Korean Veteran is Elmhurst Memorial Parade Grand Marshal

ELMHURST, Ill., May 16, 2016 -- The Grand Marshal for Elmhurst’s 98th Memorial Day Parade is U.S. Army Sergeant Richard Agemura, a combat decorated Field Artillery Battalion Radio Chief who served in the Korean War from April of 1952 to July of 1953.

Agemura was born in the west coast city of Santa Maria, California, in May of 1930 to Japanese parents—his father worked as a small vegetable farmer in the Delano area—who immigrated from a small fishing village at the southern-most tip of the Kagoshima prefecture (or state) on Kyushu, the third largest and most southwesterly of Japan’s four main islands.

An 11-year-old Agemura and his family were among some 120,000 Japanese Americans (62% of them U.S. citizens) rounded up for transport to internment camps shortly after the Empire of Japan’s sneak attack on the U.S. Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941—“a date,” then-President Franklin Roosevelt so memorably stated, “which will live in infamy”—and then shipped back to their ancestral homeland at the end World War II.

But Agemura, at age 19, obtained a passport to return to the U.S.in May of 1949 and relocated to his American guardian’s sweet home of Chicago.

In November of 1951, however, Uncle Sam called on the 21-year-old to do his duty. Agemura completed basic training at Camp Chaffee, Arkansas, from December of 1951 through March of 1952. He was among a select group of recruits who were exempt from guard duty, kitchen patrol and other basic requirements as they studied maps for directing artillery barrages.

In Korea, his assigned unit was the 8th Army’s 75th Field Artillery Battalion stationed near the deadly Kumwha Valley, which was comprised of A, B and C Batteries armed with medium 155-millimeter howitzers. Reassigned to the Radio Department, Agemura served as his Communication Officer’s driver and ready radioman, and rose to the rank of Radio Chief.

For his service, Agemura was awarded the Korean Service Medal with Three Bronze Combat Stars, National Defense Service Medal and United Nations Service Medal.

When a transportation problem left Agemura stranded near Yokohama, Japan, for several weeks while on an emergency R&R (military slang for rest and relaxation) to visit his parents, his Battalion’s radio and wiring department was “wiped out” in a North Korean bombing attack.

“When I got back to Korea, nearly everyone I knew was either killed or wounded,” Agemura stated. “My Communications Officer was among those wounded.”

In the 1980s, Agemura traveled to Branson, Missouri, to visit the Veterans Memorial Museum wall honoring those who died in Korea, including his second in command.

Ruled by Japan from 1910 through World War II, Korea was split in two at the 38th parallel by occupying forces, with the U.S. to the south and the Soviet Union to the north.

Starting with the North’s June 25, 1950, invasion of the South, the Korean War pitted the world’s major military powers in direct conflict as the United States-led United Nations defended the South and Cold War adversaries China and the Soviet Union backed the North. The war featured the first air-to-air combat of jet fighters in the skies over Korea.

An armistice was signed on July 27, 1953, creating Korea’s Demilitarized Zone (2.5 miles wide by 160 miles long) that roughly splits the Korean Peninsula in half. Without a signed peace treaty, the two Koreas are technically still at war.

Agemura was on board a transport ship back to America when the armistice was signed.

Immediately after Pearl Harbor, Agemura’s father was picked up by the local police and jailed before his transferred to an internment camp in Crystal City, Texas. A woman from a neighboring farm voluntarily picked up clean clothing and more traditional Japanese food like fish and rice to deliver to his father in the local jail.

“There was no Christmas for us that year,” Agemura recalled.

Agemura’s mother pulled the sixth-grade student, then 11, and his younger brother and sister out of elementary school in fear for their safety.

In February of 1942, his family was herded onto a train to southwest Arizona’s Poston I internment camp near the Mohave Desert and the Colorado River Indian Reservation, whose tribe once endured its own forced relocation. The camp held some 18,000 Japanese Americans, mostly women and children, from California, Oregon and Washington.

“They tried to set up a school system, but there were no books, no paper, no pencils,” Agemura stated. “There was a young girl, maybe 19, assigned to tell stories.”

Agemura remembered how older boys would sneak out through the barbed-wire cattle fencing to collect petrified wood and rocks, which they then polished into trinkets.

Two years later, the Agemuras were reunited at Crystal City, which the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), on authorization from the Department of Justice (DOJ), reclassified specifically to house families. The nearly 4,800 total number of internees also included Americans of German, Italian and Latin descent and their ethnic ancestors.

Crystal City, which Agemura described as very a “hush, hush” location, established an accredited education program featuring American, Japanese and German schools providing elementary, junior high and high school classes.

Not long after WW II ended, 15-year-old Agemura and his family were shipped back to Yokohama, Japan, by way of Seattle, Washington, along with other non-voluntary repatriates who found themselves exchanged for Japanese-held U.S. and Allied prisoners of war.

His parent’s village had been napalmed by the Allied forces on nearby Okinawa Island in anticipation of a full-scale invasion of Japan, which surrendered on August 15, 1945, after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima on Honshu Island and then Kyushu’s Nagaski.

“Many days of hunger,” Agemura stated. “Every meal was a potato and water; no tea.”

However, the Agemura’s English speaking skills soon led to jobs (and better food) assisting the occupying U.S. force. The father got hired as an interpreter and his eldest son found grunt work for a KP unit. Not having driven since age nine in a farm truck, Agemura became the Jeep driver for soldiers assigned to do chlorine testing at a nearby water treatment plant.

Agemura spent one year completing the passport application process. His Chicago-based guardian was the son of a California farmer that his family knew from before the war.

“My father told me that my grandfather and he had walked across the Mexican border into California to find work on farms owned by Japanese,” Agemura stated.

Agemura attended summer school for two years because he was deemed too old for high school before reporting to Ft. Sheridan on November 14, 1951 for his military induction.

Discharged honorably on August 12, 1953, Agemura is a life member of Elmhurst American Legion THB Post 187, both Korean War Veterans Association’s National and Greater Chicago chapters, and Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 2838 in Darien.