Editer’s noat: Yes I know that is not spelled correctly. Neither was some of the below post, nor was it written worth a rat’s ass yesterday. I did a rough draft after coming home with a swollen and hurting knee. I decided to rest after that draft and eventually blew off finishing the piece until today. Although I write this blog as a way to instill a little writing discipline in my life I, unlike many other unlucky schlubs, do not have to worry about a deadline so that if I am in pain and feel like crap I can just put off completion until I feel better. Unfortunately, when I finished yesterday, I hit the little button that says “Publish” instead of the correct one for my situation at the time that said “Draft.” Ooops. So, you probably had difficulty trying to read this. I know I did. I have gone back and completed a second draft. I trust it is better than the first although it might not be better than what a third draft might do. However, I have to visit a doctor in a few minutes to see about my still swollen and still painful knee. This thing, this post, still isn’t over but it will be eventually. If you want to see how it eventually comes out, come back and read it again in a few days, read it now or just say “$^*&@^%#!” Okay? Aloha.
Call it eerie or just plain weird, but how many times do you pick up a book to read that starts in the very same place you are in or have been in within the last week? Well, maybe if you are in New York, N.Y., the capital of the World maybe it isn’t so strange. But inside the Jefferson County Courthouse in Beaumont, Texas, where you sat a couple of hours last week to be empaneled for a jury that never happened? And to top it all off, the book is a story of Japanese American soldiers who rescued a so-called “lost battalion” during World War II fighting in Europe. That’s pretty odd, at least to me.
Writer Robert Asahina’s “Just Americans,” subtitled “How Japanese Americans won a War at Home and Abroad,” travels backwards from 2004 from a contentious meeting in the Jefferson County Commissioners Court to Dec. 7, 1941 and back again. The, my, local courthouse was the scene just a year before I moved back “home” of a drama that puzzled many, including me, and angered others. The meeting was over changing the name of a local rural road.
Now I covered more than my share of commissioners court meetings during my years as a Texas reporter. I say more than my share because too many times those meetings seemed to be more a sanctuary of ignorance rather than a hall of local governance. Although I didn’t really always mean it, I used to joke that the main qualification for being a Texas county commissioner was having had a lobotomy. Although as one county commissioner I knew, who also had a local country-western band, might say: “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.” Still, when it came right down to it, seemingly, it was just to difficult to tell whether it was a lobotomy, a bottle or both.
Getting back on the stick though, changing county road names hardly gets many people out on a Monday morning or Tuesday afternoon. However, the meeting in 2004 in Beaumont did draw a crowd thanks to some folks who locals considered as “outsiders” and who wanted to change a local road name from “Jap Road” to just about anything else. As Asahina points out, to those offended by the name it could just as well have been “Nigger Lane,” or “Spic Alley,” or “Kike Street.” The person who sparked changing the name was not really an outsider. She was just a Japanese American lady who had grown up in Jefferson County, where her paternal grandparents had arrived in 1921. Most Japanese who came to this part of Texas in those days did so because of rice farming. “Jap Road,” they had one in Jefferson and next door in Orange County, was named to honor the families who settled there. Nevertheless, Sandra Tanamachi, the Beaumont native who eventually got civil rights groups to help her change the local “Jap Lanes,” felt the name was less than an honor.
“Just Americans” is an often-times riveting battle tale of how a bunch of plucky Americans of all backgrounds including Asian and Anglo fought to rescue members of the 36th “Texas” Infantry Division who were trapped by Germans due to an ill-advised decision which was made by U.S. Army Maj. Gen. John Dalquist. By that time, for all you Texans unfamiliar with the story, the division had little to do with Texas except in name only. It was and is once again the Texas National Guard division, its members have served many deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Where “Just Americans” exceeds in its own mission — relating a war tale that more than justifies the right for Japanese Americans to call themselves “Americans — is in its explanation of the American social history of the Nisei, the American-born children of the Japanese. It would be ridiculous for such a book to tread lightly around the imprisonment of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans set in motion by an ignorant Executive Order 9066 signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Ignorant is the choice word here because the “relocation” of the American Japanese was based on blatant racism which is especially ignorant when set in motion by someone as supposedly enlightened as FDR. Thankfully, the book doesn’t tread lightly. Instead Asahina tells of heartbreaking visits by Japanese American soldiers who would visit their families in these “relocation camps” only to quickly leave because the young soldiers found themselves going “home” to a place where no home existed.
