On an October Wednesday in 1946, a 24-year-old man stood in a Sears department store in Los Angeles, holding a price tag and studying lawn mowers. William Bruce had come home from the war a year and a half earlier. He lived in a small house in Buena Park. His young wife stood beside him, her parents a few steps behind, all of them discussing the width of a mower blade.
Bruce was not listening. He had looked up across the store and was staring at a man the prisoners had called Meatball. To understand what Bruce saw, you must understand what Bruce survived. He survived the fall of Corregidor.
He survived the Bataan Death March. He was packed into the hold of a hell ship and shipped across the Pacific, where he spent the next three years starving, beaten, and worked to the edge of death. The man standing thirty feet away had been one of the men responsible. His name was Tomoya Kawakita.
He was 25 years old. He was enrolled as a student at the University of Southern California. He was an American citizen, born in California, carrying an American passport. Bruce did not attack him.
He did not shout his name. He said later he wanted to wrap his hands around Kawakita’s throat there in the middle of the store. Instead, he waited. He watched Kawakita finish what he was doing.
He followed him quietly to the parking lot. He wrote down the license plate. He walked to a pay phone and called the FBI. That was how the story began.
During World War II, the Japanese Empire took roughly 350,000 prisoners of war across Asia and the Pacific. About 132,000 were western Allied troops: Americans, British, Canadians, Australians, Dutch. More than 35,000 never returned home, a death rate of 27 percent. In German and Italian camps the death rate for western POWs was 4 percent.
For American prisoners specifically, over a third did not survive. Those who did spent an average of 38 months behind barbed wire. In April 1942, Corregidor and Bataan fell to the Imperial Japanese Army. Nearly 76,000 American and Filipino soldiers surrendered, the largest single force in American history ever to lay down its arms.
They were sick and starving, and Washington had told them no relief was coming. What happened next was the Bataan Death March, 65 miles on foot in tropical heat. Prisoners who fell were shot. Prisoners who stopped for water were shot.
Prisoners who tried to help a comrade were shot. Between five and ten thousand men died on that road, about 600 of them Americans. William Bruce was on that road. He was 19 years old.
The 12,000 Americans who survived the march were later shipped to Japan on cargo vessels the survivors called hell ships, locked in holds without food, water, or sanitation. Some ships were torpedoed by American submarines unaware their own men were aboard. Bruce survived the march, survived a hell ship, and in August 1944 arrived at Osaka Camp 3-B at Oyama in western Japan. To understand Tomoya Kawakita, you must go back further.
On September 26, 1921, a boy was born in Calexico, California, near the Mexican border, to Japanese immigrant parents. Under American law, because he was born on American soil, he was an American citizen from birth. Under Japanese law, because his parents were Japanese citizens, he was Japanese as well. A dual citizen with two passports and two possible lives running parallel.
In 1939, Kawakita graduated from high school and sailed to Japan with his father to visit the boy’s grandfather. The father returned to California. The son stayed, enrolling at Meiji University in Tokyo to study commerce. The same year, another young Nisei from the same corner of California crossed the Pacific.
His name was Meiji Fujisawa. He was preparing for a career in import-export between the two countries. He carried the same dual citizenship, the same divided blood, the same age, the same voyage. But before Fujisawa left the United States, his father did something of decisive importance: he went through Japanese legal channels and had his son’s name removed from the family koseki, the Japanese family registry.
Fujisawa left for Japan in 1939 an American, and only an American. Kawakita’s name remained in the registry, untouched, waiting. On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and every Nisei student in Japan became a problem no one knew how to solve. In 1943, Kawakita made a decision his defense attorneys would spend years trying to justify: he went to the Japanese registration system and officially entered his name into his family’s koseki.
On paper, voluntarily, he became a full Japanese citizen. The same year, thousands of Nisei across the American West were being interned in camps behind barbed wire on the American side. In 1943 the US Army came to those camps and to Hawaii asking for volunteers. Thousands stepped forward.
The 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the 100th Infantry Battalion fought in Italy, France, and Germany, becoming the most decorated unit in American military history. Sadao Munemori, who threw himself on a live grenade in Italy on April 5, 1945, was one of them. His mother was in an internment camp when the telegram arrived. That same year, a family friend helped Kawakita find work as an interpreter for a private company on Japan’s western coast.
The company, Nippon Yakin, operated a nickel refinery at Ooyama, Kyoto Prefecture. Nickel was a strategic metal; it went into armor, engines, and war. Seven and a half miles from the smelter, beside the open-pit mine feeding it, stood a small camp of wooden barracks surrounded by wire, later called Osaka Camp 3-B. Kawakita arrived at Ooyama in August 1943.
