Culture & Life · Honolulu, Hawaiʻi
I Am an American: The Nisei Soldiers Who Fought for a Country That Doubted Them
A new exhibition in Honolulu opens four days before Veterans Day with the story of the Japanese American soldiers of the Second World War — and the sign in an Oakland shop window that gave it its name.
01The sign
Four words in a shop window
The morning after Pearl Harbor, a grocer in Oakland, California, painted four words on his shop window: I AM AN AMERICAN. Tatsuro Matsuda, a University of California graduate whose father had opened the Wanto Company store in 1900, put the sign up on December 8, 1941. By the time Dorothea Lange photographed the store in March 1942, the shop at 401-403 Eighth and Franklin streets was closed, its owner ordered away to a War Relocation Authority center.
That photograph gives its title to a new traveling exhibition that opened in Honolulu on Saturday, November 7, 2026. “I Am An American: The Nisei Soldier Experience” is on view at Capitol Modern, the Hawaiʻi State Art Museum, through March 13, 2027, in commemoration of Veterans Day. It tells the story of the second-generation Japanese Americans known as Nisei, who served in the United States Army while their families were held behind barbed wire.
02December 1941
From Pearl Harbor to the camps
Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941. The battleship USS Arizona sank at her berth after her forward magazine exploded; 1,177 of the men aboard her were killed. The attack turned a distant war into an American one overnight, and it turned suspicion that Japanese Americans had lived with for decades into something harder and more official.
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing military commanders to exclude civilians from military areas on the West Coast. In the next six months about 122,000 men, women and children of Japanese descent were moved to assembly centers and then confined in ten isolated, fenced and guarded relocation centers. Nearly 70,000 of them were American citizens.
In Hawaiʻi the story took a different shape. Most Japanese Americans there were not removed from the islands, which were under martial law, and many of the men who would become the most famous Nisei soldiers came from Honolulu, Hilo and the plantation towns. That is one reason the exhibition’s Honolulu stop matters: the soldiers it honors were, in large part, Hawaiʻi’s own sons.
03Behind barbed wire
A prison that was also a community
At Topaz, Utah, on October 18, 1942, the photographer Tom Parker looked down a main street of tar-paper barracks and dust. The relocation centers were built in deserts and high plains, far from the coastal homes their residents had left. Families lived in single rooms divided by hanging blankets and ate in communal mess halls.
From a guard tower at Manzanar, California, Ansel Adams photographed the camp in 1943 as a grid of barracks against the Sierra Nevada. Inside that grid, people built a life with what they had: schools, newspapers, baseball leagues, churches and gardens in the dust. The camps were prisons, and they were also communities, and the exhibition holds both facts at once.
At Heart Mountain, Wyoming, on January 2, 1943, Bill Hosokawa and his wife Alice served oyster stew to guests in their barracks home. Hosokawa, a journalist before the war, later became one of the best-known chroniclers of the Japanese American experience. Evenings like that one are part of what the camps took away and part of what their residents refused to surrender.
Children read the funnies at Manzanar in the summer of 1942, photographed by Lange in the camp’s first months. The image is quiet, and that is the point. In 1943 the government gave camp residents a loyalty questionnaire, and two questions — about serving in the armed forces and swearing unqualified allegiance — split families. Those who answered no to both became known as the “No-No Boys.”
04Hawaiʻi
The islands answer first
The first Nisei combat unit came from Hawaiʻi. In June 1942 the Japanese Americans of the Hawaiʻi National Guard were reorganized as the 100th Infantry Battalion, and they sailed for the mainland to train at Camp McCoy, Wisconsin. Many had first volunteered as the Varsity Victory Volunteers, University of Hawaiʻi students who asked to serve after Pearl Harbor and were put to work as a labor battalion while they waited for a rifle.
The 100th reached Italy in September 1943 and fought at Salerno and around Monte Cassino, taking such heavy losses that it earned a reputation for refusing to give ground. When the 442nd Regimental Combat Team joined it in June 1944, the 100th became the regiment’s first battalion, keeping its own number and its own hard-won name.
