Exclusive Portrait Series: Ken Burns' The War

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Robert Kashiwagi, 88
U.S. Army

Robert Kashiwagi was a sugar beet and tomato farmer in Woodland, working 14 hours a day and delivering produce to markets. In 1941, he was drafted into the U.S. Army but was rejected when doctors discovered an abnormal lung condition. They thought it was tuberculosis, but it was San Joaquin fever, a fungal infection he caught from long hours of farm labor.
    He was being treated at a sanitarium when, in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Executive Order 9066 went into effect, forcing some 110,000 Japanese-Americans into internment camps. Kashiwagi left the hospital to go with his family to Colorado’s Amache internment camp. There, his personal war began.
    “I was mad because I was in the camp,” he says. “I was voting already, and they went ahead and took my rights away. I’m an American-born natural citizen.”
    In 1942, the government allowed Japanese-Americans to fight in a combat unit, and Kashiwagi saw his opportunity to leave the camp. “I had a choice,” he recalls. “I could volunteer for that particular unit or not volunteer and call myself disloyal. The only way to get out of camp was to volunteer.”
Continued...

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