A white cloth belt covered in a thousand red knots, sewn by women inside an American incarceration camp, and carried through World War II by a soldier who never told a single friend he had it.
Tim and Andrea take on Sus Ito's senninbari, a Japanese "thousand-stitch" good-luck belt his mother made for him while the family was held at the Rohwer camp in Arkansas. Andrea's first question is the right one: why is a Japanese object on a U.S. history podcast? The answer opens onto one of the hardest chapters of the war at home. For the first time on the show, you'll hear the object's owner in his own voice, in a short clip of Sus Ito recorded in 2015. From there it's Pearl Harbor, Executive Order 9066, and the removal of roughly 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast, most of them American citizens, and Andrea asks what a lot of listeners will: why only the Japanese, when the U.S. was also at war with Germany and Italy? Then it's Sus himself, a farm kid from Stockton who was already in the Army before Pearl Harbor, served as an artillery forward observer with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, and came home to a PhD and a career at Harvard Medical School. They cover the 442nd, the most decorated unit of its size in American history, the rescue of the Lost Battalion, and the hard irony of Japanese American soldiers helping free Dachau survivors while their own families sat behind barbed wire at home. They close with the federal commission that blamed the incarceration on "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership," and the formal apology President Reagan signed in 1988. It took the country 46 years to say it was wrong.
A thousand stitches, sewn behind barbed wire, for a son fighting for the country that put them there.
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