An archive of past updates from our home page.

Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Our film will screen January 14 as part of the "Thursday Night at the Movies" series staged by the National Japanese American Historical Society for its program on "Prejudice and Patriotism: The Story of Japanese Americans in the Military Intelligence Service 1941 - 1952." For this screening we are sending the first test dub of the MPEG-2 encoding of our film for the forthcoming 2-disk Special Edition DVD.

In answer to several inquiries, yes, there will be a DVD of our film coming, and very soon. The final touches are now being made and we are planning for a February or March release. If you are interested in copy of our film now, we are making this special offer: purchase a copy of the VHS now and we will send the DVD at no additional charge when it is ready.

Friday, August 20, 2010
Our film screens next Tuesday, August 24, at the Fresno County Public Library, Central Library, McCardle Room. It's the second day of their series, "The Japanese-American Experience in Film." See their flyer.The film will screen from the latest check disc of the forthcoming DVD, which is still on its way. All that remains is the authoring on the second disc and the remaining artwork.

Our deepest thanks as always to Robert Kato Design of San Francisco for putting up with all the changes and refinements. Thanks to Jeff at Paragon Media in Seattle for updating all the elements. Next comes the final design of the paper insert and the two labels, and finishing work on the motion menu and menus of disc two.

To the right is an early prototype of the menu design, where you can preview the titles of the 11 new outtakes on disc one. Doug Johansen has been working closely with us on the DVD authoring. Again, click on the image to see an enlargement.

We will be previewing interviews and outtakes fro the bonus features of the DVD next Saturday, September 25, at the Heart Mountain conference at the Japanese American National Museum. More details to come.

Coming in October are two screenings at the University of Dayton, in support of their First Year Read program of Julie Otsuka's When the Emperor Was Divine.

Saturday, November 13, 2010
William Hohri passed away Friday after a long illness. William was a seminal figure in changing the way we understand American history and Japanese American history. Like the Heart Mountain resisters he admired and chronicled, William stepped up to organize Japanese America and go to court to challenge the injustice of selective incarceration based solely on race. He was a leader, a lead plaintiff, an author and an artist, and he will be deeply missed.

William got the government’s attention with his lawsuit seeking monetary damages for illegal wartime incarceration. What seemed at first to be a quixotic action helped focus Congress on passing a real redress bill before “Hohri et.al. vs. U.S “ could come to trial in federal court.

After the first successful Days of Remembrance at the Puyallup Fairgrounds and the Portland Expo Center, and the national Open Letter to Hayakawa, we in the Seattle Evacuation Redress Committee were contacted by this guy out of Chicago who wanted to keep the momentum for genuine redress going. At a time when the Nikkei in Congress and national JACL were calling for a commission to study the issue, William said it was time to organize for something better. In that, he shared the same instincts as Harry Ueno, Kiyoshi Okamoto, and Frank Emi.

The one footnote I can claim in William’s legend is an edit. William, Shosuke Sasaki, Henry Miyatake and others of us were sitting around the table in our redress “war room,” the conference room in the law offices of Ron Mamiya and Rod Kawakami at 7th and Jackson – the same block where John Okada imagined Ichiro Yamada’s grocery store to be in his novel No No Boy – trying to forge the name for this new national organization that would work around JACL and lobby Congress directly for a redress bill that provided for direct compensation to incarcerees. We spitballed a number of ideas, taking awhile to decide that “Japanese American” should be included in the name, and came around to “National Coalition for Japanese American Redress,” but I thought that sounded too … sixties, and after all here we had progressed to the tail end of the 70’s. I suggested we call it a “National Council” and Shosuke quickly agreed that sounded loftier, and we were on our way. William adopted Frank Fujii’s ichi-ni-san barbed wire logo from the Days of Remembrance for the masthead of his own monthly NCJAR newsletter, keeping the spirit alive.

We were in Washington, DC for the first round of hearings of the Congressional commission in 1981, when as our informal media coordinator William casually told me he had turned down an invitation from ABC News to appear on something called “Nightline,” because it was late and he was tired and he thought it was a local broadcast. I was horrified and chewed him out for the lost opportunity to raise money for what was by then his class-action lawsuit; ABC used JACL district governor Tom Kometani instead. At the hearings where even I wore a suit and tie, William insisted on testifying to Congress in his Frank Fujii ichi-ni-san T-shirt, with the yellow redress button in his lapel.

Like myself, once redress was won and American history had been cured, William turned his attention from holding the government accountable to holding our wartime community leaders accountable and exposing the story of the largest organized resistance to wartime incarceration. Besides his well-known REPAIRING AMERICA: AN ACCOUNT OF THE MOVEMENT FOR JAPANESE AMERICAN REDRESS, William self-published three other books. He compiled and introduced RESISTANCE, a book with first-person accounts from the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee. He published a bound edition of the notorious LIM REPORT, which chronicled the wartime collaboration of JACL leaders in their own words. He self-published a novel, MANZANAR RITES, that made fiction of the insurgency of Kitchen Workers Union leader Harry Ueno, the riot sparked by unrest at camp conditions and the JACL’s call for drafting the Nisei out of camp, and which climaxes with the Army’s fatal shooting of two young men. Ever the historian, William expresses relief in an end note that he did not have to footnote his sources.

