Recently, I listened to a podcast which featured Robert Kiyosaki as a guest. He's an American author/businessman of Japanese ancestry and he mentioned that five of his family members fought during World War II.
Three of them, he claims, fought with the 442nd Infantry Regiment in Europe. This seemed plausible to me, as I already knew this unit from the PBS miniseries The War and it was comprised mostly of Japanese Americans.
However, he then goes on to mention that the two other family members fought the Japanese and were even captured by the Japanese. This seemed odd to me, as I seem to recall that the 442nd Infantry Regiment was specifically deployed to Europe rather than the Pacific due to it being comprised of Japanese Americans.
My question: Is there any record of Japanese Americans 1) fighting the Japanese 2) being captured by the Japanese during World War II ? And if so, what typically happened to these POWs following their capture?
Many Japanese-Americans served as translators with the Military Intelligence Service (MIS) in the Pacific War. They served in Burma, in China, in the Central Pacific, and in the SW Pacific. Their main jobs were interrogating prisoners and translating captured documents, and they also translated intercepted signals, and worked to convince Japanese soldiers and civilians to surrender. As far as I am aware, none were captured by the Japanese. They were non-combat personnel, and typically stayed behind the front lines. Some were killed in action, despite that.
The general belief was that they would be treated very badly if captured, and expected to be tortured and/or killed if captured. They were often accompanied by a white American soldier as a bodyguard, to (a) defend them against capture, and (b) to reduce the chance of misidentification as enemy by their own troops.
A small number were captured by Chinese troops in Burma. At least one was captured by US troops in the unit he was serving with.
For more on these translators, see
Two Japanese-American servicemen are known to have been captured by the Japanese:
Frank Fujita, a sergeant in the 36th Infantry Division (part of the Texas National Guard), who was captured in the Battle of Java, 1942. After brief imprisonment in Indonesia and Singapore, most of his time as a POW was spent in Omori Prison Island in Tokyo Bay. He was liberated in 1945. He was kept separate from the other prisoners, and was forced to make propaganda radio broadcasts for the Japanese. For more on his story, see: Fujita, Frank; Stanley L. Falk; Robert Wear, Foo: A Japanese-American Prisoner of the Rising Sun, University of North Texas Press, 1993.
Richard Sakakida, who was an intelligence agent in the US Army, stationed in Manila together with another Japanese-American, Arthur Komori. They were spying on the Japanese community in Manila, posing as sailors who had jumped ship. With the entry of the Philippines and the USA into the war, they were rounded up together with Japanese civilians, and interned by the Philippine Constabulary. They were released after about a week, and served as translators for the US Army in Bataan and Corregidor. Sakakida served as a translator for General Wainwright duribng the surrender negotiations. Komori escaped from Corregidor (on orders of General Wainwright), and reached Australia. Sakakida was captured. He claimed to his Japanese captors that he was a civilian who had been forced to work for the US Army. He was charged with treason and interrogated and tortured by the Kempeitai for two months, and then the charges were dropped. For more on Sakakida's story, see his account at http://www.javadc.org/sw.htm (which also includes accounts by MIS translators who served in the SW Pacific. For Komori's story, see https://www.army.mil/article/103562/Arthur_S__Komori__Nisei_Special_Agent/