Last week in the Federal District Court in Los Angeles, a U.S. citizen was sentenced to die as a traitor to the U.S. In all U.S. history, only a handful of traitors have heard that sentence. None has actually been executed as a traitor to the U.S.*
The traitor was a bespectacled, wiry, 27-year-old Nisei named Tomoya Kawakita, better known to hundreds of G.I. prisoners as "The Meatball." The son of a California grocer, Kawakita was caught on a visit to Japan by World War II. He threw in his lot with the Japanese. As an interpreter in the prison...
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