By Vince Bzdek | Denver Gazette
In his 99 years on the planet, Ken Akune has been sorted into many bins.
The first was Nisei, the term for second-generation Japanese Americans born in the United States. Akune had lived in both the United States and Japan and his family was divided between the two.
The second bin was “evacuee.”
That was the term given to 18-year-old Akune, his brother Harry and 7,000 other Japanese Americans shipped out to the Granada Relocation Center in Colorado at the start of World War II because of worries about their loyalty. Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 forcibly removed them from their home on the West Coast to a remote plain of sage and dust in southeastern Colorado, known simply as Amache.
“I was mad, jealous, whatever you want to call it,” said Ken Akune in an oral history. “There’s nothing you can do about it.”
But Akune did do something about it.
“One day an Army recruiter came with news that the government now wanted young men from the internment camps to join the military,” Akune said. On the spot, the Akune brothers decided that even though their country had transplanted them, incarcerated them, taken all their worldly belongings away and treated them as subhuman, they would go fight for it, and maybe even die for it.
“People don’t realize the period of time, but, you know, I was in high school and when the war began, all these young fellows my age were all going into service, and here we couldn’t even go in,” said Ken Akune.
“Not that I was gung ho, loyal to the U.S., and everything else, but, you know, if you think about the time when everybody else is serving your country and you’re denied, it’s hard for a young guy to take.”
‘Bakatare’
The brothers’ decision to enlist earned them a new label, “bakatare,” or fool, from the first-generation immigrants in camp.
“And that’s when they scolded us and said bakatare, you know, of all the people, how could you go in?” Ken recalled. “Especially, you’re an American, you claim you’re an American and yet you’re discriminated just like we are. You’re in the same camp we are, you know. How could you take that kind of crap and still do the thing you’re trying to do?”
Because Ken was only 18 and still in school, Harry had to sign for him to get him enlisted.
“I mean, I said hey, this is a point that we can do something about our situation,” Ken said. “I thought about the fact that why are we here. You know, is it because Japan attacked the United States, and that was it, or is it because the Nihonjins never had an opportunity to prove their loyalty to the country?”