Lesson Plan

The 1944 Nisei Draft at Heart Mountain, Wyoming: Its Relationship to the Historical Representation of the World War II Japanese American Evacuation

Statement of Purpose

By examining a controversial aspect of the World War II eviction and detention experience of Americans of Japanese ancestry—the drafting of U.S. citizen Nisei from behind barbed wires at a federal internment facility in Wyoming administered by the War Relocation Authority—this brief unit of several-days duration is designed to introduce students to two controversial historiographical issues. The first one involves the changing representation of past reality. The second, and closely related, issue pertains to how historical truths and value judgments are reflective of a society’s circumstances and power relations. Since the situation under examination occurred in 1944 during the Japanese American Evacuation—yet achieved renewed prominence within the movement for Japanese American redress between the late 1960s and the present—this unit may be taught profitably in conjunction with either World War II or recent U.S. history.

Introduction

The teaching unit offers a means of studying a major event in Asian American and U.S. history, the World War II Japanese American Evacuation, that not only invites an investigation into its causes, developments, and consequences, but also induces an appreciation for how the past as a whole is constructed, communicated, and used as a source of identity and empowerment. Too often, students are taught about the details of events like the Japanese American Evacuation without comparable classroom time devoted to placing them into a meaningful historical context and situating them within an appropriate historiographical frame of analysis. While discharging this dual burden, the teaching unit ideally should capitalize on the contested response to the draft at the Heart Mountain center—compliance and dissent—to prod student exploration of the problematic nature of such concepts as loyalty, patriotism, and heroism. In this connection, the roles played at Heart Mountain in 1944 by three “representative” Nisei (Frank Emi, Ben Kuroki, and James Omura) should be catechized.

Objectives

To examine the perception, widespread within the American public even after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1988, that the Japanese American Evacuation was justified on the grounds of wartime security, generally humane in its implementation, passively conformed to by Americans of Japanese ancestry, and limited in significance to the period of U.S. participation in World War II;

to correlate Asian American historical experiences with U.S. history;

to connect the Japanese American Evacuation to the pre- and post-World War II experience of Asian Americans, in general, and Japanese Americans, in particular;

to introduce the phenomenon of intracultural variation and demonstrate its significance in terms of a highly stereotyped ethnic community in an acute crisis situation;

to sensitize students to a prominent historiographical question (objectivity versus subjectivity), non-traditional forms of evidence (photographs and oral histories), and innovative historical concepts (hegemony/counterhegemony oppression/resistance, history/memory); and

to assist students in appreciating that historical study, to be true to the complexity of the past, must embrace such dualities as change and continuity, generalities and particularities, and consensus and conflict.

Historical Narrative

On 2 November 1944, in the Federal District Court in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Judge Eugene Rice sentenced the seven leaders of the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee (FPC) to four years at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas for conspiring to violate the Selective Service Act and for counseling other draft-age Nisei (U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry) at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center to resist military induction. The moving spirit among these convicted men was Frank Seishi Emi, a twenty-year-old Nisei grocer from Los Angeles, California, who was married and the father of two small children.

After a four-month internment at California’s Pomona Assembly Center, the Emi family transferred to Heart Mountain in northwestern Wyoming in September 1942. One of ten detention camps in desolate western and southern areas administered by the War Relocation Center (WRA) for evicted West Coast Americans of Japanese ancestry during World War II, Heart Mountain reached its peak population of 10,767 by January 1943. The next month, Emi was obliged, like all adults in WRA camps, to fill out a “loyalty” questionnaire. Dismayed by its two most controversial questions—one of which asked: “Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States wherever ordered?”—and by news that a segregated army unit of Nisei volunteers was being formed to showcase Japanese American loyalty, Emi responded that “under the present conditions I am unable to answer these questions.” He then advised other confused Heart Mountain Nisei to answer likewise. In December, Emi heard an older camp Nisei well versed in the U.S. Constitution proclaim that the government had abridged Nisei rights without due process of law and, therefore, they should cease pursuing appeasement. Consequently, Emi and several other Nisei joined with this spokesman to create the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee.

