On Sunday, December 7, 1941, Lawson Sakai was an 18-year-old boy sitting in the kitchen of his home in Montebello, California, listening to a pro football game on the radio. Suddenly, an announcer broke in and said, “This just in! The White House has announced that the Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor, a Naval base in Hawaii!”
“I was so mad,” he told me years later. “I thought, ‘How dare they attack my country?'”
But when he went down to the Army recruiting office the next day, he discovered it wasn’t his country any more. He had been reclassified 4C – Enemy Alien.
“Now I was really mad! After all, I was born right here in the United States!”
Worse was yet to come. A few weeks later all the Japanese Americans on the west coast were rounded up and sent to prison camps in desolate, Godforsaken parts of the country, where they languished behind barbed wire for the duration of the war. Above them in the towers loomed soldiers with machine guns, with orders to shoot anyone who tried to escape.
But by 1943 the Army was so desperate for manpower, it created a segregated Japanese American unit called the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which ended up being awarded more medals, man for man, than any other military unit in American history. Lawson was awarded five of them, a Bronze star and four Purple Hearts, for shrapnel wounds to his in the legs and back plus temporary blindness from an exploding concussion shell.
After the war he came home, started a successful travel business, and married Mineko Hirasaki, who passed away in January. They had four children (Ken, Joanne, Janet and Dennis), eight grandchildren and one great granddaughter.
Thirty years ago he and some of his comrades founded Friends and Family of Nisei Veterans, a support group to keep alive the memory of what the 442 accomplished. He also organized tours of France where they could visit some of the cities they liberated from the Nazis.
And just in time, too. They took the city of Bruyeres just a few hours before the German commandant in the area, Klaus Barbie, the notorious Butcher of Lyon, was planning to execute hundreds of underground freedom fighters, including a teenager named Francois Mitterrand, who grew up to become President of France.
To this day, the people of Bruyeres celebrate their rescue every year with a memorial service. They also built a road from the center of town up to the 442’s base camp in the hills above the city and named it Rue de 442. And in the main square is a statue of a Japanese American G.I. holding his M1 rifle.
I accompanied Lawson and his buddies to Bruyeres in 1994, the 50th anniversary of the city’s liberation. As our bus rolled into town I spotted huge banners hanging overhead. But they didn’t say “Welcome to our liberators.” They said, “Welcome to our saviors.” You’ve heard that the French hate Americans? They sure don’t hate these guys.
The next day was Bastille Day, and Lawson and his friends paraded through the city behind the local high school band, which was playing “Marching Through Georgia,” composed during the Civil War to celebrate Sherman’s march to the sea, the beginning of the end of the Confederacy.
People were showering them with roses from the rooftops, and young mothers, who weren’t born until decades after the war, ran alongside them, holding up their babies and begging the heroes to bless them.
It was the happiest day of my life. I’m tearing up just writing this.
One by one, I’ve watched these good men die. They are the finest human beings I have ever met in my life. One time, I went to lunch at Jack London Square with a few of them, and the waitress was having a really bad day. She brought us stuff that nobody had ordered.
I was all for sending everything back to the kitchen, but they were having none of it. “Hey, I can live with this,” they said, “Let it go.”
I was puzzled for a moment, then it hit me: When you’ve done what they’ve done, and suffered what they’ve suffered, you don’t have to beat up an overworked waitress to prove you’re a real man. I said to myself, “These men are my true fathers.”
For the last three decades the Friends and Family have held a memorial service at Oakland’s Roberts Park underneath a redwood sapling they planted 30 years ago that has grown to a towering tree, and Lawson has always been front and center.
The service was cancelled this year because of the coronavirus pandemic, but we’ll be back next year. But Lawson won’t. He died on June 16 at age 96. Somehow – I can’t tell you why – I always knew in my bones that he would be the last to go.
I miss them all: John Togashi, Tad Masaoka, Shig Futagaki, and Tsune Takemoto, the bravest man I ever met. But I think I’m going to miss Lawson most of all. I know he had a full life, but I can’t stop wishing he could have lived forever.
The motto of the 442 was Go For Broke. And they did. God bless their memories. Thank you, Lawson, for everything. Happy July Fourth.
Reach Martin Snapp at catman442@comcast.net.