A Legacy of Change: Franklin Odo debuts his latest book, ‘No Sword to Bury: Japanese Americans in Hawai‘i during World War II’
January 30, 2004
‘Write what you know best’ is the advice that writers probably hear most often. And for Franklin Odo, activist, academic and museum curator extraordinaire, that’s exactly what he does. His latest title, No Sword to Bury: Japanese Americans in Hawai‘i during World War II (Temple University Press), takes him back to his native Hawai‘i to explore the experiences of a shrinking group of Japanese American men who survived World War II as part of the Varsity Victory Volunteers (VVV).
Made up of about 170 young American men of Japanese descent, the VVV was a non-military group that performed public service — mining rocks in local quarries, building roads, repairing public property — on O‘ahu in 1942. Although no one recalls how the group got its name, the VVV was officially designated the Corps of Engineers Auxiliary and attached to the 34th Combat Engineers Regiment of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In spite of their American-born status, for over a year after Pearl Harbor the men of VVV were classified 4C — “aliens ineligible to serve in the armed forces of the United States.”
More than half a century later, the VVV’s legacy of loyalty and service to their homeland — the United States of America — remains a largely untold story. Until now: No Sword hits bookstores this week.
As the founding director of the Asian Pacific American Program at the Smithsonian Institution and the first and only Asian Pacific American curator at the National Museum of American History, Odo has long dedicated his life to giving voice to those who have gone unheard for far too long. So it’s no surprise that his writings adhere to exactly the same goals.
Just over a year ago, Odo published The Columbia Documentary History of the Asian American Experience (Columbia University Press, 2003), the first book that brought together the canon of documents that are of utmost importance to APA history. Almost two decades prior in 1985, Odo published A Pictorial History of the Japanese in Hawai‘i 1885-1924, which opens with the experiences of the first Japanese immigrants to Hawai‘i and ends with the 1924 exclusionary laws that effectively denied further Japanese entry into the United States. Meanwhile, Odo’s Roots: An Asian American Reader, which Odo wrote with Amy Tachiki and Eddie Wong in 1971, was the first bona fide APA breakout text.
With the addition of No Sword to his repertoire, Odo has plans for two future titles that delve further into unexplored aspects of the Japanese American experience in Hawai‘i: “I want to suggest the richness available in the stories from one single ethnic group in one single location across two generations,” he explains. That should keep him busy doing what he knows best for decades to come.
AsianWeek: Where did your initial interest in the VVV come from? What’s the genesis of this project?
Franklin Odo: Members of the VVV first approached me. Hung Wai Ching, a Chinese American who is included in the book, made the actual contact with me in 1984, suggesting that this was a very important topic about some important people. Of course, I had long had an interest in the experiences of Japanese Americans in Hawai‘i so this was an unexplored area of that history that further fueled my interest.
AW: You conducted some 50 interviews and spent considerable time with VVV members over the 1980s and 1990s, but you felt that you didn’t necessarily get very close to these men … why was that?
Odo: These men were generally quite successful — certainly in their post-World War II lives — and hence not the ‘underdog’ / working class types on which I was focusing my research at the time. Indeed, they could be considered the models for the ‘model minority myth’ that I was anxious to critique.
AW: Other than your book, are there other ways in which these stories/lives have been preserved?
Odo: Yes. There were about 30 formal interviews, most audio but some professionally videotaped. So the tapes exist and so do full transcriptions. Otherwise, except for rare instances, I do not believe these men have had their stories captured.
AW: As of today, how many of the VVV are left?
Odo: I don’t know what the exact number is, but about a dozen of the men I interviewed showed up at the reading I did in Hawai‘i [last month as part of a pre-publication tour]. I know some others are alive but, if the percentage is partially valid, perhaps 1/3 to 2/3 might be left. It’s vague because no one is counting.
AW: Post 9-11, can you see the separation/ostracizement/internment that happened to a single ethnic group occurring all over again now or in the future?
Odo: I do think this will be difficult to effect anymore partly because we have gone through the Japanese American World War II experience. But let me temper that by saying that this statement understates the critical injustice of those detained at Guantanamo because the public thinks that ‘since we are not doing this wholesale internment, that it’s okay because those who are impacted probably are legitimate suspects.’ This line of thinking was, in effect, the same sort of justification used when the FBI picked up those who were detained in Justice Department camps during World War II — and all those from Hawai‘i — because the FBI could say that a) the ‘suspects’ had been provided hearings (how could they prove they were not subversive?), and b) each ‘suspect’ had been individually ‘selected’ and not a victim of mass arrest.
AW: What kind of progress have APAs made in terms of being a part of the U.S. military?
Odo: There has been huge progress in opportunities for APAs in the military since then. The 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the 100th Infantry Battalion and the Military Intelligence Service all added to the reputation of Japanese Americans as brave and loyal troops. So did the record of the 1st and 2nd Filipino American Regiments fighting under General MacArthur when the United States retook the Philippines. On an individual level, the military is surely far more open to upward mobility than the civilian sector, whether that be in higher education, Fortune 500 companies, the federal government and even right here in the Smithsonian!
AW: What’s the ultimate legacy that the VVV leaves behind?
Odo: I think one is that, even in very bleak conditions of racist discrimination, ‘victims’ can fight back. In this case, the VVV did so by throwing the challenge back at the ‘establishment’ to create a venue for change. The other is that we have a responsibility to work for change through the positions we occupy.
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