I am Asian. My mother grew up under my mother grew up under Japanese occupation on Guam so if anything I should have strong feelings against the Japanese. I have read numerous books on japanese war atrocities like, The Rape of Nanking and Flyboys. Even so, I have long been a critic of the internment of Japanese-Americans during the World War II. I am generally a fan of Michelle Malkin but on the issue of internment as described in her book, In Defense of Internment, she is dead wrong.

Robert Asahina's Just Americans, is the story of the internment of the Nisei, the Japanese-Americans who fought with distinction in segregated units in Europe and the nation to which they returned that was still not ready to embrace them as  fellow Americans.

Asahina focuses on the wartime exploits of the segregated 100th Infantry Battalion and  442d Regimental Combat Team. American boys of Japanese descent fighting for their country while their parents, wives and girlfriends had been forcibly removed from their homes and put into concentration camps .

In this day and age, a generation later, fighting a different war, Just Americans serves as a cautionary tale.

Asahina starts in the present day in Texas with a county level push to change the name of a Jap Road. The book does a good job of explaining the internment. In a Honolulu Weekly  interview, Asahina points out what he had learned:

I learned several things from the book. Notably that while American citizens of Japanese descent were excluded from the mainland West coast, there was no similar exclusion or internment in Hawaii. Hawaii had a large population of Americans of Japanese descent and arguably was a more likely target for invasion if not sabotage. Even so the reality was that large numbers of Americans of Japanese descent worked in military of other essential jobs in the island throughout the war.

The men of the 100th and the 442d fought, bled and died not just to save their country, but to prove their loyalty. They were thus asked to do more than Americans of Italian or German descent. They were asked to defend a country that had revoked many of their essential rights of citizenship, a country that had taken away their homes and businesses and yet they fought. They fought with distinction and earned the right to be called just Americans.

A thought-provoking and informative book

Just Americans gets 4 out of 5 stars:

Purchase Just Americans from Amazon.com.