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``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.
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