All posts by Frank Abe

FRANK ABE is co-author of the new graphic novel on Japanese American resistance to wartime incarceration, WE HEREBY REFUSE (Chin Music Press: A Wing Luke Museum Book). He won an American Book Award for JOHN OKADA: The Life & Rediscovered Work of the Author of No-No Boy (University of Washington Press), and made the award-winning PBS documentary, CONSCIENCE AND THE CONSTITUTION, on the largest organized camp resistance. He is currently co-editing an anthology for Penguin Classics on The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration.

“Top 5 Unsung Heroes In Japanese American History”

Blogger and filmmaker Koji Steven Sakai at the 8Asians.com site has singled out one of the surviving members of the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee for his list of unsung heroes. Yosh would be the first to say he’s not a hero, but he does fit under Koji’s criteria of “doing the right thing” at the right time:

Yosh Kuromiya
Much of thYosh Kuromiyae narrative of Japanese American World War II experience has focused on the bravery of the young Japanese American soldiers in the 442nd. Kuromiya’s story strays far from that narrative. At the age of 19, he made the principled decision against fighting for a country that had incarcerated him and his family based only on their ethnic background. He faced not only prison time (he was sentenced to three years) but he was also ostracized both from within the community and from society at large.

A new look for Resisters.com

You’ll notice a new look and feel for Resisters.com. Call it Resisters.com 2.0. You can now post your own comments on these pages, as well as subscribe to email news updates about the resisters in real time.

Use the subscription form in the right sidebar, or the RSS link, and share posts on your Facebook page. The feed fulfills a long-ago request by Kenji Taguma that we have a means of quickly sharing news about the resisters. It’s not quite the magazine of Asian American literary and cultural criticism that Frank Chin insists we must have, but it’s the best I can manage for now.

I promise the posts will be newsworthy and will continue to uncover discoveries about the largest resistance to the WW2 incarceration of Japanese Americans. After 70 years interest in the camps has never been stronger. The difference is that over the past decade, with our film and now the new DVD, the paradigm for that history has widened to include the camp resistance and the JACL collaboration as part of our basic common knowledge alongside the 442, the MIS, and others.

Please leave a comment below to let us know how you like the new site, which uses the sturdier WordPress platform rather than the hand-coded site that we held together with Dreamweaver.

If there is page from the old Resisters.com site you miss and would like to see restored, leave a comment and we will repost it. We’ll soon be adding videos and links to new research, along with catching up with old news updates, reviews, and anything else you’d like to see or hear.

“The Power of Words” 2.0

Mako Nakagawa and Andy Noguchi
Mako Nakagawa of Seattle and Andy Noguchi of Florin, CA, shortly after the JACL National Convention adopted their revised handbook

As producer/director of Conscience and the Constitution, I finally signed on late this week as a community supporter for the revised “Power of Words” handbook.

I never understood why this was still an issue seething within the Japanese American Citizens League. In the film we freely refer to the camps as “American concentration camps” and point out, “Even the President called them concentration camps.” PBS approved the script and aired the film in 2000. I thought the issue of terminology was settled long ago.

The JACL National Convention came to town this weekend, so I finally had a chance to hear first-hand what the fuss was about. For whatever reason, the first version of the JACL’s handbook — the underlying purpose of which was to assert the legitimacy of using the term “concentration camps” — buried reference to the correct language. Instead, it incredibly and meekly recommended relocation camps — in quotation marks, as in wink-wink, nod-nod “relocation camps” –as the term to promote. Talk about a step backward. Activists from Seattle and Florin, CA, went ape, and spent the past year trying to rewrite it. That there was even opposition to their campaign inside JACL, is telling.

Early yesterday morning at around 8:00 am at the Hyatt Regency Bellevue, the activists finally succeeded, and national JACL unanimously ratified the Power of Words 2.0 handbook.

Still, I wondered, why the need for a handbook? Lillian Baker is gone. “Concentration camps” as the proper name was established more than 30 years ago with the state landmark at Manzanar, with the titles of groundbreaking books by Roger Daniels and Michi Weglyn, and with four previous handbooks by Roger, Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, Jim Hirabayashi, Sue Embrey, and the granddaddy of camp-euphemism-rejecting papers, “The American Concentration Camps:  A Cover-up Through Euphemistic Terminology,” by Ray Okamura.

From the follow-up workshop, it seems the real value of having a national organization like JACL coalesce behind a simple statement of fact lies with work still be done by the National Park Service and other agencies that will be erecting monuments and landmarks to the camps, or to use the new term of art, confinement sites.  At places like Tule Lake and elsewhere, there will always be neighbors and revisionist historians who will want to turn back the clock and soften the truth, and agency staff need verifiable facts, documentation, and unified community support to get their wordings cast in bronze.

Seventy years after the fact it’s still a fight, so congratulations to all those who persisted on behalf of the power of words this weekend.

