Screening with panel at Fife History Museum

Two screenings coming up in the Seattle region this month and next. The first is Thursday, October 17 at 7:00 pm, at the Fife History Museum, in connection with its fine new exhibit on the home front in WW2.  Full details below. Please join us and sign up on our Facebook Event page. The poster has a great caption:

Fife History Museum poster

A Film and Panel Discussion at Fife History Museum Bring Japanese American Internment to Light

Join the Fife History Museum for the second free event in a series related to the latest exhibit Rights, Rations, Remembrance: Fife in World War II taking place on October 17 at 7pm.  The event includes a showing of the controversial World War II documentary by director Frank Abe, Conscience and the Constitution, followed by a panel discussion with the filmmaker and local historian.  Conscience and the Constitution reveals the long-untold story of the organized draft resistance at the American concentration camp at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, and the suppression of that resistance by Japanese American leaders.

A lively discussion featuring Abe, local historian Ronald Magden, Tacoma attorney Daniel C. Russ, and Puyallup Valley chapter head of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) Elsie Taniguchi will follow the showing of the film.

Magden, a highly regarded educator and author with long-time roots in Pierce Country who alto taught at Tacoma Community College for many years after graduating in 1965 with a PhD in History from the University of Washington, is known by many for spending over thirty years of his life dedicated to the telling of history and development of longshore union activity on the Pacific Coast.

He is respected for his well researched volume Furusato: Tacoma-Pierce County Japanese, 1888-1977, published by the Tacoma Longshore Book and Research Committee in 1998, which provides what may be the most comprehensive look at Tacoma’s Japanese community.

Daniel Russ graduated with his J.D. from the Seattle University School of Law. Currently, he is a partner at Britton and Russ, PLLC, with offices in Tacoma and Puyallup, and a Lt. Colonel (JAG) in the Washington Air National Guard.

Besides serving on numerous boards of directors for charitable organizations, Russ is also active with the JACL and is spearheading a collaborative effort to preserve the history of Camp Harmony at the Washington State Fairgrounds.

A distinguished member of the JACL, Elsie Taniguchi currently serves as the head of the Puyallup Valley chapter.  She was interned with her family at Camp Harmony in 1942 before being sent to Camp Minidoka for the duration of the war.  After being contacted by the Fife History Museum, Taniguchi was instrumental in assisting in developing the museum’s collections and exhibition of Japanese and Japanese American artifacts related to Fife’s history.  The museum’s collections include numerous artifacts her family used while interned.

Former broadcast journalist and award-winning reporter for KIRO News Radio in Seattle, Frank Abe is producer/director of Conscience and the Constitution.

He is a founding member of the Seattle chapter of the Asian American Journalists Association and served as national vice-president for broadcast. He first served as Director of Communications for former King County Executive Gary Locke in 1994, then for the Metropolitan King County Council and now presently serves in the same post for current King County Executive Dow Constantine.

Abe is a third-generation Japanese American whose pre-broadcast days as a pioneering actor and community activist has drawn decades of respect and admiration from his peers. He helped produced the very first “Day of Remembrance” in the country, which dramatized the campaign for redress for survivors of America’s wartime concentration camps. He helped found the Asian American Theatre Company in San Francisco and was featured in the 1976 NBC/Universal TV movie Farewell to Manzanar as a concentration camp leader.

The Fife History Museum and Dacca Barn are located at 2820 – 54th Avenue East, Fife, WA.  Admission to the Fife History Museum is always free.

For additional information about the Fife History Museum or any of the programs listed here please contact Molly Wilmoth by calling the museum at (253) 896-4710, send an email to [email protected] or find us on Facebook at Fife History Museum.

See also this video preview created by Pierce County Television:

Next up: a November 2 screening in Seattle aimed at a Japanese-speaking audience.

“Conscience” inspires Panama Hotel jazz project

doors to historic Panama HotelSeattle jazz artist Stephen Griggs is staging a series of music and spoken word concerts at the Panama Hotel Tea Room, based on the history of Japanese Americans in Seattle.  The project is inspired by the music of Oscar Holden and the novel Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet. But he was also reading John Okada’s No-No Boy and says “the powerful feelings and stories told by Okada will influence my project.” Also this:

I want you to know that your film Conscience and the Constitution served as an inspiration for my Panama Hotel Jazz project.

