(gentle music) - [Narrator] Funding for this program is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the friends of Minnesota Experience.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] This historical marker is all that's left of Camp Savage.

It commemorates a little known military intelligence service initiative that took place in Minnesota during World War II.

6,000 second generation Japanese-Americans, or Nisei, came through Minnesota's language school where they were trained to be translators, interrogators, and Japanese military experts.

(bombs whizzing) (bomb exploding) - After Pearl Harbor, the army as an institution, would have been very happy to discharge all Nisei.

- [Kimmy] Yes, they are serving their country, but meanwhile their family members are imprisoned.

They themselves were imprisoned.

- [Peggy] But I think now what I can feel is the fear that they must've had.

- Your awareness of you're Japanese and you're not the same as your fellow Americans.

Yet all the while you think as an American.

- I was so mad being incarcerated.

I joined, but as soon as I joined I decided to do my best, do my duty.

- [James] The army damn well needed them.

Could not fight a war and win without the capability that those Nisei had.

- [Narrator] While their contributions to winning the war in the Pacific are undeniable, the story of their courage, sacrifice, and patriotism is yet to be widely recognized.

(tense music) - The rules don't apply the same to everybody.

There's not equal justice, which is one of the promises of this country.

- I volunteered for the service, yes.

People thought we were the enemy.

I'm just as American as anybody.

(tense music) (gentle music) - Here I am, December 7th, 1941.

Mama and Papa asleep, the rest of the family asleep.

I see this beautiful formation, about 15 planes coming through Kolekole Pass.

Then I hear this boom, boom, boom.

I see debris going up.

The buildings going up, the planes going up.

- I was still in bed.

When my dad woke me up, turned on the radio, and then a radio announcer said Pearl Harbor was being attacked and this was not a maneuver.

It's the real McCoy.

(tense music) We were shocked, but we could hear the bombing going on and the anti-aircraft gun being shot up.

And then a plane flew over and I saw this red sun ball on the wing.

(exciting music) And we never dreamt that Japan would attack Hawaii.

- Within hours of the Pearl Harbor attack Federal authorities started moving in, start putting them basically under house arrest, closing down their businesses, treating all of these Japanese-Americans, American citizens for the most part, as potentially traitors to their nation.

(gentle music) - December 8th, the paper, they already had the information that F.D.R.

was going to ask Congress to declare war.

- The facts speak for themselves.

We will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us, God.

(audience cheering) - From this point on the war reached us and so it was very, very traumatic for us.

The following day, my father was picked up.

And I thought, "Oh my God, what's going to happen to us now?"

For we didn't know what was going to happen to him.

(gentle music) - And Germans and Italians, of course, they were also curious what was going to happen to them now that we were at war with Europe.

But very little happened to them and so not in the way of the Japanese community.

(gentle music) - [Archival Audio] To beat the Japanese and to do the job thoroughly, we have got to understand them thoroughly.

- [Narrator] At the start of World War II the United States was at a huge military disadvantage in the Pacific theater.

A significant portion of its Navy had been destroyed at Pearl Harbor.

The Japanese forces drove General MacArthur from the Philippines and the Japanese were entrenched in much of Asia and on islands throughout the Pacific.

- The Japanese language specialists in the War Department Intelligence branch realized that to fight Japan we needed more people trained in the Japanese language.

And they did an inventory of personnel resources and they only found a few dozen officers who spoke Japanese to any extent whatsoever.

The solution was to recruit and train them in military Japanese, and then use them to do the heavy lifting of the translating and interrogating prisoners.

So in the summer of 1941, the War Department directed General DeWitt to organize a Japanese language school and authorized him to go out and find soldiers who were of Japanese heritage and recruit them into the school.

(gentle music) - By the time Pearl Harbor was bombed there were around 5,000 Nisei in the American Army.

So Nisei are second generation Japanese-American, born in this country, raised in this country, American citizens.

My dad volunteered to be tested and he passed the test, he qualified.

But what was remarkable is the fact that 90% of the Nisei soldiers that they tested did not qualify.

They found that about 3% were accomplished, about 4% were proficient, and about another 3% were useful.

And the other 90% did not even speak enough Japanese to be useful to the military.

They had been educated in American schools.

They had been acculturated and assimilated more than was recognized.

