I had acquired a WW2 Type 94 Nambu pistol with it’s original leather holster in excellent conditon at a San Antonio gun show. The inside flap of the holster had a lot of Kanji/hiragana/katakana script hand-written in ink.
We had long-time neighbors of American birth and Japanese descent (He was a cancer research physician at M.D. Anderson and had been interned while She was interned at a different camp… despite their being married, native-born Americans …who were full-adult children of native-born Americans….because she had volunteered to drive/deliver U.S. Army vehicles and he was the camp physician at a different camp. They lost their California home and 800 year old family atifacts/antiques when they were incarcerated. After the war they moved to Houston. Their son Edmund (“Buzzy”) and I were in Boy Scouts together (Edmund became a diplomate in the U.S. Consul in Mexico in the 1980’s.) Their daughter married the U.S. Atty Gen in the late ‘70s.
When congress authorized reparations for incarceration of Japanese Americans in the ’80s…they refused it.
My point being they were loyal, patriotic Americans who loyally donated their talents during the war… and they were even more dedicated subsequently.
When I asked Mrs. Sutow to translate the Script inside the holster flap… she read through it silently….then responded to me thusly:
”The holster was made by a family for the war production. Raw materials were dropped off at the door of homes in the evenings, and the occupants would assemble the materials and return the completed item to their doorstep where it would be picked up in the early morning hours.
The script inside the flap is a “prayer” to the end-user for success and for the item to provide protection to the user in the Western Theatre.” — (which would have been China and Burma at that time) —- That was the succinct answer/translation she gave me….and I later decided she was perhaps reluctant to give a more detailed translation.
Why I think that is…. The Sutow family often hosted/sponsored international students while the students attended the U. of Houston nearby. I had many friendships with those students…in fact, I was the flight instructor of one of them, Ichiro Fujita, who became a “best friend” of mine. Ichiro completed his primary flight training with me and polished his English in the process. He later returned to Japan and flew a Falcon business jet for a Japanese businessman… but sadly developed stomach cancer and died in his early 30’s….just before completing initial training at Japan Air Lines.
Whenever I tried to learn more about the culture of the Japanese students who lived and were sponsored by the Sutow’s… Mrs. Sutow was helpful, educational, enthusiastic….and thorough….with her information.
BUT…whenever political or religious or Japanese patriotic beliefs were brought-up… She was vague and apparently reluctant to provide me with detailed insight to their (the native Japanese students) emotions. Mrs. Sutow would tell me, “It would be difficult for a natural American to understand the connection between a native Japanese and his/her religious and patriotic beliefs.“
Whenever I pressed her on the subject, she would say, “You would not undertand.” She was not being evasive. She was not being “protective” of them. She was as American as myself.… but I finally realized that she was doing me a favor…. by reserving her comments, she was allowing me to have comfortable and intimate friendships with truly wonderful, gifted, and intelligent young people…without ruining the relationships with little-understood political differences.
Back to the pistol and holster— (I suspect it was strongly-worded and in the twentieth-century might have been inflammatory to a young American. I think Mrs. Sutow “softened” her description of the writing in the holster. I think this because a few years later, needing funds to pay a divorce lawyer, I sold that pistol/holster to a Texas High School history-teacher who owned a well-respected gun shop in So. Austin. When I included a description of the writings to him, he was thrilled to buy it.
When twenty years later I was in his shop…. we revisited that matter…. and he told me he had displayed it to a visiting professor from Japan who was quite disturbed to see it…. and told him it was quite war-like writing and ”encouraged the owner to ruthless use of it.“
I had hoped to buy-it-back…but Chuck had sold it to a Japanese collector years earlier.
Mrs. Sutow was being kind to my feelings. She passed in the late ‘90s. Edmund died suddenly of a heart attack in his early ‘40s and left a Mexican-national wife and children, and Dr. Sutow died of a type of cancer for-which He Himself had actually found a curative treatment…but he refused his own treatment while he completed documentation….for fear the treatment would require him to publicly acknowledge it to his employer (M.D. Anderson) …who would forcibly interrupt his research before he documented it.
He knowingly and selflessly went to his death in order to save others.
I hope this true story can help absolve prejudice against those who are “different” than ourselves.