So many camp stories sound conciliatory and driven by fate. This film told stories of resistance and agency. I am not of Japanese ancestry and the film’s perspectives felt less alien to me. That opened a door for me to develop my project from a stance of civil injustice which is common ground for all Americans.

Two more free concerts in the series remain, at 2pm Saturday September  14 and 21. The Panama is located at 607 South Main Street in the International District. The project is funded by the 4Culture Historic Site Specific program.

Also inspired was Rob Hellebrand, who sent a nice note along with a paper he wrote entitled, “Nisei Divided: An Account of the Fair Play Committee at the Heart Mountain, Wyoming Internment Camp.”

I have really enjoyed looking through the resources at your website. I happened to first come upon it in 1999 when I was writing a paper for a class. I knew relatively little about the internment camps and wanted to know more, and just kind of fell into the story that you told there. This was when the DVD was still in production, so I only had the documents that you uploaded to go by.

About five years later, I attended a symposium about the resisters at the University of Oregon. I remember I was at the food table and I looked up and recognized Frank Emi from sixty-year-old pictures. He seemed surprised that I would know who he was.

Thanks for getting in touch Rob.

“Kiyoshi Okamoto and the Four Franks”

Tak Hoshizaki
Tak Hoshizaki at the “Standing on Principle” panel, July 6, 2013. Photo by Tracy Kumono Photography.

Tak Hoshizaki is one of the few surviving Heart Mountain resisters who continues to speak in public. At the Japanese American National Museum national conference on July 6, in a panel called “Standing on Principle,” Tak shared his first-hand account of the growing Fair Play Committee movement at Heart Mountain in 1944, and we thank him for allowing us to share it with you:

“KIYOSHI OKAMOTO AND THE FOUR FRANKS”

Kiyoshi Okamoto

“Fair play, fair play, civil rights, fair play” was what Kiyoshi Okamoto was saying as he talked to anyone who would listen in the cold, windy Wyoming concentration camp. Ten-thousand Japanese, most of them American citizens, held in a concentration camp in a desolate part of Wyoming, had little understanding of how their civil rights were violated. Kiyoshi was trying to tell the inmates that the United States government, their country, had wrongly imprisoned them. As he spoke to small groups, Kiyoshi called himself the “Fair Play Committee of One.”

In the winter of 1942-43, the Army came into Heart Mountain to recruit volunteers. This was the same time the infamous loyalty questionnaire with question 27 and 28 was being debated.

Frank Inouye

We now meet the first “Frank,” Frank Inouye. At the recruiting meeting, after the Army’s presentation, Inouye presented a manifesto demanding the U. S. government restore the rights of the men before drafting them. As a result, the Heart Mountain Congress of American Citizens was formed, represented by 2 people from each block. Inouye became the chairman. Before the Congress of American Citizens had time to develop, Inouye was able to leave the camp. With Inouye gone, the congress eventually evolved into the Fair Play Committee.

As a side note, Inouye later became a professor and an administrator at the University of Hawaii. He also was the main driving force who developed the University of Hawaii campus at Hilo. A few years ago, the University of Hawaii had a dedication and recognition for Frank Inouye’s efforts that brought about the existence of the Hilo branch. Frank Inouye passed away a few years ago.

Frank Emi

We now meet the second “Frank,” Frank Emi. Emi became one of the leaders of the Fair Play Committee. Emi played a major role in the Fair Play Committee conflicts with the camp administrators.

Emi at this time was married and had a family. He was not eligible for the draft. Again like Inouye, Emi also believed that before drafting the men, their full citizenship rights be restored.

The Fair Play Committee of One became the Fair Play Committee of Many. With Frank Inouye gone, the former members of the Congress of American Citizens joined together with Kiyoshi Okamoto, Frank Emi and others to form the Fair Play Committee. The Fair Play Committee began holding meetings, discussing the questionnaire and the draft. I attended a meeting and was surprised at the wall to wall attendance. The plan was to have our civil rights returned before we would serve. Also was surprised that I was not alone in my thinking of not answering the draft call.

By this time 1943-44, I was of draft age. When I entered the Pomona Assembly Center I was 16, not very good in history and English, understood very little of the Constitution of the United States let alone an understanding of civil rights. It was there in the Pomona Assembly Center as I listened to the older Nisei talk, I learned about how we should have contested “Evacuation” by legal action. How we were betrayed by “JACL.” The Japanese American Citizens League. Who were they? How did JACL have a role? I began to realize that something was wrong. When I heard of the financial losses of many families, and that families were broken apart by the arrest, removal and detention of their fathers, I realized more than ever, our removal was wrong. While in Pomona I wrote to my homeroom teacher at Belmont High School. The letter expressed my very bitter feelings of what had happened. She answered she was sorry that I felt so angry.

