When his fellow Chicagoans find out that Sam Ozaki is a native Californian, they almost always ask: "How in the world did you end up in this cold, windy city?"
The answer, the 70-year-old Mr. Ozaki explains, is rooted in war and racism.
On Feb. 19, 1942, after the outbreak of World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an order sending more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans on the West Coast into internment camps scattered amid mountains and desert. They endured squalid living conditions behind barbed wire and the humiliation of being deemed suspect because of their ancestry. The nation was at war with Germany and Italy, as well as with Japan, of course, but there were no moves to lock up any European-Americans.
The internment did more than temporarily deprive Japanese-Americans of their freedom. It subtly changed the face of America, setting off an eastward migration of Japanese to places where few had lived before, like Chicago, Salt Lake City and Denver, because people released from the camps before the end of the war were not allowed to stay on the West Coast, and many chose not to return there.
In Chicago, there were churches offering help, and factories, short of labor during the war, offering jobs. Mr. Ozaki eventually became the first Asian-American principal in Chicago public schools, and he is now living a quiet retirement on the North Side. But 50 years after the end of the war, he recalls the burden of suspicion and the limited ways internees were able to escape the camps early. Many signed loyalty oaths and found sponsors inland, as required by the Government.
But Mr. Ozaki and thousands of other second-generation Japanese, or Nisei, chose another escape route from the camps: they volunteered to fight in the United States Army.
"There was a feeling that it was the only way we could prove our loyalty as Americans," said Mr. Ozaki, who served as an intelligence officer in a unit made up of Japanese-Americans, the 442d Regimental Combat Team. He worked as an interpreter -- after a four-month crash course in Japanese at Camp Savage, Minn.
The 442d became one of the most highly decorated regiments in American military history. The 442d suffered huge casualties; Capt. Daniel K. Inouye, now a United States Senator from Hawaii, lost his right arm in battle. The team became famous for its rescue of the Texan "Lost Battalion," saving more than 200 men who had been surrounded by German troops.
By war's end, about 600 of the approximately 5,000 Nisei soldiers had lost their lives.
Less well known is the role played by Japanese-Americans who worked on the Pacific front as interpreters, interviewing prisoners of war, translating Imperial battle plans and deciphering secret codes.
One hero of the intelligence effort was Art Morimitsu, now 83, who interviewed wounded Japanese soldiers. "As they came to," he recalled, "they would look up and see this Japanese face, and there would be great relief and happiness." Then they would get a look at Mr. Morimitsu's American uniform, and the relief would vanish.
Mr. Morimitsu is a bedrock American patriot who has served as a commander of an American Legion post. He was among the veterans who protested the original Smithsonian exhibit on the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. "These revisionists make it look like the U.S. was the aggressor and Japan was the victim," said Mr. Morimitsu, who went into the carpet-cleaning business in Chicago after the war.
Yet he still runs into people who take him for a member of the enemy forces from 50 years ago, even though he was born and reared in Sacramento, Calif.
For Japanese-Americans, memories of the triumph in World War II are inextricably twined with memories of the camps and of being made to feel like traitors.
"For decades, there was silence in the Japanese-American community about the camps," said Prof. Ronald Takaki, who teaches history at the University of California at Berkeley and is the author of "Strangers From a Different Shore" (Little, Brown and Company, 1989). "It was seen as a shameful time."
It was not until the 1980's, when many Japanese-Americans who had been imprisoned began seeking reparations from the Federal Government, that more of them began to speak out. In 1988, President Reagan signed a law that apologized to Japanese-Americans for the internment and awarded each survivor $20,000 in damages. No case of espionage or sabotage by Japanese-Americans during the war has ever been documented.
For years before World War II, prejudice against Asian-Americans had been building. In 1882, Chinese were excluded from immigrating. In 1924, the Japanese were excluded from immigrating. They were also forbidden to own land or marry a white person in some states.
Mr. Morimitsu's wife, Virginia, recalled that on Dec. 7, 1941, she and her sister were attending a Christmas concert of Handel's "Messiah," at Santa Monica College. "Before we stood for the 'Hallelujah' chorus, it was announced that Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor," she said. "And it felt like all the eyes in the auditorium were placed on us."
In the weeks after the outbreak of war, Japanese-Americans anticipated a backlash. A headline in The San Francisco Examiner blared: "Ouster of All Japs in California Near!"
By February, signs were posted on telephone poles instructing all people with Japanese ancestry to prepare for evacuation.
The Morimitsus' daughter, Kathryn, a writer and computer consultant in Portland, said that her parents had never talked much about the internment camps but that she knew the experience had been 'incredibly traumatic.' "
"My father's life," she said, "has been devoted to validating his part on the American scene as a patriot.'
Being sent to the camps meant a loss of honor for people like her parents, who knew they were being tagged as second-class citizens, Ms. Morimitsu said. "And it's something that's subtly transmitted to my generation," she said. "So that while there is pride in our heritage, there is also a certain ambivalence."
In those frightening times, said Mrs. Morimitsu, who spent about a year at the Manzanar Camp in California, her mother destroyed all her mementos from Japan, fearful that the authorities would see them as evidence of treason.
"Now I have nothing from my family's past," Mrs. Morimitsu said. "The Swedish ladies at my church will show me things handed down from their grandmothers, and I have nothing to show -- nothing."
Photos: Sam Ozaki, a Japanese-American who retired as a school principal in Chicago after serving in the 442d Regimental Combat Team and avoiding internment in an American camp during World War II.; Art Morimitsu, right, a Japanese-American who was interned in Tule Lake, Calif., before volunteering for the Army, which assigned him to Burma as an interpreter in 1944, above. (Photographs by Todd Buchanan for The New York Times) Map of the United States