The Story of the First Asian American To Control an Army Division

00:00:10
Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. Up next, Major General James H. Mukayama, Junior, rose from humble, blue-collar Chicago roots to becoming the first Asian American to command a U.S. Army division. General Mook is the author of Faith, Family, and Flag: Memoirs of an Unlikely American Samurai Crusader, a book printed under retired Navy SEAL Jacko Willocks Publishing Company.

00:00:41
Speaker 2: Let’s take a listen.

00:00:45
Speaker 3: So my grandfather came here in 1901 because he had invested in the Japanese futures market, sake, and in U.S. has lost the half of the family fortune. So he decided to come to the States to gain back that money and then return to Japan. Well, now it’s eighteen years later, and my grandmother is by herself with the five children, and my grandfather is still in America. So my father is now eighteen years old, and my grandmother says, “You get on a boat, you go to America and get your dad to come back.” So that’s what he did. He gets on a boat, comes through Seattle, Washington, and finds his father in Kearney, Nebraska. They moved to Colorado, and my grandfather buys a boarding house. But what happened was there were waitresses who were serving the meals. Well, it turns out the waitresses were more than waitresses, but my grandfather didn’t know that when he bought the boarding house because my grandfather was a Christian, which was highly, highly unusual for Japanese in those days. And so my grandfather, when he found out this illicit operation going on in his boarding house, he shut it down. Needless to say, he lost a lot of clients, and so my father convinced him to sell it and take the money and go back to Japan. But my father stayed here in the States. He had a love for America. Frankly, he wanted to come here for the opportunity and the freedom we have. When he was in grammar school, English was a mandatory language. When my father was an elementary school in the nineteen hundreds, in fact, he had to memorize in English the Gettysburg Address when he was in grammar school. And so he had instilled in him early his life the feelings of democracy and freedom and opportunity. So he came here and wound up in Chicago in the late twenties. Keep in mind, these were legal immigrations. I might add, we were here before the war actually, and that was a big plus for us because there weren’t a lot of Japanese in Chicago at that when the war broke out. I mean, there were less than four hundred total in the whole city, and so we did not have to go to camp. And by the way, when I say camp, during World War II, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which ordered all people of Japanese descent to be forcibly removed and put in camps in the interior of the United States, namely in godforsaken desert areas. These were your standard concentration camps. They euphemistically referred to them as “relocation centers.” But anyway, so we had assimilated so well into the community. My dad was known by everyone. Our neighbors actually sent a telegram to our congressman vouching for the loyalty of my dad as a U.S. citizen. They didn’t even know he wasn’t a citizen. They just assumed it. But our friends were truly friends and neighbors truly rallied around us. And keep in mind, there were one hundred and twenty thousand plus that were removed and put in camps, two-thirds of whom were American citizens for three years. So you lose everything, you know, if you had a business, you obviously couldn’t run your business. If you couldn’t pay for your mortgage for your homes, you lose your home. So after the war, when they released all these people from the camps, in our case in Chicago, we were a blue-collar. We never owned a home. We always lived in a tenant apartment building. My lawn was a concrete sidewalk. But I never felt poor because my mom and dad had not only assimilated into community, but they became very strong parts of it. My father joined the Chamber of Commerce. He had a small retail business. My dad helped with Boy Scouts. We became members of our church, and my neighborhood, frankly, was we were the only minority family. We went to a grammar school of nine hundred kids. My brother and I were the only minority. You know, we had German, Italian, Polish, we had some Jews in. I never felt poor because we had such a strong nuclear family, and we all took care of ourselves. And likewise, in the neighborhood, the local neighborhood patrol were the mothers because in those days a lot of the mothers were stay-at-home mothers. The church was the main center of our activities. I actually was a choirboy, and then I was in Cub Scouts, and I was in Boy Scouts, a great organization because the motto of Scouting was “for God and country,” and the Cub Scout pack and the Boy Scout troop were sponsored by our church.

00:06:46
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Major General James Mukayama, General Mook telling the story of his family’s journey to America, starting with his grandfather just trying to recoup some investment losses, to his father, well, just deciding to stay even as his grandfather returned home. And it’s the story of America in the end, this immigrant’s tale. He was the only minority in his ethnic neighborhood. And as he said, “We didn’t know we were poor because we had a nuclear family, and so many other families around us did too.” When we come back, more of Major General Mukayama’s story here on Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. And we do it all from the heart of the South, Oxford, Mississippi. But we truly can’t do this show without you. Our shows will always be free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love what you hear, consider making a tax-deductible donation to Our American Stories. Go to OurAmericanStories.com. Give a little, give a lot. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. And we continue with Our American Stories and the story of Major General James H. Mukayama and the story of his family and how they came to be Americans. And my goodness, the story he told about the internment camps. Look, not all of America’s story is perfect or good, and this was a pretty wretched part of our past. And many Japanese suffered for no good reason but that they were Japanese.

