Fighting for a country that doubted them—but never broke them
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.
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