Japanese-Americans

I am of Japanese descent. I served four years in the U.S. Army and saw combat in El Salvador. My uncle and a cousin saw combat in Desert Storm. My father served in Vietnam, and my grandfather fought the Nazis in ’43. We are Americans. We earned the right to call ourselves Americans.

Make no mistake. The Japanese who threaten the U.S. economy are not the same as those who are American citizens. Most of us and our ancestors came to America with nothing but hopes of a better life. Most of us were considered Barukin (i.e., “the filthy ones”) because we were fishermen and farmers. The atrocities the Japanese government committed against our families make Hitler and Stalin look like humanitarians.

Japanese-Americans are not sympathetic to the Japanese government. We and/or our forefathers renounced their allegiance to Japan a long time ago. This great country gave us an opportunity to live without watching our children die of starvation or tortured to death because they had the wrong last name.

A. T. KAMEDA

Dana Point