(upbeat music) - Of course after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt had signed executive order 9066 which resulted in the forced removal of almost 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry.

- The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor our West coast became a potential combat zone.

Living in that zone or more than a hundred thousand persons of Japanese ancestry.

Two thirds of them American citizens, one-third aliens.

We knew that some of among them were potentially dangerous, but no one knew what would happen among this concentrated population if Japanese forces should try to invade our shores.

(tense music) - [Narrator] Japanese-Americans were given just two weeks to evacuate.

Businesses were sold at tremendous losses, wiping out decades of work.

Crops left in the fields.

Family possessions sold for next to nothing.

Beloved family pets given away.

An entire community and way of life displaced in an instant.

- What you can carry doesn't include very many things.

(tense music) We just took what we could.

It wasn't pleasant.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Japanese-Americans were first taken to assembly centers, often at racetracks, to a people who prize cleanliness, to be housed in horse stalls was a painful insult.

- I remember when we first got there getting these large sort of like flour sack kind of bags and then told to fill it up with straw from the straw pile because that was gonna be our mattress.

- I keep myself busy so that you know, I don't have to think about that.

Of course I'm mad, after then they'll make you mad, and you're tired and it stinks, also I want to get out of there.

- [Narrator] After the ten concentration camps were constructed nearly 120,000 Japanese-Americans were taken to desolate areas of the West, Arkansas, and the Southwest, with two camps on Native American Reservations.

- Assembling at the train station and you have your two satchels, and you're given a number with your family number and that's you.

- [Sally] I remember we all got assigned a family number and one of my sisters was in charge of writing numbers on all these tags that we put on all the suitcases.

- Not knowing where you're going, whether or not you'll ever come back, whether you will be killed.

I think now what I can feel is it the fear that they must've had, along with just the anxiety of being put out of their homes and things.

- [Sally] We got moved to the permanent internment camps to Minidoka, Idaho.

When we got there, it was really hot... and sandy and... just dirt all over the place, nothing green.

- [Bill] I was first sent to Pinedale, which was near Fresno.

And then when they closed that up, we were sent to Tule Lake.

Tule was the center that took in a lot of people that didn't agree with what was happening.

Kind of a segregation in camp.

- The people in the Poston camp where my family was confined were used as labor.

The going wage for a doctor, a Japanese-American doctor in the camp was $19 a month.

A laborer was $16 a month.

Outside of the camp it was 10 times that much.

So they worked making camouflage netting for the war.

They planted crops that were distributed to other camps.

Built millions of Adobe bricks that were used in the construction of something like 50 school buildings.

That were subsequently used by the Indian service for schools on the reservation.

- While we knew we were American citizens, we also know that we were not first class American citizens and we lived with it.

Evacuation was just part of that familiar syndrome.

And besides many of us were outraged by the actions of Japan and we blamed the Japanese for their actions rather than the U.S. government for the actions they took.

(gentle music) - The Army as an institution, the War Department, would have been very happy to discharge all Nisei and a number of them were discharged, or if they weren't discharged after Pearl Harbor, they were moved into inland posts and given menial assignments.

The Army didn't know what to do with them.

but the intelligence officers knew two things for sure.

They knew first of all, that the Nisei that they had as students were loyal and patriotic.

And number two, they knew that the Army damn well needed them, could not fight a war and win without the capability that those Nisei had.

So they trusted them.

- [Narrator] One instructor was an older Nisei, John Aiso, a Harvard Law graduate who had also studied in Japan, Aiso was a private when the war began and Captain Rasmussen recruited him for the school.

But as a private, Aiso could not teach the white officers, and as a Japanese-American he could not be commissioned as an officer.

So he was discharged in order to serve as Director of Academic Training, a position normally held by a Lieutenant Colonel.

- It took some time for the Army to actually give Rasmussen, the director of the school, permission to recruit people from the concentration camps.

But they were basically faced with the fact that they needed people who could speak the language, who were pretty fluent, and there just weren't any.

So they had to look to recruiting behind barbed wire.

(gentle music) - In one sense you had to mobilize these people who you've been treating as the second citizens.

And they had the motivation to of course, improve the lot in the society by fighting this war.

- They volunteered for different reasons.

(gentle music) A lot of them volunteered to enlist because they just didn't want to be in the camps anymore.