00:08:34
Speaker 2: Let’s pick up where General Mook left off.

00:08:38
Speaker 3: I have a daily standard mantra, which is, “Every day is a great day. I have my faith, my family, and live in the finest country in the world.” I say it every day. In fact, I do our grocery shopping. And so when I go to the Jewel grocery store here in the Midwest, all the cashiers want me to come to their stations because they know what I’m going to say. But when I was born here, I hit the lotto. And so when I say that mantra, sometimes I get pushback about the finest country in the world part, and I say, “Listen, I’ve been around the block a few times.”

00:09:19
Speaker 1: You know.

00:09:19
Speaker 3: It does help to be around about eight decades. And so I tell them, when I joined the military, there had never been an Asian American admiral or general in our armed forces. Now I was not the first; that was about the third or fourth. The club isn’t real large. But I’ve seen in my lifetime alone the improvements in our society when it comes to racism. We have elected an African American as a president and re-elected him. Now, has our country made mistakes? Obviously. But I’ll tell you what, we’re the only country that I know of that had a Civil War to abolish slavery, costing over half a million lives to settle that situation. And our president, who ran on that platform, was assassinated. He gave up his life, Abraham Lincoln, knowing full well the risk he was taking. And the proof is in the pudding: there are hundreds of millions of people throughout the world who want to come to this country, versus the minuscule few who say that, you know, this is terrible and they want to leave. But have I experienced racism? I grew up right after Pearl Harbor. I mean, the phrase “Remember Pearl Harbor” was still sunk in everybody’s mind, and for a long time. I got to tell you, I wasn’t real happy about going outside on December 7th. But, you know, I always considered the source and frankly, the number of incidents in my life of racism and prejudice are far outnumbered by the goodness of our nation in terms of equal opportunity. And when I was in high school, by the way, as I mentioned, you know, we didn’t have a lot of money, so I had to work hard to earn money so I could go to college. So when I was in high school, I played in the band. In high school, I became the first chair of clarinet in the band. I was the principal woodwind of the orchestra. But I also played in two combos to make money on the side. So one was a Polish band, so I played for Polish weddings. You know, since I played clarinet, you know, I was pretty good with polkas. And by the way, by the third set, everybody was so drunk, nobody cared. And of course, here I am a high school guy, and you know, at weddings and things like that, you know, people buy the band drinks, right? So needless to say, I was not going to turn that down, and so it was, that was a good gig. But then also I played another band which played for Jewish bar mitzvahs, so I told people, I had them coming or going either way. I knew all the synagogues on the North Side and suburbs of Chicago. And I learned very early in life that I have a bad temper. And my wife can attest to that, unfortunately, because although she’s stuck with me for fifty-two years now, so I guess I have some other redeeming qualities. But I knew very early in life, when I say early in grammar school, that I had a bad temper, so I had to control myself. On the other hand, I was always, I was kind of a nerd, so I was always picked on, especially during recess. But I had to control my temper.

00:13:08
Speaker 2: I knew that.

00:13:10
Speaker 3: But one day, a guy called me a “Jap,” and I lost it. Literally, I had him on the ground in seconds and I was on top of him, and I was beating him, and the kids had to drag me off of him, and they all looked in astonishment, and he said, “Who is this guy? Not the Jim Mukayama that we know.” There was a book years later that I read, and it was called Wild at Heart by John Eldridge, and he starts the book by talking about his son coming home from school one day and he looked kind of down, you know. So Eldridge says, “Son, what’s going on?” He said, “Well, Dad, you know, he got this bully at school. I don’t know what to do about it.” So Eldridge tells his son, he said, “Son, you go back and you tell the guy to stop, and if he doesn’t stop, you hit him as hard as you can.” And I’m sitting there reading this, and you know, I get this flashback and I’m saying, “Yes!” And then my wife is there and she says, “What? What are you, you know, what are you doing?” And I said, “I, I know that every guy who read that book, that story, would sit there and say, ‘Yes!’” But I knew every woman who read that story would be in horror.

00:14:39
Speaker 2: You know.

00:14:39
Speaker 3: They’d say, “No, you can’t do that. You can’t tell our son to do that, you know, tell him to go tell the teacher.”

00:14:45
Speaker 2: You know.

