Finally, Brothers in Arms : Remembrance: Accident of fate put the U.S.-born Fukuhara brothers on opposing sides in World War II. Three survivors are reunited for Little Tokyo museum ceremony.

By PETER Y. HONG

Nov. 11, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Few families reunited for Veterans Day experienced World War II in as many ways as the Fukuhara brothers.

By being in the wrong places at the wrong times, the American-born Fukuhara boys ended up as brothers- at- arms in the war.

When the atomic bomb hit Hiroshima, Harry Fukuhara’s U.S. Army unit was preparing to attack Japan.

Near the planned landing site, his younger brothers Pierce and Frank--who had gone back to Japan to attend school--were part of Japanese army units waiting to take on the Americans. Frank, the baby of the family, was in a suicide squad assigned to charge the invaders with a bomb strapped to his back.

Meanwhile, their mother and eldest brother, Victor, were in their ancestral home, which happened to be Hiroshima.

The bomb’s radiation eventually killed Victor. But by bringing about a quick Japanese surrender it kept Harry, Pierce and Frank from facing off on a battlefield. That helped make possible their reunion this week in Los Angeles, along with thousands of other veterans gathered to kick off a museum exhibit on Japanese American soldiers.

Figuring that his life, as well as those of his mother and two other brothers, might have been spared because of the Hiroshima bombing, Harry Fukuhara, 75, sums it up with a painful calculus: “One life for four; perhaps they’re not bad odds amid the misfortunes of a great war.”

Harry Fukuhara’s life embodies the mix of tragedy and triumph that so many Americans experienced through World War II and the decades that followed.

Harry’s mother took her five children, who had been born in Seattle, back to her native Hiroshima after Harry’s father died in 1933. Harry, then 13 and unable to speak Japanese, vowed to return to the United States as soon as he could.

“If I could have hitchhiked back I would’ve,” he said.

He came back after he finished high school in 1938. He was working his way through college as a houseboy in Glendale when Pearl Harbor was bombed.

On that day, he was immediately fired from his weekend job as a gardener. The neighborhood grocer refused to sell food to Harry and his sister, Mary, saying he “didn’t want Jap business.”

Despite such slights, and the fact that thousands of Japanese Americans were forcibly sent to desert internment camps, Harry was eager to join the war effort. He tried to enlist in the Army, but was turned away as 4-F, ineligible due to poor vision.

The retired teachers whose house Harry tended kept him from losing faith in his fellow Americans. When their efforts to keep him out of the internment camps failed and Harry went off to Gila River, Ariz., they drove for hours to visit him despite wartime gasoline rationing.

In 1942, the Army came to Gila River to recruit bilingual men for intelligence work and were willing to overlook Harry’s 4-F status.

Army life was an antidote to the misery of camp and the racism he suffered in Los Angeles. Through a battlefield commission, the former houseboy became an officer.

Harry had no contact with his family during the war, but assumed his brothers were in the Japanese army because they were the right age.

Although he was able to block out fears for his family’s safety for much of the war, that became impossible after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. One of his duties was to explain the event to Japanese prisoners.

While informing the prisoners of the destruction of Hiroshima, he was also describing the devastation of his family’s home city, and privately hoping that his mother and brothers were elsewhere during the bombing.

Arriving in Japan in September with the U.S. occupation forces, Harry drove for 24 hours from Kobe to his mother’s house. Along with his driver, a blond 19-year-old from Michigan clutching a rifle, Harry knocked on the door.

His mother and aunt came to the door and stared at the driver. They were frightened, emaciated and did not recognize Harry.

Harry had rehearsed what he planned to tell them, but seeing them standing there, frightened, he could only utter “Mom, I’m home,” in Japanese.

Inside, glass shards were embedded in the walls, and the shadows of trees and shrubs were burned onto the back of the house. Victor was lying on the floor, suffering from radiation sickness that would take his life within the year.

The next day Harry learned that Pierce and Frank were alive and living nearby.

“I recognized him right away,” Frank said of Harry. “But I didn’t know why he was wearing the U.S. uniform. I thought he was a POW.”

The surviving brothers harbored no resentment toward each other over their roles in the war; Pierce and Frank felt the war was so miserable that they were relieved when the bomb quickened its end.

Pierce and Frank were not the only Americans serving in the Japanese Army. Other Japanese Americans were stuck there while visiting relatives, and some who had gone to Japan to work because of racial discrimination in the United States were also drafted.

Remaining in Japan through the war had already made the younger brothers thoroughly Japanese. Frank had forgotten how to speak English. Today, Pierce, 73, lives in Yokohama, and Frank, 71 (who relearned English after the war), divides his time between Nagoya and Hawaii. Both were successful businessmen in Japan’s booming postwar economy.

The war also brought Harry closer to Japan and gave him a challenging career. Though he fled the country as a teen-ager, he ended up spending the rest of his working life there as an Army officer (he retired as a colonel in 1971) and civilian employee of the Army.

Now living in San Jose, Harry spends much of his time working on efforts to recognize Japanese American veterans. The brothers were in Los Angeles this week for Friday’s opening of an exhibit at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo, which explores the experiences of Japanese Americans in fighting both the enemy abroad in World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam, and racism in the United States.

A monument to Japanese American World War II veterans was also dedicated Friday in Little Tokyo.

Harry’s work on veterans projects has brought him some recent recognition. During ceremonies marking the 50th anniversary of the war’s end in Hawaii in September, Harry was among a group of veterans who played golf with President Clinton. Clinton was so moved by the story of Harry and his brothers that he later mentioned Harry in a speech defending immigrants.

“There’s not another country in the world that could tell that story,” Clinton said.

Although he was honored to be held up as an example by the President, Harry said that Clinton made the same mistake that he and other Asian Americans have had to live with: “He thought I was born in Japan, but I was born in the United States.”

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