... from an article I was writing for Asian Pacific Heritage Month:
 
 

• Web Site of the Go for Broke National Education Center
   
• The "Go for Broke" Regiment Lives Duty, Honor, Country (American Forces Press Service)
   
• Asian Pacific Americans: Going for Broke (Experiencing War: Stories from the Veterans History Project, Library of Congress)
   
• Go for Broke! (Soldiers - The Official U.S. Army Magazine, November 2003 - warning: very large PDF)
   
• The Hawai'i Nisei Story: Americans of Japanese Ancestry During World War II (University of Hawaii, in cooperation with Nisei veterans)
   

The setting is Italy in World War II. Four Buffalo Soldiers — members of the 92nd Division, which had African-American soldiers and white commanders — get cut off from their unit and find themselves trapped in a small, mostly ruined village that has already survived one devastating German attack in reprisal for suspected partisan activities. Smart, responsible Lt. Stamps, conniving, charming ex-street preacher Bishop, moony, trilingual Puerto Rican Hector, and the simple gentle giant Train, who has taken a badly injured Italian boy under his wing, spend several days in the village, wondering how to follow their orders to capture a German for questioning, waiting for their army to come and get them before the Germans do, and learning a lot about the villagers and themselves. When partisans show up with a German prisoner, things start to happen, fast and furious and ugly.

Link for more

This is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in this period of history. You should note that there are some grisly episodes of violence - it's a war story - but McBride has a journalist's detachment about these incidents and doesn't wallow in them, which helps.

One of the things that is striking about most English-language story-telling endeavors - whether we're talking written fiction, comics, television, or movies - is how uniformly Caucasian the casts of characters are. And if people of color appear, they're in stereotyped roles: the Native American tracker, or the black housekeeper. If the setting is historical, the justification is "that's the way it was then." For IBARW, here's a little online research about the Old West of the United States, and why it's actually more historically accurate to have people of African, Native American, Hispanic, and other types of descent among a cast of cowboys, gunslingers, general store owners, and other classic Western archetypes during the late 19th and very early 20th centuries.

So if a Gojyo-type character were to end up in Edo-era Japan, would he be able to support himself by gambling? This stray thought brought me to this article from the Japan Times Online:

By the middle of the Heian Period (794-1185), gambling had become rampant among the inhabitants of the capital, Heiankyo (present-day Kyoto). People wagered enthusiastically on practically anything: cock fights, horse races, cricket fights and fanciful competitions that made use of flowers, pictures or folding fans.

Around this time professional gamblers, known as bakuto, first appeared. Historical accounts gave details of brawls, killings and robberies involving gamblers, which led to increasingly strict measures to repress their activities. Between 1225 and 1284, the authorities issued no fewer than nine edicts prohibiting gambling.

During the Edo Period (1603-1867), members of the ruling samurai class were discouraged from gambling ... .

What's less clear is what he'd be playing - not cards, which came in with the Portugese, later. From the discussion later in the article, the likeliest thing would be a dice games of various sorts. Hmm ... .