Two new law school journal articles examine the Japanese American draft cases.

The most recent is by Seattle University Law Professor Lorraine Bannai. Its publication in the Seattle Journal for Social Justice is being marked with a Day of Remembrance event, “Honoring Courage: Remembering the Japanese American Internment” on Wednesday, February 15, at 5:00 p.m. in the second floor gallery of Sullivan Hall, 901 12th Avenue. The event is co-sponsored by the school’s Asian Pacific Islander Law Student Association. It’s free and open to the public.

“I’ve written an article, focusing on Fred Korematsu, Gene Akutsu, and Yosh Kuromiya for their resistance to the WWII internment. I drew from the Conscience and the Constitution website and film and am grateful for all of your work.

“To launch the issue of the Seattle Journal for Social Justice that the article will appear in, Seattle U. is hosting the event described in the attached. Gene will be speaking at the event. We very much would like to have members of the Japanese American community here to recognize the courage of those who were interned.

“Again, thank you for your work on the resisters’ cause, upon which I could draw.”
— Lori Bannai

The other article was published by our good friend Professor Eric Muller, in the Spring 2005 edition of Law and Contemporary Problems, a quarterly published by the Duke University School of Law. Never short for words, Eric is Special Editor of the entire issue devoted to “Judgments Judged and Wrongs Remembered: Examining the Japanese American Civil Liberties Cases On Their Sixtieth Anniversary.” The entire issue is worth reading and is posted online.

Eric’s article,”A Penny for Their Thoughts: Draft Resistance at the Poston Relocation Center,” adds to our knowledge of the inner workings of the Poston resistance and the different sentences handed to three different groups of Poston resisters, with exhaustive research into Richard Nishimoto’s diary, Community Analysis reports and letters from the project attorney.

My review of Frank Chin’s book on the resistance, Born in the USA, is now published in the special “A Tribute to Miné Okubo” issue of Amerasia Journal, Volume 30:2, 2004. It is available for $13 per issue plus tax and $4 handling from: UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press, 3230 Campbell Hall, Box 951546, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1546. For more information, call (310) 825-2968, e-mail [email protected] or visit the center’s Web site.

By special permission, you can also read it here:

A story told in Born in the USA has journalists James Omura and Larry Tajiri prowling the hills of pre-war San Francisco late at night, dreaming about which of them would write “The Great Nisei Novel.” It would be an epic that spanned the immigration of their Issei parents and the appearance of the second-generation Nisei as a new breed of American.

Little did they know how war with Japan would soon interrupt that social progress and place them on opposite sides of Japanese America’s response to expulsion and incarceration: whether to cooperate or resist.

Read the rest of the review. I would love to hear your response to the review or the book itself. Just use the Contact Us link above or leave a Comment below.