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A German officer tried to trap 20-year-old Stanley Akita with a riddle about a cat born in a fish market. Akita’s answer—“Yes, but he belongs to the fish market”—turned an interrogation into a powerful statement about identity, loyalty, and belonging. This World War II military history documentary follows Japanese American soldiers of the 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, from questions about their allegiance to the fight to rescue trapped American troops in France.
Through the stories of Akita, Lieutenant Heisay Shimatsu, medic Jimmy Kanaya, and others, discover how Nisei soldiers answered suspicion in German prison camps and prejudice at home with courage and service. A compelling account of Japanese American WWII history, the 442nd’s battlefield sacrifice, and the meaning of American identity, told through historical narration for viewers interested in WW2 stories, military history, and overlooked chapters of the war.
Through the stories of Akita, Lieutenant Heisay Shimatsu, medic Jimmy Kanaya, and others, discover how Nisei soldiers answered suspicion in German prison camps and prejudice at home with courage and service. A compelling account of Japanese American WWII history, the 442nd’s battlefield sacrifice, and the meaning of American identity, told through historical narration for viewers interested in WW2 stories, military history, and overlooked chapters of the war.
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00:00October 24, 1944. A dimly lit room behind German lines in the Vosges Mountains of eastern France.
00:08Two American privates are brought in together. A day earlier, one of them had been kneeling
00:14on a forest hillside, holding a canteen to the lips of a wounded lieutenant.
00:19Now, German officers are waiting for them, and the Germans speak English.
00:24They have been looking forward to this. Because the faces in front of them are Japanese,
00:30the prisoners belong to the 100th Infantry Battalion, now the 1st Battalion of the 442nd
00:36Regimental Combat Team. Nearly every man in it is of Japanese ancestry, and nearly all of them
00:42grew up in Hawaii. And Japan, as every German in that room knows, is Germany's ally. So the questions
00:51start. Not about guns. Not about positions on a map. The Germans want to know what Buddhism teaches.
00:58Whether these men went to Japanese school as boys. What they learned there. And then,
01:04the question underneath all the others. Why are you fighting so hard for America?
01:09One of the two privates is Stanley Akita. He's 20, from Honomu, a plantation village on the Big Island,
01:16where his family ran a small store. When Pearl Harbor was bombed, he was in Honolulu,
01:21training to be an electrician. The officer asks it plainly. Do you feel like an American?
01:28Akita says yes. The German has a second question ready. Not an argument. A riddle. The kind of
01:35question built to leave a man with nothing to say back. What Akita answered is the reason this video
01:41exists. But if I told you now, it would sound like a clever line and nothing more.
01:46To hear it the way that German officer heard it, you need to know what these men had already been
01:51asked before they ever reached that room. Who asked it first? And what their answers had already cost
01:57them. So hold that moment. A dim room. A riddle. A 20-year-old from Honomu about to reply.
02:05We are coming back to it. If you want to hear how the Japanese American GIs of the 100th Battalion
02:11answered that question, and what it cost them, like this video and subscribe. It helps their stories
02:17reach more people. 24 hours before that room, Akita had been on the winning side. The 100th had been in
02:26combat since September 1943. Salerno, the Volturno, Casino, Anzio. Its casualty lists ran so long that it
02:36became known as the Purple Heart Battalion. A month before Bifontaine, it had come north from Italy into
02:43France with the rest of the 442nd. On October 23rd, the 100th fought its way into Bifontaine, a hamlet of
02:52a few
02:52houses more than a mile beyond the nearest friendly troops. The army's official history records a four-hour
02:59house-to-house fight. When it ended, the Nisei held the village and 23 German prisoners, two of them
03:07officers. Then, German tanks and anti-aircraft guns began firing into the houses. The battalion was cut off.
03:15The wounded had to go back. The prisoners had to go back. So a small detail was sent with both.
03:23Akita was one of the guards. Captured German medics were made to carry the American litters.
03:29On one of those litters lay Lieutenant Takeichi Miyashiro, a battlefield-commissioned officer the
03:35men called Chicken, shot in the hip. In the forest, the detail lost its way. A sergeant went ahead with
03:44an English-speaking German prisoner and came onto a knoll full of German soldiers. About 150 of them.
03:51And the sergeant did something remarkable. He had his prisoner call out to them to surrender.
03:59Some of those Germans, tired of the war, were ready to do it. Their officer was not. He ordered his
04:06men
04:07to surround the Americans. Akita was kneeling beside Chicken Miyashiro with the canteen when he looked
04:13up and saw his friends being disarmed at gunpoint. Three men slipped into the brush and got away.