Some of them felt that this was a way for them to prove their patriotism.

Although they were U.S. citizens, there was really nothing for them to prove.

- My intention was get out of camp any way I could, except escaping.

I was so mad being incarcerated.

I joined, but as soon as I joined now I decided to do my best to do my duty.

(gentle music) - I volunteered for the service, yes.

People thought that we weren't American.

We were the enemy and we had to dispel that.

No, I didn't particularly like being in camp either.

You knew you were restricted, and didn't belong there.

And still there's no way that you could get out there.

And had what they call fire towers, and the only thing up there was soldiers and his machine gun pointing into camp.

So that was, it was just really a concentration camp.

- It was hard to make the decision to go and they wanted to be because they wanted to show that they were good Americans, but there were lots of people in camp that were not happy with these young men leaving to join the service.

And I guess sometimes those things got quite heated.

- [Narrator] The Military Intelligence Service, or M.I.S.

Nisei, were among the many Japanese-Americans who enlisted or answered the draft.

They wanted to prove their patriotism, that they belong to America, and that the camps were a mistake.

There were though a smaller number of Japanese-Americans who refused the draft and protested what they believed was an unconstitutional imprisonment of their community.

They were called No-No Boys, for the refusal to answer affirmatively two questions on a loyalty oath that all those imprisoned in the camps, whether citizens or not, were forced to sign.

- I understand that in some of the camps, by that time, there were these riots and there were No-No protesters who refused to sign the loyalty oath.

They were shipped to Tule Lake and there's all this sort of a growing awareness of the injustice of it all.

- With all of this happening the commanding officer, Kai Rasmussen, started to look for a new location for the school.

- The Military Intelligence Language School started in San Francisco, but it had to be moved out of the West coast when the Japanese-Americans were forced off the West coast and into the camps.

- [Narrator] A Danish immigrant, Rasmussen spent four years in Japan with the United States military and was an early advocate for the inclusion of Japanese-Americans in the language school.

As Rasmussen searched to relocate the school he reached out to representatives of the Western states but all refused.

Wyoming Governor Nels Smith proclaimed, "If you bring Japanese in my state, I guarantee you they will be hanging from every tree."

(gentle music) - The Governor of Minnesota at that time was Harold Stassen, and he said, "Minnesota had room for the soldiers and there was room in the people's hearts."

(dramatic music) - It was not anything new for the people of the Twin Cities to see military men in their midst.

Fort Snelling, during any number of wars and military conflicts had been a center of activity.

- [Narrator] Given the welcome provided by Minnesota's governor, the M.I.S.

officers decided that Camp Savage and nearby Fort Snelling should be their new home.

Even if Camp Savage was not yet properly equipped to house the Nisei students.

- So when the first class of Nisei soldiers started at Camp Savage, they found that this place was really in bad shape.

- These were really just temporary wooden buildings thrown up during the great depression.

And they're just made to be banging them out quick, bang them out cheap.

Not really weatherized against Minnesota winters.

- [Karen] There was a sign spelled out in white rocks that said, "Homeless men's shelter," which was very ironic because many of these men now were homeless.

- It was sort of roughing it, but it was not a hardship thing.

It was nothing like the, what I hear of the accommodations at the relocation centers.

(gentle music) Considering what our folks had been subjected to we felt we weren't that bad off.

Things look different as you look back and you think, "My God, now what have they done to us?

And why did we put up with it?"

But at the time you can't stand off and look at a situation from any theoretical ground.

You just lived it as it came along.

(gentle music) - Well, I used to hear that the Military Intelligence Service Language School was a secret and I believe that certainly what was happening there was top secret.

But there was an article in May of 1942 in the paper about the Camp Savage school.

Certainly the community knew what was going on in terms of the school, they just didn't know the details.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] And so now in Minnesota, the language school was ready for its initial class.

- We got into St. Paul, they met us.

We were dressed for California and we got into big trucks with the back end open, canvas cover, and it was so cold.

Oh, it was cold!

- Something like 30 in the barracks with a coal stove, couple of them in the barracks.

In the middle of the night, somebody would come and shovel coal into the potbelly stove.

- You know, where you have the toothbrush holder and sometime we would forget the fact they were a little icy, we'd put it up near a window sill and so on.