Now two years later, I had decided that I would not go if called. A few weeks later I received my draft notice. I did not appear for my physical. I continued to work at the camp engineering office. One of the nisei workers approached me and told me an administrator’s son was killed by the Japanese. The nisei worker suggested that I not work there anymore to ease the pain of his loss. I stopped working.

A few days later I was picked up early in the morning. There were 63 of us. The largest Selective Service trial on record. We hoped that the publicity of the trial would help in the return of our civil rights, release from camps and return to our homes, our neighborhood.

We, the 63, decided for a trial by a judge only. The idea was that with the war on, members selected for a jury would not be sympathetic to us. A big mistake. In his book Free to Die for Their Country, Eric Muller describes the presiding judge as a racist. Strike three. In the trial, failure to report for the draft was only considered. The fact that we were being drafted from a concentration camp was not brought up. Only that we had broken the Selective Service Act. We were found guilty and given a 3 year sentence to serve in a Federal Penitentiary.

The leaders of the Fair Play Committee were later arrested, found guilty of conspiracy to violate the Selective Service Act and sentenced to 4 years in the Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. They appealed the sentence and won. They served about 18 months. In 1947, President Truman pardoned all the Nisei draft resisters. All of us, the Fair Play Committee members and the resisters, now had our full citizenship back. The records of our imprisonment erased. We were now regular citizens.

We all returned to civilian life, going back to school or going to work, putting aside our thoughts of these experience. Except for Emi. Frank Emi gave talks before groups and at various universities telling the story of the Fair Play Committee and the draft resistance at Heart Mountain. News media and the Japanese American community gave little note and eventually swept the story “under the rug,” giving little mention of the resistance. We were written out of the Japanese American history. Our story of draft resistance to regain our civil rights buried and forgotten.

I continued my education and was studying for my master’s degree at UCLA when the Korean Conflict started. I was young enough and soon found myself drafted and in the Army. I personally know of five other Heart Mountain resisters who like myself later served. The age limit was 28 so only the youngest of the resisters were still eligible for the draft. We had our civil rights returned, our families were now out of the concentration camps. As we stated as our stand during the trial, give back our civil rights and release our families and we will gladly serve.

The story of the Fair Play Committee was seldom if ever mentioned in the vernacular papers, let alone the regular press. The exploits of the 442 were broadly and repeatedly publicized and rightly so. The Fair Play Committee was now a forbidden topic. Swept under the rug. Written out of history. The resisters, we were the bad guys.

Frank Chin

We now meet the third “Frank.” Frank Chin, a Chinese American, an outspoken playwright, novelist, and writer. Chin apparently discovered / uncovered the story of the Fair Play Committee and the Heart Mountain draft resisters and wrote in his typical manner about the Fair Play Committee and the resisters. Chin obtained copies of reports and documents on Heart Mountain, those that were written by the administrators. Chin published “The Organized Resistance” in the annual special edition of the Rafu Shimpo in December of 1981. Chin wrote a very in-detail, documented history of the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee.

With this story, Chin was instrumental in bringing to light the resister story. Chin’s exposé answered the question put forth by the younger Japanese Americans, “Why didn’t you resist?” We did resist but our actions were never told. Chin has supported and written much on the resister’s story.

Frank Abe

Now we meet our fourth “Frank,” Frank Abe. Frank had also wondered, “Why didn’t you resist?” When Abe learned about the resisters, he set out on a long 20-year plus journey that culminated in the famous documentary film Conscience and the Constitution. He spent many hours tracking down and interviewing the surviving resisters. Abe’s question for the Japanese Americans now is, “Why did you turn your back on those who resisted?”

We are now meeting in Seattle, Frank Abe’s present home town. Thank you all for being here and for your kind attention. Kokoro kara.

Thanks again to Tak Hoshizaki for sharing his remarks. He’s been quoted in a few books about the resistance, but we hope he continues to write about the FPC in his own words.