The FPC did not galvanize into a viable organization, however, until 20 January 1944. On that date Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson announced that the army, which in early 1942 declared American Japanese undraftable because of ancestry, had reinstated normal selective service for Nisei as a step toward their regaining full citizenship. By mid-February the FPC was holding regular meetings and by month’s end had 275 dues-paying members. Frank Emi (whose domestic situation exempted him from being drafted) and the FPCers reacted to the resumption of the draft by noting, suspiciously, that Nisei were treated as citizens only when it was to the government’s advantage. They maintained that if the government restored their full citizenship rights they would gladly comply with selective service requirements. Toward this end, the FPC first consulted an attorney about pursuing a test case challenging the application of selective service law to men interned behind barbed wire, and then petitioned President Franklin Roosevelt to clarify their citizenship status.

In March-April 1944 the FPC’s influence peaked. Not only did the organization gain widespread support for its position, but sixty-four Heart Mountain Nisei refused their preinduction physicals. In early May a federal grand jury indicted all but one of these resisters. Tried as a group in Wyoming’s largest mass trial, the sixty-three men were found guilty on June 26 and sentenced to three years in a federal penitentiary. A month later, Frank Emi and the other six FPC leaders were secretly indicted by the same grand jury. Although not waiving their right to a jury trial, like the resisters had, their plight (as indicated earlier) was virtually the same.

The day before the Wyoming court convicted the FPC steering committee, it acquitted yet another Nisei on trial for being a party to the alleged conspiracy, thirty-one year old journalist James Matsumoto Omura. Born near Seattle, Washington, Omura served in the 1930s as English-language editor for a string of Japanese vernacular newspapers in Los Angeles and San Francisco. In this capacity, he earned the enmity of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) leadership, whom he assailed as frivolous, obsequious flag-wavers and castigated for presuming to speak for all Nisei in spite of their organization’s comparatively scanty membership. The bad blood between the JACLers and Omura curdled when he launched the first Nisei magazine of politics and culture, Current Life, in October 1940. In featured editorials for his progressive monthly, Omura berated them regularly through the final published issue of January 1942. By then, owing to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, the U.S. declared war on Japan, and this situation set the stage for a showdown between the JACL leadership and James Omura.

On 19 February 1942, President Roosevelt, capitulating to pressure by politicians, nativist groups, and influential media figures, signed Executive Order 9066—purportedly for “military necessity.” This document, which authorized the secretary of war to establish military areas “from which any or all persons may be excluded as deemed necessary or desirable,” was the instrument by which 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of them U.S. citizens, were incarcerated for up to four years in concentration camps like Heart Mountain. Four days after its issuance, James Omura and Fumiko Okuma (the business manager of Current Life to whom Omura was secretly married) appeared in San Francisco at hearings sponsored by a House of Representatives select committee chaired by Congressman John Tolan of California to investigate “national defense migration.” Earlier a parade of JACL leaders had informed the Tolan Committee that the government could count on their complete support should mass eviction and detention of their entire ethnic population be viewed as imperative for prosecuting the war. To this position, whereby loyalty was equated with the sacrifice of rights and accommodation to authority, Omura and Okuma flatly dissented. While the fiercely patriotic Omura agreed with JACLers that subversive actions within the Japanese American community should be reported to government officials, he denigrated their notion that mass evacuation was a necessary evil and disparaged their chauvinistic policy of “constructive cooperation.” “I would like,” intoned an indignant Omura, “to ask the committee: Has the Gestapo come to America? Have we not risen in righteous anger at Hitler’s mistreatment of Jews? Then is it not incongruous that citizen Americans of Japanese descent should be mistreated and persecuted?”

On 27 March 1942, the army issued a proclamation declaring that in two days the free movement of Japanese Americans out of the strategic defense areas of the West Coast would be frozen and their enforced movement into assembly centers begun. Omura, who had determined not to linger in San Francisco for internment, fled to the “free zone” of Denver, Colorado, where his wife had already rented space to house Current Life. Unable to continue the magazine’s publication, Omura started an employment placement bureau. In addition to assisting Denver’s burgeoning war refugee population (Colorado’s Ralph Carr was the only Western governor to welcome Japanese Americans) find jobs free of charge, Omura filed several racially discriminatory cases through the War Manpower Commission that led to Nisei defense jobs. To pay his bills, Omura took gardening jobs, worked in a munitions factory, and wrote free-lance articles for Denver’s several Japanese vernacular newspapers. On 28 January 1944, he accepted the position of English-language editor for one of them, the Rocky Shimpo.