My condolences to Yuriko and their family. The family is planning a celebration of William’s life at the Fukui Mortuary in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo. Frank Emi and Yosh Kuromiya are being asked to speak. More details as they become available.

Sunday, November 21, 2010
Thirty years ago, William Hohri picked up our Days of Remembrance movement here in Seattle and took us national. William's memorial service was today in Little Tokyo. Nice of Elaine Woo at the L.A. Times to call and ask for a quote. Martha Nakagawa offers exhaustive coverage of William's life and times in the Rafu Shimpo, and she still says she feels bad that she wasn't able to include William's earlier life in the Shonien and Manzanar's Children's Village.

Wednesday, December 1, 2010
These are the words I have long dreaded having to write: Frank Emi died today. We've lost a giant. That's him in the poster above, standing squarely with his arms crossed, defying the government and our own Japanese American leadership, by organizing a movement inside an American concentration camp to refuse to report for draft induction in order to protest mass incarceration based solely on race. It was an honor to know him and to be able to document his story on film. Here's an outtake from our film of Frank descibing how he and the other Fair Play Committee leaders earned the respect of other inmates and officials inside Leavenworth federal penitentiary in WW2

Frank Emi was a man 40 years ahead of his time. He was an ordinary young man, but a man of conviction who rose to the occasion when faced with the injustice of the camps. With a wife and two kids he was not even eligible to be drafted out of camp, but he risked his freedom and the welfare of his family to help lead the largest organized resistance inside the camps. It was a classic example of civil disobedience in the American twentieth century, and he and others paid the prce: two years in federal prison.

By his words and his deeds, Frank Emi leaves a legacy for those who seek evidence that Japanese America did not endure the loss of all their rights, and three years in camp, without some kind of protest or resistance.

Martha Nakagawa warned me that Frank had recently been taken to the ICU. She was gracious enough to bring her portable DVD player to the hospital and play Frank this clip and other outtakes from the film. I'm glad he was able to see the work and know that a DVD is soon coming out. Martha said Frank was moved to a hospice last Saturday. It is still sinking in that Frank is gone. Rest in peace Frank, and thanks for marking your place in Japanese American history.

Thursday, December 2, 2010
Frank Emi's funeral will be held on Friday, Dec. 10 at 10:00 am, at the Nichiren Temple, 2801 Fourth Street, in Boyle Heights. Thanks to Martha Nakagawa for the tip. Here's another video clip from the forthcoming DVD, Frank Emi issuing a challenge to the JACL even as the group apologizes to him and the others for persecuting them during the war.

Monday, December 6, 2010
Martha Nakagawa has published a thorough remembrance of the life of Frank Emi in today's Rafu Shimpo newspaper. I will be attending the memorial service this Friday in Los Angeles and hope to meet you all there. Heart Mountain resister Yosh Kuromiya will be one of the three speakers.

Frank goes to his final rest dressed in his white judo gi, a Buddhist ojuzu prayer bracelet wrapped around his left hand and his judo medals set next to him. More than 250 mourners attended his service at Nichiren Buddhist Temple for an hour of sutra chanting (click on the images to enlarged images).

For his eulogy, writer Frank Chin announced "Superman is dead!" He then drew chuckles reading an excerpt from his book, Born in the USA. You can follow along, it's the "Brothers and Sisters" exchange between Frank, brother Art, and sister Kaoru on pages 163 to 166.

Bob Iwasaki from the Hollywood Judo Dojo knew Frank as "Emi-sensei." Heart Mountain resister Yosh Kuromiya had this:

Frank Seishi Emi was a fighter. The word “retreat” was not in Frank’s vocabulary. He and he alone, would decide when it was time to move on. Sadly, that time has arrived. Read more...

The Los Angeles Times published a thoughtful and prominent obituary for Frank Emi on page B-1 of their local section, conferring on him the honor he deserves.

At the interment service at Evergreen, actress and soon-to-be filmmaker Momo Yashima gave a dramatic reading at the gravesite.

Before we left for the reception, a few of us adjourned to the adjacent "Potter's Field" section of Evergreen Cemetery, where we lit incense at the recently installed marker for FPC founder Kiyoshi Okamoto. Relative Marie Masumoto located Okamoto's remains last year in a mass grave for paupers from the year 1975, and a ceremony was held to dedicate the new marker. On this day Okamoto's great-nephew Earnest Masumoto read some new remarks on the occasion of Frank Emi's passing. And from our discovery of the resisters, we've come full circle to the interment of both leaders in the same city, in the same cemetery.

Saturday, December 18, 2010
Calling Frank Emi "defiant," the New York Times takes note. Reprinted in the San Francisco Chronicle.