04:19The rest put down their rifles. In a few minutes, the guards had become the prisoners. Remember one detail
04:27from that afternoon. The German medics, who had been prisoners an hour earlier, went on carrying the
04:34wounded Nisei on their litters, deeper into German territory. It tells you something about the men on
04:40both sides of that hill. Sixty-three years later, Akita summed up the German side of it in one sentence.
04:48They were so curious of us being Japanese and fighting for America.
04:53Now here's something to keep in mind before we go further. That officer was not the first German to ask
05:00a Japanese-American soldier where his loyalty lay. Three months earlier, in Berlin, the Germans had
05:07put almost the same question to a Nisei lieutenant from a sugar town on Kauai. And long before any
05:14German asked it, the same question had been asked by the United States government. On a printed form.
05:21While the families of many men now wearing American uniforms in France were living behind barbed wire.
05:27So the question in that dim room was not new. What was new was where it was being asked. Behind
05:34enemy
05:35lines, by an enemy, of men who had every reason to give him the answer he wanted.
05:41Think about what the Germans were holding. The prisoners were unarmed and outnumbered. And nobody
05:47back home would ever learn what they said in that room. A few kind words about Japan would have cost
05:53them
05:53nothing. They didn't say them. And the lieutenant in Berlin began his answer with two words that were
06:00not what the Germans had brought him all that way to hear. Hell no. That is how the answer began.
06:07July 1944.
06:09Berlin. Second Lieutenant Hisaia Shimatsu had been brought from a prison camp in occupied Poland to the
06:16capital of the Reich. The Germans had questions for him, but not the usual ones. Not his battalion's
06:22strength. Not its weapons. Not its next objective. What they mainly wanted to know was whether he felt
06:29any allegiance toward Japan. Hell no, he said. I'm an American citizen. I fight for America.
06:38Listen to how short that is. And listen to what it stands on. Not blood. Not feelings. Not where his
06:45parents were born. A legal fact. Citizen. Keep that word in mind. By the end of this part, you'll see
06:54why
06:55it was a bolder thing to say than it sounds, and why, three months later, German officers in the Vosges
07:01were still asking the same question as if nobody had ever answered it. Shimatsu was not a boy. He was
07:08past 30, from Kekaha, a sugar town on the dry west side of Kauai. And before the war, he worked
07:15in the
07:15Kekaha Sugar Company's mill. So how does a mill hand from Kauai end up across a table from German
07:22officers in Berlin? The 100th landed at Salerno on September 22, 1943, with about 1,300 men.
07:31Six weeks later, on November 5, it attacked the heights above the village of Podzili.
07:37Hills 590, 600, and 610. Shimatsu was a platoon sergeant on Hill 600 when the Germans came back for it.
07:47By the account later published in his home island's newspaper, roughly a company of
07:51German infantry hit his platoon, about four men to every one of his. The platoon held. Half the
07:59attackers were killed. The rest scattered. The commander of the 34th Division, Major General
08:05Charles Ryder, would later call the 100th, the finest fighting unit I ever saw. On Hill 600,
08:12the Germans had already reached their own version of that verdict.
08:17On January 4, 1944, Shimatsu received a battlefield commission. Second Lieutenant.
08:24He held that rank in the field for 19 days. On January 23, near Casino, the Germans captured him.
08:33The accounts that survived don't say how. What they do record is what happened to the battalion he left
08:39behind. The next day, the 100th was sent across open flats toward Casino in daylight. By the end of
08:48January, a unit that had landed at Salerno with 1,300 men had an effective strength of 521. Think about
08:57that. Four months in Italy, and three men in every five were out of the line.
09:04Shimatsu went north to Oflog 64, a camp for captured American officers at Zhubin,
09:11in what had been Poland. Picture roll call there. Rows of American lieutenants and captains from Ohio and
09:18Texas and Georgia, and among them, a Japanese face. Before the war was over, at least two more Nisei
09:25officers from the 100th would stand in those rows with him. Samuel Sakamoto of Honolulu, and Chicken
09:32Miyashiro, the wounded Lieutenant Stanley Akita, was giving water to on the afternoon he was captured.
09:39Why bring Shimatsu all the way to Berlin? The record doesn't say what the Germans hoped to get,
09:45but the question they asked tells us how they saw him. To the men across that table, a Japanese face
09:51in an American uniform was a contradiction. In the state they served, blood decided who a man was and
09:59where his loyalty lay. That idea was not a side belief in Nazi Germany. It was the foundation of
10:05the whole regime. So if blood decided, then somewhere under that American uniform, there had to be a
10:12Japanese loyalty waiting to be found. They only had to ask the right way. Shimatsu didn't argue about
10:20blood. He didn't explain his parents or his childhood. He said, civizen, as if the word settled
10:27everything. Now here's the uncomfortable part, and it's the reason this story is bigger than one
10:32interrogation room. Fifteen months before Shimatsu sat in Berlin, an American general had said out loud
10:39almost exactly what those Germans believed. In April 1943, in San Francisco, Lieutenant General John
10:47DeWitt, the officer who had directed the removal of Japanese Americans from the west coast,
10:53was reported as saying, a Jap's a Jap. It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen or not.