Stop the Fence at Tule Lake

Join the growing movement and sign the petition to Stop the Fence at Tule Lake. More than 500 people have now sent emails via the Change.org online petition sponsored by the Tule Lake Committee, urging the FAA to deny an 8-foot high fence around the local airport that is evidently used mostly for local crop-dusting planes.

Outline of proposed fence at Tulelake Airport
The outlines of the Tule Lake National Monument and of the Tulelake Municipal Airport are superimposed on a wartime photo of the Tule Lake Segregation Center. You can see how a fence around the airport would destroy the physical and emotional integrity of the site. Artwork by Evan Johnson.

Tule Lake is ground zero for the government and JACL program to segregate dissidents and so-called “troublemakers” inside America’s WW2 concentration camps. Conscience and the Constitution touches upon this. Tule Lake is the last great untold story in Japanese America. Several films about the Segregation Center are in the works. I urge the FAA to deny the fence and keep the landscape and horizon of the Tule Lake site unbroken, and protect the physical and historic integrity of the site for visitors and filmmakers.

Petition backer Evan Johnson questions claims that the fence is even needed for aviation. He writes, “I don’t get the motivation for the fence – which serves no realistic safety function. This airport is essentially the crop-duster operation, essentially serving one man.” Johnson also provides the following research:

  • Percentage of aircraft wildlife strikes that are deer strikes: 2
  • Number of deer strikes in California between 1982–2000: 13
  • Number of reported strikes of any wildlife anywhere in Modoc County: 0
  • Month during which most deer strikes occur: November
  • Time of day at which deer strikes are most likely: Dusk
  • Number of owners with registered aircraft at Tulelake airport: 3
  • Number of aircraft which they currently registered: 10
  • Number of those registered to Nick Macy: 8
  • Amount of money in farm subsidies paid by the USDA to Modoc County in 2010: $464,000
  • Amount one registered owner of a single plane at Tulelake airport received between 1995–2010: $298,792
  • Estimated average cost to build 16,000 feet of 8′ chain link fence: $303,840
  • To build that fence topped with barbed wire: $343,840
  • Number of times per day the FAA recommends walking an airport fence circumference for inspection: 1
  • Number of employees at the Tulelake airport who will be doing this: 0

So please sign the petition at Change.org. Here again is the link. Also, go the Facebook page for “Stop the Fence at Tule Lake” and LIKE it. Thanks.

Revisiting “Farewell to Manzanar” and the revolt against the JACL

The screening and discussion of Farewell to Manzanar this Friday night at the Japanese American National Museum annual conference in Seattle provides an opportunity to share these newly-rediscovered photographs taken by photographer Nancy Wong.

rioters in truck
Mako, Lawson Inada, Frank Chin, and extras recruited from the Bay Area Asian community prepare to recreate the Manzanar Riot for the 1976 NBC/Universal film, FAREWELL TO MANZANAR. Photo by Nancy Wong.

Nancy shot these on location on the grounds of the former Santa Rita state prison in the summer of 1975 while we were assembled to recreate the Manzanar Riot of December 6, 1942. Mako played “Sam Fukimoto,” the character based on Harry Ueno, the fiery leader of the Kitchen Workers Union whose arrest for the beating of Los Angeles JACL leader Fred Tayama, played in the film by myself as “Frank Nishi,” sparked the Manzanar Riot.

The AIIIEEEEE boys with one actor
Three of the editors of the groundbreaking literary anthology AIIIEEEEE! with the brother of the fourth, posing on location for FAREWELL TO MANZANAR: (from left) Lawson Inada, Frank Chin, Shawn Wong, and Michael Paul Chan, who went on to perform in the cast of The Closer. Photo by Nancy Wong.

In my youthful enthusiasm I did not know that first-time film actors should not try rewriting their own lines, but that’s what I did the night before we shot the big mess hall confrontation with Mako/Sam Fukimoto/Harry Ueno — much to the dismay of scene partner Seth Sakai, whom I’d failed to notify and who cursed me after our scene and hurled his gloves in my direction, to the applause of the hundreds of extras in the scene. I have to thank director John Korty for allowing me to make the change. Among the extras were writers Toshio Mori and Shawn Wong.

But I felt compelled to make the scene more specific reading this seminal essay by Art Hansen and David Hacker that reconstructs the actual events in “The Manzanar Riot: An Ethnic Perspective” [4MB], which had recently appeared in the fall 1974 issue of Amerasia Journal.

