The Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism During World War II, to be built in Washington between its capitol and Union Station and scheduled to be dedicated in November 2000, may be as much a memorial to betrayal and falsified history as it is to patriotism. There will be names and words that affirm this patriotism from former Presidents and past and present members of Congress. These will also include those from a former staff sergeant named Mike M. Masaoka. Sgt. Masaoka worked in public relations and escaped combat by being ensconced in regimental headquarters behind the lines. He later became a Washington lobbyist. Joined to these words will be the names that need no words: the names of around 800 Japanese-American soldiers who were killed in action.

The obvious question: Why this staff sergeant? Why not the sole Japanese-American recipient of the congressional Medal of Honor in this conflict? Why not Pfc. Sadao Munemori, who, after knocking out two German machine guns, dove on a German grenade and saved the lives of his two buddies while losing his own?

The answer is as labyrinthine as the wartime history of Japanese-Americans with our government’s machinations to obscure its illegal and unconstitutional exclusion-detention combined with conflicting responses from the government’s victims. Most of us went along helplessly. We clung to the fragile hope of being called "evacuees," who were being "evacuated" to live in "communities" called "relocation centers." They were prisoner of war camps. The hope crumbled. A few challenged the military orders or protested with overt acts of resistance. Others decided that cooperation was prudent. And a few actively collaborated with the military and attempted to demonstrate their absolute loyalty by turning in names of persons they deemed to be dangerous to national security. They also stood unalterably opposed to the constitutional test cases. Mr. Masaoka was in the last group. His betrayals provoked an anger that persists to this day. The placement of his words and name on the memorial serves to canonize Masaoka and to legitimate these betrayals.

In addition to the names and words, will be a brief but flawed account of the wartime history of Japanese-Americans. One might understand the flaws had its writer and those who approved her account not been the same Japanese-Americans who experienced this history. The writer is a Japanese-American employed by the National Japanese American Memorial Foundation, and the board of this foundation, comprised exclusively of Japanese-Americans, approved her account. They should know that the number removed from the West Coast and southern Arizona was around 110,000, not the 120,000 that is to be carved into stone. The 120,000 represents the total interned, including almost 6,000 infants born in the camps, plus others who entered the camps later. They should know that the program of mass exclusion and detention did not include Japanese-Americans living in Hawaii. They should know that in a separate program, commencing within hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor, a few thousand Japanese aliens were arrested as suspect enemy aliens and interned in internment camps, not isolation camps. They should know that there are Japanese-Americans who break the law.

This account’s most egregious flaw is the clear implication that it was from the camps, "in a stirring demonstration of loyalty, [that] thousands of Japanese Americans volunteered for military service." There were 10,000 who did volunteer, but they were living in freedom in the Territory of Hawaii. Only 1,208 volunteered from the camps. Given the fact that those in the camps had lost the protections and guarantees embedded in the U.S. Constitution and lived in conditions below those guaranteed prisoners of war under international conventions, the 1,208 is a remarkable number but hardly stirring.

There is, of course, a federal bureaucracy whose job is to ensure the historical accuracy of inscriptions on memorials on federal land: the National Park Service. After the board of the N.J.A.M.F. approved the inscriptions, concerned researchers, writers, and scholars wrote to the N.P.S. to call its attention to the several errors and to offer their corrections. I wrote a four-page letter to John G. Parsons, Associate Regional Director of the N.P.S. He mailed his reply two weeks later and seems not to have read my letter. One of the errors is as non-threatening as remembering that our nation’s declaration of war occurred on December 8, 1941, not December 7. As an indicator of his devotion to precision in his letter, he named the N.J.A.M.F., "Japanese American Patriots Memorial Foundation." He couldn’t even match the initials. He graciously ends his letter with the hope that I will "visit this significant addition to this nation’s commemorative landscape."

What will it commemorate? Patriotism or betrayal? History or falsified history?

William Hohri is the author of Repairing America: an Account of the Movement for Japanese American Redress, and columnist for The Rafu Shimpo newspaper.