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Published Wednesday, August 4, 1999, in the San Jose Mercury News

JOE RODRIGUEZ

BY JOE RODRIGUEZ
Mercury News Staff Columnist

Documentary honors interned resisters

FRANK ABE belongs to the original ``model minority'' -- Japanese-Americans. It's supposed to be a compliment, but my sansei friends gag whenever they hear it. Many Americans, I think, need to believe in the myth of an obedient and completely assimilated minority. Abe is out to destroy it.

He's producing a television documentary about Japanese-American men in internment camps who refused to be drafted for military service during World War II and are still paying the price for defending their rights.

``I've never had more trouble getting people to talk,'' he said. ``These guys were ostracized for over 50 years, first by their government and then by their own people.''

I met Abe a few weeks ago at a panel discussion in Seattle. The topic was the agony of minority soldiers asked to fight for an America that didn't respect their rights at home. We heard about the black Buffalo Soldiers who battled American Indians, and about Spanish-speaking Mexican-American soldiers recruited to fight Spanish-speaking Filipino rebels.

WE'RE familiar with the all-Japanese 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Those units lost a lot of men and earned many medals. Abe's story is not about them.

It's about the men in the largest draft resistance trial in U.S. history -- men like Mits Koshiyama.

Like most Japanese-Americans from San Jose at the time, Koshiyama was sent to the Heart Mountain internment camp in Wyoming. From the start, the Japanese American Citizens League counseled them to follow orders, to prove their loyalties, perhaps for an early release. The group later lobbied the War Department to allow the men to fight.

That wish was granted. Thousands of men volunteered and were drafted. But several hundred refused to be drafted, demanding that the government first restore their rights as citizens and release their families from the camps.

That act of civil disobedience earned Koshiyama and about 80 other resisters and sympathizers two punishments: federal prison sentences and lifetimes of being ostracized by the JACL and their own people.

Fifty-five years later, the national JACL is considering a resolution that calls for a formal apology to ``the resisters of conscience'' for not recognizing ``their principled stand'' and asks that they be honored at a public ceremony.

``We were never resistant to being drafted,'' Koshiyama, 74, said recently to Donna Kato of the Mercury News. He said their strategy was to win back their rights and then enlist in the war.

ABE belongs to the third generation of Japanese-Americans called sansei. The sansei are baby boomers who came of age politically with the civil rights movement, so it's no surprise their support has prompted the resisters to finally talk publicly.

The resisters' defiance didn't cheapen the sacrifices of the Japanese-American men who went to war. I believe the resisters would have followed them and fought and died with as much honor or more. They wanted only for America to recognize its mistake. The government eventually did, first when President Truman pardoned the resisters after the war and again a few years ago with federal cash payments to surviving internees.

I don't know much about the Japanese, but I do know that public apologies in their culture carry the importance of a final judgment and social acceptance. These men deserve one at an appropriate public ceremony.

They may have marched out of step with most of their own people, but there was no right or wrong way to prove their loyalty. It was always there. The government just couldn't see it.

The right thing to do now is thank the interned resisters for fighting on the legal front against bigotry. They've spent most of their lives paying too heavy a price for defending the rights most Americans take for granted.

History will reward these men for their principled stand.


Contact Joe Rodriguez at

[email protected] or
(408) 920-5767.


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