LIHUE — It has been 72 years since the Imperial Japanese Navy conducted an early morning military strike on Dec. 7, 1941, at Pearl Harbor that sunk or damaged seven destroyers, killed 2,402 Americans and injured 1,282. On that day,
LIHUE — It has been 72 years since the Imperial Japanese Navy conducted an early morning military strike on Dec. 7, 1941, at Pearl Harbor that sunk or damaged seven destroyers, killed 2,402 Americans and injured 1,282.
On that day, Kauai native Jiro Yukimura was a 21-year-old college student. He remembers seeing the Japanese Navy planes flying toward Pearl Harbor from his dormitory on the University of Hawaii at Manoa campus as he and his friends were getting ready for Sunday church services.
“We couldn’t hear the noise but could see a lot of planes flying overhead and we thought, ‘Oh gee, the maneuvers are strange,’” Yukimura, now 93, recalled during an interview with The Garden Island at his Lihue home.
“It seemed like there was a lot more than the kind of usual planes flying toward Pearl Harbor, but we didn’t think much of it until, of course, we turned on the radio and the radio announcer said Pearl Harbor is being bombed by the Japanese.”
Normal routines, he explained, came to a sudden, grinding halt.
Yukimura and his friends never made it to church that day.
Later in the evening, a call was issued on the radio for volunteers.
Yukimura, a college senior at the time, volunteered immediately, believing that his two years of mandatory ROTC classes at UH could be put to use.
“I had those two years of training, so I knew how to handle a gun although we never fired a gun,” Yukimura said. “It was for show only — how to carry it on the shoulder and so on.”
By the next day, the United States had officially entered World War II after Congress passed a formal declaration of war against Japan.
That morning was also the first time that Yukimura drank black coffee — the only drink available — as he and his friends who volunteered waited for their assignments at the National Guard Armory, where the State Capitol building now stands.
It was there Yukimura and many others were sworn in as members of the newly formed Hawaii Territorial Guard and handed a helmet and an M1903 Springfield rifle and one clip loaded with five ammunition rounds.
Yukimura said his first assignment was at the Ala Wai Boat Harbor, where he and other volunteers watched for any signs of a land invasion by Japanese forces.
His group then was split up about two weeks later to guard other parts of the island, including a water tank atop Wilhelmina Rise, a water pump in Kapahulu, and an electrical relay station in Kuliouou for about another month and a half.
That all changed, however, when he and other nisei (second-generation Japanese Americans) were called back to the Armory and dismissed immediately.
“They kicked us out and the reason for that was because of our Japanese ancestry,” Yukimura said. “That was the worst time in my life there. We all hugged each other and cried, actually, to think that they kicked us out when we were taking the time to do our best to help out. But, what could I do?”
By the time he returned to his dormitory at the Okumura Home that day, a dormitory run by Reverend Takie Okumura, Yukimura decided to return to Kauai.
But even the short journey home, he said, was a painful one.
In those days, Yukimura said there was only one daily flight to Kauai. And those who were Japanese at that time, he explained, were last on the airline’s priority list.
“I had to get to the airport about three days in a row, because being Japanese, you didn’t have any priority,” Yukimura said. “It was just like Jim Crow up in the Mainland United States, we found out later, in terms of how the blacks were treated when they rode any kind of public transportation like the bus — all the others go in first and then, if there’s room, the blacks go in. That’s just the way it was at that time.”
Some of his friends who were discharged from the Hawaii Territorial Guard and stayed on Oahu later became members of the Varsity Victory Volunteers (VVV), a group of 155 Japanese American students assembled by then Military Governor Lt. Gen. Delos Emmons to perform a variety of labor-intensive jobs at Schofield Barracks.
Many of them, Yukimura said, later became part of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team after the group was voluntarily disbanded and merged with the all-nisei regiment in 1943.
Yukimura submitted his volunteer papers that year and was later shipped out with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team for infantry training at Camp Shelby in Hattiesburg, Miss.
“Once you volunteer into the Army, the whole idea is to fight, so you kind of figure that you may not come back again,” he said. “We didn’t know what was going to happen to us. We only knew that, as volunteers, we were going to do our best.”
About six months later, Yukimura and about 250 others were picked up by the classified Military Intelligence Service and relocated to Camp Savage in Savage, Minn. for intensive Japanese language training.
Throughout the war, Yukimura served as a translator and was stationed in Sydney, Brisbane, Manila, Okinawa and Tokyo while members of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the 100th Infantry Battalion fought the Axis powers in Europe.
He later witnessed the end of World War II on board the USS Missouri, where high-ranking military officials from the Allied Powers and Japanese representatives, led by Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu signed the surrender documents.
“My feeling at the time was, ‘The war is over so now I can go home after all three years in the Army,’” Yukimura said with a laugh. “Just watching it, all (these) thoughts come through your mind but I do not remember (them) already.”
