Battle Zone : Veterans’ Groups Disagree About Who Should Be Listed on a Proposed Monument to Japanese-American Soldiers

They fought ferociously, overwhelming German troops and earning decorations by the bundle, attempting to prove their loyalty to the United States and raise the status of Asian Americans.

Now, 45 years after the fighting ended, some of these Japanese-American heroes of World War II are fighting each other.

Their new battleground is not a beachhead in Italy or a forest in France but, rather, the site of a proposed monument to their achievements in the First Street Plaza development in Little Tokyo.

One veterans’ group wants the monument to list the names of all veterans who served overseas during World War II, including the Army’s all-Japanese-American 100th Battalion and 442nd Infantry Regimental Combat Team (RCT) in Europe, and the Military Intelligence Service (MIS) in the Pacific.

A rival group would honor only those Japanese-Americans killed in action, not those who survived. And it would include the names of more than 325 fatalities from the Spanish-American War, World War I, and the Korean and Vietnam conflicts, as well as the approximately 700 who died in World War II.

Harry Akune, 70, of Gardena, said many of his World War II colleagues volunteered for the service from internment camps, believing that if they proved their loyalty to the United States, Americans would accept their families more easily.

Akune, who favors naming only World War II veterans on the monument, said the “successful fighting record of the troops had a lot to do with how the American government and the people perceived us after the war. These are people who definitely made a difference.”

In her 1983 study of the 100th Battalion and 442nd Regimental Combat Team, historian Masayo Duus reached the same conclusion. Her study noted that Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes wrote in 1945 that the outstanding record of the units was “the most important single factor in creating in this country a more understanding attitude toward people of Japanese descent. The goal for which they strove, acceptance for their families and themselves as loyal Americans, is being achieved.”

Each side of the monument dispute is adamant, said Bill Watanabe, executive director of the Little Tokyo Service Center social service agency. “They are kind of digging in. They have been writing letters to the editor of the Japanese-American newspapers in Los Angeles almost every day, criticizing the opposite position or saying it is wrong. It’s quite vehement.

“The people most affected are the veterans. To them, it’s a very emotional, very difficult issue. A lot of others are concerned because of what the controversy is doing to friendships and relationships within the community.”

Readers have been sending emphatic letters for six months to Rafu Shimpo, whose daily readership of 23,000 makes it the largest Japanese-language newspaper in Los Angeles and perhaps in the continental United States.

Chris Komai, editor of the English-language pages in the newspaper, said that in 14 years at the publication, he has seen as many letters on only one other subject: the federal bill to pay reparations to Japanese-Americans interned during World War II.

Letters to Rafu Shimpo have called the plan to memorialize only soldiers from World War II “shameful and deplorable,” “absolutely outrageous” and “dishonest and fraudulent.”

But another reader wrote that those who support the proposal to honor soldiers from all wars “have been making contradictory and exaggerated claims based on half-truths and their own erroneous perceptions.”

Col. Young Oak Kim of San Diego, a Korean-American and longtime Los Angeles resident who won the Distinguished Service Cross fighting with the Japanese-American units in Italy, said the monument must include the names of all 12,000 veterans of World War II, including those who survived. Kim said the comprehensive list would ensure that future generations remember the loyalty of Japanese-Americans during wartime.

“It will stop the average person and make him wonder why all those names are up here,” Kim said. “Fifty to 100 years from now, people may forget what the Japanese community did, but the sheer size of this list is a way of making people think about it.”

But Robert Hayamizu of Los Angeles, another World War II veteran, called the plan to memorialize the living “a vision of supreme grandeur by living leaders . . . who espouse such an immodest concept of martyrdom and immortality for themselves.”

Hayato Kihara of Hacienda Heights agreed and said a majority of veterans are on their side. Kihara said his group mailed ballots to members of 11 Japanese veterans’ groups. The returned ballots were counted under the eye of Rafu Shimpo editors. The former soldiers favored memorializing veterans of all wars, 838-600.

Neither group disputes that while attempting to prove their loyalty to America, the World War II soldiers covered themselves with glory.

The 100th Battalion landed at Salerno in 1943 and fought at Cassino and Anzio in Italy in 1944. Later it joined the 442nd RCT north of Rome. The two units fought up the Italian peninsula and went to France for the liberation of Bruyeres and the rescue of the Lost Battalion, a group of Texas soldiers surrounded by German troops for a week in the Vosges Forest.

“About 8,000 men who served with the unit received decorations,” Duus wrote in “Unlikely Liberators,” her study of the 100th and the 442nd, “and the 100th and the 442nd were honored with seven presidential citations. Five of the citations were for actions during the 20 days of fighting in the Vosges. That was unprecedented.”

The proposed monument will be part of a new First Street Plaza bounded by San Pedro, 1st, Temple and Alameda streets. It will include a 60,000-square-foot Japanese-American National Museum, a 26-story office building, 316 housing units and a 350-room hotel.

Michael Barker, co-managing partner of the Barker-Patrinely Group developing the plaza, said no cost has been established for the monument because, although the original 138 entries in the design contest have been narrowed to 10, no final design has been chosen.

“I’m sure it will be expensive,” he said, “because the veterans want something very classy and so do we.” Barker said private donations will finance the project.

Karen Kalfayan, a senior administrative analyst for the city administrative officer, said construction of the plaza will probably start in the fall of 1991.

Watanabe of the Little Tokyo Service Center says he hopes the dispute over the veterans’ monument is resolved long before then.

“To me, there is an honorable part of this, which is to memorialize the contributions of the Japanese-Americans who fought in behalf of the United States,” he said. “I’d hate to see it seen negatively as something selfish or an ego thing.

“There are people who fought in the 442nd and the MIS who believe they played a unique part not only in the war, but in terms of race relations and the acceptance of Asian-Americans in America. So they feel strongly about their contribution to American society.

“On the other hand, they need to see that their story, although unique, is not necessarily separate from other veterans who served in and gave their lives in other wars for the U.S.

“I would say why don’t they compromise. For me, it’s easy to say because I’m not a veteran. But to them, it’s hard because they feel so strongly about it.”