In the morning it'll be all frozen solid in there.

And you know, the toothbrush is stuck in there.

- The school was divided into classes, but classes were divided into groups.

- They had divided it into how much ability one had.

- I was in class 14, so I wasn't all that good.

There were 22 classes all total.

- I was assigned to Section Two, the top level was Section One.

So Section Two was pretty high.

- I was in probably the lowest class.

(upbeat music) - You have to imagine the Nisei who were born in the United States, even if they had parents who were speaking Japanese to them, perhaps they were going to Japanese Language School on Saturdays.

And so coming to the language school, I think the toughest hurdle for most of them was to learn the military terminology.

Most of them, I don't think were quite fluent.

As a matter of fact, in that time, in the 1940s, they were discouraged to actually speak Japanese because they were encouraged to be American.

- Pretty tough training started about eight o'clock in the morning.

And with a lunch break, continued on to about two o'clock.

Had a little bit of a military march after that.

- [Bill] Studying til five, have dinner, and then go back to class, seven until nine.

- [Toshi] More, more, more studying back in our barracks and go to bed around 10.

- For those of us who had to try to keep up, we would go to the latrine where there would be a light and we'd study as late we could.

- Then come back to barracks and get into bed and under their blanket, and use a flashlight.

They don't want to flunk out.

If they do they'd be shipped out to other combat unit instead of language school.

- And there was a six months course.

Tough, man, it was tough.

- We were first teaching only language.

Then we began to teach interrogation techniques.

We had lots of specialized classes in interrogation techniques and other skills that we learned were necessary in the field because we got feedback all the time.

Graduates come back, tell us, "No, this is what should be part of the training," and so on.

So this whole curriculum became more and more sophisticated.

- [Narrator] As a Nisei studied so intensely in Minnesota, the early war in the Pacific was not going well and the need for their linguistic skills was becoming more and more urgent.

- Once the M.I.S.

Nisei got out to the units and the places where they worked, they saw right away how valuable they were and they could see the kind of information you could get out of one prisoner.

If they had any doubts in the school, once they got out to the Pacific, they realized that they were actually contributing much more than a rifleman up on the front lines.

They were worth 10 rifleman or more.

It wasn't just the ability to translate or speak Japanese what the Nisei had was a real knowledge of Japanese culture and Japanese psychology.

So they could use their own judgment when it came to interrogating a prisoner.

Should they be tough with them?

Should they go easy on them?

Should they offer him a cigarette or should they shout at them and make them stand at attention?

They had a real knowledge of Japanese psychology because they'd grown up with Issei parents and the Kibei had spent time in Japan and they could use that.

And no Caucasian who just sat in a classroom for a year could learn that kind of sophisticated understanding of Japanese culture.

- [Narrator] As the war progressed and the need for the Nisei linguists became clearer, their studies were sped up and intensified.

And yet Rasmussen understood the soldiers needed an occasional break.

Sergeant Bill Doi was called on to help in this.

- Morale was obviously bad.

When you're all you're doing is working and trying to study and not sleeping and worried about everything.

- Colonel Rasmussen felt that there was a need for anything that I wanted to do to try to alleviate some of that stress would certainly benefit, not just their free time, but the ability to study too.

- He was sort of charged with setting up some social kind of programs.

- Holding dances for one thing.

And it just grew and grew.

(upbeat music) - We had weekly dances, picnics, swimming parties, we had those up at the lakes.

It made me be very, very happy to be in Minnesota.

This is Minnesota.

This is how they treat us even though we're of Asian descent.

(upbeat music) - I was most surprised to be able to dance with our haole compatriots.

They were so nice to us.

- There was an instructor that taught skiing.

There's a 125 person Japanese-American choir that performed in the Field House.

And they were broadcast worldwide around Christmastime.

- [Announcer] Carried by N.B.C.

around the world, the music of our 125 voice Japanese-American Choir, Directed by Lieutenant Joseph Running.

(choir vocalizing) - [Narrator] The military intelligence Nisei were now serving all over the Pacific theater.

In Southeast Asia and in India.

On Pacific islands like the Solomon's and Guadalcanal.

In New Guinea, Australia, the Philippines, and on to Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and even in China.

They translated captured documents and intercepted messages.

They interrogated prisoners on the battlefield.

