Miho and Shiosaki had longed to join the service after Pearl Harbor, but at the time, the Army wasn't accepting Japanese American recruits, considering them 'enemy aliens.' Tokiwa had been imprisoned with his family in an internment camp, forced to endure dehumanizing conditions, but nonetheless enlisted when President Roosevelt lifted the ban on Nisei in the military, despite his country's humiliating and bigoted treatment of people like him.

In his excellent new book, Facing the Mountain, Daniel James Brown tells the story of the men of the 442nd and their families, who 'through their actions, laid bare for all the world to see what exactly it means to be an American.' It's a fascinating account of some of the bravest Americans who ever lived, and a sobering reminder of a dark chapter in American history - years of anti-Asian racism that, as we're reminded daily, never really went away.īrown's book focuses mainly on four young Nisei men: Katsugo 'Kats' Miho, Fred Shiosaki, and Rudy Tokiwa, who would all enlist in the Army after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and Gordon Hirabayashi, a Quaker and conscientious objector who would spend the war fighting stateside for civil rights, a decision that would land him in prison. Named after the regiment's motto - 'Go For Broke' - the inscription on the monument reads in part, 'Looked upon with suspicion, set apart and deprived of their constitutional rights, they nevertheless remained steadfast and served with indomitable spirit and uncommon valor, for theirs was a fight to prove loyalty.' Army, which was composed of Nisei, second-generation Japanese American soldiers in World War II. In the middle of the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles, there's a monument dedicated to the 442nd Infantry Regiment of the U.S.

Facing the Mountain, by Daniel James Brown

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