His teenage son got his first taste of performing by entertaining the customers with jokes as the emcee for group dinners.įollowing high school graduation, Morita worked his way up to head of computer operations for an aerospace company. So dedicated was Morita to honoring these men that he personally appealed to “Karate Kid” director John Avildsen to re-write his Miyagi character as a 442 nd veteran who had received the Congressional Medal of Honor for valor under fire.Īt the end of the war, the Morita family was released and settled in Sacramento, where his father opened a successful Chinese restaurant. But there was also much to mourn as husbands and sons who had enlisted from the camp never returned. They were later moved to the Tule Lake Internment Camp in northern California.Įach week, when fresh newspapers arrived, Morita along with the other Japanese-American prisoners, early read the latest news of the 100 th/442 nd Regimental Combat Team’s battlefield triumphs. But the day he left the hospital, at the age of 11, he was met by an armed FBI agent, who transported him from California to the Gila Internment Camp in Arizona, where his family was already confined. The son of migrant workers, Morita contracted spinal tuberculosis at the age of two and was taken away from his parents to spend the next nine years in a sanitarium confined in a body cast.Īfter extensive surgery, he was finally able to walk. More than just another role for this popular star and Academy Award-nominee, Morita actually lived aspects of the real-life story that inspired this new motion picture. It was an honor for everyone involved with “ONLY THE BRAVE” to work with the legendary Noriyuki Pat Morita in one of his very last films.
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