Almost a year prior to editing the Rocky Shimpo, Omura had contested the JACL supported Nisei combat unit because it was segregated and, therefore, a symbol of racism. Omura’s appointment to his new post closely followed Secretary of War Stimson’s announcement about Nisei draft resumption, another policy that Omura knew the JACL had urged upon the government. When this measure caused the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee to mushroom, Omura opened the Rocky Shimpo’s pages to that organization for news releases. Then, on 28 February 1944, Omura wrote his first editorial about draft reinstitution and the reaction to it by those detained in WRA camps. His concern at this point was not Heart Mountain, but the actions taken at the Granada, Colorado, and Minidoka, Idaho, centers. There draft resistance had been sporadic and punctuated with denunciations of democracy and avowals of expatriation to Japan. Whereas Omura believed that the government should restore a large share of the Nisei’s rights before asking them to sacrifice their lives on the battlefield, he could not condone impulsive, reckless, and irresponsible draft resistance.

It soon became plain to Omura that the Fair Play Committee represented an organized draft resistance movement dedicated to the principle that citizen Japanese should do their duty as Americans, equally, but not before being treated equally by the U.S. government. Thereafter in his Rocky Shimpo editorials he supported the FPC, not as an organization but solely on the issue of restoration as a prelude to induction. That the Heart Mountain Sentinel, the camp newspaper, was staunchly pro-JACL (and, as such, censorious of the FPC for placing Japanese American loyalty and patriotism at risk) assuredly added fuel to Omura’s fiery editorials. These gained members for the FPC and dramatically increased Rocky Shimpo sales in Heart Mountain and the other camps (where, opined Omura, “at least 90 percent of the people . . . are opposed to the JACL”). But Omura’s hard-hitting editorials also caused the government to sever his connection with the paper in mid-April 1944 and then, two months later, prompted the Wyoming grand jury to indict him plus the seven FPC leaders.

At the Cheyenne trial involving Frank Emi and James Omura (who was acquitted under the First Amendment constitutional right of “freedom of the press”) a third Nisei, Ben Kuroki, was in attendance as a potential government witness. Although not called to testify, Kuroki was interviewed by a Wyoming Tribune reporter at the trial’s closing. In the resulting article he branded Emi and his cohorts as “fascists,” blasted their activities as “a stab in the back,” and bewailed that “they have torn down all [that] the rest of us [Nisei] have tried to do.” Considering what Ben Kuroki had accomplished in the war, these words carried great weight.

Born and raised in Nebraska, the twenty-five year old Kuroki and his farming family had not been subject like most Japanese Americans to mass eviction and detention. One of a handful of Nisei the Army Air Corps accepted for service, Kuroki overcame immense prejudice against him to become a gunner in thirty perilous bombing missions over Axis North Africa and Europe. Rotated back to the U.S. as the first bona fide Nisei war hero in early 1944, Sergeant Kuroki’s canceled appearance on a hit radio show in southern California triggered a cause célèbre. Annoyed that this cruel slight had occurred because the network feared the highly decorated Kuroki’s ancestry might offend West Coast residents, the elite Commonwealth Club invited him to address them in San Francisco on February 4. Much of Kuroki’s talk covered his wartime experiences and how they had deepened his respect for democracy. But before concluding he alluded ruefully to the prejudice he had met in California upon his return from battle: “I don’t know for sure that it is safe for me to walk the streets of my own country.” Capstoning his oration, Kuroki echoed the JACL Creed—“Though some individuals may discriminate against me, I shall never become bitter or lose faith, for I know that such persons are not representative of the majority of the American people”—and reminded his listeners that Nisei soldiers were proving their loyalty to the United States on the bloody battlefield of Italy. When Kuroki sat down, the 600-plus audience gave him a ten-minute standing ovation.

The combat Nisei to whom Kuroki referred were in the 100th Infantry Battalion. Rooted in prewar Japanese American volunteers and draftees in Hawaii, the 100th was activated as a special battalion in mid-June 1942 upon being sent to the mainland for training. Not until late September of the next year, however, did the 100th see duty on the Italian front and suffer its first casualties. In January 1944, the battalion gained a glowing reputation for its stouthearted performance in the Battle of Cassino. This battle and others decimated the battalion’s original 1,300 soldiers, and replacements and reinforcements were badly needed. Eventually these troops would be supplied by the all-Nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which arrived in Europe in June 1942 and thereafter incorporated the battle-tested 100th as its 1st Battalion.

