Author: Kinji Inomata

Publisher:

Published: 2013-03-15

Total Pages: 456

ISBN-13: 9780984931507

Pure Winds Bright Moon depicts the untold odyssey of a runaway, stowaway youth from 1800's Japan who sailed into New York Harbor in 1899. In 1906, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy, serving on five battleships as a trusted officer's steward to heroic captains and commanders. He also served under Admirals and other high-ranking officers at the Pensacola Naval Air Station. Because of his long and honorable 30-year military service, in 1942, he became the only Japanese male of record in U.S. history to have been Honorably Exempted from incarceration in America's WWII Japanese concentration camps. It further covers his unprecedented triumph as among the first Japanese to be naturalized in 1919, racially-intolerant Pensacola, Florida, as well as being among the first in U.S. history. Astonishingly, his citizenship was upheld on appeal while the citizenship of hundreds of other Japanese was denied or revoked. Contrary to alien land laws prohibiting Japanese from owning land, he was also among the first to own property. Pure Winds Bright Moon also encompasses his post-military career as a stately steward to Hollywood's 20th Century Fox Chairman, Joseph Schenck, to legendary singer-showman Al Jolson and to silent screen star Norma Talmadge. In 1969, in the sunset of his career, he was celebrated as the oldest surviving crewmember of the U.S.S. New Jersey, the most celebrated battleship in naval history. This important historical work further recounts the unpublished history of his Hapa-Japanese family's attainment of exemption from being unceremoniously uprooted from their homes and confined in Japanese prison camps along the west coast. It also explores the Army's weird, wonderful and racist Mixed Marriage Policy, which paradoxically, prevented their arrest and recounts their ordeal in coping with race prejudice, harassment and vigilante violence while living unimprisoned in the lion's den of wartime Los Angeles. It further exposes the bloodguilty baiting of the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor by Franklin D. Roosevelt and his war cabinet by obstructing the Pearl Harbor commanders' military operations to search and destroy the Japanese fleet.