051943
Go for Broke is born
President Roosevelt activated the 442nd Regimental Combat Team on February 1, 1943, with the words, “Americanism is not, and never was, a matter of race or ancestry.” More than 12,000 Nisei volunteered. About 2,645 came from Hawaiʻi and about 1,300 from the mainland camps, and they assembled at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, to train as a self-contained combat team. Their officers above the rank of captain were, at first, all white.
Their motto was “Go for Broke,” a gambler’s phrase for staking everything on one throw. At Camp Shelby they built pontoon bridges, marched through the pine woods and learned to fight as a single unit. Many mainland volunteers had left parents and siblings behind barbed wire to enlist; many Hawaiʻi volunteers had never seen snow.
06France, 1944
The Vosges and the Lost Battalion
The regiment fought north through Italy and then into southern France, landing near Marseille in September 1944 and pushing into the Vosges Mountains. On October 18, 1944, the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion fired its 105mm guns in support of an infantry attack near Bruyères, a town the regiment had to take to open the road east.
The rescue that defined the regiment came a week later. On October 24, 1944, German forces cut off the 1st Battalion of the 141st Infantry Regiment, Texas National Guardsmen, in the Vosges. Two battalions of the 141st tried to break through and failed. The 442nd, just pulled off the line after Bruyères and Biffontaine, was ordered back in. For five days, from October 26 to October 30, its men charged up steep, rain-slick slopes into dug-in defenses. On October 30 they reached the trapped Texans: 211 men walked out alive. The rescue cost the 442nd more than 800 casualties. One rifle company went in with 185 men and eight came out unhurt; another went in with 186 and only 17 escaped wound or death.
On November 12, 1944, on ground near Bruyères where many of their comrades had fallen, color guards of the 442nd stood at attention while the unit’s citations were read. The ceremony was brief and formal, the kind of occasion armies hold when there is no time for more. The regiment had been in combat for less than two years.
07The Pacific
The quiet war of words
While the 442nd fought in Europe, about 6,000 other Nisei served in the Pacific, in a war their language made possible. On November 1, 1941, a month before Pearl Harbor, the Army opened a secret language school at the Presidio of San Francisco with 60 students. Its first class graduated 45 Nisei in May 1942, the same month mass removal began. The school moved to Camp Savage and then Fort Snelling in Minnesota.
The graduates interrogated prisoners, translated captured documents, intercepted radio traffic and persuaded Japanese soldiers and civilians to surrender. By the end of the war they had translated some 20.5 million pages of documents, including the captured “Z Plan” that laid out Japan’s planned counterattack in the southwest Pacific in 1944. General Charles Willoughby, General Douglas MacArthur’s chief of intelligence, credited the Nisei linguists with shortening the war by two years.
08The price
The most decorated unit in American history
The numbers the 442nd and the 100th left behind are still startling. In less than two years of combat the men of the combined unit earned more than 18,000 individual decorations, including 21 Medals of Honor, more than 4,000 Bronze Stars and 9,486 Purple Hearts, and seven Presidential Unit Citations. For its size and length of service it remains the most decorated unit in American military history.
Only one Japanese American received the Medal of Honor during the war itself: Private First Class Sadao Munemori of the 100th Battalion, killed near Seravezza, Italy, on April 5, 1945, after smothering a grenade to save two comrades. Sixteen days later, on April 21, 1945, Second Lieutenant Daniel Inouye led an assault on a ridge near San Terenzo, Italy, and lost his right arm to a rifle grenade while destroying three machine-gun positions. He went on to become Hawaiʻi’s first representative in Congress and a senator from 1963 until his death in 2012.
In France in 1944 the regiment held memorial ceremonies for its own dead even as the fighting went on, and in late 1944 its men marched up muddy roads in the Chambois sector toward the German border. In the last weeks of the war in Europe, elements of the 522nd were among the Allied troops who reached Dachau, where they found the concentration camp and its dead.
Homecoming was not a homecoming. Veterans returned to houses and farms that had been sold, to businesses that were gone, and in some towns to signs that still said they were not wanted. Some went to college on the GI Bill; some went back to the camps to collect their parents; some, like Inouye, went into politics to change the laws that had failed them.
