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Tuesday, November 14, 2000
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Loyal opposition

COURTESY PHOTOS

THE ACCUSED: Mits Koshiyama (center, with eyes downcast) was 19 when he and 62 others from the Heart Mountain (Wyo.) relocation camp went on trial for resisting the draft. The year was 1944.

Documentary tells story of relocated Americans who resisted WWII draft

Kie Relyea, The Bellingham Herald

RESISTANCE LEADER: Frank Emi led the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee, whose members in 1944 refused to be drafted until their rights as U.S. citizens had been restored. Heart Mountain was a Wyoming relocation camp.

When Frank Abe asked his parents why they didn't resist when the U.S. government drove them from their home into internment camps during World War II, their answers only frustrated him.

"The answer would always be accompanied with a pat on the head," he remembers of his efforts to learn about the period when 120,000 people of Japanese descent, most of them U.S. citizens, were imprisoned following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.

You're too young, he was told by others who lost homes and businesses, you have to understand the context of the time. You can't apply your '60s civil rights-Berkeley standards to the '40s.

Then Abe learned about the Heart Mountain resisters, a group of Japanese-American men interned in Wyoming who refused to be drafted into the U.S. Army during WWII until their rights were restored as citizens and their families were released from the camps.

That knowledge changed his life: "Here were real guys who stood up and resisted in the only way they could at the time," he says.

Abe, a radio and television reporter who lives in Seattle, took that information and made it into a documentary that will air nationally on Public Broadcasting Service later this year. However, "Conscience and the Constitution: An Untold History of Japanese-Americans Imprisoned for Draft Resistance During WWII" will get a pre-release screening at Western Washington University Wednesday.

The Bellingham event, which will be followed by a panel of speakers, is a joint effort of Phi Alpha Theta, the history honors society; the Northwest Coalition for Human Dignity; and the Whatcom Human Rights Task Force.

"It's an issue that has local resonance. It happened on the West Coast," says Brendan Burkhart, president of the Western chapter of the history society.

To Robin Elwood, office manager for the Whatcom Human Rights Task Force, the documentary is an inspirational story.

"It's a chapter of history that most people don't hear in their high schools here," Elwood says. "I hope people take away a clearer understanding and respect of the history of individuals standing up for human rights."

To the 49-year-old Abe, born after the camps and raised in the era of civil rights activism, the silence surrounding the draft resisters was puzzling. It was as if they had disappeared.

Abe's documentary, which he produced, not only explores the history of the resistance but also tackles the conflicts within the Japanese-American community that led to the silence and to a rift that still exists today.

"Some people are relieved we're finally telling the story," he says. "It does show that our community is not monolithic."

Documentary

"Conscience and the Constitution: An Untold Story of Japanese-Americans Imprisoned for Draft Resistance During WWII" will be shown at 7 p.m. Wednesday in Science Lecture Hall 130 at Western Washington University.

The event is free.

The documentary's national broadcast on Public Broadcasting Service is scheduled for Nov. 30.

KCTS Channel 9 will broadcast it at 10 p.m. Dec. 12, with a repeat at 3:30 a.m. Dec. 18.

More information on the Bellingham screening: 650-2020 or 733-2233.

More on the issue: http://www.resisters.com/

After Pearl Harbor was bombed on Dec. 7, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered the mass removal of Japanese-Americans -- the issei, or first-generation immigrants barred from U.S. citizenship, and the nisei, born in this country -- from the West Coast into 10 camps.

It was then that the national Japanese American Citizens League, formed in 1930, stepped forward. Led by national field secretary Mike Masaoka, the JACL, anxious to prove its members were not the enemy, encouraged the issei and nisei to comply with the U.S. government's orders in exchange for humane treatment. Once they were interned, Masaoka urged the United States to draft the nisei out of the camps so they could prove their loyalty.

This documentary is not about those veterans.

"Make no mistake, they were courageous and I admire and respect their courage," Abe says. "And this is a very difficult thing to understand: Their valor did not directly address the constitutional issues raised by the camps. And I think that's often misunderstood."

More than 300 Japanese-Americans refused to be drafted on civil rights grounds during WWII. Abe says draft resistance occurred at eight of the 10 "concentration camps," but Heart Mountain was the only place to have an organized movement, where one out of nine refused the draft.

One week after D-Day, 63 resisters from Heart Mountain were put on trial for draft evasion. They were found guilty and sentenced to three years in federal prison. Twenty-two more from Heart Mountain resisted. In all, 85 were convicted.

The documentary examines the case of seven resistance leaders.

"These men were not draft resisters in the sense that we understand in the '60s," Abe says. "They're not pacifists, nor are they conscientious objectors."

In fact, six of the imprisoned were later drafted to serve in the Korean War, and went.

Abe's documentary also explores the price the men paid for their stand. Many were ostracized, as were their families, and branded as traitors and agitators.

Despite President Truman's pardon of all wartime draft resisters in 1947, the U.S. government's admission in 1988 that the incarceration was wrong, and the JACL's apology in July for suppressing the resisters, the rift and pain still run deep.

"Even that action was bitterly opposed by some old timers who walked out in protest at that meeting," Abe says of the JACL apology. "It will never be resolved. And that's OK."

Abe sees the documentary as a tool for teaching about human rights. He hopes the resisters' actions can be seen as a part of American civil disobedience in the 20th century. What's more, he seeks to restore a piece of history lost for 50 years to the myth of total compliance by Japanese-Americans.

"I hope they'll recognize, as others have noted, that the power of the film is that it does not find any villains, that we simply show everyone's actions," Abe says.

"Everyone believed at the time what they were doing was correct."

Reach Kie Relyea at [email protected] or 715-2234.

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