Japanese American soldiers fought loyally for a country that didn’t always love them back
Yonemitsu grew up in Nāʻālehu, a town on the Big Island with a sugar plantation that employed about 500 immigrants from Japan, China, Portugal and the Philippines. Yonemitsu and his daughter Hope currently live in that same town, the southernmost community in the United States.
“I was appalled on arrival at Jerome to see the barbed wire fencing and machine-gun equipped towers that encircled the camp,” Yonemitsu told TODAY. “A large number of the internees were American citizens, and some internees were from Hawaii. In spite of their meager resources, they welcomed us with a feast that brought fond memories of home.”
“In Hawaii, we had the same questions asked of us that we had to answer, but we were not behind barbed wire, so that affected us in a very different way,” Shima said. “To many of the Nisei, that is a nonquestion, because there’s no relationship between the Emperor of Japan and ourselves.”The impact of the Nisei soldier experience extends beyond veterans to the generations that followed.
A shift came with the fourth generation, known as Yonsei, she said — the grandchildren of the veterans. “What the 100th and the 442nd and the MIS did resounds into the next generation and into generations to come,” Shima said. “What he did by that statement is that he removed from the table this stigma of disloyalty that was placed there when war began by Roosevelt,” Shima said.
“When he learned that his grandparents were put into the camp, he was angry when he was little,” Sato-Yamazaki said. “But when he heard that America apologized, that meant a lot to him. And I think that apology wasn’t just for the generation, for the wrong, but it’s something that I think helps the next generation and future generations to understand that a wrong was committed but our country did apologize.
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