Update:
Saturday, February 4, 2006 George Kurasaki was one of those fellows we wished we could have known,
one of the Heart Mountain boys who did not seek attention for himself. When we
were searching for resisters to interview for our film, he was
among those who sent word back that they did not wish to be interviewed. But
George finally did come out to join us. He came to the JACL apology ceremony
to the resisters in San Francisco in 2002. We noted
his presence there at the time, and now regret we didn't follow up with him
to learn more. George passed away just after the new year. The San Jose Mercury-News
recognized his life with this fine remembrance, "George
Kurasaki, prankster on farm," in which we learn of his risking arrest
for violating curfew and travel restrictions after Pearl Harbor in order to propose
to his sweetheart, and of their getting married before eviction so they could
stay together.
Two
new law school journal articles examine the Japanese American draft
cases. The most recent is by Seattle University Law Professor Lorraine
Bannai. Its publication in the Seattle
Journal for Social Justice is being marked with a Day of Remembrance
event, Honoring
Courage: Remembering the Japanese American Internment on Wednesday,
February 15, at 5:00 p.m. in the second floor gallery of Sullivan Hall,
901 12th Avenue. The event is co-sponsored by the school's Asian Pacific
Islander Law Student Association. It's free and open to the public.
"I’ve
written an article, focusing on Fred Korematsu, Gene Akutsu, and
Yosh Kuromiya for their resistance to the WWII internment. I drew
from the Conscience and the Constitution website and film
and am grateful for all of your work.
To launch the issue of the Seattle Journal for Social Justice that the article
will appear in, Seattle U. is hosting the event described in the
attached. Gene will be speaking at the event. We very much would like
to have members of the Japanese American community here to recognize the
courage of those who were interned.
Again, thank you for your work on the resisters’ cause, upon which
I could draw."
-- Lori Bannai
Update:
Wednesday, February 22, 2006 An eventful Day of Remembrance just past. The Fresno Bee on Feb.
19 published an op-ed from 16-year old Marissa Honda, an insightful piece
in which she
speaks of her faith in her generation to remember the legacy of the draft
resisters, in contrast to her older relatives who lived through those times:
I
can tell by their shifty eyes and serious expressions that many of
them still feel embarassed by those who might have been seen as disloyal
Americans. It is as if by supporting the resisters after 50 years,
they still fear being labelled as disloyal Americans themselves.
The
Seattle University School of Law has now posted a streaming video of
its Feb. 15th Day of Remembrance event, Honoring
Courage: Remembering the Japanese American Internment. Go to this
page for a link the full 90-minute video, which features Minidoka
resister Gene Akutsu at the 40-minute-35-second mark, and some moving
remarks from Karen Korematsu on how she's stepped into her father's
shoes to carry on talking about his test case. That's at the 1-hour-2-minute
mark. That
same page will also link you to a full set of streaming videos from
the "Judgments
Judged and Wrongs Remembered: Examining the Japanese American Civil
Liberties Cases of World War II on their Sixtieth Anniversary" conference
held at the Japanese American National Museum back in November 2004.
You can see the remarks from Frank Emi, Yosh Kuromiya, and Gene Akutsu,
along with one of the last public appearances of Fred Korematsu. The
whole enterprise helps promote publication of a new article on the
resisters, "Taking the Stand: The Lessons of the Three Men Who
Took the Japanese American Internment to Court," published in the Seattle
Journal for Social Justice by Seattle University Law Professor
Lorraine Bannai.
Update:
Friday, March 10, 2006 Time flies. It's already time on Saturday, March 11, at 2:00 p.m.,
for the resisters' readers theater presentation, "A Divided Community," at
the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in Los Angeles. See the
flyer which makes nice use of Yosh Kuromiya's original water color
sketch of Heart Mountain. As before, three of the original resisters from
the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee members will take part in the staged
reading. Yosh Kuromiya, Frank Emi, and Mits Koshiyama, in the center of
the photo below, will be joined by WW2 veteran Paul Tsuneishi (far left)
and actors Momo Yashima (far right) and Mike Hagiwara.
