Posted on 11/11/2002 2:18:40 PM PST by americaprd
CAMDEN, N.J. -- Harry K. Fukuhara spent half of 1942 in one of the internment camps where the United States government moved 110,000 Japanese-Americans after Japanese pilots bombed Pearl Harbor. He wanted out badly and got out, but only because he agreed to go to war defending the nation that had detained him because of his race.
Fukuhara and thousands of other Japanese-American World War II veterans living and dead were honored Monday as defenders of the Constitution with the National Constitutional Center's "We the People" Award.
About two dozen of the veterans, now in their 80s, attended the ceremony aboard the USS New Jersey, which is docked just across the Delaware River from the Constitution Center's Philadelphia headquarters.
About 1,300 Japanese-American soldiers were placed in the Army's segregated 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which were together known as the "Go For Broke" unit.
Another 6,000 were scattered across military units as part of the Army's Military Intelligence Service, which provided interpreters, interrogators and spies.
The soldiers of the 442nd earned lasting acclaim and respect for their valor in action against German forces in France following the D-Day invasion.
Fukuhara, a member of the intelligence group, stayed in the Army for 48 years before he retired as a colonel.
Fukuhara, now 82 and a resident of San Jose, Calif., said he and his comrades found their World War II service an especially perilous experience.
"We had to have our own bodyguards to protect us 24 hours a day to guard us from those who might mistake us from the enemy," Fukuhara said.
Fukuhara was born in Seattle, but raised in Hiroshima. Three of his brothers were in the Japanese military _ including one who was killed by the bomb the Americans dropped on Hiroshima at the war's end.
Loyalties tugged in several directions were a common denominator among the veterans in Camden on Monday.
Phil S. Ishio, another retired Army colonel who was part of the Military Intelligence Service, was drafted while his aunts and uncles were shipped to internment camps, branded a threat to national security.
"We did it because it was the only way we could show our loyalty," said Ishio 82, a Silver Spring, Md. resident who wore his Army dress uniform to the ceremony.
The men symbolize one of the low points of in the interpretation of the Constitution, said Joseph Torsella, president of the National Constitution Center, which is planning to open a new museum in Philadelphia on July 4, 2003. The stories of two members of the "Go For Broke" regiment will be featured among the center's exhibits.
"It's important to try to understand all our constitutional history, good as well as bad," Torsella said.
The U.S. Supreme Court in 1944 ruled in Korematsu v. United States that an executive order from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt two years earlier requiring Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast to be moved to internment camps was constitutional.
History has been unkind to the Justice Hugo Black's majority decision, which Justice Frank Murphy in a dissent called "legalization of racism." Many scholars say the ruling violated the Constitution's equal protection clause.
The constitution center has previously honored U.S. Sens. Robert C. Byrd and Mark Hatfield, Ambassador Walter Annenberg, U.S. Rep. John Lewis and Benjamin Bradlee, the former Washington Post editor who made First Amendment history by publishing the Pentagon Papers.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsday.com ...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.