Author’s booth at the 2012 JACL National Convention

JACL convention logoLook for me in the author’s booth in the exhibit area for the 2012 JACL National Convention, which comes to town this weekend at the Bellevue Hyatt.

I’ll be at the table both Friday and Saturday from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm.

We’ll have the new Two-Disc Collector’s Edition DVD on sale for a special convention discount. Looking forward to meeting delegates who wander by and sharing the story of the Heart Mountain resisters. Thanks to convention  chair Elaine Akagi for making the arrangements.

DVD review by John Streamas

John Streamas is Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at Washington State University in Pullman. His book, Japanese Americans and Cultures of Effacement, is forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press.

On Conscience and the Constitution, Two-Disc Collector’s Edition

Shortly after I met her in 1995, poet Toyo Suyemoto advised me never to join the Japanese American Citizens League.

She was still bitter, a half-century after the war, over the JACL’s presuming to speak for all Japanese Americans, as it urged them gladly to comply with government orders to evacuate their homes and enter concentration camps in barren, hostile places in the desert. At the time of her own evacuation, Toyo was a young mother whose husband had abandoned her and their infant son Kay. She and Kay left for camp with her parents and siblings, and they would all leave after the war for new homes in Ohio.

In the late 1950s Kay, who should have been a hearty teenager, died of illnesses induced by the harsh conditions of camp. All her life, Toyo wrote about her camp experience, and her poems, though seemingly serene descriptions of the Utah desert where she was imprisoned, are full of underlying despair, rage, and hope. Late in life she spoke before high school and college audiences about her wartime experience, and with energetic humor she urged them to fight back against institutional oppression, warning that only constant vigilance can hope to resist racism.

In the 1970s novelist Frank Chin and his literary circle helped the world rediscover Toyo’s poems, seeing in her life and work a feisty resistance of the sort they also saw in Frank Emi and the Fair Play Committee, young men in the Heart Mountain camp in Wyoming who resisted the military conscription that became possible during Japanese Americans’ incarceration.

Toyo had read the wartime editorials of James Omura, and was aware of the Heart Mountain resisters. The JACL urged the community to prove their loyalty by becoming part of the military effort, but Emi and the others, supported by Denver journalist James Omura, refused, insisting that their constitutional rights must first be restored before they would consider service.

The resisters’ refusal and subsequent trial was for decades a “dirty secret” of Japanese American history, as the JACL continued to presume to speak for the community. The story of these resisters forms the core of Frank Abe’s 2000 film Conscience and the Constitution, which was broadcast on PBS and which has surely done more than any other film or book to tell it from their perspective.

Now the film is reissued with new material. This is no gimmicky “director’s cut” with twenty additional minutes that amount to a vanity project. The core film remains, but Abe adds to the discs – of which there are now two, one of them dedicated exclusively to additional material – extended interviews with people featured in the film, footage from the 2002 event in which the JACL publicly and formally apologized to the resisters, and access to a helpful viewers’ guide.

In the film itself, historian Roger Daniels reminds audiences that history is written by the winners, and observes that in postwar Japanese America those winners have been the JACL, who have dictated how even a civil rights-era nation might read the incarceration – until now when, thanks to Abe and other activists such as Chin and historian Michi Weglyn, the suppressed narratives are finally surfacing.

The material in Abe’s new edition reinforces Daniels’s caution about the JACL version of history. More than a century ago, African American writer W. E. B. DuBois argued that the black American develops a “double consciousness,” one for engaging with whites, the other for living in the home community. History for all communities of color can be understood as existing on two planes. Most Americans know little about Japanese Americans’ imprisonment during the war, and so the historian’s first job is to teach that history. On this plane, the U.S. government reduced all Japanese Americans to potential saboteurs, a threat serious enough to warrant mass incarceration. On the other, interior plane, the JACL reduced them all to good Americans happy to prove their loyalty, even if at the price of incarceration; but, on this plane, they were not reducible, as some complied while others despaired and still others fought back. But the resisters fought two foes, the uncomprehending government and the capitulating JACL.

The focus of Abe’s feature film is to tell the story on both planes, focusing on the outer plane, the general history for audiences unaware even of the incarceration. The focus of the new material is the inner plane, the suppressed history of resistance’s consequences.

Most valuable, perhaps, are comments by Frank Emi, a core organizer of the Fair Play Committee. Emi acknowledges the JACL’s formal apology, but he also refers to the “unholy ghosts” of the organization’s past: During the war it willfully kept the government informed of resisters’ actions, and after the war it ostracized them, drove them out of community life. These ghosts must also be atoned for, says Emi.

Lest squeamish Japanese Americans worry that the new edition of Abe’s film package threatens to air the community’s dirty laundry, let it be remembered that the federal government acknowledged in 1988 that the wartime incarceration was not only wrong but even deserving of symbolic restitution – a fact that implicitly repudiates the JACL’s wartime position. During the war, Japanese Americans’ only enemy should have been institutional racism, not neighbors working as snitches for the racists.