The piece reveals that one of the fundamental causes of the Manzanar Riot was not, as simplified in the film by Korty, simply a grumbling over sugar stolen from the mess hall. It was more, as mentioned in Conscience and told more fully in Jeanne Houston’s book,  a revolt against the power conferred by the government and the camp administration to the Japanese American Citizens League. As documented in Art and David’s essay, Fred Tayama and internee security chief Kiyoshi Higashi had returned the day before from an emergency meeting of the JACL in Salt Lake City attended by two delegates from each of the ten camps. In that meeting National JACL, enacting its own policies without any ratification or popular vote of the people, resolved to urge the U.S. government to reinstate Selective Service for the Nisei as a means of asserting their U.S. citizenship and proving their loyalty. As Hansen and Hacker wrote: “For the internees — Issei, Kibei, and Nisei — the time had come when something had to be done to prevent the corrosive effects of the JACLers … The events of December 6 were but a logical culmination of developments originating with the administration’s decision to bypass the community’s natural Issei leadership to deal with its own artificially erected JACL hierarchy and to embark on a program of Americanization at the expense of Japanese ethnicity.”

Watch that scene in the film in this light. The revolt against the JACL prefigured the resistance at Heart Mountain and other camps that occurred a year later, when the JACL plea for a Nisei draft was finally granted.

In a somewhat related aside, Frank Chin now claims that Bay Area radical activist and early Black Panther Richard Aoki — recently named as an FBI informant, a charge that’s also been disputed — was there with us on location. I never knew Aoki, but in an email Frank writes, “Remember the first day at Santa Rita? There was a fattish fella in a mustache and tee shirt passing out lemonade. That was Richard Aoki.” He later speculates, “Why was Richard Aoki at the Santa Rita FAREWELL TO MANZANAR shoot? … Aoki might have been getting acquainted with Yellow actors in the parts of camp activists and victims.” Or, maybe he was just there to ladle out refreshments. We may never know.

Resisters and redress at the Japanese American National Museum annual conference

Japanese American National Museum conference logoJapanese America comes to Seattle this weekend for the JA National Museum annual conference at the Seattle Sheraton, commemorating the 25th anniversary of winning redress for the camps.

Heart Mountain resister Tak Hoshizaki speaks Saturday at 2:00 pm on a panel called “Standing on Principle.” I’ll be there Friday sharing the Conscience DVD at a Marketplace exhibit table. I’m also speaking on a panel called the  “Tangled Routes to Japanese American Redress” — a title you’ll hear me dispute — and looking forward to reuniting with Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston for a Friday evening screening of Farewell to Manzanar, which the Museum recently freed from the clutches of Universal Studios for a long-overdue release on DVD. More on that in our next post.

newspaper article: "An Appeal for Action"
“An Appeal for Action” was the original manifesto of the Seattle Evacuation Redress Committee. Written by Issei intellectual Shosuke Sasaki, it was mailed along with an audiocassette of Shosuke reading it to every chapter of the JACL in the mid-1970s, before we got it published as an op-ed in the Sunday Seattle Times as an advancer to the very first Day of Remembrance.

For the redress panel Friday we will welcome conferees to the region that, in our humble opinion, saved the redress campaign before it ever got off the ground. I will share the story of how the Seattle Evacuation Redress Committee, with the advice and experience of writer Frank Chin, delivered the key strategy for reframing the issue after an AP story quoted California Senator S.I. Hayakawa calling the JACL’s resolution for redress “ridiculous,” and saying “The relocation was perfectly understandable … even the JACL supported it at the time.”The Wall Street Journal backed him up with an editorial titled, “Guilt Mongering.”

You could feel the air leading out of the redress balloon, until Seattle created and staged the first “Day of Remembrance” on Nov. 25, 1978, as a means of leveraging the media to tell our story and encouraging the local community to “remember the camps/stand for redress with your family.” At Friday’s panel we’ll talk about the turnout of 2,000 people — the largest single gathering of Japanese Americans since, well, World War II — that made national news and rallied our community behind our shared experience of incarceration and injustice.

photo of crowd
Despite the misleading caption, the first-ever Day of Remembrance was a joyous reunion and a taking-back of our shared history, with the not-too-subtle subtext of showing people like S.I. Hayakawa that Japanese Americans rejected any notion that “relocation was perfectly understandable.” Seattle Times photo by Pete LIddell.

