We are learning more about Sam Horino, one of the seven leaders of the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee. A nephew of his contacted us from Chicago, uncertain as to whether it was his uncle featured in this April 6, 1942, story that Time Magazine has put online, “Moving Day for Mr. Nisei” (now requires subscription).

Son Isamu Horino, 26, is a tough, wiry Nisei boy with a shock of unkempt hair and a stubborn jaw. He never did like the way white citizens treated him. (But he went to school in Japan for a while, did not like the way yellow men treated him either.) Rebel Isamu decided a few years ago to make a lot of money just to prove he was “as damn good as a white.”

Said Isamu: “I decided if I was going to be a bastard, I’d be a first-class bastard. . . . I figured I could beat a big bunch of white gardeners out of their business. I did. I acted just like a white man, but I did it better, and my gardens are the best in town.” Isamu paid more than $1,000 in income taxes this year; owned four trucks, a half-dozen power-mowers; had three full-time assistants—two Japs and a Mexican; hired white college boys for part-time work. Said Isamu Horino: “Why should we support anything in this country with a whole heart? I don’t mean any of us give a damn about Japan. We hope they get licked. But . . . nobody ever let us become a real part of this country. . . . If they want to take away all we’ve got and dump us out in the desert, we’ve got no choice. But we don’t like it. . . . And we’re expected to buy bonds, too. Not me!”

Yes, that’s the voice of Sam Horino, and what the article fails to mention is how when soldiers showed up at his home in Hollywood to force him out, he refused to comply and made them carry him out in their arms. That’s the spirit of resistance that led Sam to later lead the Constitutional challenge to incarceration inside Heart Mountain, alongside Frank Emi, Kiyoshi Okamoto, Paul Nakadate, Guntaro Kubota, Min Tamesa, and treasurer Ben Wakaye.

Filmmaker Curtis Choy has just posted a shorter 2:38 excerpt from his online film Watada, Resister. This one he calls “Watada’s epiphany” and in it Heart Mountain resistance leader Frank Emi asks 1st. Lt. Ehren Watada why he enlisted in the first place.

Undaunted by an initial mistrial, the Army on Friday refiled charges against Watada. See the Seattle Times and Seattle P-I coverage of this development.

The case of Army 1st Lt. Ehren Watada, who has refused deployment to Iraq in principled protest against what he believes is an illegal war of occupation, has led many to compare his stand to that of the WW2 Nisei draft resisters.

Watada himself made the link in his comments to Ben Hamamoto of the Nichi Bei Times:

As a Japanese American, Watada sees historical parallels between himself and those who resisted the World War II incarceration. “(The resisters) said ‘we’re Japanese American’ and we are part of this country no matter what the president says. They faced ostracization and imprisonment, but it was shown many years later that they were correct… What I’m doing is no different.”

The parallel is not precise. The Heart Mountain resisters did not object to fighting in WW2, only to the unconstitutionality of the forced incarceration of themselves and their families. But as I talked this week with John Iwasaki when he called from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, it hit me that the resisters and Lt. Watada do share this one similarity: both put themselves on the line to object to actions by their government. Iwasaki was localizing a wire story, “Japanese Americans criticize Watada,” reporting a joint statement from 9 Japanese American veterans groups to publicly denounce Watada for disrespecting “a legacy of military service by Japanese American soldiers dating back to World War II.”

“No Japanese Americans did anything like that, and that is why Japanese Americans are so upset,” (Robert) Wada said, (a charter president of the Japanese American Korean War Veterans). “He is doing something that has never been done by Japanese Americans.”

That’s not exactly the case, said Seattle resident Frank Abe. He produced “Conscience and the Constitution,” a documentary about Japanese Americans who resisted the World War II draft because they and their families were held in internment camps for years after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

Wada is “overlooking the fact that 315 Japanese Americans in World War II resisted the draft as a means of protesting the forced incarceration of their families,” Abe said Wednesday.

Read the full article in the Seattle P-I.

The resisters’ readers theater presentation, “A Divided Community,” will be presented on Saturday, March 11, 2006, at 2:00 p.m., at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in Los Angeles.

See the flyer which makes nice use of Yosh Kuromiya’s original water color sketch of Heart Mountain. As before, three of the original resisters from the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee members will take part in the staged reading. Yosh Kuromiya, Frank Emi, and Mits Koshiyama, in the center of the photo below, will be joined by WW2 veteran Paul Tsuneishi (far left) and actors Momo Yashima (far right) and Mike Hagiwara.

The program will be repeated at UCLA on May 2, 2006, at Kinsey Pavilion.