The 442nd, destined to become the most decorated unit for its size and length of service in American military history, was comprised initially of Hawaiian and mainland Nisei who had volunteered for service when the government announced its formation on 1 February 1943. The expectation was that Hawaiian Nisei volunteers would number 1,500 and their mainland counterparts twice that figure. Almost the reverse occurred. In Hawaii, where there was no mass wartime eviction of Japanese Americans, more than 2,600 were inducted (out of the nearly 10,000 who volunteered); on the mainland, only around 800 volunteers were inducted (from the total volunteer pool of approximately 1,250 Nisei in the WRA camps).

That so few of the eligible 23,600 draft-age Nisei in the camps had volunteered—at Heart Mountain out of 2,300 eligible men a mere 38 were volunteers—was of dire concern to the War Department, the WRA, and the JACL. Therefore, when the Nisei draft resumed in January 1944, they hoped that those eligible would readily comply with selective service regulations and, if necessary, fight and even die for their country. In April of that year, while FPC draft resistance was still intense at Heart Mountain, the army encouraged by the WRA and the JACL decided to send Kuroki on a morale building tour of three WRA camps, beginning with turbulent Heart Mountain.

The partisan Heart Mountain Sentinel paved the way for Kuroki’s visit. In its April 8 issue it printed two letters from “outsiders” side by side: the first was from a Caucasian member of Kuroki’s bomber team saluting him as a person who had “proved himself as loyal an American as any man who had ever crossed the ocean”; the second letter was from Nisei George Nomura attacking the FPC for its “diabolical plan to evade their undeniable obligation to serve this state [USA].” The front page of the Sentinel’s April 22 issue juxtaposed its lead story about the war hero’s imminent visit with a smaller item announcing James Omura’s ouster as Rocky Shimpo editor; also on this page was a reprinted letter from seven Caucasian members of the Iowa National Guard acclaiming the valor and patriotism of Nisei soldiers from Heart Mountain with whom they had shared the fight against fascist forces in Italy.

Kuroki’s week-long, end-of-April excursion to Heart Mountain was chronicled in printed accounts and photographs by the Sentinel in its April 29 and May 6 editions as being an unblemished triumph: “Kuroki ‘Takes’ Heart Mountain.” But two private accounts of the Nisei sergeant’s visit, even though deriving from a stridently pro-Kuroki and anti-FPC perspective, tell a rather different tale.

On May 1, Heart Mountain’s director, Guy Robertson, informed WRA Director Dillon Myer by post that “Sergeant Kuroki was dined and danced and spoke before many different groups, including members of the so-called Fair Play Committee,” yet felt compelled to add that on Kuroki’s departure day, six more Nisei refused their preinduction examinations. The weekly reports by the camp’s community analyst, Asael Hansen, are still more revealing. They indicate that the shy five feet, nine inch, 145-pound airman’s reception at Heart Mountain was a decidedly mixed one. Whereas 3,000 camp residents greeted him, the crowd at a scheduled mid-week address was much smaller than anticipated and hardly anybody gathered for his sendoff. Then, too, while Kuroki’s speeches were applauded and he was swarmed over by the camp’s adoring children and teenagers, their Japanese alien parents were offended by his completely American ways and point of view on the war (such as his emphatic prediction that “we” will soon bomb Japan). His encounters with Nisei draft resisters, moreover, did not proceed smoothly. Four of them allegedly had a session with him punctuated by this exchange: “What would you do if you were us?” “I’d volunteer for induction.” “So you think it is all right for us to be evacuated and locked up here.” On another occasion, following a “quite heated” session between Kuroki and the FPC membership, “a few of the men expressed a strong desire to beat him up.”

When Kuroki granted the aforementioned interview to the Wyoming Tribune in the wake of the November trial of the FPC leaders and James Omura, he told the reporter about the two sessions that Asael Hansen had documented a half year earlier. On the first occasion the resisters had rationalized their not showing for their draft physicals by quoting laws and the Constitution, though he could tell that “they didn’t really understand what they were talking about but had been influenced by others.” Convinced that the FPC was the influencing agent, he met with that organization and registered his strong disapproval of their actions. However, they persisted along the same course, culminating in the trial of their “key leaders” that had brought him to Cheyenne as a government witness against them.

