames. Young Kazue sat on a hill with her family, watching everything they knew turn to ash.
In the chaos, her mother did something remarkable: she turned their church into a makeshift hospital. Kazue, just a child, helped care for the wounded. She translated for Japanese American women who couldn't speak English to the doctors. She watched her mother bring order to suffering.
That's when she knew: she would become a doctor.
The problem was, in 1906 America, Japanese girls didn't become doctors. They didn't become much of anything.
Kazue's father had studied law in Japan, but no American law firm would hire him because he was Japanese. He ended up running a small shop selling tea, rice, and chinaware. Kazue attended segregated schools—forced to switch elementary schools solely because of her race. The message was clear: America had very specific ideas about what people who looked like her were allowed to do.
She ignored every one of them.
In 1920, Kazue graduated from Stanford University with a degree in zoology. She was brilliant, hardworking, accomplished. And she couldn't find work.
"There was nothing for a Japanese girl to do, except maybe be a salesgirl," she recalled years later, "and my father wouldn't let me do that, so I got a job as a maid working in a family for about a year—it was crazy and it was no fun."
A Stanford graduate working as a maid because no one would hire a Japanese woman.
Determined to practice medicine, she enrolled in a nursing program at Children's Hospital. She graduated at the top of her class. Surely now, with top marks from a prestigious program, she could work.
She couldn't.
"The climate in San Francisco was that they just 'didn't use' Japanese nurses," she explained. "The staff wouldn't have it."
Most people would have given up. Kazue got angrier.
If they wouldn't let her work as a nurse, she'd become a doctor instead.
In 1929, she enrolled at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania—one of the only medical schools in the country that would accept women, and one of the few that would accept a Japanese American woman. In 1933, at age 36, she graduated with her medical degree, becoming one of the first two Japanese American women to earn an M.D. in the United States.
She returned to San Francisco and opened her own obstetrics practice. Japanese American families flocked to her—finally, a doctor who understood their language, their culture, their lives. By 1938, her practice was thriving. She purchased her own home in the heart of San Francisco's Japanese American community.
For the first time in her life, everything was working.
Then came December 7, 1941.
Pearl Harbor.
Within months, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. Over 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry—most of them American citizens—were ordered to leave their homes. They were given days to pack two suitcases. Everything else would be left behind.
On an April day in 1942, Kazue boarded a bus with hundreds of other frightened Japanese Americans. They were taken to Tanforan Assembly Center—a converted racetrack in San Bruno, California, where families were crammed into horse stalls that still reeked of manure.
The conditions were abysmal. No privacy. Inadequate food. Terrible sanitation. And pregnant women everywhere, terrified about giving birth in these conditions.
The camp administrators asked Kazue to set up medical facilities and lead the Japanese American medical team.
She had no proper equipment. No sterile delivery rooms. No backup if something went wrong.
She did it anyway.
In her first month at Tanforan, Kazue delivered fifty babies.
Fifty.
One emergency delivery happened so quickly that Kazue ordered onlookers to tear a laundry room door off its hinges to use as a delivery table. She worked with whatever she had—improvising, adapting, saving lives in impossible conditions.
"In other camps, I know they'd send the pregnant women out to the nearest county hospital to deliver," she said years later. "But I never thought about sending them out from Tanforan. I thought it was my duty."
From Tanforan, she was transferred to Stockton Assembly Center. Then Tule Lake. Then Poston. Then Manzanar. Then Topaz. Six different camps over eighteen months. At each one, she set up medical facilities. At each one, she led teams of Japanese American medical professionals. At each one, she delivered babies, administered vaccines, treated the sick—all while being imprisoned by her own government for the crime of her ancestry.
In fall 1943, Kazue was finally released.
She returned to San Francisco, to the home she'd been forced to abandon, and found it destroyed. Everything had been stolen or vandalized. Her medical equipment, her furniture, her personal belongings—gone.
"By the time I got back, there wasn't much left, all my good things were gone," she said quietly. "I think that happened to most of the Japanese."
She was 46 years old. She'd lost her practice, her home, nearly two years of her life. Most people would have been broken.
Kazue started over.
She reopened her practice in her neighborhood. And the community embraced her immediately.
"Everybody was happy to see a Japanese woman doctor," she remembered. "In all the years before I retired, there was only one other Japanese woman doctor in this area."
For the next forty years, Kazue served her community with unwavering dedication. She treated families regardless of their ability to pay. She took u***d mothers and terminally ill patients into her own home to care for them. She never took a vacation—not one day off in four decades.
She delivered babies for multiple generations of the same families. Daughters whose births she'd attended brought their own daughters to her. The children born in internment camps grew up and had her deliver their children.
In 1970, the San Francisco Examiner named her one of the "Most Distinguished Women of 1970."
At age 75, when early symptoms of Alzheimer's began to appear, Kazue finally closed her practice. She died on December 15, 1992, at age 95, having delivered over 10,000 babies during her remarkable career.
Her story should be taught in every medical school. She faced racism at every turn—couldn't work as a nurse despite being top of her class, could barely find a medical school that would accept her, was imprisoned by her own country during the prime of her career.
And she never stopped healing people.
She proved that a woman's worth isn't determined by what society allows her to do—it's determined by what she does anyway. That discrimination can close a thousand doors, but determination only needs one to stay open. That even behind barbed wire, even when your government has labeled you enemy, you can still choose to serve.
They told her Japanese women couldn't be doctors. She became one anyway. Then her own government imprisoned her—and she delivered 50 babies in her first month behind barbed wire.
