One expects George Sakato to be bitter toward the U.S. government. It forced him, at 21, to leave his home town, shutter his family's grocery store and move to a city where he knew no one.
But Sakato is as patriotic as they come. On the annual Day of Remembrance, Thursday at Cottonwood High School, Sakato will tell his story. It began with Executive Order 9066, which authorized the U.S. military to evacuate and imprison 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. After a series of trials that are hard to imagine in this century, Sakato received the Congressional Medal of Honor.
The Japanese American Citizens League will honor Sakato during Thursday's event, while extending a warning. The rounding up of a particular group of non-white people, without due process, isn't relegated to history.
In early 1942, Sakato's family was forced to leave Redlands, Calif., and move to Phoenix, with only the belongings they could fit into suitcases. Soon afterward Sakato went to enlist in the Air Force. He was instead inducted into the Army at Fort Douglas, and went on to join the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. The 442nd suffered the worst casualties of any unit of its size in history. Sakato remembers the morning when he charged up a hill, into German fire, trying to protect the few Allied troops left on the battlefield near Biffontaine, France.
The Allies had entered German territory and were hiding in German foxholes. "My buddy stood up . . . and he got shot," Sakato remembered. "He died in my arms."
Sakato picked up an enemy rifle and P-38 pistol in the face of oncoming German troops. "I charged up that hill. I never could run up hills like that before. That day, I had the adrenaline," he said. Months later, with the war ending and Sakato being moved from hospital to hospital, he found out that he had been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.
But when he returned home and sought work in Denver, employers weren't interested. He trained during the day to become a diesel mechanic and worked nights at the Post Office. Wherever he applied, the question was, "Do you have 10 years' experience?"
"I'd just gotten out of the Army. How could I have 10 years' experience?" asked Sakato, then 25. He continued at the Post Office till his retirement in 1980.
"In the early 80s, his Distinguished Service Cross was stolen. Our house was broken into," said Bess Sakato, George Sakato's wife of 55 years. The U.S. Defense Department replaced it — and nearly 20 years later, the Sakatos got a phone call from the Pentagon.
The cross would be upgraded to a Congressional Medal of Honor. "On June 20, 2000, President Clinton put this on me," Sakato said, adding with a smile, "55 years late."
Utah played a part in the imprisonment of Japanese Americans from 1942-45, since 8,000 were held at Topaz, a so-called "relocation camp" near Delta. The outlines of barracks, as well as vegetable and flower gardens planted by the people jailed there, can still be seen, said Edith Mitko, the state Asian Affairs director whose parents lived at Topaz.
"They were married on the morning of Pearl Harbor," Mitko said. "On their honeymoon, their camera was confiscated, and they were stopped at roadblocks, all the way to Yosemite," where they spent a few days before reporting to Topaz.
"They weren't bitter at all," added Mitko. Her parents, David T. Saito and Setsu Aoki Saito, are deceased. "But they never taught us Japanese. That was their secret language."
Now, as Arab-Americans are coming under scrutiny and mistrust, Mitko obviously hopes the U.S. government won't repeat its mistakes of 60 years ago.
"With the war on terror, they're incarcerating people and using the same rationale" that people of a particular ethnicity pose a threat to national security. "Even though the Constitution says that no person shall be deprived of life and liberty without due process . . . the laws aren't enough. People have to speak up."
Earlier this month, the Associated Press reported that U.S. Rep. Howard Coble, R-North Carolina, called the incarceration of Japanese-Americans necessary, for their own safety. "Some probably were intent on doing harm to us, just as some of these Arab-Americans are probably intent on doing harm to us," added the congressman, who is chairman of a House homeland security panel.
"To suggest that the government locked up 120,000 innocent people for their own protection is not only patronizing and offensive, but it is patently incorrect," Floyd Mori, president of the Japanese American Citizens League, said in a letter to Coble.
Mori, who lives in Sandy, will preside over Thursday's Day of Remembrance event, scheduled at 6 p.m. at Cottonwood High School, 5715 S. 1300 East. "There is a void of information regarding what happened" to Japanese-Americans during and after the war, Mori said. "A lot of people say, 'That couldn't have happened in this country.' It can happen."
E-mail: durbani@desnews.com