From Northern Japan to North Reading: Remembering Raitaro Okuro
by Matthew T. Page
If you’ve ever taken a stroll or walked your dog through North Reading’s peaceful Riverside Cemetery, you may have walked right past the headstone of an especially remarkable person.
Raitaro Okuro (ライタろ お黒) was a special person in so many ways, not least because he was one of North Reading’s first (if not the first) Asian-American residents. His story is both inspiring and a little tragic, given that his work at the State Sanitorium (tuberculosis hospital) cut his life somewhat short. Yet his legacy is worth honoring, both in terms of the struggles he faced as a Japanese immigrant in Massachusetts, as well as his dedication to caring for the sick even when he himself was terribly ill.
Raitaro Okuro (circa 1892). Reproduced with the permission of the Mount Allison University Archives (2007.07/2524).
Coming to America
Raitaro Okuro was born in 1873 in Hakodate, a port city on Hokkaido—Japan’s northernmost island. At the time, Hokkaido was a rough-and-ready place that had been left largely ungoverned until 1868, when Japan’s new leaders began to colonize the island and subjugate and assimilate its indigenous inhabitants, the Ainu. Raitaro’s parents were likely resettled in Hakodate as part of this attempt to settle an island that Japan worried would be seized by the expansionist Russian Empire.
A photograph of Hakodate taken the year before Raitaro was born. From the collection of the Tokyo Photographic Museum.
In 1889, Raitaro embarked on an epic sea journey to Sackville, New Brunswick—a distance of over 15,000 nautical miles—to study at the Mount Allison Boy’s Academy (now Mount Allison University). Hoping to train as a missionary and return to Japan, Raitaro enrolled at the Boston School of Theology in 1895. Soon afterwards, he began work as a butler at 128 Commonwealth Avenue, the home of Boston real estate and cigar manufacturing tycoon Charles Henry Bond.
Charles Henry Bond and his home at 128 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston. (photo credit: backbayhouses.org)
Love and Loss
It was at 128 Commonwealth that Raitaro Okuro met and fell in love with the family’s live-in governess Dorothy Duffieu, an Englishwoman. The two married in 1903 and welcomed a son (Arnold Okuro) in 1905. Over the following decade or so, Raitaro continued to work as a butler while remaining very involved in Boston’s small but vibrant Japanese community. Dorothy, meanwhile, took occasional visits back to England to see family. It was on one of these visits that Dorothy passed away, leaving her husband widowed with a twelve year old son.
Raitaro was also suffering from tuberculosis, an affliction for which he sought treatment at the North Reading State Sanitorium. Built in 1909, it was one of four specialist tuberculosis hospitals in Massachusetts. Innovative for its time, some of its wards were ‘lean-to’ structures designed to give patients plenty of fresh air. Resembling a set of aircraft wings, these wards consisted of a central sitting room with open porches extending out on either side (see below).
After some period of treatment, Raitaro recovered enough by 1919 to begin working at the Sanitorium as bacteriologist—a skilled “high tech” job that was very advanced for its time. As bacteriologist, he was responsible for regularly testing patients to determine which were contagious and which were not. Other than the facility’s three physicians, this made Raitaro the one other true medical professional at the North Reading Sanitorium.
Quiet Discrimination
Yet the Sanitorium’s payroll (see below) reveals that Raitaro was the victim of what would now consider to be racially-motivated pay discrimination. According to state records, Raitaro earned just $420 a year in 1919, equivalent to $7,600 in 2024 dollars. This made him the hospital’s lowest paid employee; even its dishwasher and pot scrubber earned more than he did.
Worse, Raitaro earned a fraction of what white bacteriologists at other state institutions earned ($1,000 to $2,000 annually). Even if we assume that he received free room and board, Raitaro was conspicuously underpaid.
Other than this fact, we know little about Raitaro’s time in North Reading. In 1922, his tuberculosis worsened, causing his death just a few weeks shy of his fiftieth birthday. His modest grave marker in Riverside Cemetery belies his remarkable life—one that took him began at the fringes of the Japanese empire and ended in the bucolic woodlands of North Reading.
For this reason, he is someone we should admire and remember. Unusually adventurous and industrious, he is an important part of North Reading’s story. Amidst hardship, chronic illness, and the loss of loved ones, he achieved personal growth and found purpose.