Order DVD for college libraries now

Thanks to all at the AAAS conference who said they would order our educational edition DVD through their college libraries. Now is the time to pick up this valuable teaching resource for your classrooms and students with fund balance remaining in the current school year. To order is simple, just send a purchase order to Kate Ampel at Transit Media at [email protected], or ring her up at (800) 343-5540, and she’ll do the rest. And please leave a comment if you have already done so!

“Allegiance” developmental lab concludes

Best wishes to actor George Takei and the cast, creatives, and crew of the musical Allegiance, on the private performance today near Times Square to present the results of their three-week developmental lab to industry reps and investors. A successful production, they hope next year, holds the promise of drawing thousands of new eyes to the story of the draft resistance at Heart Mountain and the clash of ideas between cooperation and resistance.

New 42nd Street StudiosFor Japanese Americans the thing to watch will be the “book,” or the script of the show that connects the songs. Rewrites are reported through Twitter to be part of the lab. The final book will be scrutinized by those whose history would be appropriated for the stage: the Heart Mountain resisters, the Nisei war veterans, and the Japanese American Citizens League as embodied in the show by the real-life Mike Masaoka. They are among those who look for rewrites to cure some of the fundamental script issues that have been identified here and elsewhere. But for now, break a leg.

Cinema Asian America interview – ‘Conscience and the Constitution:’ Talking with Frank Abe

In support of our film being featured on Comcast XFINITY video-on-demand this month, Cinema Asian America curator Chi-hui Yang conducted this online interview for their TV Blog. I told him his questions were among the most thoughtful I’d ever been posed.  See what you think:

Interview: ‘Conscience and the Constitution’: Talking with Frank Abe

by Chi-hui Yang | May 2, 2013 at 2:44 AM

Cinema Asian America May lineupThe history of Japanese American internment is a complex one and reveals many deep contradiction and divisions both within America, and more specifically, the Japanese American community. You chose to focus on the latter in “Conscience and the Constitution” noting that in 1944, the draft resisters at the Heart Mountain Relocation Camp in Wyoming “served two years in prison, and for the next fifty were written out of the popular history of Japanese America.” What were the stakes for you as a journalist, and a Japanese American when you decided to dig deep into this contested history?

FA: I never bought into the idea that Japanese America’s only response to this massive violation of constitutional rights was passive resignation – shikatagai, Japanese for “it can’t be helped” – or patriotic self-sacrifice as embodied by the Nisei soldiers and go for broke! But as a baby boomer born after the camps, if you asked, “gee, why didn’t you guys contest this?” you’d get a pat on the head and told that “you weren’t there, times were different, you can’t judge us with your Berkeley civil-rights activism of the Sixties.”

So when I first learned of the organized resistance at Heart Mountain, which incidentally was my father’s camp, I felt like I’d found a missing link. And the more we scripted out the story, the more we could see that it would shift the paradigm of Japanese American history and show that besides cooperation and collaboration, there was protest and resistance.

Here was a classic example of civil disobedience in the American 20th century, but it threatened the party line and the popular narrative of victimization. That made it critical to me as a journalist that we get the story right and tell it fairly, to document an unassailable case, and to get it into the marketplace with the legitimacy conferred by a presenter like PBS. It must have worked because none of the dismissive “old guard” really pushed back – well, maybe one, and he can be seen near the end of the film.

Most meaningful to me was that the film provided the historical context and framework through which the children of the resisters could finally understand what their fathers and mothers did. Many of these people my age had gone through life feeling vaguely uneasy about their fathers’ time in a federal penitentiary. When they saw that there was no community backlash to the film, and instead a large audience for the recovery of this untold story, they could see that their fathers were in fact principled people who acted in the best American tradition.

You’ve said that this film in many ways, would have been very difficult to make before the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, in which the US government gave reparations to Japanese Americans who were interned during WWII. Why?

FA: Because without an accepted foundation of verified fact, anything we put out there would have been too easily dismissed as opinion or hearsay. I was jolted into action to help kick-start the redress campaign when writer Frank Chin literally came to my door and said, “If you lose Japanese American history, you can kiss Japanese American art goodbye.” At that time in 1978 every attempt to raise the issue of injustice in the newspaper or on the radio was greeted with letters to the editor and callers on the air who would snarl, “yeah, but don’t forget these guys bombed Pearl Harbor,” or “don’t forget they were put in camp for their own protection.” Whenever Frank Emi spoke in classrooms he had to bring armloads of books and court cases to first prove the case against the camps before he could begin to talk about the Fair Play Committee. Frank Chin showed us that by staging events like the first Days of Remembrance in Seattle and Portland, we could use the media to get across the simple message that the camps were wrong, and that paved the way for the first redress bills in Congress.

