Dear Editor,
Hello, Mr. Johnston — I came upon your Frank Fujino story in the Pacific Citizen (Nov. 6-19, 2020) after another of my internet searches for him. I had done a few of these over the years, hampered by the fact that I was misspelling his name (“Fujima”) — which I had only seen once, in his own handwriting.
I was looking for information on him because I had met him in the autumn of 1982, while canvassing for an organization called the Citizens Action League, getting donations and petition signatures (for the record: It was a campaign against the decontrol of natural gas prices — CAL took on a lot of issues, but that was what we were working on at the time.) Having never forgotten him, I wondered what his fuller story was.
When I door-knocked him that evening, he answered in his wheelchair. During our exchange (he signed the petition), I noted on the wall a framed movie poster for “Go For Broke” and remarked that I had seen the film.
He looked up in surprise — “Really? You know about that?” I said yes, I knew about the 442nd, including that it was the most-decorated unit of WWII. He grew excited and asked if I wanted to see his book from the 442nd’s last veterans’ convention, and, of course, I said yes.
Wheeling to the kitchen table, he told his wife, “Get him some cookies! He knows about my unit!” So, we spent some time going over this book full of photos and reminiscences. I recall one photo of him sitting up in bed smiling in a French hospital, minus his leg, young and good-looking.
His wife — a pretty, beleaguered-looking woman — did as he asked and never smiled or said a word. What lingered with me was his excitement at finding a young white-bread stranger who knew what the 442nd was and who had some vague idea of what he and Japanese Americans had endured.
So, I left with my baggie full of cookies and proceeded to the house of Frank’s neighbor, a 40-something blue-collar white guy, who looked at the petition and said, “Oh, I see you got Frank.” And I told him about my visit.
He said, “Yeah, poor Frank,” adding that while he was over there fighting, his wife (or future wife, going by your story) had been interned — at Manzanar, he said, though that detail was evidently wrong. Thinking of him and of his wife, and all the men like him, and all those families, still makes me stop and catch my breath.
I remain glad that I stayed up late one night and watched that movie, however simplified and sanitized its depiction was. (I’m impressed that it was made at all, back then.)
And I am very grateful for your article. Frank at the time was the age that I am now — 64 — and had less than a year to live, it turned out. My main feeling about him is poignance. He struck me the way other men of that generation have, whose damage made them more volatile and overbearing than they would otherwise have been.
(I’m recalling (the late-actor) Sam Shepard talking about his father, a bomber pilot and world-class alcoholic — and all the men who came home from the war broken, and all the women who tried to fix them but could not. In the case of Japanese Americans, add internment and virulent racial prejudice.)
I was left with the impression of a fundamentally good man, possibly a great one, who would have been hard for a wife or child to contend with.
Sincerely,
Bernie MacKinnon,
Memphis, Tenn.
