DID YOU KNOW? (Cheri)

First of all, postage stamps rate go up on July 15.

When I found this out, I went to the USPS web site to buy a bunch of Forever stamps.  Partly to save money, and partly because I'm a a collector of postage stamps . . . little pieces of art.

When I saw that these stamps had been available for three years, I emailed my friend Marian (also our absolutely most-frequent blog commenter) and asked her whether she knew about them.  She keeps stamps to mail to me, so I knew that she pays attention . . . not to mention that she is Japanese-American and of a certain age.

This was her very interesting response:

Yes I was aware of them because my uncle was part of [the 100th Infantry Battalion,
442nd Regimental Combat Team]. He was injured in Italy.
 
They were sent to rescue the “lost battalion” who were surrounded by Germans.
They did free the “lost battalion” and lost many lives themselves.
 
His battalion freed Jews from a concentration camp.  The battalion was not give credit
until a Jewish man told the media that when they were liberated and
saw Japanese soldiers, they thought the Japanese had won the war.   
 
Then they heard the soldiers speaking English.  The man said that he
wanted to meet the man that he spoke to on that day. 
Eventually, they were brought together. 
It was a very moving moment.  
 
Since my uncle had severe injuries, he was sent to the US for
medical treatment in a southern state.  He had metal in his body
all the rest of his life.  
 
When he and a friend got out of the hospital, they could not go back to Hawaii
because all Japanese had been taken to concentration camps
from the western states.  One day they went on a bus and was told by the driver to
go to the back of the bus.
 
An American officer who was on the bus, told the driver that these men
had almost died serving the US. They were not to be told to sit at the back! 
The bus company was notified and my uncle was never again told to go to the back.

The "Go For Broke" phrase on the stamps intrigued me, and I found this reference to a former exhibit at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum and then the Japanese American National Museum.  Now I want to watch A Flicker in Eternity: Stanley Hayami, a short documentary that is available through the JANM.

Another time, Marian told me about being a very small child and seeing an older gentleman return to her town on Kauai, in the  later 1940s:

Everyone was laughing, crying and rejoicing.
 
I asked my mother who that man was.  She looked at me and told me that
he was my grandfather.  He had been away.

Marian very surprised to learn, in college, that Japanese Americans had been held captive during World War II.  She called her mother, who said that her grandfather, as a leader of their village in Hawaii, had been held for several years.
 
How could Marian not have known this?  Her mother’s response:

Your grandfather told us not to tell the grandchildren. 
"They are Americans; they need to love their country."