Short bio of Producer Frank Abe

Short biography of Producer/Director FRANK ABE

For nearly two decades Frank Abe has been instrumental in recovering the story of the largest organized resistance to the WW2 incarceration of Japanese Americans.

He helped produce the first "Day of Remembrance" media events that publicly dramatized the campaign for redress for America's wartime concentration camps. He helped found the Asian American Theater Workshop in San Francisco, and was featured as a concentration camp leader in the NBC/Universal TV-movie, Farewell to Manzanar.

As a broadcast journalist, Abe was an award-winning reporter for KIRO Newsradio in Seattle, serving as senior reporter covering criminal justice and government at the King County Courthouse and producing a weekly series on writers of color, "Other Voices." He has been honored as a founder of the Seattle chapter of the Asian American Journalists Association and served as national vice-president for broadcast.

Abe served as Director of Communications for then-King County Executive Gary Locke starting in 1994, later performing the same duty for the Metropolitan King County Council and currently for King County Executive Dow Constantine.

Full biography of Producer/Director FRANK ABE

Frank Abe, a third-generation Japanese American, grew up being told that his parents’ generation had passively submitted to the wholesale denial of their rights during World War II in order to prove their loyalty.

The early question of his generation, "Why didn’t you resist?," was usually answered by a pat on the head and an admonition against applying the values of today to events of the past.

Later as a journalist, Abe was astonished to learn that the area where he grew up, the Santa Clara Valley in Northern California, was once the home of many who later resisted the draft at Heart Mountain. Any mention of an organized resistance had been left out of the books he had read by the unofficial keepers of Japanese American history.

Feeling he had been misled, Abe sought out stories of the resisters and felt compelled to share them. He wrote an article for a community paper reclaiming the resistance as part of his heritage. Thus began the ten-year journey to the film Conscience and the Constitution.

After interviewing as many of the survivors of the resistance at Heart Mountain as he could, and investigating their stories, Abe feels the question for Japanese Americans is not "Why didn’t you resist," but "Why did you turn your backs on those who resisted?"

Abe, a former reporter for KIRO Newsradio 71 in Seattle, Washington, won numerous awards during his reporting career. He was honored as a founder of the Seattle chapter of the Asian American Journalists Association and served as National Vice-President for Broadcast.

From 1994 to 1997, Abe was Communications Director and spokesman for then-King County Executive Gary Locke, now Ambassador to China. Abe served as New Media Executive Producer for Locke’s successor, County Executive Ron Sims, and for the King County Dept. of Transportation under Sims. Abe moved to the Metropolitan King County Council in 2002 as Communications Director for the Council and as Executive Producer of the County’s government access channel, King County Television. He returned to the executive branch in 2009 as Communications Director for the current King County Executive, Dow Constantine.

For the campaign to redress the wrongs of the camps, Abe helped create and produce the first "Days of Remembrance" in Seattle and Portland in 1978 and 1979. To continue the campaign, he helped form the National Council for Japanese American Redress in Seattle in 1979, which lobbied for a redress bill and later sued the government for reparations.

With the American Friends Service Committee he helped direct a series of symposiums, "Japanese America: Contemporary Perspectives on the Internment." The collective efforts of Abe and others built the momentum that led years later to the passage of the federal Civil Liberties Act of 1988.

With a B.A. in theater directing from the University of California at Santa Cruz and training as an actor with the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, Abe (with Frank Chin) was a founding member of the Asian American Theater Workshop (now Theater Company) in San Francisco. He was featured as a concentration camp leader in John Korty’s 1976 NBC-TV movie Farewell to Manzanar.

Abe’s own father was incarcerated at Heart Mountain. Only after making this film did he learn that his father donated $2 to the Fair Play Committee and subscribed to the Rocky Shimpo newspaper where James Omura’s editorials appeared.

Updated: May 31, 2011