-
I'm a veteran of the starship Enterprise.
-
I soared through the galaxy
-
driving a huge starship
-
with a crew made up of people
-
from all over this world,
-
many different races, many different cultures,
-
many different heritages,
-
all working together,
-
and our mission was to explore strange new worlds,
-
to seek out new life and new civilizations,
-
to boldly go where no one has gone before.
-
Well
-
— (Applause) —
-
I am the grandson of immigrants from Japan
-
who went to America,
-
boldly going to a strange new world,
-
seeking new opportunities.
-
My mother was born in Sacramento, California.
-
My father was a San Franciscan.
-
They met and married in Los Angeles,
-
and I was born there.
-
I was four years old
-
when Pearl Harbor was bombed
-
on December 7, 1941, by Japan,
-
and overnight, the world was plunged
-
into a world war.
-
America suddenly was swept up
-
by hysteria.
-
Japanese-Americans,
-
American citizens of Japanese ancestry,
-
were looked on
-
with suspicion and fear
-
and with outright hatred
-
simply because we happened to look like
-
the people that bombed Pearl Harbor.
-
And the hysteria grew and grew
-
until on February 1942,
-
the President of the United States,
-
Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
-
ordered all Japanese-Americans
-
on the west coast of America
-
to be summarily rounded up
-
with no charges, with no trial,
-
with no due process.
-
Due process, this is a core pillar
-
of our justice system.
-
That all disappeared.
-
We were to be rounded up
-
and imprisoned in 10 barbed wire prison camps
-
in some of the most desolate places in America:
-
the blistering hot desert of Arizona,
-
the sultry swamps of Arkansas,
-
the wastelands of Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Colorado,
-
and two of the most desolate places in California.
-
On April 20th, I celebrated my fifth birthday,
-
and just a few weeks after my birthday,
-
my parents got my younger brother,
-
my baby sister, and me
-
up very early one morning,
-
and they dressed us hurriedly.
-
My brother and I were in the living room
-
looking out the front window,
-
and we saw two soldiers marching up our driveway.
-
They carried bayonets on their rifle.
-
They stomped up the front porch
-
and banged on the door.
-
My father answered it,
-
and the soldiers ordered us out of our home.
-
My father gave my brother and me
-
small luggages to carry,
-
and we walked out and stood on the driveway
-
waiting for our mother to come out,
-
and when my mother finally came out,
-
she had our baby sister in one arm,
-
a huge duffel bag in the other,
-
and tears were streaming down both her cheeks.
-
I will never be able to forget that scene.
-
It is burned into my memory.
-
We were taken from our home
-
and loaded on to train cars
-
with other Japanese-American families.
-
There were guards stationed
-
at both ends of each car,
-
as if we were criminals.
-
We were taken two thirds of
the way across the country,
-
rocking on that train for four days and three nights,
-
to the swamps of Arkansas.
-
I still remember the barbed wire fence
-
that confined me.
-
I remember the tall sentry tower
-
with the machine guns pointed at us.
-
I remember the searchlight that followed me
-
when I made the night runs
-
from my barrack to the latrine.
-
But to five year old me,
-
I thought it was kind of nice that they'd lit the way
-
for me to pee.
-
I was a child,
-
too young to understand the circumstances
-
of my being there.
-
Children are amazingly adaptable.
-
What would be grotesquely abnormal
-
became my normality
-
in the prison-of-war camps.
-
It became routine for me to line up three times a day
-
to eat lousy food in a noisy mess hall.
-
It became normal for me to go with my father
-
to bathe in a mass shower.
-
Being in a prison, a barbed wire prison camp,
-
became my normality.
-
When the war ended,
-
we were released,
-
and given a one way ticket
-
to anywhere in the United States.
-
My parents decided to go back home
-
to Los Angeles,
-
but Los Angeles was not a welcoming place.
-
We were penniless.
-
Everything had been taken from us,
-
and the hostility was intense.
-
Our first home was on Skid Row
-
in the lowest part of our city,
-
living with derelicts, drunkards,
-
and crazy people,
-
the stench of urine all over,
-
on the street, in the alley,
-
in the hallway.
-
It was a horrible experience,
-
and for us kids, it was terrorizing.
-
I remember once
-
a drunkard came staggering down,
-
fell down right in front of us,
-
and threw up.
-
My baby sister said, "Momma, let's go back home,"
-
because behind barbed wires
-
was for us
-
home.
-
My parents worked hard
-
to get back on their feet.
-
We had lost everything.
-
They were at the middle of their lives
-
and starting all over.
-
They worked their fingers to the bone,
-
and ultimately they were able
-
to get the capital together to buy
-
a three-bedroom home in a nice neighborhood.
-
And I was a teenager,
-
and I became very curious
-
about my childhood imprisonment.
-
I had read civics books that told me about
-
the ideals of American democracy.
-
All men are created equal,
-
we have an inalienable right
-
to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,
-
and I couldn't quite make that fit
-
with what I knew to be my childhood imprisonment.
