David Akira Itami: The Tragic Story of a Kibei

I recently came upon the account of David Akira Itami, who tragically took his own life on December 26, 1950 by shooting himself. After documenting similar individuals in my book "The Sun Will Rise Again," I felt a need to recount his narrative to you.

Akira was among the estimated 6,000 Japanese Americans (Nisei) who enlisted in the military.

During World War II, he served in the Intelligence Service of the US Army. His value to the army was particularly significant due to his status as a Kibei-Nisei, which referred to Japanese Americans who had been sent to Japan as children by their Japanese-born parents to receive education for a period of three or more years before returning to the United States as young adults.

The Kibei-Nisei would play a crucial and contentious role in the Second World War. Due to their profound understanding of the Japanese language and culture, their role in the military intelligence division of the US Army was of utmost importance. However, there was also a persistent doubt that the allegiances of certain individuals may not be entirely devoted to the American cause. However, unlike many German and Austrian exiles who escaped persecution in their own countries, these individuals had enjoyed mostly content lives in Japan.

Akira was born in Oakland, California. Because his parents had immigrated from Japan to the United States, they were legally barred from gaining American citizenship. In contrast, Akira was born in the United States and thus received automatic American citizenship at birth. This was a generational issue, as indicated by the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924, which restricted additional Japanese immigration to the United States following a wave of tens of thousands of Japanese immigrants. The younger generation of Japanese-Americans, or "Nisei," were all citizens, although their parents, known as "Issei," were not.

Akira's father, Jojiro Itami, departed from his hometown of Kajiki, a small coastal town in Kagoshima Prefecture on the southern island of Kyushu, at the age of twenty. He relocated to California with the aspiration of achieving prosperity as a shopkeeper. When Akira was born in 1911, his parents were facing a challenging battle to sustain their dry cleaning business due to increasing hostility towards Japanese people in the East Oakland region.

Their choice to send Akira to Japan was mostly influenced by economic considerations rather than national sentiment, however. The favorable exchange rate between the dollar and the yen had a significant role in their decision. Prior to Akira reaching his second birthday, he was sent to Kajiki to reside with his aunt on his father's side. He would stay in Japan till the age of nineteen. Due to being sent to Japan at an exceptionally early stage of his life, Akira did not acquire proficiency in the English language until he came back to the United States as an adult.

Akira was admitted to the local Dajo Primary School, where he displayed exceptional intelligence. As a result, he was advised to bypass his last year at the school and join the esteemed Kajiki Prefectural Middle School a year ahead of schedule. Despite being the top student in the school, Akira had difficulty in securing admission to Japan's prestigious colleges or military academies. Due to financial constraints, he was restricted to applying exclusively to colleges that did not charge tuition fees. He submitted an application to the Daito Bunka Gakuin (Academy of Greater East Asian Culture) in Tokyo and was subsequently admitted. Akira benefited from receiving not just a tuition-free education but also stipends that covered his accommodation and meals.

Akira's academic performance was exceptional, but he had to end his studies before graduating and go back to the United States in 1931 due to his mother's deteriorating health and his parents' inability to sustain the small financial assistance they had been providing to his aunt in Japan.

Prior to 1931, Akira had received his upbringing and education solely as a patriotic young Japanese individual. In addition, his education at the Daito Bunka Gakuin had deeply ingrained in him a firm belief in pan-Asian unity. Unfortunately, Japanese militarists were already using and twisting this passion to further their aggressive colonial expansion agenda. After returning to the United States, Akira's life took an unexpected and dramatic turn in the opposite direction.

Akira, as a Nisei, prioritized the acquisition of English language skills, as he had only communicated in spoken and written Japanese before to his arrival in California. Due to his exceptional cognitive abilities, he was able to accomplish this task with remarkable speed and exceptional proficiency. However, acquiring the Nisei community's American cultural perspective would become a significant obstacle. Akira was unfamiliar with the American teen culture, which the Nisei in California had grown up with. He discovered that less than 10% of Nisei people spoke Japanese fluently, and the vast majority were unconcerned about their Japanese cultural heritage.

Akira's finances were completely exhausted, necessitating his pursuit of a promising job opportunity. The prevalence of anti-Japanese discrimination was escalating to perilous levels in California, rendering it exceedingly arduous for individuals of Japanese descent to secure employment beyond agricultural labor or positions within the local ethnic economy. However, in Alaska, there was a significant rise in salmon runs. As a result, Akira departed from Oakland during the summer of 1932 to seek employment at a cannery in Alaska. He returned to California that fall, but, rather than returning to Oakland, settled in Los Angeles, which offered more opportunity for study and for meaningful work.

Initially, he taught Japanese language courses at the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple in Los Angeles. Later, in 1934, he secured a position on the editorial team of the bilingual daily Kashu Mainichi Shinbun/The Japan-California Daily News.

In 1935, Akira gave up his Japanese citizenship while preserving his Asian roots.

He temporarily suspended his newspaper duties for a duration of eleven months in order to serve as a translator at the Japanese Embassy in Washington, D.C. During a portion of that period, he held the position of secretary to Major-General Kenji Matsumoto, who served as the military attaché of the embassy.

