Daniel Inouye

September 7, 1924 – December 17, 2012

Japanese American war hero who lost his arm earning the Medal of Honor, then served Hawaii in the U.S. Senate for nearly fifty years.

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Daniel Ken Inouye was born on September 7, 1924, in Honolulu, in what was then the U.S. territory of Hawaii, the son of Japanese immigrants. He was a seventeen-year-old high school student on December 7, 1941, when Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbor and drew the United States into World War II; trained in first aid, he ran to help the wounded. Overnight, Americans of Japanese ancestry fell under suspicion. On the mainland, more than 110,000 of them, most born U.S. citizens, were forced from their homes into incarceration camps; Hawaii's large Japanese community was mostly spared, but young men like Inouye were at first classified '4-C,' enemy aliens ineligible to serve the only country they had ever known. When the Army finally agreed to form a segregated unit of Japanese American soldiers, Inouye left college and enlisted, joining the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Fighting in Italy and France, the all-Nisei 442nd became the most decorated unit of its size in American history, even as many of the soldiers' own families sat behind barbed wire at home. On April 21, 1945, near San Terenzo, Italy, Lieutenant Inouye charged a ridge bristling with German machine guns. Shot in the stomach, he kept going; then, as he drew back his arm to throw a grenade, an enemy round nearly tore the arm off, leaving the live grenade clenched in a hand he could no longer feel. He pried the grenade loose with his other hand and threw it into the enemy position before it could explode, then fought on until he collapsed. He lost his right arm. Inouye came home a hero, but the discrimination had not vanished; in one often-told moment, a barber refused to serve him even as he stood there in uniform with an empty sleeve. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and decades later, after a review found that Asian American soldiers had been passed over for the nation's highest honor, his award was upgraded to the Medal of Honor in 2000. His courage placed him alongside other minority servicemembers who fought for a country that had not yet granted them full equality, from the Navy's Dorie Miller to the Tuskegee Airmen. Barred by his injury from his dream of becoming a surgeon, Inouye studied law instead. When Hawaii became a state in 1959 he was elected its first U.S. Representative, and in 1962 he won a seat in the U.S. Senate, taking office in 1963 and serving there for the rest of his life as one of the longest-serving senators in American history. A national audience came to know his steady voice during the Senate Watergate hearings in 1973. By the end of his career he had risen to President pro tempore of the Senate, third in the line of succession to the presidency, an extraordinary height for a man once branded an enemy alien. Daniel Inouye died in office on December 17, 2012, at the age of 88; his last word, fittingly, was 'Aloha,' and he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013. His life traces one of the great arcs of the American story: a young citizen distrusted because of his ancestry who gave his arm for his country, then spent half a century helping to govern it, proof of both how far the nation fell short of its promises and how far it could be pushed to keep them.

Daniel Inouye

Further reading

Daniel Inouye

Further reading