ACCESSIBLE DESCRIPTIVE TRANSCRIPT
[Visual and sound descriptions: On Black-and-white TV from the 1960s: Daniel K. Inouye, a Japanese American man with a round face and neat, dark hair parted on the side. He addresses the camera in a sharp black suit, with a slender tie, and a fashionable striped shirt. Then, a montage of TV images of Japanese Americans, from school children at desks and college graduates in their robes to men in combat. Protesters march for voting rights. The man addresses delegates at a Democratic convention. Low string instrumentals play.]
Dan Inouye: Aloha, this is Senator Dan Inouye reporting to you from Washington.
Ken Inouye: He was the eldest son, one of the first in the family to go to college.
Robert Stodden: He was disabled in World War II.
Jennifer Sabas: He was a really big picture thinker.
Jeff Watanabe: He was an important person in my life.
Lachi: You can tell how important he was to like, all Hawaiʻians.
Ken Inouye: He always defined himself as equal to.
Inouye: Children of such progress demand to be heard when they become aware of inequities still to be corrected.
[A tender instrumental tune begins. A Black woman in a tailored sky-blue suit and silver platform heels. Her long braided copper-colored hair is in a high ponytail with a blue flower. She strides through a small downtown park using a white cane with dark stripes.]
Lachi: One in four American adults have a disability and I’m one of them. I’m Lachi, I’m a recording artist and disability culture advocate, and I’m here to introduce you to disabled renegades.
[Opening title: On coarse tan fabric, the title appears as if typed on: “Renegades. Daniel K. Inouye. Life of Service.” Theme music: I face each day as a renegade. Now, tranquil instrumentals over family photos yellowed with age: Inouye as a smiling toddler. Then sternly standing at attention, with slope arms, a child-sized shotgun against his shoulder. In a flat cap, smiling with his little sister. Archival video of home life: farming, dinners, shopping, school. With mountains rising in the distance, palm trees rustle in the wind.]
Lachi: Daniel Ken Inouye was born in 1924, the first-born son of Japanese American immigrants in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi.
Ken Inouye, Daniel Inouye’s Son: Their household was actually very typical of Japanese American households of the time. You know, you had folks who had immigrated from Japan and they’ve put down roots here in America. Children were taught to appreciate their ancestral culture, but at the end of the day, these folks considered themselves American.
Lachi: Throughout his early life, Inouye struck a balance between his heritage and his identity as an American, always seeing himself as equal to. That was until one fateful day in 1941.
[Sirens wail over steep, craggy mountains and battleships in the harbor.]
Ken Inouye: They’re listening to the radio and with horror, they’re hearing, “This is not a drill. This is not a test.” You know, “We are under attack.”
Inouye in an interview from 2008: “The Japs are bombing Pearl Harbor, it’s not an exercise.” So I went out and all of a sudden, three planes flew right overhead. Gray…red dots. The world had come to an end, my world.
Ken Inouye: Everything that they’d been working towards to become Americans, to become considered as Americans, and along with the ships at Pearl going up in smoke, their dreams were going up in smoke.
Lachi: He tried to enlist, but it wasn’t like, the easiest for him.
Ken Inouye: He had to overcome the classification designated for enemy aliens.
[Grand instrumentals as Inouye, Former Senator of Hawai’i speaks to an interviewer off-camera. He wears a tan plaid blazer and a colorful patterned shirt. Now in glasses, and slightly heavier, his thinning dark hair is slicked straight back. As he speaks, black-and-white video shows military planes soaring overhead with propellers on their noses, bombs plummeting to the clouds and the land below, explosions flinging up plumes of dirt and debris.]
Inouye: We petitioned the White House, “Please let us serve.” In 1943, an Executive Order was issued forming this regiment.
Lachi: As he felt it was his patriotic duty, Inouye was among the first in line to enlist in the 442nd segregated Japanese American combat unit and quickly rose through the ranks. In one grueling battle, as he led his troops, he took three hits, one ripping through his right arm.
Inouye: That part I remember very vividly, because I knew I had the grenade in my hand. And so here I am scrambling, looking for the grenade. I figured it fell. No, it was clenched in my fist. And so I pried it out and threw it. [He mimes throwing the grenade with his left hand, then flashes a big smile. War footage shifts from combat to wounded soldiers to surgery on the front lines.] Went right in.
Lachi: Though publicly, Inouye played down the impact of his amputation, privately, there was a reckoning.
