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11/10/2021 11:01 PMOn Veteran’s Day, it’s once again time to honor those who served our country in time of war. One of those millions was my father, Clement M. Hakim, who came to the United States in June 1941 after spending seven years in Japan. He was the youngest son of a textile merchant in Alexandria, Egypt and barely 22 when he arrived in Shizuoka, Japan in 1932 after learning everything about tea at Mitsui & Co.’s Alexandria’s office.
Japan was the epicenter of the green tea trade. Unfermented green tea was in large demand in North Africa and, after setting up his own business, my father exported tea to ports in countries all along the southern Mediterranean coast. By 1940, his business extended to the United States.
His success didn’t come easy.
In 1933, after a shipment of tea were delivered to Morocco, the chests were found to be bottom heavy with rocks. He lost all his money refunding payments to his customers and had to return to Egypt broke. The trip took weeks by steamer. He was stuck in stowage class. But one day, when standing on deck, he was spotted by a member of an entourage of a Muslim prince on a pilgrimage to Mecca who boarded in the Dutch East Indies. Scrawny and hungry but fluent in Arabic, he was assumed to be a co-religionist and invited to join them in meals and prayer. The entourage deboarded at Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. When the boat arrived at Port Said, his mother, dressed in Western garb, was at the pier waving. My father had to ignore her or would have been seen as an infidel by others on the ship. When he finally arrived safely home in Alexandria, he borrowed enough money from his parents and friends and, after a short stay, sailed back to Japan.
On The Brink Of War
The rest is part of the tea industry’s lore.
Now much wiser, he slowly built up his export business. By 1941, his customers were now around the world. Green tea was very popular and its popularity in the United States was no exception. United States tea packers were now his biggest customers. But the world was on the brink of war. Japan had already spread its brutal dominance over China and its expansionist policy was extending to Southeast Asia and the Pacific region. President Roosevelt issued an oil, scrap steel, and war supplies embargo on Japan in an effort to stop it. Moreover, tea from Japan was no longer available. The embargo together with FDR’s August 1941 order to freeze all Japanese assets in the U.S. preceded Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.
By June 1941, the environment for foreigners doing business in Japan was already very difficult. My father decided to move to the United States. Fortunately, he was able to transfer his financial assets to Chase Bank in New York before the subsequent freeze. From his new office in New York, with tea supply cut off from Japan, he now imported tea from India and Ceylon.
The attack on Pearl Harbor finally brought a reluctant United States into a global war. In early 1943, my father became a naturalized citizen and enlisted in the United States Army. His knowledge of the Japanese culture and language (he was fluent in six languages) proved invaluable and he was sent to the military intelligence school at Camp Savage in Minnesota. After training and graduation, he shipped out to India as a second lieutenant in Military Intelligence (G-2).
Dropped Behind Enemy Lines
Over the next two years, my father was intimately involved with uncovering Japanese efforts to infiltrate India. He was dropped behind enemy lines in Burma and, dressed as a native, spied on Japanese movements as its army marched to the Ledo Road.
After our army’s victory at Okinawa, final preparations were being made for the eventual invasion of Japan. General MacArthur needed men who spoke the language. His chief of staff requested my father’s transfer from the India-Burma theater to MacArthur’s headquarters in the Philippines.
The atomic bomb hastened Japan’s surrender. My father, now a captain in the Counterintelligence Division, moved on to Tokyo with MacArthur and his staff. He was put in charge of rebuilding Japan’s devastated tea industry, at the time the second-largest source of foreign currency after silk. One of the first things he did was to make sure his old acquaintances in the tea trade were put back into the responsible roles they had lost due to their opposition to the war.
He remained on MacArthur’s staff until his honorable discharge in 1946.
Love of Country
But my father’s service didn’t stop there. For several years after, the State Department asked him to assist Japan’s recovering tea industry. In that role, including advising former President Hoover’s world food mission, he used his contacts to sell Japanese tea in countries around the world.
Until 1953, my father, out of a great love for his adopted country, continued to volunteer his services to the government while at the same time continued to build his own business. Like so many of his contemporaries who served during the war, my father never spoke much about his service. It wasn’t until many years later, after the parade of our returning troops after the 1991 war when my aging father had donned his old army cap and walked over to Fifth Avenue to watch them, that I learned in greater detail what he did during and the years right after the war. He was remarkable man who defied adversity and built a life highlighted with service to a country that he loved.