Brothers Fighting Brothers

They were brothers, alone in America. It was a Sunday, and Ken Akune, 18, was helping Harry Akune, 21, prepare gardening equipment for the following day’s work.

A tenant emerged from the boarding house where they were living not far from downtown Los Angeles, shouting to the streets that Pearl Harbor had been bombed by the Japanese. From that day, Dec. 7, 1941, life would never be the same--for the Akunes or the world.

The brothers, born in this country, had lived in both the United States and Japan and their family was divided between the two. Both would go on to serve their country--the United States--in World War II in the Pacific theater. They would do that despite being sent to internment camps by a government suspicious of their loyalties, and despite knowing that it was likely the fighting would pit them against two other brothers fighting for Japan.

Their story is far more complex than what most Americans are familiar with, far more complex than the one told in movies like “Pearl Harbor.”

The Akune brothers were among 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry imprisoned in relocation centers during the war. Eventually, they were also among the 16,000 who would serve the U.S. overseas in the war. But, while they wore the same uniforms and defended the same flag as other American GIs, the war was different for them and other Japanese American soldiers. The freedom they fought for was not theirs to lose, it was theirs to gain.

“Enemy aliens.”

“Spies.”

There were many names. Only later would one more be added. “Heroes,” says Christine Sato, executive director of the Go for Broke Educational Foundation in Torrance.

The organization takes its name from the motto of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and 100th Infantry Battalion, both segregated units composed entirely of Japanese American soldiers. Together they became the most decorated unit in the history of the military, based on size and length of service.

They fought courageously at Cassino and the Gothic Line in Europe. They rescued what became known as the Lost Battalion from Texas, suffering more than 800 casualties in order to save 211 lives.

Sato, 31, says the manner in which the soldiers demonstrated loyalty for their country accounts in large part for the freedom and opportunities afforded subsequent generations. “They helped define what it is to be an American,” she says, “that it’s not about race or the color of your skin. It’s about the manner in which you serve your country.”

Veterans will gather this morning, Memorial Day, at Evergreen Cemetery in East Los Angeles and this afternoon at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center downtown.

The stories of the Akune and other families reflect how rules of life and order suddenly changed in America and how chaos ensued. It’s the story of brothers fighting brothers, a nation turning its back. It’s about the pain and anguish of a war 60 years ago, about legendary battles and a crescent moon long ago above the San Joaquin Valley.

Childhoods Divided

Each spring, when poppies bloomed, Japanese American families near Turlock, south of Stockton, would gather for a picnic prior to the planting season. Children would wrestle and race, while adults visited and danced.

Riichiro Akune was a jovial man, kind and generous. He and his wife owned a small Japanese grocery store, and often he would give credit when families were experiencing hard times, which was almost always.

Ken Akune remembers the night he and his siblings--four brothers and four sisters--waited outside for their father to come home. It was a night of great expectations as child No. 10 was due. He remembers the tears in his father’s eyes that night.

It was a boy, he told the children, but something went wrong. He didn’t make it. Neither did their mother.

It was the first of many tragic turning points in the Akune children’s lives. Ken Akune looked up at the sky, and even now, when he sees a crescent moon and Venus, shining brightly side by side as he did that night, he thinks about them--a baby brother laid to rest in his mother’s arms.

Upon her death, the children, who held dual citizenship, were sent to live with relatives in Japan.

Their father returned to Japan for good, but the two oldest sons, Harry and Ken, returned to the States to live in the country that felt most like home. When the war began, they were cut off from the rest of the family. To attempt communication with relatives in Japan would have drawn suspicion, so with the exception of one exchange of letters through the Red Cross, they lost contact until after the war.

The U.S. government, citing concern for security, ordered all Japanese Americans on the West Coast into relocation centers in desolate areas farther inland. The two brothers were transported from their home in Los Angeles to an assembly center in Merced, then on to a camp in southern Colorado. There, they were allowed to leave the grounds only to assist local farmers in the grueling work of harvesting sugar beets.

Then, one day an Army recruiter came with news that the government now wanted young men from the camps to join the military.

“I didn’t care what the government had done to us,” Ken Akune says. “When they came around, it was a chance for me to do what Americans were supposed to do, go out and serve their country. When they opened their door, for me, I felt like my rights were given back to me.”

