A 94-year-old nun from central Seattle died Monday, Oct. 17, following a short illness, according to a notice from the Maryknoll Sisters of Maryknoll, New York.
Sister Stephanie Marie Nakagawa was the convent’s first Japanese-American to come from the West Coast.
Nakagawa was born Helen Marie Yasuyo Nakagawa in Seattle on Sept. 23, 1922. She was raised in Seattle and attended the Immaculate Conception school — which has been closed for about four decades — on 18th Avenue in the Central District.
Nakagawa interviewed for admission to the Maryknoll Sisters soon after graduating Immaculate Conception in 1940. She was accepted and arrived only days before the attack on Pearl Harbor in Dec. 7, 1941. While her family and more than 100,000 more Japanese-Americans were interned by the U.S. government, Nakagawa was allowed to remain with the convent throughout World War II.
She graduated the convent’s college in 1947 and was sent to teach for 10 years at St. Anthony Grade School in Wailuku, Hawaii.
Nakagawa spent most of 40 years in Japan, where she supervised a hostel in Kyoto and taught English in Yokkaichi. She finally returned to Maryknoll, New York, in 2002 to care for elderly nuns in the convent’s residential care unit.
“I often think that people we have loved and who have loved us – not only make us more human – but they become a part of us and we carry them around all the time whether we see them or not,” Nakagawa once said, according to her Maryknoll bio. “In some way we are a sum total of those who have loved us and those we have given ourselves to.”
Nakagawa celebrated her 75th anniversary with the Maryknoll Sisters with a jubilee in February, just over eight months before her death.
A Vespers service will be held Oct. 27 at the Maryknoll Sisters Center and a memorial mass will be held at 11 a.m. Oct. 28.
