Hug a Veteran Day

I've never served in any war, and that's all the more reason to admire and honor those who have risked their lives fighting in those conflicts that have left our nation and our allies stronger, freer, and more secure.

There are two people, one verified and one not verified, who are the last remaining veterans of World War I. They are Florence Green of the UK who served in the Women's Royal Air Force, and Andrew Rasch, who claims to have been in the US Navy. Both of them are 110 years old.

Of course, there are still thousands of World War II veterans, including 87-year-old Daniel Inouye, one of Hawaii's two US Senators. There are loads of veterans from the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Desert Storm, the second Iraq War and the Afghanistan conflict. My hat's off to them all, along with those who served in dangerous conditions during the Cold War or otherwise between wars.

Frank, a family friend now in a nursing home, is a veteran of the 100th Battalion. Along with the 442nd Infantry Regiment of which Daniel Inouye was a part, they became famous as nearly all-Japanese-American fighting units distinguished by their immense bravery. I sometimes ask him questions about his time in Italy, but while his mind is still sharp at ninety-something, it's hard for him to speak. The conversations are limited, but he enjoys watching old cowboy movies, which I bring him on DVD. 

At the same nursing home as Frank is a woman named Jackie who was a pilot in the WAC (Women's Army Corp). Her job was flying newly minted aircraft from the Mainland (usually California) to Hawaii or elsewhere where they were needed by combat pilots and male officers authorized to fly in combat. She was still flying her own private airplane up and down the California coast past the age of eighty, when a mild stroke left her in a wheelchair and unable to drive, much less fly. Listening to her tell stories about the war and California and Hawaii back in the day has been fascinating, but I get the impression that I'm the only one who ever hears them. What little family she has never visits her. (Don't even get me started on the utter disregard for human life when people ignore those in nursing homes, simply because they fear their own ridiculously low threshold of discomfort will be crossed if they enter such a facility and actually speak to someone there.) 

I have a number of relatives who have served in the US military, though I haven't had the chance to hear many stories. One grandfather, who died years before I was born, served in Europe and then Japan and Korea, and became a career soldier. Two uncles were in Vietnam, and one of them also made the military his career. A cousin is an officer who has recently served in Iraq and Afghanistan. I expect some of his kids will also follow suit.

An uncle by marriage lied about his age and joined the Navy, and he eventually fought at Iwo Jima. He passed away recently, having been going through the stages of Alzheimer's Disease, the "long goodbye." I wrote about him here and here. He died less than three weeks after I wrote that first link and I spent the last part of my summer arranging the funeral.

Nursing homes are full of veterans. Go visit one. Not today, but tomorrow or the next day, when most everyone else will have forgotten them until next year.

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No Daily Kor today

Just bask in the glow of Pyongchang having won the 2018 Winter Olympics hosting rights. I'm a bit too busy today, but I'll catch up with today's news tomorrow, just in case Monster Island is your primary source for all that's important and newsworthy on the Korean Peninsula (don't laugh, that is my intention!).

In a few hours, I’ll be on a plane to the Mainland, and then off to help out my aunt whose much older husband is an Iwo Jima veteran (on the American side, just so we're clear). He’s in the final stages of Alzheimer’s and is getting sustenance through a feeding tube. This trip will almost certainly be the last time I see him alive (though that's what I'd thought about my trip in March).

His Alzheimer's was really kicking in around the time of Clint Eastwood's film, Flags of Our Fathers*, about those who fought and died or survived on that crucial island. It sticks out in my head because he and my aunt came to meet us for dinner and he talked about having just seen it and how he really enjoyed it, and how he was there, etc., etc. Over the course of dinner, he recounted that story probably three times, each time as if it had just popped into his head.

In hindsight, I wish I’d videotaped “interviews” of the guy when his mind was still clear. Supposedly he lied about his age to enter the war (or he got permission somehow, depending on who’s telling the story) but he was seventeen, I think, when he was at Iwo Jima. His nursing home care has literally bankrupted my aunt.

* This movie was a two-part film series, with Letters From Iwo Jima being the Japanese-language second installment. This, too, was an excellent movie, told from the point of view of the Japanese soldiers who would mostly die in that desolate place. I had wished that I could persuade my uncle to see it, because I would have been curious about his reaction. Would he have been interested, all these decades later, in seeing the other side, or would it just have brought up negative memories and emotions? Clearly, by the time Letters came out, he was in no cognitive condition to see it and appreciate it on any level, and he had earlier stated he didn't have any desire to see it. It's probably my own selfish conceit to want to have a WWII veteran see this movie, although I think that's what Clint Eastwood intended in part. Sadly, Mr Eastwood's intentions themselves were a bit of a failure: most Americans only saw Flags, and most Japanese only saw Letters, and thus neither side got the big picture Mr Eastwood had hoped. 

