I don’t know this man, nor do I want to. I guess he’s a regular on a show I don’t know, nor do I want to, called Shark Tank on CNBC. Maybe you’ve seen this television commercial for a venture of his in which promises to get, just for you, Large Amounts of Money in Covid Relief. So I guess he is a shark, after all. He is Canadian, which gets him no slack in my book. This is the letter I just wrote him.

Mr. O’Leary:

Your “bonsai” television commercial is offensive.

They’re not “banzai.” They’re “bonsai.”

They’re not “shrubs.” They are trees.

If you’re trying to be funny, you have failed.

I come from a California town whose entire Japanese American population was interned behind concertina wire in the Arizona desert, where the temperature in summer and fall hovered at 109°.

Twenty-five of the fifty-eight members of our high school’s class of 1942 were Nisei.

Many of them would go on to serve in the United States Army. Two were members of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the most highly-decorated unit of its size in United States History.

Three were awarded Bronze Stars for valor.

One, the twenty-year-old leader of an intelligence team inserted into the mountains of China, disguised himself as a peasant to go behind Japanese lines—the enemy’s lines—to rescue another American, a downed pilot. After the war, businessman George Nakamura was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal for his efforts to heal the relationship between Japan and the United States.

Another, a medic in the 83rd Infantry Division, was shot by a German sniper in the Hurtgen Forest as he was kneeling over a wounded comrade. Medics, with their distinctive helmets marked by red crosses, were prized targets. Makoto Yoshihara’s Bronze Star was posthumous.

A third, a member of the 442nd,  volunteered to bring up more ammunition under heavy German fire in the Vosges Mountains of France. The 442nd was there to liberate 230 Texas National Guardsmen, mostly justifiably terrified nineteen-year-old draftees, who were surrounded. Nearly 1,000 Japanese American GI’s were killed or wounded in the relief of what became knowns as “The Lost Battalion.” Sadami Fujita didn’t make it.

I understand that your nickname is “Mr. Wonderful.”

Earn it.

Withdraw this disrespectful commercial.