While pursuing redress over the next ten years, we had to show a united front with the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) and others. We couldn’t muddy the argument by bringing up the cooperation of JACL leaders in the eviction from the West Coast and administration of the camps, or the resistance to the draft at Heart Mountain and other camps. Once we held the government accountable for redress in 1988, we were freed to turn to holding our own leaders accountable, a movement that climaxed with the events seen at the end of Conscience.

And are there still lingering histories of the internment which have not been told which future generations of filmmakers should uncover?

FA: It’s harder now with each passing year, but there needs to be an authoritative study of the false distinctions between loyalty and disloyalty that were forced upon us by the wartime government and internalized by our own community – the no-no’s, the renunciants and the expatriates. Whether by intent or incompetence, these expressions of dissent were driven by administrators who effectively created disloyalty, anger and alienation through the implementation of loyalty oaths and segregation of families based upon their answers.

“Conscience and the Constitution” was made more than a decade ago and you’ve remained very active in screening it and making it available in classrooms. How can we connect up the history you examine in the film, with current conversations and politics in the US?

FA: The unjust eviction and incarceration of Japanese Americans based solely on their race is the single largest precedent that inhibits the power of the federal executive to profile populations on the basis of race, ethnicity and religion. We saw that in play right after 9/11, when the knee-jerk hostility and calls for roundup of Arab Americans were tempered by the acknowledgment that America made this mistake after Pearl Harbor. As historian Eric Muller put it, our memory is a precious resource in the fight against racism and scapegoating, and it’s one to which we bear special witness.

On the cultural scene, the specific story we frame of the wartime JACL’s promotion of military service and its suppression of the Heart Mountain draft resistance has found unexpected life in actor George Takei’s legacy project, a musical called Allegiance. The show premiered last fall in San Diego with aspirations for a Broadway run, and while there are certain issues with the script, which is still in development, it has certainly kept this story in front of a national audience.

You’ve been deeply involved in Asian American culture and politics for more than three decades, as a journalist covering the community, as a founding member of the Asian American Theater Company, and as a filmmaker. What was the starting point for you and what excites you about Asian America today?

FA: Coming out of college my imagination was captured by the AIIIEEEEE! Boys: the band of young writers who first proclaimed there was such a thing as an Asian American sensibility and who proved it by recovering and republishing the works of John Okada, Louis Chu and others. It was an imaginative home I never knew I had, and the works of fiction, poetry, and theater that were created were rooted in our shared history and the excitement of rediscovering a buried past.

Today I can get annoyed by the fashionable notion in some places that we’ve moved past history, past the camps, that it’s all been said and done and we’ve moved on. Then I can get excited by the emergence of former editor Naomi Hirahara as a celebrated mystery writer who can slip in references to the Fair Play Committee; or more recently the Kaya Press translation of Lament in the Night, a gritty 1925 novella written in Japanese by an Issei who authentically captures the back alleys and bathhouses of LA’s Little Tokyo before the war in a way we’ve never seen before.

What are you working on now?

FA: We’re marketing a two-disc special edition DVD of Conscience with outtakes, extensions of the interviews and new featurettes, because there was so much great material we couldn’t fit into the hour-long film. It’s a useful resource for students to enable research of the primary interviews along with the rich database of documents we put online at PBS.org/Conscience . Next is an anthology of essays that examines the postwar resettlement of Japanese America and the world into which the resisters were thrust after serving their two years in prison. That’s another lingering history that’s not been well examined, and we’ll investigate it through the lens of writer John Okada and his foundational novel, “No-No Boy.”

Watch our film on Comcast video-on-demand through month of May

Comcast XFINITY logoWe’ve just learned that our film has been selected for national distribution through Comcast XFINITY’s video-on-demand service. Thanks to Chi-hui Yang, curator of the “Cinema Asian America” series, Comcast digital cable subscribers with On-Demand in select TV markets can watch Conscience and the Constitution for just $1.99 per view.