Before Heart Mountain’s November 1945 closure, 85 men were imprisoned for draft law violations, while for all ten WRA camps the total was 315. Averaging twenty-five years in age, the resisters typically served two years in federal prisons before President Harry Truman issued them a blanket postwar pardon. As for the FPC leaders, their verdict and sentencing was overturned on appeal after eighteen months of imprisonment. Not all WRA camp draft resisters were given the same treatment, for it depended on what judge heard their case. For example, Judge Louis Goodman dismissed the indictments against seven Tule Lake, California, draft resisters. “It is shocking to the conscience,” he declared, “that an American citizen be confined on the ground of disloyalty and then, while so under duress and restraint, be compelled to served in the armed forces or be prosecuted for not yielding to such compulsion.”

In spite of substantial draft resistance, the great majority of eligible Nisei men in the WRA camps complied with their orders. Even at Heart Mountain, 700 men reported for their selective service physicals; of these, 385 were inducted, of whom eleven were killed and fifty-two wounded in battle. Totally some 13,500 Nisei men from the ten camps entered the U.S. Army. More than 75 percent of them—or put another way, more than 50 percent of all eligible Nisei males—saw army service in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team during its 225 days of heavy combat in Italy and France in 1944-45. This represented the highest percentage of eligible males of any racial or ethnic group assigned to a World War II combat unit, and this situation resulted in more than 700 deaths and 9,486 casualties. When President Truman received the 442nd on the White House lawn on 15 July 1946, he told them, “You fought not only the enemy but you fought prejudice—and you have won.”

Ben Kuroki, whose fame was overshadowed by the collective exploits of the “Go For Broke” 442nd, nonetheless stayed in the limelight for several years after his sojourn at Heart Mountain. While there he had announced his intention to fight in Asia—and before long he did. In 1945, he overcame a War Department regulation to become the first and only Nisei to serve in active combat with the Army Air Force in the Pacific theater, participating as a turret gunner on a B-29 in twenty-eight bombing missions over Tokyo and other Japanese cities. When he returned to the United States in early 1946, he was booked into the palatial Waldorf Astoria Hotel and asked to take part with celebrated generals and political leaders in a New York Herald Tribune forum on the war, and his remarks were then published in the Reader’s Digest (“The War Isn’t Over at Home”). Kuroki also was the subject of a 1946 biography entitled Boy From Nebraska. After traveling around the country on a JACL-endorsed speaking tour, Kuroki married, attended college, and became, in his home state, the first Japanese American editor of a general newspaper. Later he won awards for journalistic excellence when editing a suburban Michigan newspaper before continuing (and ending) his career in southern California. Although not a public figure for most of the postwar years, Kuroki was the invited keynote speaker and honored guest at the December 6, 1991, opening of the Museum of Nebraska’s exhibit on Nebraska and World War II. The very next day, the New York Times, in its lead editorial commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor, acclaimed Ben Kuroki as an “authentic hero” and linked his wartime accomplishments with those of the legendary 442nd.

For resisters like Frank Emi and their supporter James Omura there was no public applause, leastwise not until recently. The JACL’s wartime position that the sole way for Nisei to prove their loyalty was through military service, coupled with the extraordinary postwar publicity given the 442nd and the concurrent image construction of Japanese Americans as a model minority, made these men anonymous in mainstream America and social outcasts among their coethnics. Insofar as draft resistance was heard of in the Japanese American community, it was in derogatory terms: “draft dodgers,” “pro-Japan,” “hot heads,” “trouble-makers,” and “traitors.” Omura’s situation was still worse. His “crime” of defending the FPC’s position was compounded by his opposition to the JACL’s leadership and public policy. Branded a pariah, he was harassed by members of his own community to the point where his employment opportunities dried up and his marriage ended in divorce. Remaining in Denver, he switched from journalism to landscape gardening, remarried, raised a family, and turned his back on other Japanese Americans and their concerns.

