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27 July , 2002

HISTORY MIS-ING IN ACTION

When we think of Japanese Americans in World War II, we think of the bravery of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the most highly decorated unit for its size and length of service in the history of the US military.

Photo courtesy of "Uncommon Courage"

The 442nd is almost mythical in its reputation; its battle cry of "Go for Broke!" was used as the title of the 1951 Hollywood movie that preserved its valor on the silver screen. The plotline was compelling: Not only were these American soldiers brave in combat as they fought across Europe, they had to battle prejudice just to get to serve their country. They were conscripted from the internment camps, and left behind family and friends who remained imprisoned in the states. The irony of the story was unique.

But not that unique.

Halfway around the world, another group of Japanese Americans also served their country bravely, most leaving behind loved ones in internment camps in the US. But they didn't have a battle cry, and they didn't even get to serve as a unit like the 442nd (or the 100th Infantry Battalion, an orphan outfit of Hawaiian nisei dubbed "The Purple Heart Battalion" which joined with the 442nd in Europe in 1944).

And they never received the acclaim and glory they deserved. Because the Japanese American soldiers of the Military Intelligence Service were by design scattered individually and in small groups to various units and fronts along the Pacific theater, they never received the concentrated attention of their brethren fighting the Nazis.

Yet, the MIS suffered even more burdens than the members of the 442nd - they had to be protected from fellow American GIs. The MIS nisei and kibei (JAs who were educated in Japan) were always accompanied by non-JA soldiers, whose job was to protect them from attacks by GIs who might mistake them as the enemy.

The MIS soldiers were initially recruited before Pearl Harbor was bombed, when it became apparent that the US might go to war with Japan. Because there were so few people in the military who could speak, read or write Japanese or was familiar with the Japanese culture, the US Army interviewed enlisted Japanese Americans for their language potential just a month before December 7, 1941, and continued to accept nisei and kibei after internment, moving its training school from San Francisco to Minnesota. The US Navy declined to recruit Japanese Americans, and instead trained Caucasian sailors during the war at Japanese language schools in California and at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

Some MIS members served with Gen. Douglas MacArthur's troops as they hopped islands across the Pacific and eventually returned to the Philippines; others were sent as far as the China-Burma-India theater, and worked with British troops.

Many saw combat along the front lines, and most were invaluable as translators of captured Japanese documents including communiqués as well as personal diaries, which often revealed details of troop movements and Japanese high command intelligence. The MIS were also crucial as interrogators of prisoners of war.

After Japan's surrender, the MIS was also critical in the establishment of MacArthur's Occupation Forces, as translators of mountains of documents and publications; as interpreters in everything from interrogating repatriated Japanese soldiers returning from China to re-establishing diplomatic relations with Japan; as implementers of a myriad new programs and systems of governance, education and business; as investigators of crime and cold war espionage and simply as ambassadors of American goodwill to the defeated country.

But it wasn't until 1997 before Congress passed legislation allowing consideration of a unit citation for a group such as the MIS because its members served individually with many units, and 2000 before the Presidential Citation was finally awarded to the group as a whole.

This neglected history and the irony of soldiers with imprisoned families fighting the people of their ancestry is movingly captured in a documentary video, "Uncommon Courage: Patriotism and Civil Liberties," which has been broadcast in a one-hour version on PBS (the video, which is available. Director gayle yamada captures the story of the MIS veterans from the inception of the program through the war and occupation years right up to the awarding of the Presidential unit citation. The documentary received an Edward R. Murrow Award for its journalistic integrity.

The film was the centerpiece of a recent event at the Denver Buddhist Temple that gave proper tribute to the MIS veterans who live in the area. A joint effort of the Tri-State/Denver Buddhist Temple, Simpson Methodist Church, Japanese American Community Graduation Committee, Mile-Hi JACL, American Legion Nisei Post 185 and the Rocky Mountain MIS, the tribute drew more than a hundred people including veterans and their families, and helped to shine the spotlight on the long-unsung accomplishments of the MIS. Emcee Carolyn Takeshita read the names of local MIS vets and oversaw the taking of a group photo.

After the showing of the documentary, Sami Nakazono moderated a panel of veterans recounting their experiences during World War II and the occupation. Actually, she didn't have to do much moderating. The men -- Tom Haga, Nob Furuiye, Dr. Sueo Ito, Tatsuo Matsuda and Harry Fukuhara from California -- had bottled up their memories for so long they poured out once the cork was popped, and the time flew by too fast.

My father was not part of the MIS program. He was just a kid in Hawaii when his father took the family back to Japan in 1940, and he ended up working for the occupation troops as a houseboy before enlisting in the US Army. During the end of the occupation and the start of the Korean war he was in Japan assigned to a similar program, the Counter Intelligence Corps.

Learning about the bravery of the MIS vets made me appreciate all the more my dad's experience, and fed my hunger to learn more about the world of the CIC.

NOTE: You can learn more about the MIS on these Web sites:
Japanese American Veterans Association of Washington DC
Go For Broke Education Foundation
"Uncommon Courage" is available from the Japanese American National Museum