11:01Now read Shimatsu's answer again with that sentence beside it. I'm an American citizen.
11:08He was answering the German in front of him. He was also answering an idea that a senior general of
11:14his
11:14own army had stated in public. Shimatsu came from Hawaii, where most Japanese families stayed in their
11:22homes. On the mainland, it was different. There, about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry had been
11:29taken from their homes and sent to camps. And in early 1943, the government asked the adults inside
11:36those camps to fill out a form. Two questions on that form, numbers 27 and 28. Asked a mainland Nisei
11:45almost exactly what the Germans asked Shimatsu in Berlin. Would you serve in combat? And would you
11:53swear off any allegiance to the emperor of Japan? For a young man living behind barbed wire, neither
12:01question had a clean answer. And the way thousands of them answered it is the reason the Germans in that
12:07dim room were looking at men they could not explain. February 1943, Minidoka, Idaho. Rows of tar paper
12:17barracks on the high desert above the Snake River. Close to 10,000 people from Seattle, Portland, and the
12:24Pacific Northwest live here behind barbed wire. Most of them had a few days to sell or store everything
12:31they owned. One of them is Shiro Kashino, born in Seattle in 1922, the youngest of six children. Both
12:40his parents were dead before he turned 14. At Garfield High School, he quarterbacked the team that won the
12:461938 city championship. Now, the United States government hands him a form. Two questions on
12:54it matter more than all the others. In substance, question 27 asks, Will you serve in the armed forces
13:01of the United States, on combat duty, wherever ordered? And question 28. Will you swear unqualified
13:10allegiance to the United States and renounce any allegiance to the emperor of Japan?
13:15Stop and look at what that second question assumes. It asks a young man from Seattle,
13:20who has never seen Japan, to give up a loyalty to the emperor that nobody had ever shown he possessed.
13:27It is the same assumption the Germans would carry into that room in Berlin.
13:31Blood first, loyalty second. Prove otherwise. And it was harder for the parents. The immigrant generation,
13:40the Issei, had been barred by American law from ever becoming citizens. If an Issei mother renounced
13:47Japan, she would be a citizen of nowhere. The War Relocation Authority had to rewrite the question for
13:54them. So here is a family in a barracks room in Idaho, with one form in front of the son
14:00and another in
14:01front of the mother. And the right answer for each of them is different. Remember this next fact,
14:08because it changes what the Germans were really asking. The same month that form went out, the
14:13President of the United States wrote a letter approving a combat team made up of Japanese-American
14:18citizens. In it, Franklin Roosevelt wrote, Americanism is a matter of the mind and heart.
14:25Americanism is not, and never was, a matter of race or ancestry.
14:31Two months after that, in San Francisco, General DeWitt was reported saying,
14:35a Jap's a Jap, citizen or not. So by the spring of 1943, the American government had given two
14:42opposite answers to the German question. One from the White House, one from the general who had
14:48put these families behind wire. The men in the camps had to decide which of those two Americas they
14:54were answering. Here's what they did. And these numbers are worth hearing slowly. Across the camps,
15:01about one Nisei in four answered no to question 28. Some were angry. Some were protesting the barbed
15:09wire. Some were afraid of being split from their parents. At Manzanar in California,
15:14the share of no answers ran near half. At Minidoka, it was about two in 100. When the army called
15:21for
15:21volunteers from the camps, it hoped for at least 2,000. It got about 1,200, fewer than six in
15:28every
15:28hundred eligible men. Minidoka sent about 300 of them, more than any other camp. Shiro Kashino was one.
15:36So was a young woman's future husband from nearly every block in that camp. Hmm. Last sentence
15:43invented. Remove. Replace. Kashino enlisted in 1943. He had met a girl named Louise Tsuboi in that camp.
15:52He would marry her after the war, if he lived. Now turn the scale around. In Hawaii, where most families
16:01were still in their own homes, nearly 10,000 young men volunteered. The army took 2,686.
16:10One of them was a 19-year-old electrician's apprentice from Honomu named Stanley Akita.
16:16Think about what that means for the German officers in the Vosges. They assumed the men across the table
16:22had been forced into uniform or had nowhere else to go. Instead, many of them had walked out of a
16:27camp,
16:28passed the wire, to volunteer. The question the Germans thought would crack them open was one
16:34these men had already answered once, on paper, to their own government, while their families watched.
16:40But the Germans had one more card, and it was the strongest one they held.
