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BY: Can you, how much more do you know about Uncle Bako? I'm curious to just know more about him.

TI: Yeah, I talked a little bit about his father and how dapper and good looking he was. The same thing, when I look at his pictures, that incredibly good looking, I've talked to people in the community, he was a really good athlete, good student, viewed as a real leader in the community. My parents told me that he had a girlfriend before he went off to the war and they were planning to get married, and so that was another tragedy. And so as I talked to people in the community, they would all just talk about how devastated people were that he was killed, because he was viewed as such a, with so much potential. And so I know, in particular, for my mom's family, how devastating that was, because I think so much was being put on his shoulders as the future of the family. He was at the University of Washington, so he was the first person in the family to go to college, and so to lose him was so hard.

BY: By the way, while we're on the subject of Uncle Bako and the 442nd, because of your knowledge, so describing the 442nd, is it all Nisei, almost all? What is the best way to say that? Because I've seen everything from all Nisei to, Bob in this book saying "mostly," I think?

TI: The 442nd -- and this was, again, the 1940s -- it was a segregated unit. So it was formed to create a Japanese American infantry unit. But having said that, the officers tended to be Caucasian or white. They even had one officer who was a Korean American who was pretty well-known in military history, Colonel Kim. So it wasn't all Japanese-Americans, so oftentimes the officers were white. But generally the infantry was all Japanese American. I don't know, I mean, there were some infantry who were maybe half Japanese and half white and things like that, but in general, you were a Japanese American if you were in the infantry.

BY: I was wondering if the distinction was all the troops, if you will, Japanese American, the officers white, that's why some historians stop short of saying "all-Nisei," okay. And then I've also read different, it's put different ways, but would you say it's the most decorated unit of its size? Is that the preferred term?

TI: Yeah, it's interesting from a historians' standpoint. The question is who said that first and how was it documented. It was actually first said in some military... what's the right word? Like newspapers that said that the 442nd was the most decorated unit for its size and duration of service. And that was based on the number of medals, in particular the number of Purple Hearts, they were nicknamed the "Purple Heart unit" because of just the astounding number of Purple Hearts they received. But what we've been trying to do is find the underlying documentation for the army to have made that statement. We haven't found that yet, but that phrase has been picked up and used. And once -- as a historian, you know this -- once it's been used in several sources, then all of a sudden people say, "Oh, it must be true." We haven't found the underlying documentation for that. So what I tend to say is it's clearly one of the most highly decorated units in military history, but I don't say it is the most until I see the actual numbers.

BY: I know, this history is hard at times, isn't it? [Laughs]

TI: And then when people, especially from a credible source, if they say something that maybe stretches a little bit, it becomes the new truth. And part of what we wanted to do at Densho was to really be a really credible, trustworthy source of information. Because on one side, people might be deniers of what happens, and we want to make sure that we have this record. But then on the other hand, we don't want people to embellish it in ways that say it was worse than it really was, too, we want to be clear about that. So we have pushed back, especially in the area of documentaries or plays or fiction, saying, well, it wasn't like that. It wasn't like a, say, a Nazi concentration camp where someone may portray it that way, so we will push back in that way also.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2020 Densho. All Rights Reserved.