Daniel Ken Inouye was seventeen years old and dressing for church in Honolulu when the radio announced Japanese aircraft over Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941. He got on his bicycle and rode toward the smoke. He found a Red Cross station, grabbed what bandages he could carry, and spent the rest of that day helping tend the wounded.
He graduated from high school in 1942 and immediately tried to enlist. Japanese Americans had been classified 4-C after Pearl Harbor — enemy alien — and the Army turned him away. When the War Department opened enlistment for the 442nd Regimental Combat Team in early 1943, Inouye was among the first to volunteer. He was eighteen years old.
By April 21, 1945, the war in Europe had perhaps two weeks remaining. Second Lieutenant Inouye was leading an assault on a heavily defended ridge near San Terenzo, Italy, when a bullet struck him in the abdomen. He kept moving. He destroyed the first German gun emplacement with grenades and his rifle, then silenced a second. He was approaching a third position when an enemy rifle grenade shattered his right arm at the elbow.
The live grenade he had been holding dropped into his right fist, which could no longer open. He pried it free with his left hand and threw it at the German position. Then he stood up, still under fire, and continued directing the assault until he lost consciousness from blood loss. His men took the objective.
For that action, the Army awarded him a Distinguished Service Cross — its second-highest honor.
In 1996, Congress directed the Army to conduct a formal review of Asian American veterans' cases from World War II. The review found consistent evidence of racial bias in the original awards process: Distinguished Service Crosses that should have been Medals of Honor. On June 21, 2000, President Clinton placed Medals of Honor around the necks of twenty-two veterans — or, for most of them, handed the medals to the families they had left behind — at a White House ceremony. Inouye was 75 years old.
By that point, he had served nearly 50 years in the United States Senate — one of the longest tenures in the body's history, and one of the most consequential on questions of military affairs and veterans' rights. He was the first Japanese American to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives, then the first in the Senate. He chaired the Appropriations Committee. He served as President pro tempore at the time of his death in December 2012, placing him third in the presidential line of succession.
He never stopped being the boy on the bicycle who turned toward the smoke.
On December 8, 2021 — the day after the eightieth anniversary of the attack — the U.S. Navy commissioned USS Daniel Inouye (DDG-118) at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam. She is an Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer, armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles, torpedoes, and Standard missiles, carrying a crew of around 300 sailors. She is among the most capable surface combatants the Navy has ever built.
She patrols the Pacific — the same ocean that a seventeen-year-old watched burn from a Honolulu hillside in 1941, the same ocean that Japanese American fishermen worked from San Diego's docks before the war took the boats and the government took the families. USS Daniel Inouye is somewhere in those waters now, doing the work, bearing a name that connects every piece of this story: the fishing fleet and the internment camps, the 442nd and the years it took for the country to correct its own record.
JADA is a classic wooden yacht, built in Stockton in 1938 and sailing these waters for nearly twenty years. On clear afternoons, when she passes through the bay entrance at Point Loma and the Pacific opens ahead, the horizon you are looking at is the same water DDG-118 patrols. You cannot see her from the deck. That is, in a way, the point — the whole story of these men is about the service that happened out of sight, the recognition that came far too late, and the weight of a country's debt that a destroyer's name can honor but not fully repay.
Sources: National WWII Museum, "Medal of Honor Recipient Daniel Inouye" (nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/medal-of-honor-recipient-daniel-inouye); National Park Service, "Daniel Inouye: A Japanese American Soldier's Valor" (nps.gov/articles/inouyeww2.htm); Wikipedia, USS Daniel Inouye (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Daniel_Inouye); U.S. Pacific Fleet, USS Daniel Inouye Commissioning Ceremony (cpf.navy.mil/COMPACFLT-Speeches/Article/2886260/).
Come stand at the bow of JADA and look out toward the Pacific horizon, where history is still underway.
Hear this story where it happened. JADA sails past this very spot. Join the San Diego Bay History Sail →
Wear the story. Commissioned on Pearl Harbor Day. Named for the eighteen-year-old who rode toward the smoke. Fifty-five years between the Distinguished Service Cross and the Medal of Honor it should have been. The DDG-118 shirt →