Interesting as well was just how schizophrenic the U.S. relocation policy was. All was not equal when it came to Japanese if you lived on the West U.S. Coast as opposed to those Japanese Americans who lived on the U.S. territory of Hawaii. The young, seemingly laid-back Hawaiians were not nearly as burdened as were their mainland kin, according to Asahina. Nonetheless, the young Japanese Americans often found strife among each other in the barracks between the “Buddaheads” of Hawaii and the mainlanders who were called “Kotonks.” Asahina explained that the Buddaheads were so named for a play on a Japanese word meaning “pig.” The “Kotonk” was the word for a sound of both a coconut and a mainlander’s head splitting open.
Japanese Americans were certainly not the only minority group to be given much less than was deserved for their military service in World War II. There isn’t a lot I am passionate about when it comes to Waco, Texas, a place I lived for seven years, but I do strongly believe that its first and perhaps the first U.S. World War II hero, black Navy cook Dorie Miller from Waco deserves a Medal of Honor. If you’ve ever seen the movie “Pearl Harbor,” you might remember Miller as the Cuba Gooding character. Miller, in real life, pulled his wounded captain to safety and shot down Japanese planes when the battleship West Virginia was hit on Dec. 7, 1941. There is some uncertainty about what exactly happened, but Miller was brave enough to have been awarded the Navy Cross. Had he not have been black, which is these days pretty much the verdict except by the Navy and some in Congress, Miller would have received the MOH.
The same is the case for a number of Japanese Americans involved in the rescue of the “lost battalion.” Although you can “blame” politics, Bill Clinton did right some wrongs when he upgraded a number of medals held by the Japanese Americans who rescued the “Texas” battalion to the highest honor. Among those who were awarded the Medal of Honor was Lt. Daniel Inouye, who later lost his arm after fighting in Italy. Inouye became the first U.S. House member from Hawaii after it became the 50th state. He was later elected to the Senate and remains the longest serving senator now since the death of Sen. Robert Byrd recently.
While Sandra Tanamachi would probably have wished the road she fought to change the name from Jap Road had become something else it is “Japanese Road” in some places while “Boondocks Road” in others. The latter is a restaurant which had advertised in a radio jingle that exclaimed the eatery was “Waaaaay down on Jap Road.” The jingle had kind of set Tanamachi off and also set her on the quest to rid the road of the name she found offensive.
So the question gets asked, and has in the past was asked by me, why is “Jap” so offense a word to Japanese Americans? I put that question to my blog’s “Vice President of Technical Stuff,” Mr. Tokyo Paul, a friend from college journalism classes who now lives in Tokyo. Paul really didn’t have much of a clue, saying the word “Jap” was something more offensive to Japanese Americans than to the Japanese. The answer as to where the offense lies was in the use of the word “Jap” both before and after the war. Inouye remembers being called “a dirty Jap” by Americans after his homeland of Hawaii was bombed. As Asahina explained, many Anglo West Coast residents also would let the returning Japanese Americans know that they were now and forever considered dirty Japs. One could find “No Japs Allowed” on signs in local cafes in Oregon and California or see a sign in a barber shop reading: “We Don’t Cut Jap Hair.”
I get the hurt. I can’t begrudge a Japanese American who went through those times his or her pain or what the words must mean to them. I still think that word hurting that much shows a sensitivity that probably the Nisei would have been best advised to just let slip on by. What about “Dirty White Boy” that the 70s rock group Foreigner sang? If anything, Asahina shows in his book that the Nisei proves just the opposite when it comes to the old saw “Sticks and stones can break my bones but words will never hurt me.”
Good God Granny, the things these brave soldiers of the 100th Battalion and 442nd Combat Regiment went through be they Japanese American, Korean American, Philippine American or Georgia Cracker American, broke their bones, their hearts and more. But some let that “dirty Jap” mouthed from some little insignificant son of a bitch hurt them. That’s too bad. But I guess we really didn’t really need Jap Road in the first place.
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