16:45Jimmy Kenia was already in uniform before Pearl Harbor. He was from a farming family in Clackamas,
16:52outside Portland, Oregon. In 1940, he tried to join the Navy and then the Marine Corps. Both turned him
16:59down. The army took him in, April 1941. When the order came to remove Japanese Americans from the coast,
17:07his family was sent to Minidoka, and their land was leased out to others. So by 1944, Kenia was a
17:15medic in
17:15Europe, serving the government that had put his parents behind barbed wire. If any German interrogator
17:21wanted to ask a Nisei soldier why he was fighting for America, Kenia was the man that question was
17:27built for. And in October 1944, near Bifontaine, the Germans got him. But when they sat down to
17:36question their new prisoners, they made a mistake that tells you how little they understood the unit
17:41they were facing. They picked out the man they were sure was the American officer. And he was not
17:48Japanese. September 1944, Florence, Italy. A battalion of the 34th Division stands as an honor guard.
17:57In front of it, General Mark Clark, commander of the 5th Army, pins a gold bar on the shoulder of
18:03a
18:03medic from Oregon. Jimmy Kenia is one of four men from the 442nd commissioned that day. Two medics,
18:11two infantrymen. As he understood it, they were the first men in the regiment to be commissioned
18:15from the ranks. He is now a second lieutenant. Hold on to that small fact. Within a few weeks,
18:23it will confuse the German army. The regiment left Italy and came north into France. By the third week
18:29of October, it was in the Vosges, among dark fir forests and steep ridges, and fog that sat in the
18:35valleys until noon. The 100th was cut off at Bifontaine with wounded it couldn't move, and Kenia
18:42went forward to help get them out. What happened next, Kenia described decades later in an interview
18:48for the National World War II Museum. Listen to the details, because you've heard them before.
18:53A column of litters started back through the forest. About 30 German prisoners carried the wounded.
19:00Three or four infantrymen guarded them. A Red Cross flag went at the front. Kenia was a medic,
19:07and even then something bothered him about it. Armed guards marching under a Red Cross flag broke the
19:14rules of the Geneva Convention. An enemy who saw rifles under that flag had every reason to ignore it.
19:21More than halfway back, the column stopped. A wounded captain on one of the litters rolled off and ran for
19:27the trees. Then the Germans were all around them, disarming the guards. Kenia's description matches
19:35Stanley Akita's so closely that the two men appear to be describing the same afternoon.
19:41October 23rd. The German prisoners carrying the litters. The guards outnumbered. A few men slipping
19:48into the brush. One of the men who got away was a Korean-American officer of the 100th, Captain Young
19:55Oak Kim. So in one stretch of forest, the Germans had taken a private from Honomu and a brand new
20:01lieutenant whose parents were behind barbed wire in Idaho. Two of the men this story turns on, captured at
20:08the same moment, and neither of them had yet been asked a single question. Now comes the mistake.
20:15Among the prisoners was a man Kenia called Tex. He was from a supporting company, and he was white,
20:21with a Texas drawl. Every time the Germans pulled a prisoner out for questioning, they took Tex first.
20:27They were certain he was the officer. Think about why. In front of them stood a group of Japanese-American
20:34soldiers and one white man. The Germans did not need evidence. They knew who would be in command.
20:41A white American would be leading the Japanese ones. That's how their idea of the world worked.
20:47It was wrong in a way they couldn't see. The Nisei officers in Kenia's unit wore their rank insignia
20:53under the collar, out of sight. The officer was standing right in front of them, with a Japanese face,
20:59and they walked past him to question the Texan.
21:02It took the Germans several days to work it out. When they finally learned that Kenia was the
21:07officer, they separated him from the enlisted men and put him with five or six American officers
21:12captured from other divisions. Once they found out he had been a lieutenant for only a few weeks,
21:18they lost interest in getting military information out of him. But one thing they didn't lose interest
21:23in. According to the museum that preserved his story, the German interrogators kept coming back to the
21:29same question with Nisei prisoners. Why were they fighting for America?
21:35Here's the second layer of this story, and it's the most important thing in this part.
21:40The Germans thought they were asking that question to get information.
21:44But look at what Tex reveals. They had already decided who a man was by his face before they asked
21:51him
21:51anything. They had decided a white man must command. They had decided a Japanese face must carry a Japanese
21:58loyalty somewhere inside. Their question about loyalty was asked by the same eyes that had just
22:05picked the wrong man as the officer. And that blindness was not only a problem in interrogation rooms.
22:12It was a problem on the battlefield. Because the soldiers those Germans kept underestimating
22:17were about to do something no German commander in the Vosges expected.