This information was sometimes of immediate use and saved those in their own units.

But even more importantly, the Nisei help their commanders adjust their battle plans and strategy and outmaneuver the enemy.

In short, the intelligence gathered by the M.I.S.

Nisei increased the capabilities and effectiveness of U.S. troops all over the Pacific theater.

- Thrillingly real episode of savage warfare in a South Pacific jungle.

- This is an important point.

Some of the M.I.S.

Nisei went out with the frontline units and did the quick translation of captured documents on the battlefield and the initial interrogation of those prisoners.

But then behind the lines, you had these large organizations that were almost like intelligence factories that took in thousands of pages of captured documents and took in hundreds of prisoners a few days after they had been captured, maybe a few weeks afterwards.

And then looked through this mountain of information looking for those little nuggets that would turn a battle.

- [Narrator] As a T4 private M.I.S.

graduate, Walter Tanaka served as interrogator of Japanese P.O.W.'s.

During the war, he like other Nisei, was not allowed to become an officer.

But at the start of the occupation of Japan, he was promoted to Lieutenant.

After serving also in the Korean War Tanaka ended his 20 year military service as a Major.

- My dad was assigned to a center in Brisbane called ATIS, the Allied Translator and Interpreter Service.

And ATIS was the center in Australia for prisoner of war interrogation, and also the center for translation of captured enemy documents.

ATIS's height had about 4,000 linguists working there.

Most of whom were Nisei trained here in Minnesota.

They interrogated something like 14,000 prisoners of war and translated something like 2 million documents.

This prompted General MacArthur to say, "Never in history did an army ever know as much about the enemy prior to engagement."

General Merrill of Merrill's Marauders, and Merrill's unit fought behind enemy lines in Burma.

And they had a casually rate that was like 95, 90 - 95% of the troops.

And there were Nisei linguists that accompanied Merrill's Marauders.

There's an iconic picture of General Merrill kneeling alongside two Nisei linguists and their names are on the picture.

And you can look them up and find they came from Camp Savage.

- [Narrator] Merrill's Marauders relied heavily on their linguists and needed the best of the best.

Back at Camp Savage a group of upcoming graduates were given an offer that was potentially high risk, high reward.

- They said, "This is a dangerous mission.

However, if you survive you'll be sent back to the state-side, serve in the state-side for duration of the war."

So that was a good deal.

Our mission was to open the route to help the Nationalist Army in China fighting Japanese there.

So in order to do that we have to make a route to join the Burma Road.

- There was one point where Merrill's Marauders was back in the jungle, back behind Japanese lines, and the Japanese had surrounded their unit.

- [Roy] The unit were much bigger than we expected.

We've been surrounded.

We're getting short on water, and ammunition, and ration.

So I decided to go down there find out.

Sneak in there.

- [Todd] He took it upon himself to crawl through the tall grass to the Japanese lines and then he listened as the Lieutenant on the Japanese side positioned all his men for the attack in the morning.

- [Roy] I just came back just before midnight.

So we've got about four hours to prepare, do something.

- Normally in a defensive position you have to defend all around your perimeter, because you don't know which direction that attack is gonna come from.

This time, they had good information.

They knew attack is gonna come from this one direction.

So you took all their machine guns put it on that area of the front.

And sure enough the next morning here came the Japanese first wave of soldiers attacking over the field and the machine guns shot all the soldiers, but the battle wasn't over because that was only the first wave.

There's a second wave behind them.

- The second wave coming up there, I stand up and shout (yelling in Japanese).

(Yelling in Japanese) - He told the second wave to charge.

So they stood up and they charged into the machine guns thinking that it was one of their officers telling them to charge.

- So they didn't know who gave the order and that the way they'd been trained.

So I knew that.

- And because of that he saved the unit.

- They feel that I save it, but I would just member of the team doing just my duty.

- [Narrator] The Marauders were sent on some of the most perilous missions of the war and had the casualty rate to prove it.

Deep in jungle warfare, the Nisei had the added danger of being captured or mistaken for the enemy.

General Merrill himself said, "As for the Nisei group I couldn't have gotten along without them.

Probably few realize that these boys did everything that an infantry man normally does.

Plus the extra work of translating, interrogating."

Their sacrifice and courage was not lost on their fellow soldiers.

