On this Memorial Day, we turned to the life and legacy of Yukiokawamoto, a Japanese-American World War II veteran who served his country under almost unthinkable circumstances, and then spent a lifetime building bridges between the two cultures he called his own.

Amna Navaz has the story for our ongoing series, Race Matters.

You have a treasure trove of memories.

An archive of artifacts.

From ceremonial honors,

It's not everybody gets a gold medal, you know?

To symbols of service.

It's his dog tick.

So this was hanging in your house growing up.

Yeah.

To presidential mementos.

From President Johnson to your father as a note of appreciation.

For siblings Brian, Don, and Sharon, the collection is a preservation and a celebration

of their father, Yukio Kawamoto's life.

He really had an interest in saying, one, people understand one another.

They put their differences aside, and they can see the people understand one another, they put their differences aside,

and they can see the best in one another. And that's what became a lifelong journey.

Born in Berkeley, California in 1919, Kawamoto was the son of immigrants from Hiroshima, Japan.

His father, a handyman, and his mother, a Japanese teacher.

He straddled his Japanese heritage and his All-American identity, the Boy Scout, who went

to Cal Berkeley to study engineering.

But during his senior year in 1941, a tragic and terrible was the scene of destruction.

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