Update:
Wednesday, April 12, 2006 Just received news that the resisters' readers theater presentation,
"A Divided Community," will be repeated at UCLA on May
2, at Kinsey Pavilion. See the
flyer which once again makes nice use of Yosh Kuromiya's original
water color sketch of Heart Mountain.
Update:
Tuesday, April 25, 2006 You know you've come a long ways when the things you did in your
youth come back as "history." Join us at the University of Washington
this Friday, April 28, for a day-long forum on "Remembering
Japanese American Redress: A Symposium on History, Incarceration,
and Justice." I'll be showing two surviving TV news clips from the
first "Day of Remembrance" in 1978 and projecting photos and
news clippings demonstrating the news coverage we earned that showed Japanese
Americans nationwide that no mob would attack if they spoke up and stood
for redress.
I'll be speaking
at two screenings of CONSCIENCE coming up: “Friday Night At The
Meaningful Movies” for the Wallingford Neighbors for Peace and Justice,
May 5 at Keystone Church in Seattle, and Emerald
Ridge High School in Puyallup, Washington, on May 12.
Update:
Thursday, June 1, 2006 The bad boy of Asian American letters has done it again. The Manzanar
Committee has discovered what the Organization of Chinese Americans and
the Northwest Asian American Film Festival learned before them. Frank may
make for a lousy guest, and I didn't hear exactly what he said, but I think
characterizing his legitimate points as "name-calling" diminishes
what he had to say and insults the intelligence of their constituency:
The Manzanar Committee
expresses their deepest apologies to those who were offended by remarks
made by Frank Chin, one of the speakers at the 37th Annual Manzanar
Pilgrimage. Though the intention and focus clearly communicated to
Chin in the Committee's invitation was to focus on his central role
with beginning the annual Day of Remembrance and being part of a
Pan-Asian movement that supported redress as well as encouraging
youth today to become more politically aware and informed, Chin departed
from this intention when he resorted to name calling against the
Japanese American Citizens League and the 442nd Regimental Combat
Team. These are views which may reflect those of Chin but not the
Manzanar Committee. Read
more as an Acrobat pdf.
Update:
Friday, July 21, 2006 I froze when I saw the subject line of Frank Chin's e-mail. This
sad news speaks for itself:
LET US NOW
PRAISE FAMOUS MEN: MAKO
Mako
died today at his home in Somis, in Ventura County. He was known by
his first name only, and used his mother's surname Iwamatsu. His sister
Momo Yashima was with him when he breathed his last. Neither he nor
his wife Susie wants a funeral or a memorial, or any kind of service.
He was the son of activist anti-militarist painters Taro Yashima and
Mitsu Iwamatsu, who fled Japan before WWII. Mako was a sickly child
and left with his grandparents in Japan. The story of Taro reunitijng
with Mako after the war is told in Taro Yashima's "picture book,"
HORIZON IS CALLING.
Actors who worked
with him and those who were trained by him or worked under his direction
who feel him in their work may want to get together and get roaring
drunk. I don't know. He spoke at Steve McQueen's passing, the star of
THE SAND PEBBLES, Mako's first movie that won him an Oscar nomination.
I had mixed feelings about RISING SUN with Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes,
but saw this as one of Mako's best, most textured performances. He wasn't
a bad guy or the butt of a joke. He played an executive of a corporation
who loved golf. Perhaps because of his love of golf, he was very good.
If anyone out there
wants a Mako film fest and get drunk, be sure to let me know. Asian-American
art and culture has lost an inspiration to writers and actors, and art
may have lost the only Asian with guts enough to put his talent where
his vision is. He was an Asian American who could rough and tumble instead
crawl and bat their eyes. This bottle is for you, Mako. -- Frank Chin
Mako believed
in our film project on the resisters and lent his name to our fundraising
efforts. He graciously provided the voice of the "resister singing
in jail" that is heard in our film. He was proud of the discovery
he made about the song that should accompnany the handwritten verses
of "Song of Cheyenne," which we found preserved in the wallet
of resister James Kado. And he frequently championed the language and
dialogue of John Okada's No-No Boy as the authentic speech of
postwar Nisei he wanted to hear more of in American film. In the movie
about the resisters, I always wanted him to play Guntaro Kubota, the Issei
leader who risked his freedom to help the young boys fight unfair conscription
from camp. He will be deeply missed.