- [Soldier] I was bodyguard to an American of Japanese descent who was risking his life to act as an interpreter for us.

He was the target for both Jap and American bullets and wish to God that some of the people at home who say, "Democracy is for the white race only," could be made to go out and fight for it.

(gentle music) - We thought we'd be returned to the state-side, but that didn't happen because more important mission coming up.

Then we'd be rotated.

So in other words, they broke the promise.

Then it's supposed to be back in three months, took me a few years before I rotated back to states.

Later on I was awarded medal because my citation was stamped top secret.

After more than 60 years, Secretary of the Army awarded me the Bronze Star Medal with a V device that stands for Valor.

So that's greatly honored, even though after 60 years... but better late than never.

- [Narrator] The success of the Nisei in the Pacific increased the call for their services.

Having outgrown Camp Savage, nearby Fort Snelling opened its doors to the new recruits including the first class of women.

- [James] Army intelligence at the highest levels was actually very interested in using women in non-combat jobs.

From the very beginning when the Women's Army Corps was organized in '42, wasn't until late in '44 that they organized one class of Nisei women who had joined the Women's Army Corps.

- There were a class of 50 women at Fort Snelling.

These women were different from the men in that it would have been really unusual for them to break gender roles of that time to join the military.

It would have been considered unladylike.

Some of them had parents who didn't agree with their decision and it was really kind of radical for them to enlist at the time.

- [Terry] They just felt that I shouldn't be doing something like that and going so far from home.

But I told them that I just couldn't stay home and do housework.

I wasn't accomplishing anything I said.

I said to my parents, "There is a war going on and he can't do it alone."

I said, "What I would be doing is replacing all these men to help end the war."

I tried to talk with my parents into letting me go.

And finally, they released me and signed the consent for me to go in.

- Terry Toyama Nakanishi, she was 17 at the time.

So she even had to have her parents approve her decision.

Of course, her mother didn't want her to.

Her family was working on a farm in Pocatello, Idaho.

Her father had lost his job after Pearl Harbor and her brother actually was in the 442nd.

- [Narrator] The 442nd regiment was a segregated Japanese-American combat unit that fought in Europe.

Over 14,000, served into 442nd, which became the most decorated unit in the European front and fought some of its most harrowing battles.

- [Announcer] It was the 442nd Infantry Division that was ordered to cut a way through to them.

This was the famous and unique battalion composed of Americans of Japanese ancestry.

For nine days while the Texans hung on grimly up ahead, they cut that way forward in bitter cold and in some of the toughest fighting country on the Western front.

- You can only imagine as a parent losing both your son and your daughter to the military.

After her training here at Fort Snelling, she worked as a clerk at the General MacArthur's office in Tokyo as a translator.

- [Narrator] Of the Nisei Women's Army Corps, one instructor commented, "The first 10 of the class are extremely expert as translators and interpreters of Japanese.

And all of them are on par or a shade above par in comparison with the Nisei male linguists."

- [Kimmy] Just the fact that these women had the guts to enlist in the military in that time period is amazing to me.

- [Narrator] As the war continued and the M.I.S.

Nisei were sent to the Pacific, the contradiction between their service and the imprisonment of their families became more troubling to many of the soldiers.

- By that time, we had reconciled ourselves to the idea that the camps existed.

There were a lot of volunteers from the camps in the school.

And when I was going to go overseas, I asked for two weeks leave to go to visit my folks who were still in Heart Mountain in the camp there.

And they dropped me at the entrance to the camp and I marched in and I was an officer so the guards saluted me.

And I went in and saw how my family had lived for during all that time.

(gentle music) Struck me the first time that this thing was really an anomaly.

You know, it's contrary to any principles, all the principles, we were taught about American citizenry and equality under the law and that sort of thing.

We had taken it because it was war, it's a war time contingency, but more you thought about it you realize I was, why is it confined to the Japanese?

Why not the Germans and Italians who were also at war against us?

(gentle music) - [Narrator] The U.S. Pacific forces were becoming increasingly successful, taking island after island from the Japanese.

But getting Japanese soldiers to surrender or to release Japanese civilians was still difficult.

It required courage, delicate maneuvering, and a cultural knowledge of Japanese psychology on the part of the Nisei linguists.

- Hoichi Kubo was attached to the 27th Infantry Division.

