Many Japanese American parents encouraged their sons to fight for the U.S., which spoke to a tradition of respect for family and "a Japanese value that had to do with country, essentially, and they saw their sons as Americans." The complexity of the situation deepens when one considers the feelings of the incarcerated parents and siblings, she added. So, you have that desire to prove themselves as Americans, as men." Some of them were drafted, but many of them, after 1943, were volunteers. "Some of them went because their brothers were going. "I think some of the sons went because they wanted to prove they were Americans, so they were willing to make the sacrifice," she said. military, risked their lives for the country that had imprisoned their loved ones.Ĭalling it a tragic chapter in American history, Okawa said the reasons those young men served, despite the injustice done to their elders, varied. It was one of the many ironies of a scenario few could understand at the time, she said: Parents locked up behind barbed wire fences while their sons, wearing the uniform of the U.S. How could they answer that one, wondered historian and author Gail Okawa - whose grandfather was one of the many men incarcerated in the Santa Fe camp.
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