Have a nice cup of hot coffee and read all about my grandfather and family's:
"Liberation Without Litigation from America's WWII Japanese Prison Camps "
Pure Winds Bright Moon depicts the untold odyssey of Kenji Inomata, 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, erroneously referred to as Internment camps. It further covers his unprecedented triumph as among the first two Japanese to be naturalized in 1919, racially-intolerant Pensacola, Florida, as well as his being among the first in U.S. history. Astonishingly, his citizenship was upheld on appeal while the citizenship applications of thousands of other Japanese were denied or their citizenship status revoked. Contrary to alien land laws prohibiting Japanese from owning land, he was also among the first to own property. In 1937, he was also the first Issei employed by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. 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This important historical work further recounts the unpublished history of his Hapa-Japanese family’s attainment of exemption from being unceremoniously uprooted from their homes and confined in Japanese prison camps along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. Pure Winds also recounts their ordeal in coping with race prejudice, harassment and vigilante violence while living unimprisoned in the hornet's nest 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 through its military provocations against Japan, obstructing the Pearl Harbor commanders’ military operations to search for and destroy the Japanese fleet through FDR's stand down orders injurious to U.S. military efforts and by employing counterfeit, insincere diplomatic negotiations with Japan. Finally, it speaks to the Government's unconscionable jailing of 110,000 guiltless Japanese and other attention-holding events of historical and social significance.
Author Kinji Inomata's book signing event at the Hapa Japan Festival 2013 in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo at the East West Players Theater. Seen with him is part of his chop suey family!