May is Asian American/Pacific Islander Heritage Month, but along with National Native American Heritage Month (November), Black History Month (February), Women's History Month (March), and other National and International Months to observe walking, poetry, pets and so much more, you can learn about and celebrate these things all year long. (Clowns only get a week in August in case you were wondering.) Just in the last year, I have written about Japanese Incarceration (10/25/21), Asian Stereotypes (11/8/21), and The Chinese Exclusion Act (11/1/21), but I have never written about the 442nd Infantry Regiment of the United States Army. It was the most decorated regiment in U.S. military history. It was almost entirely made up of second-generation Japanese American (Nisei) soldiers who fought valiantly in World War II. Why did these young men, many of whom had been herded into "Japanese relocation camps" with their families, all of whom had been subjected to racial slurs and attacks, want to risk their lives for a country that viewed them as enemy aliens (and for a time refused to allow them to enlist because they were labeled as such, like being 4F, unfit for military service)? Daniel James Brown tells the story of these men in his new book, Facing the Mountain: A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II (940.54 BRO).
As you can read in Facing the Mountain, not all Nisei young men were willing to die for a country that treated them as enemy aliens. There were the No No Boys, a term for those who answered "no" to the "loyalty questions". Especially offensive was question number 28 which asked if individuals would swear unqualified allegiance to the United States and forswear any form of allegiance to the Emperor of Japan. American citizens, not surprisingly, resented being asked to renounce loyalty to the Emperor of Japan when they had never held a loyalty to the Emperor. Read these two books to learn more: John Okada : The Life and Rediscovered Work of the Author of No-no Boy (B OKA) and No-no Boy by John Okada (F OKA)
Daniel Brown also features the story of Gordon Hirabayashi whose civil disobedience during World War II gave him a prominent place in American civil rights history and earned him the Presidential Medal of Freedom which was awarded months after he died in 2012. When a curfew was imposed upon Japanese Americans, he refused to follow the order. Then, when it came time to register for "relocation," he instead turned himself in to the FBI with the intention of creating a test case of the government's right to incarcerate Japanese Americans without due process of law. Read A Principled Stand: The Story of Hirabayashi v. United States (341.67 HIR).
History comes alive for me when I can find a personal connection - even when it is of the six degrees of separation type. In this story, Gordon Hirabayashi was the older brother of my much loved fourth grade teacher, and Mack Nogaki (shown at right in the photograph) was the father of one of my classmates. I know that other Japanese American friends of mine had their own family stories of life and death during World War II, but no one talked about them. My friends' families didn't talk about their experiences, even amongst themselves. There was no mention of the Relocation Camps in our US History classes. Daniel Brown addresses this, too, in Facing the Mountain. I hope you will read the four books I have featured today.