-
I had read history books,
-
and I couldn't find anything about it.
-
And so I engaged my father after dinner
-
in long, sometimes heated conversations.
-
We had many, many conversations like that,
-
and what I got from them
-
was my father's wisdom.
-
He was the one that suffered the most
-
under those conditions of imprisonment,
-
and yet he understood American democracy.
-
He told me that our democracy
-
is a people's democracy,
-
and it can be as great as the people can be,
-
but it is also as fallible as people are.
-
He told me that American democracy
-
is vitally dependent on good people
-
who cherish the ideals of our system
-
and actively engage in the process
-
of making our democracy work.
-
And he took me to a campaign headquarters
-
— the Governor of Illinois was
running for the Presidency —
-
and introduced me to American electoral politics.
-
And he also told me about
-
young Japanese-Americans
-
during the Second World War.
-
When Pearl Harbor was bombed,
-
young Japanese-Americans,
like all young Americans,
-
rushed to their draft board
-
to volunteer to fight for our country.
-
That act of patriotism
-
was answered with a slap in the face.
-
We were denied service,
-
and categorized as enemy non-alien.
-
It was outrageous to be called an enemy
-
when you're volunteering to fight for your country,
-
but that was compounded with the word "non-alien,"
-
which is a word that means
-
"citizen" in the negative.
-
They even took the word "citizen" away from us,
-
and imprisoned them for a whole year.
-
And then the government realized
-
that there's a wartime manpower shortage,
-
and as suddenly as they'd rounded us up,
-
they opened up the military for service
-
by young Japanese-Americans.
-
It was totally irrational,
-
but the amazing thing,
-
the astounding thing,
-
is that thousands of young
-
Japanese-American men and women
-
again went from behind those barbed wire fences,
-
put on the same uniform as that of our guards,
-
leaving their families in imprisonment,
-
to fight for this country.
-
They said that they were going to fight
-
not only to get their families out
-
from behind those barbed wire fences,
-
but because they cherished the very ideal
-
of what our government stands for,
-
should stand for,
-
and that was being abrogated
-
by what was being done.
-
All men are created equal.
-
And they went to fight for this country.
-
They were put into a segregated
-
all-Japanese-American unit
-
and sent to the battlefields of Europe,
-
and they threw themselves into it.
-
They fought with amazing,
-
incredible courage and valor.
-
They were sent out on the most dangerous missions
-
and they sustained the highest combat casualty rate
-
of any unit proportionally.
-
There is one battle that illustrates that.
-
It was a battle for the Gothic Line.
-
The Germans were embedded
-
in this mountain hillside,
-
rocky hillside,
-
in impregnable caves,
-
and three allied battalions
-
had been pounding away at it
-
for six months,
-
and they were stalemated.
-
The 442nd was called in
-
to add to the fight,
-
but the men of the 442nd
-
came up with a unique
-
but dangerous idea:
-
the backside of the mountain
-
was a sheer rock cliff.
-
The Germans thought an attack from the backside
-
would be impossible.
-
The men of the 442nd decided to do the impossible.
-
On a dark, moonless night,
-
they began scaling that rock wall,
-
a drop of more than a thousand feet,
-
in full combat gear.
-
They climbed all night long
-
on that sheer cliff.
-
In the darkness,
-
some lost their handhold
-
or their footing
-
and they fell to their deaths
-
in the ravine below.
-
They all fell silently.
-
Not a single one cried out,
-
so as not to give their position away.
-
The men climbed for eight hours straight,
-
and those who made it to the top
-
stayed there until the first break of light,
-
and as soon as light broke,
-
they attacked.
-
The Germans were surprised,
-
and they took the hill
-
and broke the Gothic Line.
-
A six-month stalemate
-
was broken by the 442nd
-
in 32 minutes.
-
It was an amazing act,
-
and when the war ended,
-
the 442nd returned to the United States
-
as the most decorated unit
-
of the entire Second World War.
-
They were greeted back on the White House Lawn
-
by President Truman, who said to them,
-
"You fought not only the enemy
-
but prejudice, and you won."
-
They are my heroes.
-
They clung to their belief
-
in the shining ideals of this country,
-
and they proved that being an American
-
is not just for some people,
-
that race is not how we define being an American.
-
They expanded what it means to be an American,
-
including Japanese-Americans
-
that were feared and suspected and hated.
-
They were change agents,
-
and they left for me
-
a legacy.
-
They are my heroes
-
and my father is my hero,
-
who understood democracy
-
and guided me through it.
-
They gave me a legacy,
-
and with that legacy comes a responsibility,
-
and I am dedicated
-
to making my country
-
an even better America,
-
to making our government
-
an even truer democracy,
-
and because of the heroes that I have
-
and the struggles that we've gone through,
-
I can stand before you
-
as a gay Japanese-American,
-
but even more than that,
-
I am a proud American.
-
Thank you very much.
-
(Applause)