Bishop Museum hosts exhibit honoring WWII nisei soldiers

Japa­nese-American soldiers who fought in the Pacific and Europe during World War II will be honored over the next six weeks in a special Congressional Gold Medal exhibit and series of panel discussions beginning Saturday at Bishop Museum.

The exhibit, which runs from Saturday through April 14 in the Castle Memorial Building, honors those who served in the 100th Battalion, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the Military Intelligence Service. Several documentary films featuring the Japanese-American soldiers will be shown at the museum during the six-week exhibition.

The 100th Battalion and the 442nd RCT are among the most highly decorated units in U.S. military history, having earned 21 Medals of Honor, more than 4,000 Purple Hearts, 560 Silver Stars and seven presidential unit citations. Two-thirds of the 14,000 Japanese-Americans who served in the segregated "Go for Broke" Army unit were from Hawaii; others volunteered while their parents were interned behind barbed wire fences on the mainland.

Yasunori Deguchi, who enlisted in the 442nd from Captain Cook on Hawaii island when he was 17, said the Congressional Gold Medal is "recognition of the efforts of so many soldiers and civilians."

"We just happen to be the survivors," said Deguchi, 88. "I was one of the fortunate ones to come back."

The exploits of the roughly 6,000 nisei linguists who made up the Military Intelligence Service were classified until the 1970s. MIS veterans, who were assigned to various Army units in the Pacific, are credited with translating intercepted Japa­nese dispatches and serving as interpreters. The MIS was honored with a Presidential Unit Citation in 2000. Some have credited the MIS with shortening the war in the Pacific by two years.

The exhibit, developed by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in collaboration with the National Veterans Network, coincides with the 70th anniversary of the formation of the 442nd RCT.

The observance will culminate with a luncheon March 24 at the Hilton Hawaiian Village. The event will pay special tribute to the late U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye, a Medal of Honor recipient and member of the 442nd RCT.

The nisei (or second-generation Japanese-Americans) veterans will be honored by the City Council on March 20 and the state Legislature on March 25.

The 442nd Regimental Combat Team was organized on March 23, 1943, in response to the War Department’s call for volunteers to form an all-Japanese-American combat unit. From October through November 1944, the 442nd served in northeastern France. The 442nd liberated the French towns of Bruyeres, Belmont and Biffontaine in the Vosges campaign, which was also highlighted by the rescue of the 200-man Texas Lost Battalion. The 442nd suffered more than 800 casualties during the campaign.

With the battle cry "Go for Broke," the 442nd Regimental Combat Team with the 100th Infantry Battalion (separate) became the most decorated unit in U.S. military history for its size and length of service in battle.

Deguchi and MIS veteran Herbert Yanamura, 88, attended the November 2011 ceremony in Washington, D.C., at which the Congressional Gold Medal was presented to representatives of the three World War II units.

"It is a very high, unexpected honor that represents the efforts of all AJAs (Americans of Japa­nese ancestry) for their collective effort in the war," Yanamura said.

The traveling exhibit includes the original Congressional Gold Medal displayed in a glass case along with three exhibit banners that provide background on the 100th, the 442nd RCT, the MIS and the Congressional Gold Medal. The federal law, authored by then-U.S. Sen. Daniel Akaka, that authorized the medal requires that it be exhibited throughout the country before making the Smithsonian its permanent home.

Yanamura went to New Orleans in January when the exhibit began its national tour. After leaving Honolulu next month, the exhibit will be on display in Los Angeles (May 4-June 9), San Francisco (June 29-Aug. 4), Portland, Ore. (Aug. 24-Sept. 29), Chicago (Oct. 19-Dec. 8) and Houston (Dec. 21-Jan. 24).

Yanamura enlisted in the 442nd in 1943, interrupting his senior year at Kona­waena High School, and was later assigned to the MIS because of his proficiency in Japanese. As an interpreter, he took part in the Leyte invasion in the Philippines and the Battle of Okinawa.

During the three-month Battle of Okinawa in 1945, Yanamura was assigned to 381st Regimental Headquarters. One of his tasks was to appeal to Gen. Tatsumi Amamiya, head of Japan’s 24th Division, to surrender. Amamiya and his staff of 200 had taken refuge in a cave in the southern tip of Okinawa.

Yanamura said that for 30 minutes he told the besieged Japanese soldiers that the Americans would use gasoline "causing an inferno in the cave" if they did not surrender.

Yanamura said he was sent to another assignment and didn’t learn until he visited Okinawa last year — his second visit since the war ended in 1945 — that the Army had followed up on its threat.

However, according to a journal kept by a Japanese soldier, the soldiers in the cave were able to extinguish the flames, aided by a creek that ran through the cave. Yanamura said Amamiya later committed suicide rather than surrender.

Yanamura will appear with other MIS veterans on a panel discussion March 30 at 11 a.m. at Bishop Museum’s Atherton Halau.

Deguchi, who earned two Purple Hearts in Italy and France, said it’s not easy to convey the thoughts and feelings of many of the nisei veterans and their families and "the hardships they went through."

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. government declared Japanese-Americans as "enemy aliens" and sent more than 120,000 to internment camps, primarily in the western states.

Deguchi said nisei soldiers from Hawaii never fully understood the hardships that Japanese-Americans on the mainland endured "until we got to know them and listened to their stories."

The Congressional Gold Medal, along with the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Presidential Citizens Medal, is the highest civilian honor awarded in the United States. Recipients include the Wright Brothers, Rosa Parks, the Navajo Code Talkers, the Tuskegee Airmen and the Dalai Lama. It was first awarded by the Continental Congress to George Washington in 1776.

A replica of the medal is available for purchase from the U.S. Mint for $49.95. Go to catalog.usmint.gov/index.html or www.usmint.gov /mint_programs/medals/?action=medal&ID=30#.

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SCHEDULE OF TALKS
Retired Govs. George Ariyoshi and Ben Cayetano and retired state Intermediate Court of Appeals Chief Judge James S. Burns will participate in a panel discussion on how Japanese-American veterans moved into post-World War II Hawaii politics on Saturday at 11:15 a.m. at Bishop Museum’s Atherton Halau.

The event will kick off a series of panel discussions and is part of the “American Heroes: Japa­nese American World War II Nisei Soldiers and the Congressional Gold Medal” exhibit, which will open Saturday at 10 a.m. at Bishop Museum.

Other panel discussions at the museum are:

>> March 16, 11 a.m.: The Varsity Victory Volunteers. 1 p.m.: History of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and its accomplishments.

>> March 23, 11 a.m.: “What the Congressional Gold Medal means to me” with veterans of the 100th Infantry Battalion. 1 p.m.: “Go for Broke” soldiers serving after World War II.

>> March 30, 11 a.m.: “Military Intelligence War Against Japan.”

>> April 6, 11 a.m.: The unique history of internment in Hawaii and Hawaii’s role in the legislative campaign for redress during the 1980s.

1 p.m.: True stories of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

>> April 13, 11 a.m.: “Commitment to Education.”