On paper he was a civilian employee of a private mining company. In reality, he stood between Japanese speakers and English speakers, translating orders. In August 1944, 400 American POWs arrived. They came from Bataan and Corregidor, already broken after two and a half years of captivity.
William Bruce was among them. The camp held six wooden barracks, a kitchen, a latrine that did not drain, and a building called a hospital that lacked medicine. Prisoners slept on wooden platforms. In winter, temperatures dropped below freezing.
Their day began before dawn with roll call, then twelve hours of digging nickel ore with hand tools. Rations were rice, a cup in the morning, a cup at noon, a cup at night, sometimes thin soup, rarely a scrap of fish. Men lost their teeth, bled from their gums, developed beriberi and pellagra. Some went permanently blind.
Nearly one in ten men who served time at Ooyama did not leave alive. That was the world the 400 Americans entered. And in that world, the young Nisei from Calexico added his own insults to every order. The prisoners called him Meatball because he was round, smooth, and well-fed, and they knew why.
He was round because he stole their food. He spoke English like a boy from Southern California because he was a boy from Southern California. Witnesses later testified under oath that he stood over exhausted men ordering them to work harder, that he struck prisoners with his fists and with various implements, forced prisoners to hit each other, and beat a man around the head as he tried to crawl out of a filth pit. They remembered a phrase he said aloud in English: that America had given him nothing at all.
But Kawakita was not the only Nisei interpreter at Ooyama. There were others, young Japanese-American men trapped in Japan by the war, assigned the same impossible job by the same enemy government. Meiji Fujisawa, whose father had erased his name from the koseki, had ended up at the same camp, the same fence, translating the same orders. When the prisoners were liberated and war-crime investigators arrived, the Americans defended Fujisawa.
They said he did what he could, that he helped them in the small, quiet ways a man in his position could. He was never charged. He was never tried. Two men, the same fence, the same blood, the same war.
Two different answers. On August 15, 1945, the Emperor of Japan spoke on the radio, and the war was over. The fence came down. American planes dropped 55-gallon drums of food, medicine, and cigarettes.
And Tomoya Kawakita changed his coat overnight. He had never worn a uniform. Suddenly, smoothly, the man who had stood beside Japanese supervisors translating threats offered his English-language services to the American occupation forces. He was polite, competent, cooperative.
In December 1945, he walked into the American consulate in Yokohama and swore under oath that he was an American citizen, that he had never renounced his citizenship, that the 1943 koseki registration had been made under duress. The consular officer stamped his passport and sent him home. In 1946, Tomoya Kawakita sailed to Los Angeles. He did not change his name.
He enrolled in graduate school at USC. He was that confident no one would ever recognize him. He was right, for a while. Then, on that October Wednesday, the former sergeant from Buena Park looked up across a Sears store and saw a face.
Bruce did not rush at him. He watched Kawakita finish his shopping, followed him to his car, recorded the license plate, walked to a pay phone, and called the FBI. The FBI spent eight months building the case. Agents tracked down former prisoners of Osaka Camp 3-B one by one across the country, asking each the same question: did you remember the interpreter at Ooyama?
The answers came back almost identically: yes. They also had to build the citizenship case. Treason is a very specific crime; only a person owing allegiance to the United States can commit it. Kawakita’s defense would argue that when he registered in the koseki in 1943, he had legally renounced his citizenship, making him a Japanese national who could not be tried for treason.
The FBI dug out his school records from Calexico, his passport applications, and the sworn statement he had signed at the Yokohama consulate in December 1945, declaring he had never renounced his citizenship. Every document showed him claiming to be American when it suited him and Japanese when it protected him. On June 5, 1947, agents arrested Tomoya Kawakita at his home on South Hicks Street in Los Angeles on 13 counts of treason. In June 1948, a federal courtroom in Los Angeles opened.
The jury of three men and nine women looked at the defendant. He was 26, wore a suit, his hair combed, his hands clasped on the table before him, a USC graduate student who did not look like Meatball. His attorney, Morris Levine, argued that Kawakita was a boy caught in a nightmare not of his making. Lead prosecutor James Carter gave the jury a different picture: a man who treated his American citizenship as something to be discarded when Japan was winning and reclaimed the moment Japan lost.
Under the Constitution, treason is the only crime whose definition is written in the founding document itself: levying war against the United States, or adhering to her enemies, giving them aid and comfort. Conviction requires two witnesses to the same overt act. Nearly one hundred former prisoners volunteered to travel to Los Angeles. One by one, they took the stand and pointed at the young man in the suit.
