Word: nisei
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Johnny was persuaded to decline the honor in favor of his runner-up. His runner-up won the California title. As a consolation prize, Nisei John Fujio Aiso (rhymes with why so) was allowed to go to Washington for the ride...
...Washington, Johnny met Japanese Ambassador Tsuneo Matsudaira who advised him to get a change from the Pacific Coast atmosphere with its anti-Nisei discrimination and see something of the "older America." The ambassador remarked that his predecessor had received an honorary degree from Brown University. Johnny Aiso went to Brown, graduated cum laude in 1931, delivered the class valedictory. Then he went back to California, became a lawyer in Los Angeles...
When World War II came, U.S. Citizen John Aiso entered the U.S. Army as a private, rose to lieutenant colonel, highest rank attained by any Nisei...
...traitor was a bespectacled, wiry, 27-year-old Nisei named Tomoya Kawakita, better known to hundreds of G.I. prisoners as "The Meatball." The son of a California grocer, Kawakita was caught on a visit to Japan by World War II. He threw in his lot with the Japanese. As an interpreter in the prison camp at Oeyama, he taunted G.I. prisoners in their own ball-park English, took savage delight in tormenting them...
...after war's end, a startled ex-inmate of Oeyama spotted his old enemy walking out of a Sears, Roebuck store in Los Angeles. He called the FBI, who rounded up Tomaya Kawakita, 26, a California-born Nisei back in the U.S. to study at the University of Southern California. Last week, after almost three months of testimony and eight wrangling days of jury deliberation, "The Meatball" listened stolidly in a federal court as he was pronounced a traitor to his country. The penalty: five years to death...