If you haven’t already seen Conscience, this is a limited opportunity, from today through May 31, to see it at home for a nominal fee. Please share the news with friends. Read more in the news release, with a list below of the TV markets where you can “demand” our film:

Conscience and the Constitution carried nationwide in May on Comcast video-on-demand

Award-winning documentary featured in “Cinema Asian America” series on Comcast XFINITY

To mark Asian Pacific American Heritage Month this May, XFINITY On Demand ‘s Cinema Asian America presents Frank Abe’s landmark documentary, Conscience and the Constitution.

Originally released in 2000, the film has become a vital part of the nation’s on-going conversation about race, citizenship and civil liberties – complex and fraught dynamics that have become even more urgent since September 11, 2001.

“With video-on-demand and Comcast’s national presence we can reach more viewers and give them a chance to learn more about the incarceration, at a nominal cost,” said Abe. “Thanks to series curator Chi-hui Yang for including our film among so many other outstanding offerings.”

From May 1 through May 31, Conscience and the Constitution is available to all Comcast digital cable subscribers with On-Demand for $1.99 per view.

Conscience and the Constitution examines the history of mass incarceration of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans into internment camps during WWII, the majority of them US citizens. The film focuses on a group of 85 internees, who refused to be drafted to fight for the US military – an act of protest that resulted, not only in the largest trial for draft resistance in U.S. history, but also in ideological rifts within the Japanese American community that persist even today.

At a time when community leaders advocated for Japanese Americans to sign up for the armed forces to prove their loyalty to the U.S., the resisters refused to do so, knowing that they and their families had been stripped of their civil rights and incarcerated, solely on the basis of their race. The film examines the deep schisms that opened in the Japanese American community during the incarceration and which persist today.

That story also informs the plot of the new musical, Allegiance, which premiered last fall in San Diego and is currently back in development in a workshop lab in New York. “This cablecast of Conscience is timely, as audiences who’ve seen or heard about the musical can now check out the source material for themselves,” said Abe.

“Cinema Asian America” is the groundbreaking video-on-demand offering on Comcast featuring Asian American and Asian films and videos in a monthly, thematically-programmed format. The curated series brings together award-winning films fresh from the film festival circuit and classics which beg to be revisited.

To find Conscience and the Constitution through the Comcast digital cable menu, viewers should click on the “On Demand” button, then look under the “Movies” folder and select the “Movie Collections” subfolder to find “Cinema Asian America.”

Conscience and the Constitution is also available as a Two-Disc Collector’s Edition DVD, which can be ordered online for home use for $29.95 plus shipping by visiting Resisters.com/orders. For institutional rates, schools and libraries should contact Transit Media at www.transitmedia.net or (800) 343-5540.

Learn more about the film at Resisters.com, and see sample clips from the film at YouTube.com/ConscienceDVD.

Comcast TV Markets

Birmingham, AL
Dothan, AL

Huntsville, AL
Little Rock, AR

Tucson, AZ

Fresno, CA
Sacramento, CA
San Francisco, CA
Santa Barbara, CA

Colorado Springs, CO
Denver, CO

Hartford, CT

Washington DC

Ft. Myers, FL

Jacksonville, FL
Miami, FL
Orlando, FL
Panama City, FL
Pensacola, FL
Tallahassee, FL
Tampa, FL
West Palm Beach, FL

Atlanta, GA
Augusta, GA
Savannah, GA

Chicago, IL
Champaign, IL
Peoria, IL
Rockford, IL

Ft. Wayne, IN
Indianapolis, IN
South Bend, IN

Charleston, KY
Louisville, KY
Paducah, KY

Monroe, LA
New Orleans, LA
Shreveport, LA

Boston, MA
Springfield, MA

Detroit, MI

Kansas City, MO

Baltimore, MD
Salisbury, MD

Minneapolis, MN

Columbus, MS
Hattiesburg, MS
Jackson, MS

Albuquerque, NM

New York, NY

Youngstown, OH

Portland, OR

Harrisburg, PA
Johnstown, PA
Philadelphia, PA
Pittsburgh, PA
Wilkes-Barre, PA

Charleston, SC

Chattanooga, TN
Knoxville, TN
Memphis, TN
Nashville, TN
Tri-Cities, TN

El Paso, TX
Houston, TX

Salt Lake City, UT

Richmond, VA
Roanoke, VA

Seattle, WA
Spokane, WA

Wheeling, WV

The history and literature of Japanese American resistance to wartime incarceration