Update:
Friday, August 25, 2006 The
case of Army 1st Lt. Ehren Watada, who has refused
deployment to Iraq in principled protest against what he believes
is an illegal war of occupation, has led many to compare his stand to
that of the WW2 Nisei draft resisters. He himself made the link in his
comments to Ben Hamamoto of the Nichi
Bei Times:
As a Japanese American,
Watada sees historical parallels between himself and those who resisted
the World War II incarceration. “(The
resisters) said ‘we’re Japanese American’ and we are
part of this country no matter what the president says. They faced ostracization
and imprisonment, but it was shown many years later that they were correct…
What I’m doing is no different.”
The parallel
is not precise. The Heart Mountain resisters did not object to fighting
in WW2, only to the unconstitutionality of the forced incarceration of
themselves and their families. But as I talked this week with John Iwasaki
when he called from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, it hit me that the
resisters and Lt. Watada do share this one similarity: both put themselves
on the line to object to actions by their government. Iwasaki was localizing
a wire story, "Japanese
Americans criticize Watada," reporting a
joint statement from 9 Japanese American veterans groups to publicly
denounce Watada for disrespecting "a legacy of military service by
Japanese American soldiers dating back to World War II."
"No Japanese
Americans did anything like that, and that is why Japanese Americans
are so upset," (Robert) Wada said, (a charter president of the
Japanese American Korean War Veterans). "He is doing something
that has never been done by Japanese Americans."
That's not exactly
the case, said Seattle resident Frank Abe. He produced "Conscience
and the Constitution," a documentary about Japanese Americans who
resisted the World War II draft because they and their families were
held in internment camps for years after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor
on Dec. 7, 1941.
Wada is "overlooking
the fact that 315 Japanese Americans in World War II resisted the draft
as a means of protesting the forced incarceration of their families,"
Abe said Wednesday. Read
more.
Update:
Monday, October 16, 2006 An online journal called Japan Focus ("regional
and global perspectives on politics, economics, society, history & culture")
has posted a new article that references our film and draws some material
from our PBS Online site and this one, including our photos of Frank Emi
in camp and Mits Koshiyama in court. "Japanese-American
Incarceration Resistance Narratives, and the Post 9/11 Era" opens
with a quote from James Omura and examines our film and Satsuki Ina's remarkable From
A Silk Cocoon in the context of "fifty years of Japanese American
counternarratives challenging prevailing views about the incarceration
experience." Author Jean Miyake Downey says:
"Many
thanks for your inspiration and sharing news of inspiring resisters
during this time when we need to speak out again... My background
is in the African American Civil Rights Movement/Solidarity Movement
in Poland (nonviolent social change movements) and, growing up
in the 1970's and not graduating from law school until 1988,
in Florida, I bought the official versions of the incarceration,
even though they smacked "false" to me. Before the
age of internet, I remember seeing very little about the redress
movement and Civil Liberties Act in the paper, and the takes
were spinned, to minimize important aspects of the history. Of
course, I knew about Fred Korematsu, but nothing about the FPC
and other protesters."
Frank
Chin also sent a 29-page script for what looks to be a proposed
staged reading involving himself and the Heart Mountain resisters:
"Here's
a piece linking the camp resistance that began with Hirababyashi,
the draft resisters and Ehren Watada."
The
script is titled "CITIZENS DEFENSE OF THE CONSTITUTION: THE
JAPANESE AMERICAN RESISTANCE TO CAMPS OF 1942 to THE RESISTANCE
OF LT. EHREN WATADA OF 2006." Read it online, unedited, as
a PDF
document.