Download press release - Conscience and the Constitution

Roundtable Discussion on Japanese American Draft Resisters from WWII:
Boston Public Library
March 27, 3:00pm
OAH annual meeting
“Race, Resistance and Reconciliation”
This roundtable brings together historians, lawyers, and activists to discuss some very
timely issues of the nature of citizenship, race, and civil disobedience during times of war. It
also examines the wartime conflicts over loyalty and patriotism that divided communities, and
later attempts at reconciliation. Using the story of the Japanese Americans who resisted the draft
while they and their families remained incarcerated behind barbed wire, this panel will uncover
the problems of wartime citizenship when defined in terms of race and nationality, the scars that
the draft created within the Japanese American community both during and after the war, and the
possibilities and limits of recent reconciliation efforts and formal recognition of the resisters by a
new generation of JACL leaders and Japanese Americans.
Presiding: Arthur Hansen, California State University, Fullerton and Japanese American
National Museum, Los Angeles
Panelists:
Frank Emi, Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee
“Heart Mountain, the Fair Play Committee, and the Limits of
Reconciliation”
Cherstin Lyon, University of Arizona
“Beyond Heart Mountain: The Tucsonians”
Frank Chin, Independent Activist/Writer
“Born in the U.S.A.”
Commentators: Martha Minow, Harvard Law School
Arthur Hansen, professor of history at California State University at Fullerton will
moderate the roundtable. Professor Hansen has published numerous books and articles on
Japanese American internment, including Voices Long Silent, Manzanar Martyr, and most
recently “Protest, Resistance and the Heart Mountain Experience: The Revitalization of a Robust
Nikkei Tradition.” Along with Gary Okihiro, he is one of the first historians to write of Japanese
American resistance to internment during the war. He currently serves as the director of the
Center for Oral and Public History at Fullerton, as curator at the Japanese American National
Museum, and is editing the forthcoming autobiography of James Omura. Omura was a
newspaper editor tried for conspiracy to advise individuals against the draft along with the
leaders of the Heart Mountain Fair Play committee. Although acquitted of these charges under
the First Amendment, Omura lost his job at the paper, became the target of JACL hostilities, and
was ostracized by the community for his sympathy with the resisters of conscience.
Frank Emi is the last surviving leader of the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee
(FPC), the only organized group of draft resisters inside the camps. When the War Department
reopened Selective Service for Nisei men, Emi was not eligible for the draft. He was married
and had children, but joined the FPC out of a desire to fight against the unconstitutional
treatment of Japanese Americans and seek clarification of the Nisei’s citizenship rights. He
became one of the leaders of the FPC and encouraged the group to confront the government’s
unconstitutional policies with civil disobedience. He served an 18-month prison sentence at
Leavenworth for his resistance against the draft, but was acquitted of conspiracy charges along
with newspaper editor James Omura and the other leaders of the FPC. He has continued fighting
for civil rights in the postwar years and joined the campaign for redress in the 1980s. Most
recently, Emi was honored as a speaker at the 2002 ceremony of recognition and reconciliation
between the JACL and the resisters.
Cherstin Lyon is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Arizona and will be
presenting a portion of her research on race, citizenship and the law in the 20th Century. Her
presentation on this panel will be on those who resisted the draft “beyond Heart Mountain,” from
camps such as Topaz and Amache as individual resisters rather than as an organized group. She
will also provide some comparisons with others who resisted the draft during WWII on the basis
of civil rights and freedom of religion – such as Hopi Indians, and Tohono O’Odham Indians
from Arizona. Her research on the resisters from Topaz and Amache is based in part on oral
histories funded by the CCLPEP with a group of men who began calling themselves Tucsonians
after the war in honor of the prison where they met while serving nine to eighteen month
sentences for Selective Service violations. Because the Tucsonians stood alone as individual
resisters against the draft, not as a unified group as did the resisters from Heart Mountain, their
stories reveal the complex reasons why some of the Nisei chose to resist, and presents striking
examples of individual forms of civil disobedience in defense of their own interpretations of their
rights and obligations as U.S. citizens. Lyon’s presentation will also provide an analysis of their
postwar efforts to create a community of resisters with annual Tucsonian reunions, and the
importance of reconciliation to the third and fourth generation of Japanese Americans.
Frank Chin is the person most responsible for rescuing from oblivion both the Heart
Mountain resisters and James Omura, and has recently published Born in the U.S.A., the most
significant study to date based upon the resisters’ wartime campaign against the U.S. government
and their own ethnic population. The community dramatizations he developed relative to "the
resistance" were rooted in the oral histories he undertook with these men and their families, as
well as their arch opponents from the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL). These oral
histories constitute in themselves an important historical record. Chin was at the forefront over
the last twenty years of replacing the self-serving JACL version of the WWII Japanese American
exclusion/detention experience with one grounded in historical documentation, taking into
account the full range of wartime experiences.
Commentator Martha Minow is a professor of law at Harvard University. She has
written extensively on the law, identity and civil rights, war and reconciliation, and the uses of
memory for achieving social justice. Minow’s extensive research on the attempts to construct
positive legal responses to the Holocaust and her commitment to social justice provide her with
the background, expertise, and insights to draw conclusions to this panel that will push audience
members to think beyond the Japanese American resisters of conscience and World War II and
connect the issues raise by panelists to issues of war and social justice that extend beyond our
national borders, historical memory and forgetting, and the important role of civil disobedience
in the face of state efforts to squelch dissent and limit civil rights.