Honor & Sacrifice

Born in Los Angeles, Roy Matsumoto was a “Kibei,” raised by his grandparents and educated in Japan. Roy returned to Los Angeles but in 1942, along with more than 120,000 other Japanese Americans living on the West Coast of the U.S., was incarcerated in a U.S. concentration camp and volunteered to serve with a famed American guerrilla unit that fought behind Japanese lines in Burma.//Due to his invaluable Japanese language skills, Roy emerged a hero, credited by other members of his battalion with having saved their lives. Roy’s story and those of his Kibei comrades are the more poignant and powerful for the fact that most of their parents and grandparents had been born in Japan. Roy’s brothers fought with the Japanese Army in China and Guadalcanal, and his parents were living in Hiroshima when that city was destroyed by the historic first use of an atomic bomb.