In the 1970s two University of Wyoming-based professional historians (Roger Daniels and Douglas Nelson) published books based strictly on written public records that dramatized the draft resistance movement at Heart Mountain and treated sympathetically the roles played by the FPC membership and Omura. But it was not until the next decade and the climax of the movement for Japanese American redress and reparations, according to Frank Emi, that their reputation as “demented ogres” was recast within (and even beyond) their community. After Congress established the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) in 1980, that body held hearings in six major U.S. cities during 1981-82 to investigate matters surrounding the wartime camps and to recommend appropriate remedies. At these hearings, resisters told their stories. In New York, for example, FPC member Jack Tono testified first that the JACL had abandoned the resisters during the war and made their lives miserable thereafter, and then rebuked Ben Kuroki, “our great war hero,” for having labeled Frank Emi and the other FPC leaders “fascists” at their 1944 trial.

At CWRIC’s Seattle hearing, redress activists (most notably, the renowned Chinese American playwright Frank Chin), were surprised to discover James Omura (who they believed dead) not only in attendance but testifying and apparently anxious both to enter the redress fray and to refurbish his and the FPC’s reputation. By the time CWRIC had issued its report, Personal Justice Denied, in early 1983, Chin and his Japanese American cohorts had begun exhuming the resisters’ buried past by taping oral history interviews with them and by systematically researching pertinent documents both in their personal collections and at institutional archives. Moreover, this same group of activists were primarily responsible for the participation of Omura, Emi, and numerous other resisters in academic symposia and community forums that spotlighted their wartime experiences.

Whereas CWRIC judged that the Japanese American evacuation was unjustified (caused not by military necessity, but by race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership) and recommended a formal apology by Congress to Japanese Americans along with $20,000 payments to each camp survivor), Chin and his widening band of allies were anxious to go beyond the commission’s investigation and explore the machinations of the JACL leadership vis-a-vis Omura and the resisters. This task they began in earnest once President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Rights Act of 1988, which enacted into law the CWRIC recommendations.

In the interval between 1988 and the present, the draft resisters and James Omura have secured their place in the sun in Japanese American and United States history. Although there continues to be opposition to this historical revisionism, particularly from “old guard” JACL leaders and reactionary patriots, whether or not of Japanese ancestry, the trend is unmistakable. Before his death in 1994 James Omura had been deluged with community, national, and international honors, and proclaimed an American hero in the tradition of Thomas Paine, Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther King, and Caesar Chavez. Additionally, Frank Emi (the sole surviving FPC leader) and the resisters from Heart Mountain and the other WRA camps have been memorialized for their wartime role through a profusion of academic and commercial publications, documentary films, and imaginary literature. Their act of civil disobedience, twenty years before the 1960s civil rights movement, is now recognized as a historic benchmark in the U.S. civil rights chronology. Instead of invidious distinctions being made, as before, between the wartime behavior of the members of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee, they are now styled as being different yet complementary species of praiseworthy Americanism.

Implementing the Lesson

Prior to teaching this unit, have students read the section in their U.S. history survey textbook devoted to the Japanese American Evacuation. If at all possible, assign Roger Daniels’s brief but comprehensive 1993 study, Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II, as collateral reading. It would also be useful to show one or more relevant documentary films. Stephen Okazaki’s Years of Waiting, which is set largely at the Heart Mountain camp, is particularly effective because it deals with the plight of an interned Caucasian woman artist married to a Nisei, and hence speaks to Asian American and non-Asian American students alike. Another good documentary film to use is Rae Tajiri’s History and Memory, since it communicates how memory preserves the wartime experience of Japanese Americans and can be used to supplement and challenge the historical representation of it in mainstream cultural constructions. A third documentary, Robert Nakamura’s Something Strong Within, is good to use because its footage on camp life at Heart Mountain includes Ben Kuroki’s 1944 visit there. First, pass out to students copies of the above “Historical Narrative.” Then, after they have read this narrative, divide the class into small groups and have them discuss it briefly in general terms. Next, distribute the six handouts to the students and have them review their contents. Finally, as a class, discuss the questions on each of the handouts in sequential order.

Bibliography

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Arthur A. Hansen is professor of history and director of the Oral History Program and its Japanese American Project at California State University, Fullerton. A specialist on the World War II eviction and detention experience of Americans of Japanese ancestry, his most recent publication is "Oral History and the Japanese American Evacuation," Journal of American History (September 1995).

