Facing the Mountain: A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II

by Daniel James Brown

It was the price of being in America but not an American.

As the bad news continued to roll in, the nation’s angriest voices soon became the loudest, unleashing a torrent of racist rhetoric that all but drowned out the voices of those who were still able to take a step back and distinguish between friend and foe.

Politicians who had long known how racial hatred could fuel campaigns and advance legislative or personal agendas seized a ripe opportunity, and their rhetoric quickly became brazenly toxic.

Finally, they climbed off the train at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, just north of the Texas border. The place was nearly treeless, a windy, flat landscape unlike anything most of the men from Hawai‘i had ever seen. Soldiers herded them into a stockade surrounded by an inner and an outer fence, the outer one topped with rolls of barbed wire.

Then one day Will Simpson, the printer, walked into the laundry carrying a bundle of white work shirts. The family hadn’t seen him since the day after Pearl Harbor, when he’d shut his door in Kisaburo’s face. But apparently printer’s ink was as difficult to remove as industrial grease. “Kay, I can’t find anybody to do my shirts right,” Simpson said. “Would you do them?” Kisaburo paused for a moment, savoring the glee rising in his chest. Then he put on a mournful face, shook his head sadly, and said, “Jeez. Sorry. I’m just too busy.”

The army had called for fifteen hundred Nisei volunteers from Hawai‘i. Nearly ten thousand had turned out.

One of the marvels of the massive logistical operation that supported the Allied invasion of Europe was the speed and reliability with which troops in the field were able to stay in touch with loved ones back home in America. V-mail facilitated correspondence back and forth on small, standardized blue sheets. The military censored those written in combat zones, photographed them, stored the images on rolls of microfilm, and shipped them overseas, where they were printed on paper and delivered, saving much-needed cargo space on ships. As a result, a letter written from a battlefield in Italy or France could arrive—more or less miraculously—in a mailbox in Iowa in as little as a week or two.

As the regimental band played American jazz tunes, Colonel Miller strode into the hall in a full dress uniform. Seeing him, the curé insisted that the band play the American national anthem in his honor. Someone tried to explain to him that that wasn’t really necessary. But the priest insisted. While Higuchi went searching for the sheet music for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the band began playing “Sweet Georgia Brown” to fill the time. The curé, mistaking it for the American anthem, leaped to his feet and commanded the townspeople to rise and stand solemnly at attention as the raucous, brassy, swinging strains of the jazz standard lit up the room. When it was over, the curé nodded solemnly, and the French applauded wildly.

Goodman waited until the last moments of the trial to reveal his thinking, but when he did it was a stinging rebuke to the prosecution: “It is shocking to the conscience that an American citizen be confined on the ground of disloyalty, and then, while so under duress and restraint, be compelled to serve in the armed forces, or be prosecuted for not yielding to such compulsion.” And with that, in front of a stunned courtroom, he dismissed the charges against all of the Nisei resisters standing in front of him. They were free, but free only to return to confinement behind barbed wire at Tule Lake until such time as the camp was closed.