Go For Broke Monument
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The Go For Broke Monument in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, California commemorates Japanese Americans who served overseas in the United States Military during World War II. It notes the segregated military units: the 100th Infantry Battalion, 442nd Regimental Combat Team, Military Intelligence Service, 522nd Field Artillery Battalion, 232nd Combat Engineer Company, and the 1399th Engineering Construction Battalion. The monument's wall lists the names of 16,126 Nisei soldiers. "Go For Broke!" was the unit motto for the 100th.
The monument's main feature, a large inscription, describes how they served even as they were being deprived of their constitutional rights during the period of Japanese American internment. This inscription uses the term concentration camps to describe the facilities officially called relocation centers. The inscription is attributed to 100th Infantry Battalion veteran Ben Tamashiro, who is best known for his more than 60 appearances in television advertisements for the Bank of Hawaii. According to his 2004 obituary in the Honolulu Advertiser and Honolulu Star-Bulletin:
After a nationwide search failed to elicit an appropriate inscription, his former commanding officer — Col. Young Oak Kim, who was in charge of the project — wrote to Tamashiro, according to his daughter. The words Tamashiro sent back were the ones chosen — with a single change. Instead of "internment camps" as he had written, the inscription was changed to "concentration camps."
The monument's website does not explain or acknowledge the change.