Inouye: I used to play the saxophone and clarinet, but that was out of the question.
Ken Inouye: All his life, he wanted to either be a surgeon or a musician. Now he’s dealing with the reality that he is down one arm. He is depressed.
[Low instrumentals. A military nurse tends to a wounded soldier. Black-and-white photo: Nearly a dozen soldiers playing cards, many caught mid-laugh. Some are fully dressed with khaki button-downs, some in white undershirts, others shirtless. Inouye sits near the table, without a shirt, a slender scar from his upper chest crossing over his left shoulder. His left arm is amputated just above the elbow. His smile is wide and playful.]
Ken Inouye: He asked for a cigarette. The nurse comes. She has this pack of cigarettes, puts them right down on his chest. He’s thinking to himself, “Well, how am I going to open this?” So he managed to get one up to his lips. He goes, “Damn it, I need a light.” This is the point where he kind of goes, [Imitating Dan] “At this point, I was getting a little bit upset.” [Laughter] Takes the pack of matches off of his chest. As she’s talking to him, she’s flipping the flap of the matchbook open with her thumb, folding the match over. She strikes the match and she gives him this big smile.
Inouye: They gave me confidence. I left the hospital full of hope. I can conquer the world.
[A wide stone staircase leads up to a 30-foot-tall stone statue of Lady Columbia holding a laurel branch in her left hand. She is flanked by U.S. flags. Behind her, the hillside rises, blanketed by trees. Jennifer Sabas, Inouye’s former Chief of Staff, strolls with Lachi through the National Cemetery at the Puowaina Crater in Hawaii. The cemetery stretches out below the memorial stairs and statue. Instrumentals fade]
Sabas: He would talk a lot to us about his rehabilitation and being so grateful so that when he left, he was self-confident and could do anything and take on anything, but never perceived himself as disabled.
[Lachi sits with Jeff Watanabe, J.D., Inouye’s friend and colleague, at Zippy’s Restaurant over coffee. Yellow-centered white plumeria blossoms adorn her high ponytail, complementing her black summer dress with full red and pink roses.]
Lachi: So he basically did not identify as a person with a disability.
Watanabe: He really didn’t. I think he did feel somewhat awkward about talking about being disabled in an environment where he saw thousands of his own buddies killed and disabled. He said, you know, “It changed my whole life.” He ended up going to law school. Law school led him into legal work and then eventually into politics.
[Inouye’s right sleeve is tucked into his suit jacket pocket as he walks with his wife to a fair. He clasps her right hand tightly in his left. They each wear a lei draped over their shoulders. He joyfully shakes hands with children and adults alike, sitting at tables eating or riding carnival rides.]
Lachi: With that pivot, Inouye began campaigning in 1959 to become the first U.S. Representative from the new state of Hawaiʻi.
Ken Inouye: They’re having a rally and the next thing you know, all these people come in to disrupt it, calling them communists and traitors. My dad kind of decided that he had enough of this and he got up on the mic and he said, “I gave this arm to fight fascism.” And he goes, “I will gladly give this arm to fight communism.” Whenever he would tell that story, when my mom was around, she goes, “My God, I was horrified when he did that.”
[Laughter, then calm instrumentals. A dozen lei draped over his shoulders. Then, a box of the senator’s papers. At the archives, Lachi with an old newspaper. She uses a magnifying glass to read a headline.]
Lachi: Inouye won that seat and soon after was elected to the United States Senate. Still, throughout his career, he led an interesting dance when it came to policy and disability. Huh. “Disabled angry with Inouye.”
Sabas: He was always supportive of disability legislation, but he was never the champion.
Stodden: You had to really look to know that he had a disability. You’re lobbying for funds for people with disabilities. You would think, “Oh, this is a great match in the Senate to find somebody with a disability that I can work with.” But there was nothing like that.
Ken Inouye: He said definitions are everything. How you define something is very key. If you were labeled as disabled then, it was considered kind of a given that you somehow were less.
Stodden: Well, disability, particularly at that time and today to some extent, carries a negative connotation. It’s a “dis.” It’s a “can’t,” “you can’t,” basically.
Lachi: Well, I know that society often puts people with disabilities in boxes, right? And they can sometimes kind of relegate folks’ accomplishments to their disability. This prefix “dis,” which doesn’t necessarily mean negative, it could mean set apart.
Ken Inouye: The attitude that the community has now of, “I am not less than. I am equal to,” you know, to me is very much grounded in that sense of saying, “I’m not disabled.”
