I fearlessly predict the local media soon will carry numerous stories about the July national convention here of American War Veterans of Japanese ancestry. AJA war veteran’s
national conventionThe searing emotional experiences of Japanese in the U.S. in World War II are better understood in Hawaii than elsewhere, but much is missing from the picture, even here.
Internments. Combat valor. Reparations. These things most people have heard of. There is less appreciation, however, of complicated human equations even more wrenching probably than the brother-against-brother fights that developed in the U.S. Civil War, and more extensive.
There can be no better path to understanding them than to attend the revival of the play, "Our Hearts Were Touched With Fire" at Blaisdell Concert Hall on July 2, 3 and 4. (Call 591-2211 for information.)
This play by Edward Sakamoto, Hawaii-born but now living in California, intertwines the lives of three families:
One is a West Coast Japanese family sent to an internment camp, from which the younger son goes off to fight and is killed while a second son protests the injustice of internment, refuses to serve and is imprisoned.
The second family is in Hawaii, where a Japanese father, whose affection for Japan is still strong, sends his son to fight in the U.S. Army by telling him it would be better for him to be killed than to bring shame on the family. In pidgin: "Maki OK, no make shame."
Wealthy West Coast whites are the third family. They have the pull to keep their son out of the draft. He insists on serving anyway, is assigned as an officer of an AJA unit , and is killed in the bloody rescue in France of the Texas "Lost Battalion," in which AJAs suffered their highest death toll.
The play was first produced in Honolulu late in 1994. Better than anything I have seen or read, it captures the drama that swirled around Japanese families still loving their homeland but shocked by the Pearl Harbor attack and determined, as their culture demanded, to be loyal to the country where they lived. This last is something most Americans never understood or the massive West Coast internments never would have happened.
The men who were young in combat in World War II now are in their 70s, with some over 80. They will make up about half of the 3,000 attendees at the July 2-5 convention. Some events will be in the new Hawaii Convention Center.
Hosts are the Hawaii veterans organizations representing the 100th Infantry Battalion, formed from AJAs already in the Army on Dec. 7; the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, formed initially by volunteers after the Army in 1943 lifted its ban on enlistments by Japanese; the Military Intelligence Service, which provided Japanese interpreters to U.S. forces in the Pacific, and the 1399th Engineer Combat Battalion, held back in Hawaii to perform construction services. Sons and daughters organizations are forming to preserve their history and legacy.
A feature of the convention will be the July 4 dedication on Kalakaua Avenue in Waikiki, on the grounds of Fort DeRussy, of the Brothers in Valor World War II Memorial Monument, a prominent tribute to AJA soldiers. It contains a time capsule naming both donors who supported the monument and the names of those who served in the AJA units.
To keep the national memory alive it will be joined by a Los Angeles "Go for Broke" memorial for which ground was broken on April 5, and the National Japanese American Memorial, which has been assigned a site close to the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.
France also has two memorials to the AJAs who helped liberate it -- one at Bruyeres and another about six miles away in the forest above Biffontaine where the Texas "Lost Battalion" was rescued.
The AJA story also is remembered at the U.S. Army Museum in Fort DeRussy, in University of Hawaii records, in books and films, and in quite a few other places. It should survive long after the protagonists are dead, and will.
A.A. Smyser is the contributing editor
and former editor of the the Star-Bulletin
His column runs Tuesday and Thursday.