Pride, Pain Linger for Japanese-Americans Caught on Wrong Side of War : Loyalties: Hundreds were drafted to fight against America. Some regained their U.S. citizenship, but others settled into new lives.

TOKYO —  Forty-five years ago, Shigeo Yamada was an officer of the Japanese Imperial Navy clinging to the wreckage of his cruiser in the murky waters off Okinawa. Around him bobbed the remnants of Japan’s last naval offensive of World War II.

Like his comrades, Yamada was bitter over his fate at the hands of U.S. dive bombers. But there was a difference. Yamada was an American.

Born into an Idaho farming family, Yamada was one of hundreds of Japanese-Americans who, because of ties to their ancestral homeland, found themselves in Japan when the war broke out and were drafted into the Japanese armed forces.

After Japan’s surrender in August, 1945, the U.S. government stripped the Japanese-Americans--most of them second-generation, or Nisei--of their American citizenship, but some were restored later.

Yamada, a longtime Tokyo resident, says he could legally recover his citizenship by showing he served under duress.

“But I don’t consciously feel it’s right. I did take arms against the country of my birth,” said the 69-year-old sales executive.

“It was a dilemma in my mind, but what else could you do? There was nothing I could do other than object to the conscription and be thrown into jail.”

The issue of divided loyalties in the war was first raised after Japan’s raid on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Along the West Coast of the United States, 120,000 Japanese-Americans were herded off to internment camps in what the American Civil Liberties Union called the worst wholesale violation of civil rights in the nation’s history.

U.S. officials at the time claimed the loyalty of the internees was suspect. But the Japanese-Americans stoutly maintained their patriotism, and many fought bravely for the U.S. side. Indeed, the all-Nisei 442nd regimental combat team became the war’s most decorated unit, suffering 28% casualties. The unit fought only in Europe, so its members never had to face their ethnic cousins in combat.

In 1989, Congress approved more than $1 billion in reparations to families of the internees.

Several Japanese-Americans interviewed in Japan recently said they had few compunctions about fighting for Japan, whether because of blood ties or simply an unwillingness to make trouble.

But clearly, for many, dual heritage posed the dilemma of dual identities. Had circumstances been different, they likely would have fought for the United States, some said.

James Yoshida, a Seattle native who served in the Japanese army in China, recalls being confused and haunted by his mother’s admonition not to shame the family name.

“How did she expect me to behave? As an American? As a Japanese?” he wrote in a 1972 book about his successful fight to regain his U.S. citizenship, “The Two Worlds of Jim Yoshida.”

Kei Tateishi, a Japanese-American journalist who was caught in Japan during the war and later worked for Time magazine and the Associated Press, says perhaps thousands of Nisei were forced to serve in Japan’s army and navy. But the exact number may never be known because the Japanese government did not record evidence of dual citizenship when it conscripted them, he says.

“None was voluntary. All were drafted as far as I know,” said Tateishi, 73, who was put to work as a translator for Domei, Japan’s official news agency during the war.

The Nisei who chose to remain here after the war say, without exception, that they faced little overt racial prejudice growing up in the United States. But always there was that final wall: acceptance as an American.

“German-Americans in the United States were not interned,” Tateishi pointed out. “This was not the case with the Japanese immigrant. He was not accepted as white, so he went back to stay with his race, his family.”

Yamada’s family lost its potato farm in Rexburg, Ida., during the Depression and moved to Los Angeles. His parents, like many first-generation immigrants, or Issei, were eager to keep strong cultural ties with their homeland. They urged him to go to college in Japan.

Yamada, a dutiful son, was not reluctant. Around that time, he says, he learned that racial discrimination had cost him the valedictorian’s spot at Covina High School in Los Angeles, even though he had the highest grades in the class. In 1939, he enrolled at Keio University in Tokyo.

“I’d been in Japan two years when the war broke out and had become rather brainwashed,” Yamada said. “I’d acquired Japanese friends, and all of us being of the same blood. . . . “

Jack Ishio, 68, grew up in Tacoma, Wash., and served as an anti-aircraft gunner for the Japanese army. He recalls shooting down four U.S. dive bombers toward the end of the war.

“I was living in the present and not in the past. I was happy to just be in Japan and doing whatever the Japanese were doing,” said Ishio, who had returned to Japan with his family in 1938. His parents registered him for dual citizenship, and he quickly felt at home.

“I considered myself Japanese. I had no resistance whatsoever to being drafted. In a war what can you do? You can’t be thinking two things at once.”

On Aug. 5, 1945, Ishio returned to a base about a mile outside Hiroshima, where he had helped transport comrades wounded in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea.

The next morning the atom bomb was dropped. The concussion knocked them off their feet. “We said: ‘What the hell was that?”’ Ishio recalled. “At first we thought it was a city gas tank that blew off its top.”’

They saw the carnage the next day. All the wounded men Ishio had transported to the Hiroshima hospital had died. He spent the next 15 days dragging bodies through the rubble, cremating 230 a day.

“It was dreadful,” Ishio said. “But I never felt a sense of anger at the U.S. that they used such a weapon to bring the war to an end. I think that was the right thing to do.”

For many Nisei like Ishio and Yamada, the decision to remain in Japan has brought peace of mind. Most used their English to carve successful careers representing Japanese companies abroad. And in a country that has never fully confronted its wartime conscience, they faced none of the questions that led eventually to the U.S. treason conviction of Iva Toguri D’Acquino, the Nisei branded “Tokyo Rose” for her propaganda broadcasts.

Having endured their rite of passage into close-knit Japanese society during wartime, most of the conscripted Nisei married Japanese women and raised families here when peace came. But they have maintained a loose network of Nisei contacts through the Japan chapter of the Japanese-American Citizens League.

Ishio went to work for an importer of foreign cars. California-born Frank Wada, 78, who served as a truck driver for the Japanese army in Manchuria, returned to his prewar job as a mining engineer for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Shortly after the war, Wada led Japanese technical fact-finding tours of the United States.

“Part of me will always have this American spirit,” Wada said. That spirit, he says, is a willingness to relax and enjoy life, in contrast to the implacable Japanese work ethic.

“The Japanese don’t understand this.”

Yamada went to work as a salesman for Japan Air Lines, managing offices in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, and rose to become an executive vice president. Currently chairman of a liquor-importing company, he plans to retire this year and spend more time in his vacation home in Vancouver, Wash.

“I haven’t had an enemy in my life,” Yamada said.

Yamada was the only one of five Nisei to survive the battle that sank his cruiser, the Yahagi, in April, 1945, along with the famed battleship Yamato.

“All I’ve had in my life is luck.”