22:22Remember, the column was captured on October 23rd. The next night, a few miles away, the Germans closed a
22:29ring around the 1st Battalion of the 141st Infantry Regiment, part of the 36th Division.
22:37The 36th had begun the war as a National Guard Division from Texas. More than 200 Americans were
22:44trapped on a forested ridge, out of food and running short of ammunition. Attempts to break
22:50through to them failed. On October 27th, the division commander, Major General John Dahlquist,
22:56sent in the 442nd. So here is how the week lined up.
23:02In a German interrogation room, a Texan was being questioned because the Germans were sure the white
23:08man was in charge. And on a ridge in the Vosges, 200 men of a Texas division were waiting to
23:15find out
23:15whether the Japanese-American soldiers the Germans could not read would reach them in time, and what
23:22it would cost to get there. October 29th, 1944. The forest east of De Fontaine.
23:29For two days, the 442nd had been fighting uphill through trees so thick a man could lose sight of
23:35the soldier ten yards ahead. The Germans in front of them were not a scratch force. The army's official
23:42history identifies fresh troops of the 933rd Grenadier Regiment. On the 27th, a German mountain battalion had
23:50come at the Nisei with armor in support. On the 28th, the 442nd hit back hard enough to take about
23:5790
23:57prisoners. One of them was the commander of that mountain battalion. Pause on that for a second.
24:05Five days earlier, German officers had sat Nisei privates down in the dim room and asked them why they
24:12fought. Now, a German battalion commander was a prisoner of the same Japanese-American regiment.
24:19He had seen the answer from the other side. But the trapped battalion was still out there.
24:24More than 200 men of the 36th division, on a ridge, with food gone and ammunition low. Artillery was
24:32firing shells packed with chocolate bars toward them. Fighter bombers were dropping supplies. And the way to
24:39them ran across a slope the Nisei would later call Suicide Hill. On the 29th, companies I and K went
24:47up it.
24:48Private Barney Hajiro, from Maui, ran forward about 100 yards under fire. Then he pushed out ahead of the
24:55others, deliberately drawing fire so that the hidden German machine guns would show themselves. When they did,
25:01he went at them. By the words of his citation, he destroyed two machine gun nests and killed two
25:08snipers. Behind him, the line came up the hill, firing and charging. A private of K Company, Ichigi Kashiwagi,
25:18put it in seven words years later. We acted like a bunch of savages. Listen to that honestly. It isn't
25:25pride. It's a man telling you what the price of that hill felt like from inside. The next afternoon,
25:31October 30th, at about two o'clock, a Nisei patrol broke through to the man on the ridge.
25:37The first Japanese-American to reach them, by the account Densho preserves,
25:41was a soldier named Mutt Sakamoto. He offered a cigarette. One of the Texans, Ed Guy, remembered
25:48later that he was just excited to get out of there. By about four o'clock, most of two Nisei
25:55battalions
25:56had closed around the pocket. The wounded went out on litters. The ordeal was over.
26:03Now here are the numbers, and I'd ask you to hear them next to that dim room in the forest.
26:09About 211 men were brought out. To reach them, the 442nd took, by the count most often cited,
26:16around 800 casualties. One rifle company had started the campaign with more than 180 men.
26:24It came out of the forest with 17. Another came out with eight. Both were being led by sergeants,
26:31because the officers were dead or wounded. Shiro Kashino, the quarterback for Minidoka,
26:36was wounded twice in those four days. So think about what had just happened. Men whose families had been
26:42called a security risk. Men whose loyalty had been tested by a printed form. Men whose loyalty a
26:49German officer had just questioned in a dim room. They had gone up a hill into machine gun fire to
26:56save a battalion of Texans they had never met. That is the third layer. The Germans asked their
27:03question in words, and they expected the answer in words. The 442nd answered it, with 800 casualties on
27:11one ridge in the Vosges. And the German army, which had paid for that ridge too, could read that answer
27:18whether it understood it or not. Here's the part that I find hardest to set down. The prisoners from
27:25the litter column knew none of this. Stanley Akita, Roy Nakamine, Oscar Miyashiro, the others. They were
27:32being moved east, through Kolmar and Strasbourg, towards Stuttgart, sleeping in barns and stables.
27:39Velma Chang, who interviewed them, records that they didn't learn about the rescue of the lost
27:44battalion until much later. While their regiment was giving the answer on that hill, they were being
27:50asked the question again and again, with no idea that the men they'd left behind had answered it for
27:57them. And two weeks later, back in the Vosges, came a moment that has stayed in the regiment's memory
28:04ever since. General Dahlquist, whose division the Nisei had saved, called a review to honor the 442nd.
28:12When the regiment formed up, there were only a few hundred men standing in a regiment of more than 4
28:18,000.
