Spark Matsunaga: 442nd Veteran Who Won a Poet Laureate and Redress

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Spark Matsunaga was born Masayuki Matsunaga on Kauai in 1916 to Japanese immigrant parents and picked up the nickname Sparky at age eight from a comic strip character called Sparkplug. He graduated with honors from the University of Hawaii in 1941, months before Pearl Harbor. Japanese American soldiers in the Hawaii National Guard were pulled into a provisional battalion, and in June 1942 more than 1,400 of them sailed secretly out of Honolulu on the transport ship Maui, learning only near California that they were now the 100th Infantry Battalion (Separate). Together with the Varsity Victory Volunteers, their record helped lead to the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Matsunaga fought in Italy, was wounded twice, and left the Army as a captain.

He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1951, served as a prosecutor and territorial legislator, entered the U.S. House in 1963, and won Hiram Fong's open Senate seat in 1976 after beating Patsy Mink in the primary and former Governor William Quinn in the general election. In the Senate he pushed a poet laureate bill for 22 consecutive years until the post was created at the Library of Congress in 1985, helped establish the United States Institute of Peace in 1984, and drove the Japanese American redress bill. He died of prostate cancer in Toronto at 73 in 1990 and lay in state at the Hawaii State Capitol.

• In 1981 Secretary of State Alexander Haig asked him at a White House reception whether he understood English, and Matsunaga reminded Haig that he had voted to confirm him.
• The 100th Battalion adopted Remember Pearl Harbor as its motto.
• The redress package totaled $1.25 billion, with a formal apology and $20,000 for each person who had been interned.
• He voted to confirm Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy, but opposed William Rehnquist for chief justice, Robert Bork, and John Tower for defense secretary in 1989.
• Since 1999 his portrait has appeared on the $10,000 Series I U.S. Savings Bond.