In 1937, he married another Kibei, Kimiko Yano, who was born in Hawaii. In 1938, the couple welcomed their first child, a girl. Afterwards, Akira joined the Kibei division of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), the oldest and largest civil rights organization for Asian Americans in America. However, Akira had failed to gain the favor of left-wing individuals within the Kibei-Nisei group due to his writings in the Kashu Mainichi. In his writing, he stated that Japan and America had a mutual interest in opposing communism, and he firmly believed that the United States faced a greater threat from Russia than from Japan. Akira's decision to dismiss communist members from the JACL Kibei Division in October 1940 had incurred the lasting animosity of the communist faction within the organization. Regrettably, the Nisei communist press saw this as evidence of Akira's endorsement of Japanese Imperialism.

Subsequently, on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese initiated their unexpected assault on Pearl Harbor, those of Japanese descent residing on the west coast were promptly regarded with suspicion as potential spies and traitors. Community leaders were rounded up and removed to detention centers. In all, more than 5,500 Issei men were rounded up by the FBI on the evening of December 7th. Sei Fujii, who was the publisher and managing editor of the Kashu Mainichi, was one of these men. Akira assumed control of his duties, ensuring the ongoing publishing of the Japanese language section of the newspaper while maintaining a cautious approach.

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt officially signed and implemented Executive Order 9066. While not explicitly targeting American citizens of Japanese descent, this order granted the Secretary of War and military commanders the authority to designate specific military zones within the country and, at their own discretion, to prohibit the residence of "any or all persons" in those areas. The order additionally sanctioned the establishment of internment camps to accommodate individuals who were to be excluded from certain military regions. In a final editorial before publication of Kashu Mainichi was suspended on March 21, Akira joined the paper’s acting publisher and English section editor in urging Japanese Americans to comply willingly with Roosevelt’s Executive Order. Two days after Kashu Mainichi suspended publication, he was among 85 Los Angeles Nisei to join an advance work party that arrived at the Owens Valley Reception Center in Manzanar, California to help prepare for the arrival of the detainees.

In October, Colonel Kai Rasmussen, who was put in charge of the Military Intelligence Service Language School at Camp Savage, Minnesota, visited Manzanar with the purpose of enlisting Japanese language instructors. Without delay, he promptly employed Akira and two additional Nisei as civilian instructors. These three men departed from Manzanar as the initial volunteers from relocation centers to be enlisted by the US military. Upon realizing that he would be instructing at Camp Savage for an extended period, he decided to bring his wife and daughter to join him. They would establish residence in North Minneapolis.

In August 1944, the school had become too large for the camp's facilities, so the program was relocated to Fort Snelling, which was located 18 miles away. Akira chose not to move, and instead decided to join the Army on March 31, 1944. The Army quickly recognized the value of their new recruit, and Akira was sent to Washington, D.C. to work for the Military Intelligence Service (MIS), translating and deciphering Japanese codes.

Akira's service with the Military Intelligence Service was recognized in August 1946, when he was awarded the Legion of Merit. This award is the highest honor given to noncombatant American military service personnel. Akira received this honor because he had “assembled a reference library of more than 4,000 Japanese official orders, manuals and regulations, indexed under some 25,000 subject headings, which answered numerous requests for intelligence information unavailable elsewhere.”

Akira’s work continued. As soon as the war with Japan ended, he was sent to Iwo Jima and Okinawa for four months, to compile the information that Nisei members of the Military Intelligence Service had gathered from prisoners of war. This material was critical not only for analysis at home in the States, but also for use in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, more popularly known as the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. This tribunal first convened on April 29, 1946 and ran well over two and a half years until its adjournment on November 12, 1948. Akira, in the meantime, was discharged from the army on April 10, 1946, but remained a War Department civilian employee. He and three other Kibei from the Allied Power’s Translation and Interpretation Section were assigned to the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal as monitors of the Japanese interpreters.

During a break in the proceedings, Akira traveled back to the United States in October 1946 for a two-month sabbatical in order to make the requisite preparations for his wife and daughter to relocate to Japan. During an interview, Akira stated that the main obstacles in the cases were the language barriers and the lack of understanding of Anglo-Saxon law by Japanese lawyers and defendants.

Following the pressure of the trials, Akira fell into a deep depression that was immune to the comfort supplied by his own family. The seven men sentenced to death by the Tokyo Crimes Tribunal were executed by hanging on December 23, 1948. Akira died two years later, specifically on December 26, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was 39.

Akira’s death was not reported in the American press, while the Army recorded his suicide as a wartime death—“Died Non-Battle.” It seemed that Akira would be forgotten as just another casualty of the war—until novelist Toyoko Yamasaki took an interest in his case and, after extensive research in Japan and the United States, published a three volume novel, Futatsu No sokoku in 1983. (An English-language version, Two Homelands, was edited down to a single volume and released in 2008.) This novel took Japan by storm. It was turned into a yearlong television film series of 51 episodes in 1984 and was remade as a two-part film for television in 2019, which I recall watching.