28:19Dahlquist was displeased with the turnout. He complained to the officer beside him that he had ordered
28:25the whole regiment to parade. Lt. Col. Virgil Miller answered him, that's all that's left.
28:32Keep those four words close. They are part of the answer too, and we'll need them at the end.
28:38Because the men in German hands were about to hear something different from their captors.
28:44Stanley Akita said he heard it so many times he lost count. And it was no longer a question,
28:49it was an offer. You should be fighting for us, not against us. That was the sentence.
28:55Stanley Akita heard it in Germany through the winter of 1944 and into the spring of 45.
29:01He said later he heard it so many times he stopped counting. Notice how it has changed. In the dim
29:08room
29:08in the Vosges, the Germans asked why. Now they no longer ask. They tell. You belong on our side.
29:16You've just ended up in the wrong uniform. From the Vosges, the prisoners were moved by foot,
29:22by truck, and by train, through Colmar and Strasbourg to Stuttgart. There they were kept in a horse
29:29stable. American Red Cross parcels reached them, and the men made each one last six days.
29:35Then, Akita went to Stalag 7a at Moosburg, northeast of Munich, one of the largest prison camps in
29:42Germany. And there the Germans did something that tells you how they thought. They took him away from
29:47other Nisei and put him in with about 500 white American prisoners. He became one of the camp's
29:54barbers. Day after day, he was sent into Munich to clear rubble from the railroad station and the
29:59streets after Allied bombing raids. During one search in the city, a German guard pointed him out as,
30:06that small soldier. And whenever a high-ranking German who spoke English came through,
30:12the Nisei were questioned again. Did you go to Japanese school? What did they teach you there?
30:18Why are you fighting for the United States? You should be fighting for us.
30:23Now think about where Akita was standing when he heard that offer.
30:28Not in a camp of Japanese prisoners.
30:31Not with men of his own ancestry. He was sitting among white American GIs,
30:37cutting their hair, digging rubble beside them. The Germans had put him there themselves.
30:44They kept telling him he belonged with Germany, and every day they sent him back to the Americans.
30:50Akita said one more thing about those months, and it matters. The Germans never mistreated the
30:56Nisei prisoners. They were curious. They kept asking, but they did not beat the answer out of him.
31:03Whatever reply they got, they got from a man who was free to say whatever he wanted.
31:09500 miles to the northeast, Jimmy Kanaya was living through the same winter from a different angle.
31:15From Stuttgart, a German sergeant and a private escorted his small group of officers all the way to
31:21Offlag 64 in Poland. Kanaya always gave those two guards credit. They tried to protect their prisoners.
31:29During air raids, the prisoners stayed locked in boxcars while the guards took cover.
31:34At a station in Berlin, a German soldier demanded that the seated American officers give their seats
31:40to standing German troops. In the end, the sergeant made them stand.
31:46Kanaya reached Offlag 64 in the first week of December 1944. Almost a thousand American officers.
31:55Formation twice a day. A slice of bread and a bowl of soup that, at the back of the line,
32:01he called gray water. On one of his first evenings, he was late for formation in the cold.
32:06Out of about a thousand officers, he was the only man missing. The senior American officer,
32:11Colonel Paul Good, looked at him across the hall without saying a word. Kanaya was given two extra
32:18laps around the camp. It's a small story, but listen to what's in it. Nobody in that camp treated him
32:26as a Japanese prisoner. To Colonel Good, he was a late second lieutenant, and he got the same punishment
32:31any other late lieutenant would have got. Then, on January 21, 1945, with the Red Army coming,
32:39the Germans marched the camp west. Chicken Miyashiro, still on crutches from the hip wound he took near
32:46Bifontaine, couldn't walk, so he stayed behind until the Russians arrived. Hisai Shimatsu, the lieutenant
32:54who'd said, Hell no, in Berlin, went out with the column. At a rest stop, he and Lieutenant Samuel
33:01Sakamoto burrowed into the hay in a barn. The Germans moved on without searching. Both men were free.
33:08Kanaya kept marching. About eight weeks and close to 400 miles, through a German winter,
33:15to Auflag 13B at Hamelberg. On March 27, American tanks broke into that camp.
33:24It was a raid sent more than 50 miles behind German lines by Patton's Third Army, a task force of
33:30about
33:30300 men under Captain Abraham Baum. Among the prisoners was Patton's own son-in-law. Kanaya climbed
33:38onto a truck with the wounded. He was the medic. The column ran into roadblock after roadblock.
33:45It never made it back to American lines. Most of the task force was destroyed or captured,
33:51and Kanaya walked back into the camp.