The Akunes, both fluent in Japanese, were chosen for the Military Intelligence Service in the Pacific. Ken Akune’s primary responsibility was interrogating prisoners of war.

“I didn’t know for sure, but I suspected that one of my brothers, because of his age, would be in the Japanese military,” he says. It wasn’t until after the war that he discovered that, in fact, two of his brothers, the youngest only 15 years old, served for Japan.

“I thought about if I met my brother out in the field, what would I do?” Ken Akune says. “You don’t want to kill him, but if he points his rifle at you, what can you do? It’s a matter of survival.”

The brothers were viewed as the enemy in both countries. Imprisoned in the United States before joining the military, after the war, Ken and Harry Akune were met with scorn in Japan when they returned to the village where they had lived as children and where the rest of their family still lived. “There was the feeling that we were traitors, having lived in Japan, learning the language, then using it against them in the war,” says Harry Akune.

As the family members looked at each other for the first time in nearly 10 years, it was evident that the war still lived in their hearts.

“We were ready to go at it,” Ken Akune says, “and then my dad said, ‘Wait a second. The war is over.’ We cooled down, and that was the end of it.”

Shortly after the war, the Akune siblings--including those who had fought for Japan--returned to the United States. One who served in the Japanese military later was drafted into the U.S. Army and fought in Korea; the brother too young to have served in Japan would later be drafted too, and was stationed in England after the Korean War.

The brothers, most of whom have settled in Southern California, don’t talk much about the war, Ken Akune says. Like their father said, it’s over.

All the Sons Became Soldiers

Like the Akunes, Don Oka was from a large family, seven children, all sons, all born in the United States. And like the Akunes, their mother died giving birth, so they were sent to live in Japan.

In time, all seven sons would become soldiers: Don and two others fought for the United States during World War II; two brothers fought for Japan; two fought in Korea.

Don Oka, as a member of the Military Intelligence Service, was stationed on an island near Saipan in December 1944, as it was being hit hard by Japanese forces. After the war he discovered that his brother, Takeo Oka, a kamikaze pilot, was killed in the attacks.

“For us,” says Oka, “it was a civil war.”

Takeo was an elementary school teacher before the war. Of all the Oka children, he was the brightest, Don says, the most dedicated to education.

Five brothers still live. Only the two who served in Japan have passed. Danny Oka, 70, of Torrance is the youngest, “the one,” he says, “who killed my mother. She died giving birth to me.”

He ended up not being raised in the same household with his other brothers, and it wasn’t until he was 16 that he found out he was a member of the Oka family.

“It’s the saddest thing,” he says. “We are brothers, but we don’t have close-knit ties. We grew up separately.”

Some in Japan, some in the United States. Brothers, strangers, enemies and, now, brothers again. Four of the brothers live in L.A. County; a fifth in San Jose.

“We’re getting closer,” he says. “We try to get together, but for some reason it’s hard to talk about the old days.”

Paying Tribute to the Past

The old soldiers gather often at the edge of graves. Drawn together by giri, a moral commitment to each other, they pay tribute with a final salute, 21 rounds fired symbolically into the sky, “Taps”--solitary and mournful--waning to silent pause. It is time, not war, that claims them now; and, quietly, with increasing frequency, they come to pass beneath blankets of stars and stripes.

The stories of the Akunes and Okas and other Nisei, or second-generation Japanese Americans, who served are being preserved by the Go for Broke Educational Foundation as part of its effort to document their contributions to the nation’s history. Since 1998, 179 Nisei veterans have been interviewed for the project.

The foundation, incorporated in 1989 as the 100th/442nd/MIS World War II Memorial Foundation, built the Go for Broke Monument in Little Tokyo--near the intersection of Temple and Alameda streets, honoring Japanese Americans who served overseas during the war.

“We’re not trying to say the government did wrong,” says Sato, executive director. “We’re trying to say that this is an American story that occurred in U.S. history. Despite the fact that these men were incarcerated in camps, they made the choice to serve their country and prove their loyalty.”

It is not the Hollywood version. It is, however, the version held in memories of old soldiers, who stand at the edge of graves.