Lachi: Right.
Ken Inouye: “I just don’t have an arm. This doesn’t change what I can do. This doesn’t change what I am able to bring to the table or to this community.”
[Camera shutter clicks in a new scene. A framed painting of U.S. troops clamoring up a forest slope, facing tanks head-on stands by a podium. Senator Inouye, in 1978, addresses the audience at the Pentagon honoring the 442nd Regimental Combat Team.]
Inouye: The days and months following December the 7th, 1941, were sad and tragic ones. Americans of Japanese ancestry were looked upon as being untrustworthy, treasonous, and unworthy citizens. Finally, the President of the United States declared that Americanism was a matter of mind and heart and was never a matter of skin or color. I wish to thank the Department of the Army for this high distinction and high honor. Thank you very much.
[Applause as Inouye steps down from the podium. Low instrumentals return.]
Inouye: Now that we’re off the record, that’s not my platoon.
[Audience laughs]
Inouye: They’re all bunched up!
[Laughter]
Sabas: His gang was a veteran community. Those that suffered loss in defense of our country, that was really where he was. He was known as being a champion for those without voice.
Lachi: Sure.
Sabas: And those that were discriminated against and in his own way, right, attempted to right those wrongs.
[A bus of Black United Auto Worker protests passes a small group of Black and white protestors by the highway. A sign: “Onward Freedoms Soldiers.” Then 1964, in the Senate Studios, Inouye sits with three other men in suits who each wear a lei: a white man, a Black man, and a Hawaiian man holding a ukulele.]
Inouye: This is a bill that should have been passed, not this year, not last year, but 10, 20, 50 years ago. When the bill passes, it will be a victory for the people of the United States.
Lachi: Inouye’s sense of “equal to” extended far beyond his sense of self. Rising to the national scene in 1964, he championed the Civil Rights Act, then Civil Liberties in 1968, and continued to fight for the free exercise of religion, women’s rights, and protection for veterans and people with disabilities.
Inouye: The marching feet of youth have led us into a new era of politics, and we can never turn back.
[Applause and striking instrumentals over continued archival footage and photographs.]
Lachi: In 1979, Inouye introduced the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, eventually resulting in the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which provided an apology and reparations to Japanese American internees of World War II.
Watanabe: Probably one of the greatest skills the Senator had was he saw the world in relational terms as opposed to transactional terms.
Lachi: Okay. Right.
Watanabe: And I think that that really helped Hawaiʻi, because it gave Hawaiʻi much more leverage in terms of making an impact than might otherwise have been the case.
Lachi: He seemed really connected to his constituents.
Watanabe: He was.
Lachi: Very much an everyman.
Watanabe: Very much so. His campaign sticker was just “Dan.”
[Lachi laughs as a button appears on screen reading: Dan.]
Watanabe: Really!
Sabas: The greatest gift that he gave all of us is confidence. The confidence to know that we could do anything. We could compete with anybody. We could sit across the table and do good by the state.
[Serving on the Watergate Committee in 1973 and the Iran-Contra Committee in 1987 on Capitol Hill, a look of determined focus as he listens. President Clinton presents Inouye with the Medal of Honor in 2000. Low acoustic instrumentals pluck.]
Lachi: Inouye’s own confidence, that sense of “equal to,” sustained him through five decades of service in Congress. He continued to rise in standing and recognition, receiving citations for his distinguished civilian and wartime service.
Ken Inouye: To be able to get elected to office in local government, get elected to office in the U.S. government, rise up in stature in the Senate to the point that he is the president pro tem, which is third in line to the president. Only in America is that possible.
[Fade to black. Old video of the senator plays as the credits roll.]
Inouye: Whatever success I’ve had, I share with all of you. I hope I’ve lived up to your expectations. This is Senator Dan Inouye from Washington. Aloha and goodbye.
[Tender piano as theme song plays over credits.]
♪ And the road can get lonely, cold ♪
♪ And feel like the darkest nights ♪
♪ But the path was paved ♪
♪ I’m not afraid ♪
♪ I bring the light ♪
♪ I live my life ♪
♪ My rules, my way ♪
♪ I have no fears ♪
♪ I face each day as a renegade ♪
♪ I don’t think twice ♪
♪ My mind is made ♪
♪ I don’t complain ♪
♪ I face each day as a renegade ♪
[Logos for Inspiration films. ITVS. American Masters. PBS. Episode ends.]
