Advertisement - Click to support our sponsors.
Hawaii’s World
THE Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii hopes to bring life to the qualities represented by the Japanese words for sacrifice, courage, endurance, family, camaraderie, solidarity, tenacity, persistence, pride, justice, responsibility, loyalty, obligation and respect. Old values may
make a comebackThus the JCCH hall was the perfect place for the University of Hawaii College of Liberal Arts and Sciences to kick off a Nisei Veterans Forum series on "Universal Values for a Democratic Society."
Academics got together with Nisei World War II vets now in their 70s or 80s, plus a smattering of younger generation persons, to talk about how old values like "duty, honor, country" are holding up.
A current Army captain, possibly under 30, expressed the fear that "Go for broke," the World War II slogan of the Nisei 100th Infantry Battalion, is being replaced by "What's in it for me?"
"It was simpler back then," some discussants felt. "Today there is more diversity and complexity."
Yet others among perhaps 300 attendees were able to detect the beginning of a swing back to the older values. No votes were taken but a consensus might have been for only guarded pessimism rather than outright pessimism.
It is significant -- if true -- that parental spanking is returning to respectability and not always rejected as child abuse.
The keynote speaker was Sen. Daniel K. Inouye, who is among 19 World War II Nisei veterans who will gather at the White House June 21 to have their Distinguished Service Medals upgraded to the highest possible national tribute -- the Medal of Honor.
It took so long because of what is now seen as racial bias that kept AJAs from getting the top medal despite having the best combat record, highest casualty rates and most decorations of any World War II units.
Inouye continued to lead his unit forward against the Germans in Italy even after his right arm was shot off.
Inouye told the JCCH forum that he, too, is re-examining his old values. Looking back at the way tens of thousands of Japanese Americans were herded into concentration camps, surrounded by barbed war and machine guns, he now thinks the young AJA men in those camps probably were as brave as those who faced the bullets when they protested by refusing military service.
ONCE Inouye thought it the height of accomplishment to put a bullet right between the eyes of a German soldier. At JCCH, he used the "you've got to be taught to hate and fear" line from the musical "South Pacific" to underline how prejudices are fed from childhood on.
We in multi-ethnic Hawaii at least partly avoid them. His mother, from a Buddhist family, was orphaned early in life, raised for a while by a Hawaiian family and still later by a Caucasian Protestant minister's family.
Besides, he noted, after his World War II injuries he was saved by 17 blood transfusions, many of them from a black battalion. The senator flew from the forum here to Washington and then to Jerusalem to see what Congress might do to promote Middle East peace.
Inouye cited a national poll in 1991, 50 years after Pearl Harbor, that showed most Americans no longer recognized the significance of Dec. 7, 1941.
That day in history spurred to action what now is called "The Greatest Generation." It faced and met the greatest challenge of all time -- literally saving most of humanity from totalitarianism.
Were such a Hitlerian challenge to recur today, would we, could we, collectively sacrifice to meet it and strike it down?
A.A. Smyser is the contributing editor
and former editor of the the Star-Bulletin
His column runs Tuesday and Thursday.