Handout 1
Chronology of the Heart Mountain Draft Controversy in the Context of the Japanese American Evacuation Experience

September 1940 Congress approves the first-ever U.S. peacetime draft of personnel for the armed forces. Under the Selective Service Act every U.S. male citizen aged between 21 and 36 is required to register. The act prohibits racial discrimination in drafting recruits. Approximately 3,500 Nisei (native-born U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry) are drafted within the first year of the act’s operation. At the time of the act’s passage, the census shows 126,947 Japanese in the U.S., of whom 79,642 (62.7%) are American citizens.

December 1941 On December 7, Japan attacks U.S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor, and the following day the U.S. declares war on Japan. On December 11, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), under authorization of a presidential warrant, detains 1,370 Issei (Japan-born U.S. residents) classified as “dangerous enemy aliens.”

January 1942 On January 5, all Japanese American selective service registrants are placed in Class IV-C along with enemy aliens. Many Japanese Americans already in military service are discharged or put on “kitchen police” or other military tasks. The next day California Congressman Leland Ford urges the removal of all Japanese from the West Coast. On January 29 U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle issues a series of orders establishing prohibited zones to be cleared of all enemy aliens.

February 1942 On February 13, the West Coast congressional delegation urges the removal of alien and citizen Japanese alike from the strategic areas of California, Oregon, and Washington, while the following day the Native Sons of the Golden West urge the evacuation of all Japanese, regardless of citizenship status. On February 16, FBI arrest and detention of Japanese aliens is reported to be 2,192. Three days later, President Franklin Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066, which authorizes the secretary of war to establish military areas “from which any or all persons may be excluded as deemed necessary or desirable.” On February 20, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson appoints Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt as the military commander responsible for executing Executive Order 9066, and on the next day hearings by the House Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration (Tolan Committee) begin on the West Coast to investigate problems of enemy aliens and others living along the Pacific shore.

March 1942 On March 18, President Roosevelt creates the War Relocation Authority (WRA). On March 21, the initial group of Japanese Americans “volunteers” arrive at the Manzanar Assembly Center in California, the first of sixteen such temporary detention centers. On March 27, the period of voluntary evacuation out of designated West Coast military exclusion areas ends. On March 30, the War Department discontinues induction of Nisei into armed services.

June 1942 On June 17, the War Department announces that it will no longer “accept for service with the armed forces Japanese or persons of Japanese extraction, regardless of citizenship status or other factors.”

June 1942 On June 12, the Hawaiian Provisional Infantry Battalion is activated as the all-Nisei 100th Infantry Battalion.

July 1942 On August 12, the first 292 “volunteers” arrive at Heart Mountain Relocation Center.

November 1942 On November 3, army jurisdiction over evicted Japanese Americans ends and authority over them is transferred to the WRA.

January 1943 On January 28, the War Department restores privilege of volunteering for military service to Nisei.

February 1943 On February 1, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team (RCT) is activated. On February 3, the WRA begins administering a loyalty questionnaire to all inmates over seventeen. In early February, the Heart Mountain Congress of American Citizens is formed to challenge the Japanese American Citizen League (JACL) policy of cooperation with the camp administration.

August 1943 On August 21 the 100th Infantry Battalion leaves for active duty in Europe.

January 1944 On January 24, Nisei eligibility for the draft is restored. On January 26, the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee (FPC) is formally organized.

March 1944 On March 1, 400 Heart Mountain Nisei attend an FPC-sponsored public rally, at which a resolution declaring that men drafted into military service should refuse to report for the physical examination or for induction is unanimously passed.

April 1944 On April 24, Nisei war hero Ben Kuroki is ordered by the War Department on a week-long visit to Heart Mountain during the draft resistance movement to build residents’ morale. Thereafter he goes on similar visits to the Minidoka, Idaho, and Topaz, Utah, camps and meets with the same mixed reception as he had at Heart Mountain.

May 1944 On May 10, a federal grand jury indicts sixty-three Heart Mountain draft resisters.

June 1944 On June 26, the 442nd RCT, with the 100th Infantry Battalion as its new first battalion, goes into combat in European theater.

July 1944 On July 18, the earlier indicted sixty-three Heart Mountain Nisei are convicted of draft resistance in the Cheyenne, Wyoming, federal district court and sentenced to three years in federal penitentiary.

August 1944 Seven Heart Mountain FPC leaders and Rocky Shimpo editor James Omura are arrested for conspiring to assist draft violation.

