By Jonathan Lee
A Congressional Gold Medal commemorating Japanese-American soldiers who served in U.S. Army during World War II. Many of these soldiers fought even as their families were still imprisoned under President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which sent 120,000 Japanese Americans into internment camps after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
This medal was issued in 2010 to Kazuo F. Yamaguchi, a sergeant and a linguistic specialist who served with the Eighth Army. Yamaguchi said the U.S. government made the recipients pay for both the medal and the box, despite their years of loyal service. Yamaguchi was drafted into the Military Intelligence Service, a clandestine branch of the U.S. Army made up mostly of Japanese-Americans who served as anthropologists, interpreters and code breakers on the Pacific Front.