WGBH buries worthwhile
documentary about internment of Japanese Americans by
Robin Washington
Wednesday, November 29,
2000
``Conscience and the Constitution'' WGBH-TV (Ch. 2),
Friday at 2 a.m.
Count on WGBH (Ch. 2) to put making money before
broadcasting quality programs. Because of its pledge drive,
the station will excuse itself from tomorrow night's national
airing of a fine documentary, ``Conscience and the
Constitution,'' bumping the program to 2 o'clock Friday
morning.
Those who set their VCRs to catch it will most likely learn
something they didn't know. That's the story of a handful of
Japanese Americans who took a stand against injustice while
interned in the United States' shameful ``relocation'' camps
during World War II.
Their only crime was their Japanese ancestry, and about
two-thirds of the 120,000 shipped off in 1942 to what
President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself called concentration
camps were American citizens.
Once in the camps, they encountered military police ``with
the guns pointed in, not out,'' says narrator George Takei (of
``Star Trek'' fame). They also found they had virtually none
of the rights afforded to full-fledged Americans, including
the opportunity to join the armed forces.
That changed as the war dragged on and the military
reclassified the camps' Nisei, or American-born children of
Japanese immigrants, as 1-A draft fodder fit for service.
While hundreds volunteered or complied with induction, a
number did not, vowing not to serve a country that deprived
them of their rights and held them as untried prisoners in
their own land.
Among leaders of the effort was Jimmie Omura, a journalist
who escaped relocation by taking up residence in Colorado,
outside the Pacific coast states subject to the relocation
order.
The just cause of their efforts notwithstanding, the reward
for the 63 draft resisters and their organizers was hard time
at Leavenworth and other prisons. The only one acquitted was
Omura, protected by First Amendment rights, though he never
again worked as a journalist.
Perhaps more painful than prison was the ostracism in the
community led by the Japanese American Citizens League, a
group that collaborated with the government in identifying and
branding the resisters as traitors.
They were also sold down the river by the American Civil
Liberties Union, though this fascinating betrayal and
contradiction of the venerable rights group's raison
d'etre could have been examined more fully in the
documentary.
So, too, should have any connection between the camp
resisters and other organized conscientious objection efforts,
such as those by War Resisters League and the Fellowship of
Reconciliation, whose own wartime program for Japanese
American rights is left unexplored in the program.
Producer Frank Abe's work on the program spanned 10 years,
during which many of the principals died. Abe said he was
drawn to the story after questioning what his parents had done
to stand up for their rights when they were interned. Not
until production was well under way did his father admit he
had donated $2 to the Fair Play Committee, testament of the
outcast status of the resisters and their supporters that
still endures in the Japanese American community today.
That community is beginning to come to grips with the
issue, a move made easier bythe federal government's apology
to Japanese Americans in 1988. But this enlightened view of
history isn't helped by 'GBH's decision to keep it buried in
the wee hours, where it may as well not exist.
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