Seeking to mend an old division

By Herbert A. Sample -- Bee San Francisco Bureau - (Published May 10, 2002)

SAN FRANCISCO -- James Uyeda was 26 when the U.S. government, deep into World War II, summoned him to join the military.

It was an ironic edict, for at the time Uyeda and his family were confined at the Heart Mountain internment camp in Wyoming, one of 10 sites where the government herded citizens and legal residents of Japanese ancestry after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Uyeda, a Rocklin farmer before internment, was willing to fight but not while his and other families remained behind barbed wire, their constitutional liberties in tatters. He resisted the draft, and he and others like him were ostracized for years by the Japanese American Citizens League, a leading voice among Japanese Americans.

But on Saturday, the JACL will take the remarkable step of formally apologizing to Uyeda and his fellow "resisters" who were willing to die for their country if only their country recognized their rights.

The apology ceremony, to be conducted in San Francisco at the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California, marks a significant step toward healing a wound that has festered among Japanese Americans for 60 years.

"It means closure to this long, outstanding issue of being divided," said Uyeda, now 83 and still a Rocklin resident. "We never asked for an apology from anybody. We did what we thought was right and stood on that ground. ... There never would have been resisters had there not been an evacuation."

The JACL's apology, however, has opened new wounds over the resisters and the other groups of Japanese American men who refused for various reasons to serve during World War II. Several veterans groups consider the apology a denial of the sacrifices made by the 830 Japanese Americans killed and the thousands of others injured among the 30,000 who served.

"The veterans accept that the resisters did what they had to do for their own reasons," said Loren Ishii, commander of the Sacramento Nisei Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 8985. "But they draw the line on the fact that there is no apology needed."

In 1988, the federal government apologized for confining 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry and provided monetary redress to internees, Ishii noted.

"The veterans feel that is the only apology needed," he added.

About 315 Japanese Americans refused to volunteer for or be drafted into military service while the internment continued. Some also declined because Japanese American soldiers were placed in segregated units. Most were prosecuted and incarcerated but pardoned in 1947 by President Truman.

"We thought it was awful strange that we were asked to fight and defend democracy in a free world while my family (and I) were locked up in a concentration camp and denied the rights guaranteed us," said Mits Koshiyama, 77, of San Jose, who also was at the Heart Mountain camp.

"During wartime, the JACL took the government's side," added Koshiyama, whose three brothers served in the military. "They tried to suppress all the dissidents in the camps. And finally after 50 years, the JACL realized they were wrong in suppressing the rights of their own people."

The JACL supported internment and military service as a means for Japanese Americans to display loyalty to the United States. But the group went further by denouncing the resisters.

For example, Saburo Kido, then JACL's president, wrote in an April 1944 letter that the Heart Mountain resisters "definitely should be charged with sedition, especially the leaders."

The letter and other evidence of the JACL's World War II activities was unearthed by an internal study in 1990.

The resisters and others who refused to serve "were made to feel like pariahs in the community," said Betty Kano, a lecturer in Japanese American culture at San Francisco State University.

Rep. Robert Matsui, D-Sacramento, held in the Tulelake internment camp as a young child, said hard feelings over the resisters survived many years.

"Some of it was very, very mean -- very, very angry," he said. "Many of these men who had defied the draft were pretty much outcasts. Now is the time to formally address their legitimate grievances."

The internment and the scars it left were discussed infrequently among Japanese Americans until the 1988 government apology, Kano added.

Since then, books, films and a younger generation have focused more attention on the issue.

Old antagonisms were stirred up two years ago when some Japanese Americans became angry at the inclusion of parts of a creed by Mike Masoaka, a top JACL official, on a Washington, D.C., memorial. The statement, written months before Pearl Harbor, was blindly patriotic and signaled a willingness to subsume ethnic heritage to American culture, critics charged.

After some wrangling, the creed was inscribed on the memorial, which honors both internees and Japanese American soldiers.

The effort within the JACL to issue an apology, brewing since the late 1980s, finally resulted in passage of a resolution at the group's 2000 national convention. Saturday's ceremony will include a videotaped address by Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, a highly decorated World War II vet who lost an arm in combat but who respects the resisters for their stand.

"We're trying to recognize the importance of what the (resisters) did," said Andy Noguchi, co-chairman of the event and a leader of the JACL Florin chapter in Sacramento. "Certainly nothing can change what happened 60 years ago, but certainly we can try to mend fences today."

John Tateishi, JACL executive director, said some have called the civil rights group hypocritical because its past leaders criticized the resisters. The ceremony "is an attempt to put that to rest," he said.

"After all, these people are getting older," Tateishi added, referring to the resisters and the veterans. "It would be nice for people on both sides of the issue to go to the grave with a sense of peace about this issue."

But the apology has generated little peace among Japanese American vets. Ishii's Sacramento VFW post approved a resolution a year ago denouncing the JACL plans. Posts in San Jose, San Francisco, Monterey and Southern California signed onto it, and emotions clearly remain volatile.

"I'm a soldier, so I have no respect for draft dodgers," said Harry Tanabe, 79, an East Bay resident and former commander of the San Francisco post. "Each of us made our choice to go into the military. Those that shirked their duty, why should I look upon them? (The apology) is a terrible mistake."

Henry Wadahara, a former head of the San Jose post and a Vietnam vet, said, "If a guy does not want to fight for his country, he shouldn't live here."

Ishii called the apology "hollow" because the JACL leaders who set the group's policies in the 1940s are mostly long gone. Japanese Americans fought in World War II to demonstrate loyalty to the United States and in the hope their families would be released from the camps, he said. Now they are leaving the JACL, incensed by the apology, he asserted.

"Once that ceremony is done, it's going to leave a lump in a lot of people's throats," Ishii added.

Some resisters agree that the division between them and the vets may be too deep and too old to mend. But they insist, and JACL leaders agree, that they've never asked for an apology. Rather, they want a better understanding of their reasons for refusing to serve.

"A lot of people don't know about us," said 78-year-old Kenichiro Yoshida of San Mateo, who was interned at the Topaz camp in central Utah.

"All they know about are those who went into the service. They don't know about those of us who fought for our constitutional rights."

To Uyeda, the ceremony will end a troubling chapter of his life. "We just exercised our rights, and for 60 years we've been kind of divided," he said. "But if this ceremony comes about, I think it would be sort of closure to this divisiveness. I'm really looking forward to closing my book."