Abe’s new material clearly shows the consequences of both complicity and resistance, and, maybe even more importantly, it celebrates the courage of those young men who resisted not only the government but even their community’s own weak leaders.

My old friend Toyo was proud of the resisters and, had she lived to see this film and its supplementary material, she would have been proud of Frank Abe.

                                          — John Streamas

Celebrating the DVD release in Los Angeles

LA screeningWho knew that a story outside the accepted narrative of the Japanese American community would still have the power to be considered controversial? Thanks to the 125 who turned out on May 12 for the DVD launch event and the lively Q and A at the Japanese American National Museum. See the photo gallery here.

And thanks to JANM, program director Koji Stephen Sakai, and new president and CEO Dr. Greg Kimura for daring to have us there in the first place. As Dr. Kimura said in introducing us, he’d received a couple of phone calls questioning the museum’s hosting of this film documenting draft resistance insideAmerica’s WW2 concentration camps. Dr. Kimura said the film and this subject remain controversial topics in the Japanese American community even today, but he said he believes the mission of the museum is precisely to offer those alternate narratives that are outside the accepted narratives of the community. As a new hire, that was a gutsy thing to say, and I hope the people of LA rally behind his leadership. It was fitting that you could see the name of the venue – Tateuchi Democracy Forum – writ large behind him as he spoke and throughout the screening.

After the screening I made the mistake of waving a red flag in front of my good friend Martha by holding up a copy of John Okada’s No-No Boy, as recommended reading. To be heard from the upper rows, Martha had to shout, and she sure let us know how the author is really a veteran trying to write about a resister, how the title misleads the reader as the main character is not a “no-no boy,” and how the resisters really hate the book. But Yosh Kuromiya was able to say that while he hated the book for years, after several more readings he now understands that Okada was not trying to portray the resisters as confused, and that the book truly is, as he put it, “a work of art.” And Martha joined a group of us for breakfast at Dick Obayashi’s Gardena Bowl two days later.

It was a pleasure to reunite with several key players in our film: Yosh and Irene Kuromiya, Tak Hoshizaki, Prof. Art Hansen, and our fabulous world-class film editor, Lillian Benson, A.C.E. Also thanks to Momo Yashima and Ralph Brannan, Soji Kashiwagi, Marie and Earnie Masumoto, Gerald Kado, Ben Toshiyuki, Harry Honda, and cousin Jeff Shinozaki for joining us in the audience. Thanks also to J.K. Yamamoto of the Rafu Shimpo for catching us in the lobby and posting this online photo with Art and Lillian.

In memoriam: Jim Hirabayashi

Through the pioneering Center for Japanese American Studies in San Francisco in the 1970s, at the monthly lectures and workshops they sponsored at Pine Methodist Church in the outer Richmond District, Jim H. and Nancy Araki were among my first tutors in JA camp history. I looked forward to the flyers I’d receive in the mail each month. See this remembrance from Nancy at the Japanese American National Museum blog. Our condolences to Lane Hirabayashi and all the family.

In memoriam: Gloria Kubota

Gloria KubotaWe’re saddened to learn of the passing on April 26 of Gloria Kubota. Gloria was one of the most delightful people you’d ever want to meet, and she embodied the female perspective on the resistance of the Fair Play Committee documented in our film.

Gloira reminded us of the particular worries that forced expulsion heaped upon mothers like her, like having to bring canned milk and food for her young daughter on the long train ride to an American concentration camp in Wyoming. Once in camp, she was one of the few women to brave the scorn of other Nisei mothers by hosting her husband’s meetings of the nascent Fair Play Committee, and typing their bulletins onto mimeograph stencils. Gloria tells a funny story about her struggle with typing in an extended interview on Disc Two of our new DVD. You can read more about Gloria in her biography on our PBS.org site, and in the San Jose Mercury-News obit. After we finished the film Gloria stayed in touch, bringing my family fruit from her orchard in Saratoga. Our condolences to her extended family. She will be dearly missed.

Los Angeles DVD release and screening at the Japanese American National Musuem

Tateuchi Democracy Forum
Tateuchi Democracy Forum at JANM
Please join us for the Southern California debut of the new Two-Disc Collector’s Edition DVD of Conscience and the Constitution. Producer Frank Abe will screen the film and debut a new DVD featurette, “The JACL Apologizes.” Q&A with the filmmaker and DVD signing will follow the screening in the Tateuchi Democracy Forum. Admission is free to the museum and the screening, thanks to the “Target Free Family Day” in celebration of Asian Pacific Heritage Month.

Top 10 Iconic Japanese American Photos

Wyoming courtroom Koji Steven Sakai on the 8Asians.com blog places the courtroom photo of the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee number five on his list of the “Top 10 Iconic Japanese American Photos” of all time, ahead of the 442 and behind another local icon, the photo of Fumiko Hayashida holding her daughter Natalie while being evicted from their home on Bainbridge Island.