DISSENTERS IN A DIVIDED COMMUNITY

Remarks by Frank Abe for “Lesser Known Stories of the Internment: Dissidence: Resister and Renunciants”

NOTICE TO ALL: California Conference on the Internment of Japanese Americans

Radisson Miyako Hotel, San Francisco
Thursday, June 2, 2005

Our topic today is Dissidence. This is a meaty topic because history has shown that Japanese America has zero tolerance for dissent: then and now. But thanks in part to Civil Liberties programs at the federal and state levels, the stories of the resisters and renunciants are finally being restored to their proper place in history.

The title for our panel is Lesser Known Stories of the Internment. If these are Lesser Known Stories, what then is the Best Known Story?

That’s easy. It’s the JACL master narrative, the one that says our response to this massive violation of 20th century civil rights was either passive resignation – shikataganai, it can’t be helped – or patriotic self-sacrifice – Go For Broke, spill your blood to prove your loyalty.

That word loyalty again. JACL branded those who did not demonstrate absolute loyalty as criminals or traitors. A few quick hits:

• JACL did not believe in bringing test cases to court, so when Min Yasui violated the military curfew to bring a test case, Field Executive Mike Masaoka denounced him as a “self-styled martyr.”
  
  
• Just after the Manzanar Riot on December 7, 1942, Masaoka spelled out JACL’s stand on segregation in a confidential memo to the War Relocation Authority:

  “To us, there is no question that immediate and summary action must be taken in order to assure those who are loyal to this country that un-American activities and utterances will not be tolerated by this government.

  We believe that immediate action should be taken whereby, without warning or hearing, known agitators and troublemakers are moved out of the relocation centers and placed in special camps of their own …

  The second step is, we believe, to invite all persons, citizens and aliens alike, who desire repatriation to Japan either as exchange prisoners or deportees after the war, to declare their intentions in writing. These people should be moved to another special camp reserved just for people like themselves. We do not feel that they should be arbitrarily placed in the same camp as the criminals who are to be segregated in the initial movement … While this group may not cause trouble to the government, their very presence and attitude within the centers contribute to a general feeling of antagonism and ill will …

  We believe, too, that American citizens of Japanese ancestry of unquestioned loyalty should be trained in investigative methods and that these people should be delegated with the jobs of cooperating with the government in “searching” out those who are pro-Japan in their sentiments or who are troublemakers. There is no question that those with Japanese characteristics, if they can be made available, will be able to discover many facts which a non-Japanese might not be able to.

  We are not suggesting a reign of terror or a witch hunt. We are merely calling for the same type of specialized investigation to prevent sabotage and espionage within the centers as that which is carried on on the outside.”

• When draft resistance grew at Heart Mountain, the camp newspaper run by the JACL’s Nobu Kawai labeled the boys as “agitators, troublemakers, rabble-rousers, slackers, whimpering weaklings.”
  
  
• When journalist James Omura editorialized in favor of organized resistance, JACL National Director Sab Kido urged the FBI to charge him with sedition.
  
  
• And when the Heart Mountain resisters went to trial, Larry Tajiri in the Pacific Citizen urged them to rethink:

  “A final effort should be made to deter this group from proceeding with an action which can result only in permanently stigmatizing them as draft dodgers. The road they are taking leads only to final ostracism from American society.”

You get the idea. This is the price one pays for dissent in Japanese America: name-calling and slander. You get called pro-Japan, which is understood to be a very bad thing.

Roger Daniels says in our film:

“It’s very important who writes history. History is usually written by the winners, and in the short term the JACL people, or people who believe in that point of view, the people who wanted to improve the image of the Japanese American people, in the short run they controlled the history. That’s obviously no longer the case.”

Or is it?

Shortly after we announced the start of production on our film, George Yoshinaga had this to say in his “Horse’s Mouth” column in the Rafu Shimpo newspaper of September 1992:

“While many words have been written in defense of the draft resisters, perhaps we should take a closer look at some of them…. Could it be that many of them were “pro-Japan?”

He goes on to talk about the Japanese language school in Mountain View, indoctrination in “emperor worship,” and the singing of “Kimigayo,” the Japanese national anthem.

“I think this is an area which should be examined by those who want to research the draft resisters of Heart Mountain. This matter of some Japanese Americans being “pro-Japan” seemed to be a hush-hush issue over the years but since some of these people are now trying to gain hero status, it should be brought out into the open.”

When we started on our film, we set a goal of shifting the paradigm of Japanese American history, to recognize a hidden legacy of resistance alongside the stories of submission to authority and patriotic self-sacrifice.

