Proud to be Ben Kuroki's kind of people

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One thing that Nebraskans love about the Ben Kuroki story is that it makes them look good.

First, there’s Kuroki’s record as a towering war hero. The turret gunner won two Distinguished Flying Crosses and the right to wear the Air Medal with four oak leaf clusters while flying 58 missions in four theaters.

Any state would be proud to claim a military veteran of his caliber and success in protecting America’s liberty and way of life.

And in the 21st century, many Nebraskans love Kuroki’s story because he presents the state in a golden glow by the standards of today’s attitudes on race.

Son of Japanese immigrants, Kuroki grew up on a potato farm near Hershey, then a town of about 500. He was class vice president and played varsity baseball and basketball. He and best friend Gordy Jorgenson played hooky to hunt pheasants and shot ducks on the Platte River.

“At home, it was mostly Japanese that we heard. When we headed out the door for school, it was a whole new world of Americanization. That world was good for me, because it provided a solid foundation for patriotism and citizenship,” Kuroki said in a 1991 speech at the opening of a World War II exhibit at the State Historical Society Museum in Lincoln.

Although Nebraskans know that racism is rooted as deeply here as anywhere, Kuroki said he never encountered bigotry until he tried to join the military.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor motivated Kuroki to enlist, driven by what he described as a “strange guilt complex.”

One of the missions Kuroki flew in Europe was the low-level raid on Ploesti to destroy Axis oil refineries. Only two of the nine B-24 Liberators in Kuroki’s squadron came back. “We went in at 50 feet — into terrible antiaircraft fire. Our planes would crash, and we could see our buddies burning in their planes,” he told Time magazine in 1944. “No man who went to Ploesti will ever forget it.”

Kuroki fought first in Europe, and then, when he wanted to fight in the Pacific against Japan, Rep. Carl Curtis pulled some strings. Defense Secretary Henry Stimson personally waived regulations for Kuroki.

Remember, this occurred at the same time that thousands of Japanese-Americans were rounded up and put in internment camps.

Kuroki retired in California after a career in newspaper journalism, but he still told people, decades after leaving the state, that “Nebraskans are my kind of people.”

Last night, hundreds of people paid tribute to Kuroki, 90, at a dinner in Lincoln previewing the hour-long PBS documentary “Most Honorable Son” that will air in mid-September on NET.

As they honored Kuroki, Nebraskans could also take pride in themselves. Kuroki’s story shows them at their best.