33:58Kanaya tried to escape three times. And by his own words, the first two times, he went out with groups
34:05of white American officers. When a man has to run through enemy country, he picks his companions
34:11carefully. Those officers picked him. By the end of the war, the Library of Congress record of his
34:17service notes. Kanaya was the only non-Caucasian prisoner in his camp. So put the two pictures side by
34:24side. The Germans kept separating these men by race, and kept telling them their blood belonged to the Axis.
34:32The Americans around them, in barns and boxcars and prison yards, kept treating them as Americans.
34:39The Germans offered Akita a place on their side. His fellow prisoners had already given him one on theirs.
34:46And now, at last, you have everything Stanley Akita had with him on the evening of October 24, 1944,
34:55when a German officer looked at him in that dim room and asked his riddle.
35:01So let's go back into that room. October 24, 1944. The dim room in the Vosges. Two Nisei privates,
35:10German officers who speak English. Questions about Buddhism. About Japanese school. About why these men
35:17fight so hard for America. Do you feel like an American? Yes. And then the riddle. Did you know a
35:26cat born in the fish market isn't a fish? Before we hear the answer, look closely at that question,
35:32because it's more carefully built than it sounds. In one sentence, the German has packed everything
35:38his side believed. A cat is a cat because of what it's made of. Where it happens to be born
35:44changes
35:45nothing. Put a cat in a fish market, let it grow up there, let it smell of fish its whole
35:50life, and it
35:51is still not a fish. Blood decides. Birthplace is an accident. That's the German theory. It's the theory
36:00behind the trip to Berlin. Behind picking Tex as the officer. Behind, you should be fighting for us.
36:07And listen to how the question is set. It's a trap with only two ways out. If Akita says no,
36:14he's a fool. Of course a cat isn't a fish. If he says yes, he's agreed that he isn't really
36:20what he
36:21says he is. Either way, the German wins. Stanley Akita, 20 years old, from a plantation village on the
36:29Big Island, a prisoner for barely a day, said, yes, but he belongs to the fish market.
36:36That's the answer. Now let it sink in, because it does something the German never planned for.
36:43Akita doesn't deny anything. He doesn't pretend to be something he isn't. Yes, the cat is not a fish.
36:50Yes, his face is Japanese. Yes, his parents came from the other side of the Pacific.
36:56He gives the German all of it. And then he takes the one thing the German has handed him without
37:02noticing. Look at the riddle again. The cat was born in the fish market. The German himself has
37:10just admitted that Akita was born in America. The whole riddle rests on it. Akita builds his answer
37:17on exactly that admission. You've told me where I was born. I'm telling you where I belong.
37:23And belonging is not decided by what a creature is made of. It's decided by where it lives,
37:29what it has given, and who it stands with. The German asked about blood. Akita answered about
37:36belonging. And there's no argument inside the riddle that can answer that, because the riddle itself
37:41admits he was born there. Chang's account ends the exchange there. It doesn't tell us what the officer
37:48said next. Maybe nothing. But think about what he was holding at that moment. He had a prisoner who
37:54had agreed with every fact the German offered, and still refused the conclusion. And he had no
38:00question left to ask that could change it. Now put all the answers in this story side by side,
38:06because together they're the full answer to the title. Shimatsu in Berlin. I'm an American citizen.
38:14I fight for America. The answer of the law. 1,200 men from behind the barbed wire who filled in
38:21a form
38:22and volunteered anyway. And nearly 10,000 in Hawaii who lined up to do the same. The answer on paper.
38:29A regiment that went up Suicide Hill and came out with 17 men in one company and eight in another,
38:34to reach Texans they'd never met. The answer in blood. Given to the very men who said blood decided
38:41everything. A white Texan questioned as the officer, while the real officer stood unnoticed.
38:48Colonel Good's silent stare. White officers in a German prison choosing Kenia to run with.
38:54The answer of the men around them. And Akita in a dim room, saying the cat belongs to the fish
39:01market.
39:02All the others, put into one sentence. That's why the answers stunned the Germans, if anything did.
39:09Their questions were all built on the same idea, and the Nisei kept accepting the facts and refusing
39:14that idea. Every German question assumed, you are what your blood is. Every Nisei answer said,
39:22you are where you belong, and you prove it by what you're willing to pay.
39:27And here's the last layer. It isn't about the Germans at all.
39:31Akita's answer was also aimed at home. Whether he meant it that way or not.
39:36General DeWitt had said it made no difference whether a man was a citizen.
39:41Question 28 had asked a Seattle quarterback to renounce an emperor he'd never served.
39:47The German riddle in that room was, in a sense, America's own worst idea, spoken back in a German
39:54accent. And America was changing its mind.