And speaking of Japanese and World War II

The Los Angeles Times has a story on the state of California issuing an apology to the ten thousand or so Italians who were forcibly uprooted during World War II:

In 1942, his mother was declared an "enemy alien," along with 600,000 other Italians and half a million Germans and Japanese who weren't U.S. citizens. More than once, men in suits searched the Maiorana house for guns, flashlights, cameras, shortwave radios — anything that could be used to signal the enemy.

Like 10,000 others up and down the California coast, the family was suddenly forced to uproot. At their new place in Salinas, they had to be home by 8 p.m. or face arrest. And when the government seized fishing boats for the war effort, Maiorana's dad, a naturalized U.S. citizen, saw his livelihood go down the drain.

"He was on the skids for the rest of his life," said Maiorana, 75, who owns a boatyard and marina on the harbor where his father's boat — as well as those of his uncles and several dozen other Italian fishermen — were confiscated.

Families like the Maioranas last week received a formal acknowledgement from California. A measure that swiftly made its way through the Legislature expresses the state's "deepest regrets" over the mistreatment of Italians and Italian Americans during World War II. Not nearly as severe or long-lasting as the internment of Japanese Americans, the wartime restrictions are still little-known throughout California, where they were the most heavily enforced.

While the treatment of Japanese residents and Japanese-Americans was arguably far worse — all people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast, regardless of citizenship, were forced to move inland, mostly to internment camps where they were treated like prisoners — the number of Italian and German immigrants who suffered mistreatment like that of the Maioranas may have been greater in number.

The Maioranas' boat, in the foreground at left, was one of many
Italian-owned boats seized by the government.

In the late 1980s, the US Congress voted to offer an apology and compensation ($20,000 each through the Civil Liberties Act of 1988) for the sixty thousand surviving Japanese residents and Japanese-Americans who had been interned during the war under harsh conditions. That was a long time coming, but other groups, including ethnic Japanese from Latin America whom the US arm-twisted its allies into deporting into US custody and ethnic Italians and ethnic Germans who suffered losses were largely ignored.

The war ended sixty-five years ago this month, but the pain is still there.

Manzanar water colorist Henry Fukuhara dies at 96

Henry Fukuhara, an Orange County-based water colorist who highlighted the Manzanar internment camp in eastern California's Owens Valley, died two weeks ago of natural causes at the age of 96:

Fukuhara started the Manzanar workshops in 1998, taking participants -- many of whom had been interned at Manzanar -- on painting excursions to various outdoor sites around the camp, including the Alabama Hills and the nearby town of Lone Pine.

The workshops, which have attracted about 80 participants a year, featured demonstrations by Fukuhara and other noted artists, including the late Milford Zornes, a leader of the California watercolor movement.

One of 10 children of Japanese immigrants, Fukuhara was born on April 25, 1913, in the Humboldt County town of Fruitland. He was encouraged to pursue his talent in art by a teacher at Santa Monica High School. After graduating in 1931, he enrolled at Otis Art Institute but was forced to drop out after a few months to help support his family through the Depression years.

Despite the hardships of the era, he kept up with his art and in 1936 had a show of linoleum block prints at what later became the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. A Times critic wrote that Fukuhara's landscapes had "a classical feel, real character and poetry."

In 1941, his family, which owned a retail nursery in Los Angeles, was just beginning to regain its financial footing when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor launched the United States into World War II. They managed to sell the nursery and store some personal belongings before arriving at Manzanar in April 1942.

By then a husband and father, Fukuhara worked in the camp's drafting department, surveying plots for graves. "Seemed like a joke," he told The Times in 1992, "but that's what we did." He lived in one room with his wife, daughter, parents, brother and sister-in-law.

In 1943, when internees who agreed to move away from the West Coast were permitted to leave the camp, Fukuhara and his family departed for Long Island, N.Y. With his father and brother he started a flower business that prospered over the next four decades.

In 1972, while recuperating from an operation, Fukuhara began painting. He studied with prominent watercolor artists and teachers on the East and West coasts, including Edgar Whitney, Robert E. Wood, Rex Brandt, George Post and Carl Molno. He began giving his own workshops before retiring from the flower business and moving back to Santa Monica in 1989.

Paintings of the Santa Monica Pier and other local scenes soon filled the house where he grew up. But in the mid-1990s, his thoughts returned to Manzanar. He organized the first workshop to raise funds for a committee dedicated to preserving the camp as a historic site.

Requiescat in pace, Mr Fukuhara.