”
My mother is Japanese, and my father is Japanese, but I’ve never
been Japanese one day in my life. What am I? I’m an American.
”
“My mother is Japanese, and my father is Japanese, but I’ve never been Japanese one day in my life. What am I? I’m an American.” Such were the words of speaker Mas Hashimoto as he held the attention of a diverse group of listeners at the Gilroy Public Library last Saturday.
“I cannot think of a more fitting way to honor Memorial Day than to remember the Japanese Internment and the profound sacrifice made by Japanese Americans during World War II,” librarian Dennise Julia said as she introduced Mas Hashimoto, the first speaker in the library’s Ancestral Voices series.
Mas Hashimoto, of the Watsonville-Santa Cruz Japanese American Citizens’ League, spoke with great passion and knowledge about the internment of 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II, illustrating his talk with displays and a slide presentation of local internment activities in the South County area.
Anyone in Salinas, Hollister, Gilroy and Watsonville, of one-sixteenth or more Japanese ancestry was ordered to dispose of all property within 48 hours and report to the Salinas Rodeo Grounds.
Once there, they lived in horse stalls. The children cried, not understanding why they had suddenly been thrust into a place where the stench and the flies were overwhelming.
To bring this past reality home to a modern audience, Hashimoto pointed out that if this were to happen on the Peninsula today, even actor Clint Eastwood’s wife and child would be incarcerated. His wife, local news anchor Dina Ruiz, is one-quarter Japanese.
Eventually, Gilroy’s Japanese-Americans were moved to Poston, Ariz., where they were imprisoned on an Indian reservation.
A soft-spoken man looking younger than his 80 years, WWII Veteran and long-time Gilroy resident Lawson Sakai volunteered to fight for America. He joined a segregated unit of Japanese-Americans (the 442nd) that became the most decorated group of soldiers in American history.
Sakai spoke Saturday at the library during Hashimoto’s presentation.
In one of the most fiercely fought battles of WWII, the Japanese-American soldiers of the 442nd were sent to rescue a battalion of 211 Texas soldiers (the Texas 36th Division) that had become trapped behind enemy lines in Biffontaine, France.
The 442nd whose motto was, “Go for broke,” fought courageously for five days, surrounded by German troops. Sakai describes the freeing of the Texans, who had run out of food, water and ammunition. “They were just barely hanging on, and they were overjoyed to see us.”
“It is estimated that the 442nd Regimental Combat Team suffered about 800 casualties to rescue the 200 or so troops of the lost battalion,” Sakai says. His family back in the U.S., meanwhile, was being held in an internment camp. “None of us expected to come home,” said Sakai, who received two Purple Hearts.
Two years later, the 442nd also liberated the Dachau Concentration Camp in Germany.
Taking a lesson from history, it is Japanese Americans who are currently objecting the loudest to the turbaned and bearded caricatures being used in our media to portray Middle Eastern people as terrorists. “It was all about what we looked like in the past,’ says Hashimoto, “Not whether we were Americans or not. We were incarcerated for looking ‘Japanese.’ And now it’s happening all over again.”
When asked about his lack of bitterness in regard to the effects of the war and the internment, Sakai says, “It’s hard to fathom how huge this loss was for Japanese Americans. But you can’t dwell on the past; you can’t go back and change it. You can only try to improve the future. You can contribute no matter what has happened to you. You can move forward and improve things for the next generation.”
What makes him so willing to speak about personally painful experiences? “If you hold it in, people won’t know. Education is the only thing that will really change anything,” Sakai says. “Every little bit helps improve the future. It”s the only thing we have to pass on to our children and grandchildren.”