39:59On December 18, 1944, less than two months after that night in the Vosges, the Supreme Court ruled
40:06in the case of Mitsuye Endo that the government could not keep a citizen it admitted was loyal
40:12locked up in a camp. The day before, the army had announced that the exclusion order on the west coast
40:19was ending. The families behind the wire would be allowed to go home. It came too late for a great
40:26many people. It undid nothing that had already been lost. But it was the United States, through its
40:34highest court, saying in law what Stanley Akita had said in a sentence.
40:40The cat belongs to the fish market. Remember Lt. Col. Miller's four words at the review.
40:46That's all that's left. They're the price of that answer. The Germans could ask the question for free.
40:53The 442nd paid for the reply. What's left now is to find out what happened to the men who gave
41:00it.
41:01The prisoner in the hay, the medic who ran three times, and the barber of Stalag 7a, who was clearing
41:08rubble in Bavaria when the sound of American guns reached him. April 29th, 1945. Bavaria.
41:16The morning before, the German guards had simply disappeared. Now Stanley Akita heard guns, then
41:23engines. American tanks came out of the woods. In the village, German families hung white sheets from
41:29their windows. A tank crewman handed Akita a piece of American white bread. After six months of German
41:36rations, that's the thing he remembered. Roy Nakamine, sent to the infirmary at Moosburg,
41:43heard the artillery coming, and got bread from the liberators too. Oscar Miyashiro saw American
41:50soldiers and a tank, and was told General Patton himself was on his way. On the flight out to Le
41:56Havre,
41:57his plane was fired on by Germans, who hadn't yet heard the war was nearly over.
42:02By the summer of 1945, all of them were back in Hawaii. Chicken Miyashiro took the long way.
42:10The Russians, who reached his camp in Poland, sent him on to Odessa on the Black Sea. From there,
42:16he sailed to Port Said in Egypt, then Naples, then Miami, and finally home. Hisae Shimatsu, the lieutenant
42:24who hid in the hay, was back in Keikaha by June. He married, raised a family, and went back to
42:31Keikaha
42:32Sugar. He retired as a harvesting supervisor at the same company whose mill he'd worked in before the
42:37war. He died in 2002. Shido Kashino was wounded again in Italy in April 1945 and won the Silver Star
42:47near Carrara. That December, in Chicago, he married Louise Tsuboi, the girl he'd met behind the wire at
42:54Minidoka. And Jimmy Kanaya. Three weeks before the war in Europe ended, as the prisoners were marched
43:02south, Allied planes came over and the columns scattered. Kanaya didn't go back to the road.
43:08He hid in the woods near Nuremberg for six or seven days. Sick and starving, he finally gave himself up.
43:16A day and a half later, on April 26th, tanks of the 45th Infantry Division rolled in and his war
43:23was
43:23over. Here's what he did next, and I think it's the quietest answer in this whole story. He stayed in
43:29the army. He went to the Military Intelligence Service language school. In Korea, he served as an
43:36interrogator. The man the Germans had questioned about his loyalty spent part of his career on the
43:42other side of the table, in an American uniform. He served again in Vietnam. He retired in 1974 as a
43:50colonel, deputy commandant of the Army's Medical Training Center at Fort Sam Houston, after 34 years.
43:57He died in November 2019, at 99. The medic who ran three times, never left.
44:06Stanley Akita went home to the islands. His first real job after the war was as a groundskeeper at a
44:12park on Hilo Bay. He became a civil engineer with the State Department of Transportation.
44:18He married Yuki, raised two daughters, took up photography and fishing and the ukulele,
44:24and cut no more hair for prisoners. He served as president of the 100th Battalion Veterans Club
44:29six times. In June of 2007, at 84, he told a Honolulu newspaper about the Germans' curiosity.
44:38They were so curious of us being Japanese and fighting for America. He died that same summer.
44:45So let's go back, one last time, to where we started. October 24, 1944. A dim room in the Vosges.
44:54A German officer with a riddle he'd built to leave a man nothing to say. Across from him,
45:00a 20-year-old from Honomu, with his regiment's blood still on the hill behind him, and his answer ready.
45:07The German asked what he was made of. Akita told him where he belonged.
45:14Japanese-American soldiers didn't win that argument by denying who they were.
45:18They won it by deciding where they belonged, and then paying for it, on Hill 600, at Casino,
45:25at Bifontaine, and on a ridge in the Vosges where one company came out with eight men.
45:31The cat belongs to the fish market. The 442nd spent its blood proving it.
45:38Thank you for staying with this story all the way to the end. If it meant something to you,
45:43please like the video. It helps the stories of the Nisei G1s of the 100th Battalion,
45:48and the 442nd, reach people who have never heard them. Subscribe, and turn on the bell,
45:55so you don't miss the next one. And tell me in the comments where you're watching from.
45:59If your father, grandfather, or uncle served in the Second World War, write his name and his unit below.
46:06Every one of those names is a piece of this history, and I read them all.