They were in the mop-up phase, which could be just as dangerous as the main battle phase as well.

They found in many places, soldiers and some civilians who were hiding in caves, hiding in bunkers.

They had no idea what the Americans were going to do.

They had this whole mindset that the Americans were monsters, so they couldn't surrender.

They would rather die than surrender.

So in one particular cave, the Americans found out that there were some Japanese soldiers in that cave who were holding hostage a large number of civilians.

So Kubo volunteered to go in.

He took his helmet off because he knew that if he poked his head into the cave entrance and they saw a helmet they'd shoot at it right away.

So he hoped that if he poked his head into the entrance to that cave and they saw a Japanese face, they wouldn't shoot, and he was right.

And sat down, introduced himself.

He put his pistol out where they could see it and began talking to them and was quite honest with them.

He said, "I'm an American soldier."

And after a few hours he crawled back out of the hole again and the Japanese soldiers let over a hundred civilians go.

And for that, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for that act of bravery.

- [Narrator] After the capture of Okinawa, the U.S. invasion of Japan seemed imminent, but then Japan surrendered after two atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Some Nisei soldiers had relatives in these cities or in Japan and were concerned about them.

But their tasks were not finished with their language skills and cultural knowledge, the M.I.S.

Nisei would become instrumental in the pacification of Japan and its transformation into a democratic ally of the United States.

- I have received this afternoon, a message from the Japanese government.

I deem this reply a full acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration, where it specifies the unconditional surrender of Japan.

- [Journalist] Newsman rushed the president's report to a waiting world and through the early evening, Tuesday, August 14th, the fateful news is flashed.

In New York City, as throughout a rejoicing nation and world, vast throngs of grateful, happy people celebrate the end of fighting, the dawn of peace.

Two million New Yorkers jammed Times Square.

It's official, it's all over!

It's total victory!

(crowd cheering) - When it comes to the U.S., precisely because it was the victorious country and World War II was a good war that the World War II story has been kept as such a heroic story for the Americans.

The racism that was demonstrated during the war gets incorporated into this overcoming of the shortcomings of the American democracy.

And we have to remember though that this was also the experiences of African-American soldiers, this racial hierarchy.

(gentle music) So I do personally, as a historian, think that it's victorious, heroic narrative has hidden some of the parts that maybe should have been reflected upon more deeply.

(gentle music) - My oldest brother, he graduated from the University of Hawaii, and then he went to Japan.

And when Pearl Harbor broke out, he was caught in a war and couldn't come back.

After the war had ended I had sufficient points to go back home and be discharged, but I chose to go to Japan.

One, to try and locate my brother.

Second, I thought now that the war had ended we were no longer enemies.

We try to be friendly to the Japanese people, maybe perhaps, smoothen the occupation.

Goodwill ambassador.

I had never been to Japan before.

Flew over atom bombed Hiroshima.

I could see the entire city that was flattened.

Just a few isolated buildings here and there, but nothing but black ground.

I was horrified, only one bomb could do all that.

Simply devastation.

I looked up my brothers classmates, and that's when I learned that my brother had been drafted into the Japanese Army, sent to the Bougainville Island, contracted malaria and had died.

I know he was doing this against his will, but he was caught in the war.

That's what he had to do.

(gentle music) I have no bitterness about that.

One of wartime irony, I guess.

(gentle music) - [Hiromi] Once the occupation starts, then thousands of the language trained Japanese-Americans Nisei then come to the occupied Japan to help the occupation operations.

- At that time, I thought it was a good deal because this was a way of bringing order out of chaos.

But when they came in American troops with Nisei interpreters and interrogators and language personnel and the constant comment I heard was, "How great America is to be able to have great influence and great trust in the American Nisei.

And to have them be the bridge from old Japan to the new Japan."

- We also think that the occupation went smoothly partly because of what their work.

Because MacArthur only met like five or six Japanese total.

I think their role was very, very important.

(gentle music) There was a Supreme Court case, The Endo case, saying that I'm an American citizen.

I'm being detained without having been read my rights as an American citizen.

And that was found to be true.

It took them that long, the war was still going on and the Japanese-Americans were able to leave the camp starting in January of '45.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Many Japanese-Americans returned to the West coast to find their businesses and homes gone or owned by others.