09Reckoning
Apologies, medals, and a repudiated ruling
Reckoning came slowly. In 1980 Congress created a commission to examine the wartime removal, and its report, Personal Justice Denied, found that the detention had been driven by race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership, not by military necessity. In 1988 President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, apologizing for the nation and paying $20,000 to each surviving person who had been detained.
The soldiers’ own honors were corrected even later. In June 2000, after a review found that Asian American soldiers had been passed over because of their race, President Bill Clinton upgraded 20 Distinguished Service Crosses earned by members of the 100th and the 442nd to Medals of Honor, bringing the unit’s total to 21. On November 2, 2011, Congress presented its highest civilian honor, the Congressional Gold Medal, collectively to the 100th, the 442nd and the Military Intelligence Service, at the United States Capitol.
10Honolulu
The exhibition, and how to see it
The Honolulu exhibition puts objects in front of that history. About 40 wartime objects, 120 historical photographs and 70 family stories fill some 2,000 square feet at Capitol Modern, organized in six areas: I Am An American, Hawaii, Behind Barbed Wire, Theaters of War, Price of War and Legacy. There are medals and helmets, a travel bag painted with one soldier’s record of service, and a thousand-stitch belt sewn by women at home for luck.
The show opened with a ceremony at 10 a.m. on Saturday, November 7, and panel discussions with Nisei soldier families followed on Sunday, November 8, at 10:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. The museum is open Wednesdays through Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and the exhibition runs through Saturday, March 13, 2027. It is presented by the National Veterans Network with the National Museum of the United States Army and supported by the Army Historical Foundation.
It is also a traveling exhibition in the full sense. The five-year, 11-city tour began at the Presidio of San Francisco in February 2026, at the Military Intelligence Service Historic Learning Center where the language school once stood. After Honolulu it is scheduled for Portland, Los Angeles, Utah, Colorado, Minnesota, Texas, Georgia, Illinois and New York, spending about six months in each city.
Veterans Day falls on Wednesday, November 11, 2026, four days after the Honolulu opening. The 73rd annual National Veterans Day Observance will be held at Arlington National Cemetery at 11 a.m., with a wreath laid at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, where an unidentified American soldier of the First World War was buried on November 11, 1921, 105 years ago. The exhibition’s question is the one Matsuda painted in his window 85 years ago: who gets to call himself an American, and what must he prove before the answer is yes?
11Method
How this was reported
This article is desk research based on public sources checked against each other: the Hawaiʻi State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, the National Veterans Network, the National WWII Museum, the National Archives, the United States Army Center of Military History, the National Park Service and the Library of Congress. Figures are dated in the text.
Where sources disagreed, this article says so. The 442nd and 100th are credited with seven Presidential Unit Citations by the National WWII Museum and the Army’s 2011 account, while some histories count eight. The removal figure is about 122,000 people moved in six months, the National Archives’ figure, rather than the rounded 120,000 used in many summaries.
Sources
- Hawaiʻi State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, opening weekend, Nov. 4, 2026: sfca.hawaii.gov
- National Veterans Network, “I Am An American: the Nisei Soldier Experience”: nvnvets.org
- National WWII Museum, “Going For Broke: The 442nd Regimental Combat Team”: nationalww2museum.org
- National Archives, Executive Order 9066: archives.gov
- National WWII Museum, Military Intelligence Service: nationalww2museum.org
- U.S. Army Center of Military History, “Go for Broke”: history.army.mil
- National Park Service, Nisei linguists: nps.gov
- U.S. Army, Congressional Gold Medal ceremony, Nov. 2, 2011: army.mil
- U.S. Department of War, Medal of Honor: Capt. Daniel Inouye: war.gov
- Library of Congress, Lange photograph of the Oakland store: loc.gov
- Pacific Citizen, “‘I Am an American’ Traveling Exhibit Debuts,” Mar. 6, 2026: pacificcitizen.org
- Mainichi, exhibit honors Nisei soldiers, Mar. 3, 2026: mainichi.jp
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