Evidence of that change is our presence here today, inside the walls instead of pressing our noses in from the outside.

For that, I give much of the credit to these Civil Liberties funds. These programs, both the federal program in 1997 and the state program starting in 1998, could have become instruments for the perpetuation of the master narrative.

Such a concern was not without reason. During the first stages of the redress campaign, Mike Masaoka and Bill Hosokawa had lobbied against individual payments. They favored community block grants. That way they argued the money wouldn’t be wasted. But many feared it was a means for JACL to control the funds.

In fact, a prominent JACL’er, the late Fred Hirasuna of Fresno, became furious when his project to document the history of the JACL Legislative Education Committee did not get more than $25,000. It really galled him to learn that a documentary about the draft resisters got the biggest possible grant. He said this in a Letter to the Editor in the Nichi Bei Times, August 1997:

“We question some of the grants disbursed by the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund… an explanation is needed as to the standards used to make these grants…. We understand that among these grants, $100,000 was given to Frank Abe. What kind of criteria were applied to his proposal? What is his proposal?”

In the Fresno JACL Newsletter, April 1998, he wrote:

“Both Frank Abe and Frank Chin (a Chinese American) place great blame on JACL and Japanese Americans for not asserting our constitutional rights…. My answer: Both Abe and Chin were very young in 1942, Abe was not even born. They, from the luxury of 20/20 hindsight, cannot picture the conditions and pressures that faced us, especially those of us who had family responsibilities … Both you, Frank Abe and Frank Chin, as you both admit, are very anti-JACL. I think there must have been something, sometime, somewhere, where JACL, or members of JACL, did not support your views or projects which you proposed.”

Fred’s message was this: if we have public dollars, they should be earmarked for the most popular narrative, the JACL model minority, Go For Broke narrative, not for the stories of dissenters who were in the minority.

Fortunately, the original Civil Liberties board, chaired by attorney Dale Minami, drew clear guidelines that relied on the quality of proposals and gave preference to those that told “Lesser Known Stories.”

That was huge. Because consider this: when we started on our project, there was no film, no book, that gave the full story of the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee. Nothing on the renunciants since the UC Berkeley study published as The Spoilage and Michi Weglyn’s Years of Infamy.

There were mentions here and there, footnotes and anecdotes. But nothing for students to sink their teeth into and learn from.

And that was just seven years ago. And since then, really in the last five years, since 2000, we’ve had three or more films on the subject, several books including Eric Muller’s and Frank Chin’s, and support for new research by Barbara Takei. All supported by various Civil Liberties funds.

It wasn’t just the money. It was also the legitimacy the funding conferred in the eyes of a big part of the audience. It showed we weren’t wild-eyed radicals.

Civil liberties funding helped break the hold of JACL and the Nisei Vets in the telling of our story.

Interestingly enough, ever since our film came out, in concert with all the other books and films, the critics went silent.

I encourage you to go see the Friday night event with Heart Mountain resisters Frank Emi, Yosh Kuromiya and Mits Koshiyama. Look at the title of that: “A Divided Community.”

Ours is indeed A Divided Community. But that’s OK. I get annoyed, whenever this topic comes up, with people who keep saying we need “healing” and “reconciliation,” as if there has to be a happy ending somewhere, or so that we can “put this behind us.”

Some old wounds need to be attended to. The scab needs to be picked at. I, for one, want to keep this story in front of us, not behind.

If we’re A Divided Community that means there’s a place for dissent, and for people like Frank Emi, Hank Naito, and Hiroshi Kashiwagi.

We’re done with playing the model minority. We no longer need to pretend to be a monolithic community with a single master narrative, a single face we present to the public.

Civil liberties funding has been critical to that work, of everyone here on this panel.

For my part, Conscience and the Constitution continues to be screened in a variety of contexts by humanities forums, student activists, and arts advocates. We continue to maintain two websites at PBS Online and Resisters.com. Excerpts from the raw interviews are scheduled for streaming online by Tom Ikeda’s Densho Project. In the works is a DVD of Conscience with extra features, including extended stories from the Fair Play Committee and journalist James Omura, a featurette on the JACL public apology ceremony in 2002, and materials for use by students and educators.

I think funding for future programs should continue to seek out and support projects that are outside the mainstream, projects that reward agitators and troublemakers instead of punishing them.

New programs should also ensure that the artifacts of all the Civil Liberties projects are housed in a permanent archive and made available online for easy access by students who are Googling to do their homework.

Let our “Lesser Known Stories” become part of the new paradigm for the Japanese American history that we leave for the 22nd century.

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Updated: June 8, 2005