00:14:46
Speaker 3: Now, the good news is that I grew up in the neighborhoods and we had a code, and the code was, you took care of things yourself, and you didn’t tattletale and go to the teacher and cry about, you know, because had we done that, kids who were tattletales, they were ostracized among the kids. I mean, it’s the worst thing you could do. And so I fortunately avoided having anyone tell the teacher and rat on me, so I didn’t get called, you know, to the principal’s office. That, that was the thing I feared the most when I was in school because my parents taught me to respect my elders and to respect my teachers. So if they got called to school for anything, you know, I didn’t care what the principal was going to do to me. I worried more about what my father was going to do. So my dad told us, my brother and I, “Never shame the Mukayama name,” that means the family, “and never shame the Japanese race. But you have been born in America. You are America. This is your country, this is your homeland, this is where your loyalty lies. And you need to take the best of the Japanese culture and add that to the American culture to make our country the best it can be.” Now, my dad, by the way, a lot of people don’t know this: Japanese could not become naturalized citizens of the United States until 1952. And my dad had been here since 1918, so he was one of the first to become naturalized. So he goes downtown to the Federal Center to be sworn in, and the judge, I still can’t believe this to this day, the judge asked my father, “What took you so long to become naturalized?” And my father had to give the guy a five-minute Civics lesson and he said, “Judge, they just passed the McCarran Act. This is 1952, which is the first time we’ve been eligible to become people of Japanese descent.” So, I mean, he was respectful, but, you know, it’s incredible that that could have happened.

00:17:12
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Major General James Mukayama, General Mook tell his story, his story as a young musician playing in Polish bands and then playing in synagogues, playing Yiddish music, and just having a good old time and every once in a while a free drink.

00:17:28
Speaker 2: And he learned early in his life that.

00:17:30
Speaker 1: He had a bad temper, and one day, one bully pushed him too far. We learned also about what it meant to his father to be Japanese, and also what the Mukayama name meant, but also that his loyalties were owed to America. Now, he was an American. When we come back, more of General Mook’s story here on Our American Stories, and we continue with Our American Stories, and with General Mook’s story, his family’s immigration story continues.

00:18:17
Speaker 3: I just found out a couple of years ago from my wife that she came across a wonderful treasure of a two-hour audio tape of my mother, who at eighty-four was interviewed, and it was an audio tape interview by a researcher from the University of San Francisco, who was researching Japanese Americans of my mother’s generation. The interviewer kept on asking, “Well, tell me about your experiences in Wyoming and Nebraska and Wisconsin and Oklahoma and California. Tell me about racism that you experienced.” And my mom said, “I didn’t.” This woman could not believe it, and she kept on probing her, and my mom said, “No, I mean, we were part of the community.” So my senior year in high school, I worked from five o’clock until ten o’clock at night, Mondays through Fridays, and eight hours on Saturday. So as a senior in high school, I worked thirty-three hours a week. You know, I was pretty busy. The lesson it taught me was time management because I really had no time when I came home at night. I got home probably around ten-thirty at night. I had to study. And by the way, I had my best year in high school that year. I had straight A’s. That really made me focus. So now I’m in college, University of Illinois, so I’m in the dorms with a roommate, and just like any testosterone-laden guy, when I was in high school, one of my favorite readings was Playboy magazine. So I actually saved the centerfolds. So I wallpapered our ceiling and two of the walls with Playmate centerfolds. Well, one day, my roommate’s mother came to campus to visit us without notice. She didn’t tell us she was coming. Obviously, if she told us she was coming, we would have kind of cleaned up our room, but she didn’t tell us, right? So there it is. We’re on the weekend. Knock on the door and it’s his mother, and she walks in and she looks at the room and she looks at her son and she says, “Oh, Fred!” And then I looked at him and I said, “Yeah, Fred,” you know, our room was famous on campus. Guys would knock on our.

00:21:00
Speaker 2: Door, you know.

00:21:01
Speaker 3: And I say, “Yeah, can I help you?” “No, we’re not here to see you. We just want to see your room.” When I graduated after getting my master’s degree, being an infantry officer, I volunteered for Vietnam, and the Army, in its infinite wisdom, sent me instead to Korea. So I go to Korea to the Second Infantry Division, which was stationed on the Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, which separates, obviously, the North from the South. Our mission was to defend against infiltrators from the North, so we were going up against the North Korean Special Operations, and we were tripwires. We knew that if the North was going to come across, we’d be pretty well toast. So I’m on the DMZ. I’m now a platoon leader for an infantry company, and it was so good. I finally, after eight years of ROTC and one year of graduate school, I’m finally doing what I was trained to do in life: leading soldiers. And it was better than what I thought it would be. People say, “Well, gee, you know, how, how did you become a general?” I often ask myself that too, in astonishment, but my answer always is, “I had great noncommissioned officers.” Those are the sergeants who made me look good. And I had commanders who mentored me, and they didn’t cut my head off when I screwed up. And I did my fair share of mistakes as a junior officer. And so I’m leading this combat patrol, ambush patrol. And one day, I got a message that I was to report to the battalion commander at the battalion headquarters. You know, normally that’s not good. So I get on my jeep and go down to the battalion headquarters, and he says, “Lieutenant Mukayama, how are you doing?” I said, “Sir, you know, it’s really great. I mean, I’m leading troops and I’m doing what I’ve been trained to do for eight years, and I appreciate the opportunity to do that.” And he