CATFA META: JIM MORITA

[amarriageoftrueminds]

Re: His family. 

As a Californian, if Jim’s family were interned their most likely place of internment would be Manzanar concentration camp, as it’s the closest to Fresno. 

(124 miles due east, though it takes 4 hours 22 mins to reach it by car nowadays -- presumably much longer, back then -- as you’ve got to go around Sequoia National Park to get there. The only other California camp was Tule Lake, but that is 482 miles due north of Fresno, or 8 hours even by  modern car.) 

Manzanar opened in March 1942 (coincidentally, the same time Red Skull recovered the Tesseract), housed 11,070 Americans of Japanese ancestry and their immigrant parents, and there’s a book, Farewell to Manzanar, (ebook here), which is a memoir by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston about her time in the camp (as well as her life before and after.) 

Even angstier possibility: Some Japanese immigrants were given the opportunity to return to Japan on prisoner exchange ships. If Jim’s family were immigrants and decided to do this, there’s a real possibility that the last time Jim ever saw them was when he shipped off to war! 

(Unless... he stayed in the army and somehow got himself attached to the US army of occupation in Japan, from September 2, 1945 to April 28, 1952? Which  might be feasible as he could be counted as a useful Japanese-American public figure to have around? Some potential for a really moving post-war family reunion story, there. Hell, there’s no reason why all the Howlies couldn’t have gone with him!)

Sidenote: Though Jim is Japanese-American, Kenneth Choi (the actor who plays him) is actually Korean-American. so maybe you could throw in a ref to that and make Jim Korean on his mother’s side? (ie. suggesting only one half of his family would be interned, which is an unusual viewpoint to have... though would presumably see them experiencing even more prejudice at home when the Korean war started? 🤔)

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Re: Jim and the War.

Given CATFA's habit of putting militaries nowhere near where they should be / when they should be, I think you could say that Jim was part of the 442 and they were just deployed much earlier in this 'verse. If they’re letting Steve publically found a desegregated unit in November 1943, it’s not so much of a stretch! 

(Or you could go for some off-the-wall backstory where Jim was already in Europe when war broke out, for some reason, and he got stuck, ended up joining up with American forces to fight, and really is the lone Japanese guy in the whole US Army at the time? Again, if there’s a random French Resistance guy in Italy, why not?!) 

If he’s in the 442nd, he would’ve trained at Camp Shelby, Hattiesburg, Mississippi (bumping the timeline back a year in April 1943; IRL it was in 1944), and come into conflict not only with white soldiers but also with other Japanese-Americans from Hawaii, (pejoratively called Buddah-heads) who outnumbered the mainland Japanese-Americans (pejoratively called Kotonks) and had a pretty dim view of them. (Although this changed after some of the Hawai'i recruits took to the nearby Japanese incarceration centers at Jerome and Rohwer, Arkansas.)

Historically, the 442nd also served alongside the 92nd Infantry Division, (aka the Buffalo soldiers), a segregated African American unit... so maybe that could’ve been Gabe’s unit and how they first met? 

(Here’s how both units’ insignia look).

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Pre & Post-war:

Judging by his chopsy personality I'd say it's more likely Jim lived/worked in Fresno's Chinatown than on a farm. That man has 'Service Industry / dealing with The Public' all over him.

Given that this grandson lives in NYC / is the head of a prestigious science-based high school, I wonder if Jim moved to the east coast after WWII? That would also put him closer to Dum-dum and Gabe (and Frenchy and Monty if they visited America, of course). 

Jim’s ethnicity makes it likely he would've been snubbed of medals he deserves after WWII. (Twenty Japanese WWII personnel didn’t get their Medals of Honour until 1998, and only then after an investigation into anti-Asian bias in the forcesh.) 

Unless the remaining white Howlies spoke up for him (same goes for Gabe). So maybe there could be a link there, between Jim moving closer to Dum-dum,, and Dum-dum fighting his cause.