George F. Will: Japanese American Heroes, Bereft of Bitterness
[George F. Will is a columnist for the Washington Post.]
Hearing about a shortage of farm laborers in California, the couple who would become Susumu Ito's parents moved from Hiroshima to become sharecroppers near Stockton. Thus began a saga that recently brought Ito, 91, to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, where he and 119 former comrades in arms were honored, during the annual Days of Remembrance, as liberators of Nazi concentration camps. While his Japanese American Army unit was succoring survivors of Dachau, near Munich, his parents and two sisters were interned in a camp in Arkansas.
Ito attended one-room schools, graduated from high school at 16 and was accepted at Berkeley. His parents, however, believed that Japanese Americans could not rise in the professions — even the civil service — for which the university would prepare him. So he attended community college, studying auto mechanics, although he could not join the mechanics union.
In 1940, Congress passed conscription, and Ito was content to be drafted, thinking the military would be an adventure. He got that right.
Although he was nearsighted and "my feet were flat as boards," he and five other Japanese Americans from around Stockton were inducted in February 1941. Because "Japanese revered their sons being in the military," the Japanese American community threw a farewell banquet for them and gave each $35. After Pearl Harbor, the Army "took our rifles away."
Soon, while he was in training at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, his parents and sisters were interned as security threats, first at a California racetrack where they slept in horse stalls on straw mattresses, later in Arkansas. Bored by life as a military mechanic and "gung-ho about going to war," he volunteered to be a forward spotter seeking targets for the artillery, a job with a high casualty rate and a short life expectancy. Soon he was in Mississippi, from where he, wearing his country's uniform, could occasionally visit his family behind barbed wire in Arkansas.
Read entire article at Jewish World Review
Hearing about a shortage of farm laborers in California, the couple who would become Susumu Ito's parents moved from Hiroshima to become sharecroppers near Stockton. Thus began a saga that recently brought Ito, 91, to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, where he and 119 former comrades in arms were honored, during the annual Days of Remembrance, as liberators of Nazi concentration camps. While his Japanese American Army unit was succoring survivors of Dachau, near Munich, his parents and two sisters were interned in a camp in Arkansas.
Ito attended one-room schools, graduated from high school at 16 and was accepted at Berkeley. His parents, however, believed that Japanese Americans could not rise in the professions — even the civil service — for which the university would prepare him. So he attended community college, studying auto mechanics, although he could not join the mechanics union.
In 1940, Congress passed conscription, and Ito was content to be drafted, thinking the military would be an adventure. He got that right.
Although he was nearsighted and "my feet were flat as boards," he and five other Japanese Americans from around Stockton were inducted in February 1941. Because "Japanese revered their sons being in the military," the Japanese American community threw a farewell banquet for them and gave each $35. After Pearl Harbor, the Army "took our rifles away."
Soon, while he was in training at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, his parents and sisters were interned as security threats, first at a California racetrack where they slept in horse stalls on straw mattresses, later in Arkansas. Bored by life as a military mechanic and "gung-ho about going to war," he volunteered to be a forward spotter seeking targets for the artillery, a job with a high casualty rate and a short life expectancy. Soon he was in Mississippi, from where he, wearing his country's uniform, could occasionally visit his family behind barbed wire in Arkansas.