80 Years On: Japanese American Vietnam Veteran Tells War Stories to Students

   New York, Aug. 12 (Jiji Press)--A Japanese American veteran of the Vietnam War has been relating his experience of discrimination and the misery of war to students in the United States.
   "I don't want our experiences to be repeated ever again, for any race or any person," Takeshi Furumoto, 80, a resident of New Jersey, says in Japanese. He was born in a concentration camp during World War II, volunteered to fight in the Vietnam War and suffered mental and physical trauma from his time on the battlefield.
   His father, Kiyoto, born in Japan, emigrated to California in 1921, labored at farms from his teens and founded a vegetable wholesale company in 1938. Some 120,000 Japanese Americans were sent to concentration camps in 1942 under U.S. Executive Order 9066, which was signed by then President Franklin Roosevelt and regarded them as hostile aliens. Kiyoto, who was one of them, lost his property.
   He decided against signing up for military service or pledging allegiance to the United States as he was afraid that doing so would make him unable to return to Japan. He was locked up in the Tulelake concentration camp in northern California, where Furumoto was born in October 1944.
   The family of seven lived in a small room that was extremely cold in winter. "Japanese Americans were hated, and nobody helped us," Furumoto remembers. "After the war, most of the parents who spent time in such camps wouldn't talk about their painful experiences."

(2025/08/12-19:05)