Their possessions in storage, stolen, sold, or vanished.

Most of the Issei, or first-generation, never recovered economically.

As for the M.I.S.

Nisei, even after the war, more linguists were needed for the complexities of the occupation, which continued for several years.

Back in Minnesota, though, the school was closed and returned to its original location at the Presidio.

- In 1940, before the war, there were only 40 people of Japanese ancestry living in the entire state of Minnesota.

And then 10 years later, there were 1,050 about.

So what changed in those 10 years?

Well, the school being here for one, the Twin Cities was one of the places that there were universities that were here that were accepting Japanese-American students.

And there was a resettlement committee here that was helping to place Nisei in different jobs.

- For my father that whole interment experience was really devastating because when you think that he had been in this country from 1899, you know, and the war didn't start until 1941.

I mean, that's 40 years of living, you know, as a respectable immigrant.

I mean, he only had his green card because he wasn't allowed to be a citizen, and then to lose everything like he did.

And he also felt like he was no longer the head of the family, the fact that more and more, he had to rely on his own sons because of the language barrier and the fact that he couldn't earn the proper income to provide for us all that really my brother, Fred, almost took over that role of being the fatherly figure in the family.

(gentle music) When we first moved into this house in South Minneapolis we were the only Japanese family for several miles around I'm sure.

And so it was just a matter of days when we started getting hate mail saying, "We don't want any Japs in the neighborhood, get out or else," kind of threatening letters.

Our house was directly across the street from a church.

And people in that church kind of took our family under their wing.

Tell us that we could heal hold our heads up high.

We didn't have to be, you know, ashamed of anything and just walk around the neighborhood with us.

- You know, when one of the thinks about it, M.I.S.

is military intelligence, and still they don't trust us enough to let us out of the camps.

We were held in camps and our parents are still held in camps.

And those who have not left are kept there because they're not trusted.

And still, they're recruiting people to work in military intelligence.

It's something funny.

- For me, it took reading more.

And then just as Dad got older I would sometimes bring up things that I wanted to capture.

Not enough things.

I wish he were here, I could ask him a litany of other questions, but because he became an activist after all this stuff, that he's not sure that he would have reacted exactly in the same way if he were to be in that position.

But of course, you know, you don't know you were there at that time and that's what you did.

- Yes, I wish it certainly didn't happen.

We didn't have much but what we did have we completely lost.

Maybe that was what made me so involved in the Vietnam War.

I wanted to see that end.

- He has done a number of things for the Japanese and redress for getting some kind of remuneration for being disrupted from their homes and families during the incarceration, and he was quite involved in that too.

- [Narrator] In the late 1980s, Nisei and Sansei Japanese-American activists petitioned the U.S. government for an apology and redress for their imprisonment.

Recent legal research had uncovered that at the start of the war the government had information that refuted the War Department's claim that the Japanese community was a military danger.

And yet when Japanese-Americans took up legal challenges during World War II, both the military and the Solicitor General lied to the Supreme Court about this information.

In the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, the U.S. Congress and President Ronald Reagan acknowledged that there was no military necessity for the incarceration of Japanese-Americans and that the government's actions were based on race, prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of leadership.

- [President Regan] The legislation that I am about to sign provides for a restitution payment to each of the 60,000 survivors.

Yet, no payment can make up for those lost years.

(audience applauding) - I don't think it was so much about the money.

It was really that it was recognized, that it happened, and that it was wrong.

- This is a chapter in American history that's often overlooked and there's so little of it in the textbooks.

And I think that it's important for students to understand exactly what happened, so something like this never happens again.

That's my main motivation is for them to understand how easily a person's civil rights can be taken away if we're not careful.

- My grandfather, right after Pearl Harbor, was arrested and placed in an I.N.S.

prison.

My family was confined on an Indian Reservation.

There's so much with share in common with a lot of other groups where the rules don't apply the same to everybody.

There's not equal justice, which is one of the promises of this country.

So, you know, looking back at being banned from immigration like the Muslims today.

And being held in I.N.S.

prisons like refugees are today.

And being confined on an Indian Reservation like the Native Americans were, I can see better what happened to us then in light of what's going on now.

(gentle music) (bright twinkling) - [Narrator] Funding for this program is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the friends of Minnesota Experience.