AJA students attending universities in The Land of The Rising Sun were mistrusted, mistreated, routinely conscripted into the Imperial Army and shipped to the front lines.

Those on this side of the Pacific were considered unworthy of being in the military. AJAs already in the Army were disarmed, assigned menial duties and stunned by the sting of having their loyalty questioned. In a sense, AJAs became lesser citizens, people almost without a country. In some instances the circumstances tore families apart and even pitted brother against brother.

The difficulty of dealing with divided personal identities and open public hostility in the face of a deadly world conflict is illustrated in the remarkable stories of two families from O'ahu — each with three brothers fighting for one side, and one brother fighting for the other.

Six decades after the war ended when Japanese Emperor Hirohito told his people the war was over on Aug. 15, 1945 — V-J Day — few members of the Kameda or Yempuku families are still around.

Their stories, including tragedies, ironies and close encounters by enemy brothers, are left to be told by two of the family members who were alive at the time — one who was a warrior, one a younger brother.

Genzo and Kazu Kameda of Waialua raised eight sons who were all exceptional baseball players, said Donald Kameda of Kaimuki, now 84. On the day the bombs rained down on Battleship Row, he was a 21-year-old student attending Saint Louis College in Kaimuki on a baseball scholarship.

"We saw the planes come over Waialua," Kameda recalled. "I didn't know they were Japanese at first. I thought they were our planes doing training."

Almost immediately his family was under suspicion, he said. Donald and his older brother Ted were picked up by authorities and taken to Honolulu for interrogation. It wouldn't be until after the war that they would learn why authorities had been so suspicious.

Yet when nisei, or second-generation Japanese-Americans, were finally allowed to defend their country in 1943, the three youngest Kamedas answered the call.

"When they asked for volunteers for the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, my brother Fred was the first to volunteer," Donald said. "He was also the first one to die in I Company."

That happened on June 26, 1944, in the Appenine Mountains near Belvedere, Italy — the first day the famed "Go For Broke" Combat Team saw battle. Fred took an enemy shot to the chest and died a short time later.

Donald joined the 442nd later that year and was involved in some of the fiercest fighting of the European conflict. In April 1945 he was with his best pal, Satoshi "Bolo" Furukawa of Maui, moments before Furukawa was blown apart in the battle for Viareggio, Italy.

Robert Kameda, the youngest of the brothers, served as an interpreter in the Philippines with the Military Intelligence Service.

But it wasn't until after the war that the family learned that Shigeo Kameda — a professional baseball player and university student in Tokyo — had been drafted into the Japanese Navy a month before Pearl Harbor. He had fought the war as the enemy of his own brothers and the land where he was raised.

Comparing experiences after the war, Donald and Shigeo came to a startling realization.

"At one point I had been on a transport ship in the Mediterranean and Shigeo was in a submarine patrolling the same waters," Donald said.

"I'm lucky he didn't torpedo me."

Still, there was never any bitterness between the two, he said.

"There were no hard feelings. Not on his part, and not on mine. You can't help what happened."

HAUNTED BY DREAD

At the same time the Kameda family was coping with war and prejudice here, another family far away was enduring a similar situation.

For eight years the Yempukus had been living on the tiny island of Atata in Japan, not far from Hiroshima City, where Josho Yempuku was a priest.

After a quarter of a century as the Buddhist priest in O'ahu's plantation town of Kahuku, Josho and his wife, Gofuyo, along with four of their five sons, had moved to Japan in 1933. Only son Ralph had remained on O'ahu to finish his schooling and attend the University of Hawai'i.

"Ralph was the oldest, I was the youngest," remembered Paul Yempuku, 78, who today is the publisher of Honolulu's Japanese daily newspaper, Hawaii Hochi.

Paul was 14 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor — an action he said stunned the family in Japan. Soon, brothers Toru, Goro and Donald were drafted into the Japanese military. Too young to go to war himself, Paul was pulled out of high school in 1944 and forced to work in the Japanese war plant.

Nevertheless, because of their Hawai'i background and that all five sons had dual American and Japanese citizenship, the family was regarded with suspicion.

"They didn't trust us," Paul said. "The military would come over and question my brothers — to make sure they weren't reporting to the enemy."

Meanwhile, back in Hawai'i, where the loyalty of AJAs was suspect, Ralph Yempuku, like Fred Kameda, was quick to prove himself by volunteering for the 442nd Regimental Combat Team which, along with the battle-hardened 100th Infantry Battalion, would take incredible losses in Europe.

But Yempuku, who had lost all contact with the family in Japan that had given him up for dead, wound up with an assignment that was distinctly different and treacherous.

"He was a spy," said his brother, Paul.

Yempuku became an officer with an all-nisei cloak-and-dagger team for the Office of Strategic Services.

The specially trained 18-man team was dropped behind enemy lines in Burma to gather intelligence, infiltrate, ambush, train guerrilla forces and, in the words of Yempuku, who died in 2002, "generally harass the Japanese."

Yempuku, who often wondered if his family was alive, was haunted by a troubling dread: the thought of meeting up with one or more of his brothers, who, if they were alive, would surely be among the enemy forces.

That horror was never realized before World War II had ended.

ENCOUNTER IN A CROWD

Although Ralph Yempuku never knew it at the time, he and a brother had actually come very near to each other in enemy uniforms at one point. The incident occurred in Hong Kong, China, two weeks after the official surrender ceremonies aboard the Battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on Sept. 2, 1945.

On Sept. 16 the British reoccupied the Chinese city, which had been under Japanese occupation since December 1941. Donald Yempuku, then a prisoner of war, served as interpreter for Japanese officials at a special surrender ceremony at Hong Kong's Peninsula Hotel.

As Donald was filing into the hotel with the surrender delegation, he spotted his older brother Ralph among a large crowd in the lobby. He also noticed that Ralph did not see him.

In a 1966 interview, the late Donald Yempuku described seeing the brother he loved in an enemy uniform as the most trying moment of his life.

"For a brief second, I felt the urge to call out," he said. "But I couldn't let myself do that. I just couldn't. In my mind the war was still going on and we were still enemies."

The two brothers later reunited when Ralph went to Atata Island, hoping against hope of finding his parents, whom he believed had been killed by the Hiroshima atomic bomb blast.

To his surprise, both parents were alive and well, along with Paul, who had just come home from college in Tokyo. Goro arrived later, as did Donald and eventually Toru.

"One by one everyone came back," said Paul Yempuku, still astonished 60 years later that his whole family had somehow managed to survive the war and find each other again.

In 1951, at Ralph's invitation, Paul left Atata and returned to O'ahu, where he gave up his Japanese citizenship and where he has lived since.

The rest of the family remained in Japan. But there were times when the family — minus Josho, who died in 1952 — got together in Japan. Those occasions were marked by a sense of joy and closeness, according to Paul.

Those times were also marked by little conversation of war.

As Ralph once put it, "There was none of the 'Gee, you were the enemy' kind of thing. Nothing like that."

Donald Kameda says that even today the subject is almost too painful to discuss.

In the decades after World War II, he and Ralph Yempuku became close friends. They talked of many things, Kameda said. Yet in all that time they never spoke of the unusual circumstances of their families' war years.

"Ralph and I never did talk about the fact that we had brothers on both sides of the war," he said.

"Actually, we didn't want to talk about the war at all."