This is the man we called Meatball. The jury deliberated for eight days. On September 2, 1948, exactly three years after the formal signing of the surrender aboard the USS Missouri, they returned a verdict of guilty on eight of thirteen counts. The judge sentenced Tomoya Kawakita to death in the gas chamber.
Before pronouncing sentence, Judge William Mathes did something many people do not know about. He spoke the name of Sadao Munemori, the Nisei soldier who had thrown himself on a live German grenade to save the two men in his trench, the first Japanese-American to receive the Medal of Honor. He named nearly 700 other Nisei who had died in American uniform during the war. Men of the same origin as the defendant, the same blood, the same divided passport.
Same origin, same war. Some chose to fight for their country. This man chose to betray it. The defense appealed.
The Ninth Circuit upheld the conviction. In the spring of 1952, the case reached the Supreme Court, which accepted it because it posed a question the Constitution had never fully answered: could a man with two passports be tried for treason by one country for acts committed on the soil of the other? On June 2, 1952, the Court affirmed the conviction. The decision established a principle still standing: an American citizen owes allegiance to the United States wherever he lives, whatever other passport he holds, whatever other flag flies over his head.
Kawakita v. United States, 343 U. S. 717, remains in the law books today.
Kawakita did not die. In 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower commuted his sentence to life imprisonment. He was taken to Alcatraz, arriving on a prison boat in the early autumn of 1953 at age 32. He spent his years on the rock among gangsters and killers, working in the laundry, the kitchen, or the industries building, behaving, in the language of the federal prison system, as an obedient inmate.
In the late 1950s, as Alcatraz wound down its operations, he was transferred between federal facilities and grew old behind American walls. While Kawakita served his years, the world moved on. In 1949, Mao Zedong’s Communist forces won the Chinese Civil War. In 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea, and American soldiers were dying on the Asian mainland again less than five years after V-J Day.
The Cold War had begun, and the United States no longer needed Japan as a defeated enemy paying for its sins; it needed Japan as an ally. Quietly, gradually, in a policy shift historians later called the reverse course, the gates of Sugamo Prison in Tokyo, where convicted Japanese war criminals were held, began to open. Some, then more, and by the mid-1950s in waves, returned to private life or directly to power. Nobusuke Kishi had been held at Sugamo as a suspected Class-A war criminal, the most serious category, crimes against peace.
He was never charged, never tried, and released without prosecution during the reverse course. Nine years later, in 1957, he became Prime Minister of Japan. Decades later, his grandson became Prime Minister too. His name was Shinzo Abe.
That was the arc. And it was not the end. Remember the family friend in Tokyo in 1943, the mid-career politician who had arranged a job for a stranded Nisei boy at a nickel refinery. His name was Takeo Miki.
While Kawakita served his sentence, Miki kept rising, office by office, patient and well-connected. On October 9, 1963, a memo reached the office of the President of the United States. It came from the Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, and concerned a request for executive clemency for Tomoya Kawakita.
The Japanese Prime Minister, Hayato Ikeda, had formally and privately asked for Kawakita’s release as a gesture of goodwill between allies. In the Cold War, Japan had become one of America’s most important friends in Asia. President John F. Kennedy granted clemency with one condition: Kawakita’s American citizenship would be revoked, an maritime deportation to Japan, and he would never again set foot on American soil.
Weeks later, on November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Tomoya Kawakita sailed to Japan, a man of 42 who had spent more than sixteen years in American custody, and disappeared into it. He lived quietly, stayed out of sight, grew old. Historians place his death around 1993.
It did not make the front pages of American newspapers. Most Americans had never heard his name. None of the sworn statements have disappeared. Every affidavit signed by every prisoner of Osaka Camp 3-B is preserved in the National Archives in Washington.
Every name they could remember, every incident they could describe, every blow they attributed to his hand, every word he spoke in English that they carried home in their heads. No treaty can grant amnesty to the truth. Three men from the same corner of Southern California. Meiji Fujisawa, born in Imperial County; his father erased his name from the Japanese registry to protect him, and the men he helped testified on his behalf when the war ended.
He was never charged and lived his life free. Tomoya Kawakita, born in Calexico, who wrote his own name into the Japanese registry, mistreated American POWs, and became the last American in history sentenced to death for treason. And William Bruce, born in California, home in Buena Park, who survived what no one should survive and, in a Sears store on an October afternoon, chose not to throw his punch. He chose instead the license plate, the pay phone, and the FBI, trusting the country he nearly died for to do what his own hands could not.
Three men, the same coast, the same generation, the same war. Three answers.