November 1944 On November 1-2, Heart Mountain FPC leaders are found guilty and sentenced to federal imprisonment for “unlawful conspiracy to counsel, aid and abet violators of the draft,” while journalist James Omura is found innocent of this charge.

December 1944 On December 18, the Supreme Court hands down its decisions in the Korematsu and Endo cases. In Korematsu Executive Order 9066 and the army’s eviction of Japanese Americans are upheld, though Justice Frank Murphy dissents from the 6-3 ruling and condemns it as “a legalization of racism.” The Endo decision finds that the government cannot detain “concededly loyal” persons against their will. Though this decision precipitates the closing of the camps it does not address the constitutionality of the mass removal and detention of Japanese Americans.

August 1945 On August 11, Japan surrenders to Allies, thus ending World War II.

December 1947 On December 24, Heart Mountain draft resisters (and those from all WRA camps) are pardoned by President Truman.

July 1980 On July 31, President Jimmy Carter establishes the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Evacuation of Civilians (CWRIC) to hold hearings for inquiring into the Japanese American Evacuation and recommending necessary remedies for it.

June 1983 On June 16, CWRIC issues a report, Personal Justice Denied, that recommends a formal governmental apology to interned Japanese Americans in World War II and individual payments to camp survivors of $20,000.

October 1987 On October 1, “A More Perfect Union: Japanese Americans and the United States Constitution” opens at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. This exhibit examines the constitutional process through the internment experience.

August 1988 On August 10, President Ronald Reagan signs the Civil Rights Act of 1988, thereby enacting into law CWRIC’s 1983 recommendations.

February 1995 On February 5, the JACL’s Pacific Southwest District, after a heated and emotional debate, approves a resolution to apologize to the Japanese American draft resisters of World War II.

Handout #2: Map

SOURCE: Frank and Joanne Iritani, Ten Visits: Accounts of Visits to All the Japanese American Relocation Centers (San Mateo, Calif.: Japanese American Curriculum Project, 1995), 3.

Handout 3
Photographs of Frank Emi, Ben Kuroki, and James Omura

Ben Kuroki signing autographs for Nisei admirers at Heart Mountain while on his official visit there in late April 1944 during the camp’s draft resistance movement.

Frank Emi and family, taken at Heart Mountain Camp just before the conspiracy trial of the Fair Play Committee in October 1944.

James Omura standing before a banner paying tribute to him and the Heart Mountain draft resisters held at the Centenary United Methodist Church in Los Angeles, California, on 21 February 1993.

63 Heart Mountain draft resisters as pictured at their indictment in a U.S. district courtroom in Cheyenne, Wyoming, on 10 May 1944.

Handout 4
Comments by and about Frank Emi

“No matter how small a minority, it’s not right to violate the Constitution to obtain a certain end. I think the Constitution should be inviolate. That’s the only thing we have.” Frank Emi, quoted in “Heart Mountain Relocation Camp-A 50 Year Remembrance,” Powell Tribune, 13 October 1992 (Supplement). Quote appears on pages 3-4 of section of supplement titled “Draft Resisters.”

“If Frank Emi and his cohorts of draft-resisters think their position is a popular one, they should talk to some of the Nisei veteran groups. Most of the Nisei vets who served during World War II don’t think the draft-resisters should be immortalized or considered martyrs. What will they come up with next? A monument recognizing those who resisted the draft?” George Yoshinaga, “Horse’s Mouth,” Rafu Shimpo, 13 October 1992.

“We could either tuck our tails between our legs like dogs or stand up like free men, and fight for justice. Some of us chose the latter. We were going to resist.” Frank Emi, quoted in Takeshi Nakayama, “Heart Mountain Resisters Hold Homecoming,” Rafu Shimpo, 22 February 1993.

Handout 5
Comments by and about Ben Kuroki

“You have but one country. As a group you [Fair Play Committee draft resisters] are not doing your part as Americans, as Nisei, or for that matter as human beings, in view of the conscientious absolvement of your responsibility.” Ben Kuroki, quoted in editorial (“Triumph Over Intolerance”), Heart Mountain Sentinel, 29 April 1944.

“I believe that, from what I hear from those who were there, he [Ben Kuroki] was well received in Heart Mountain Camp. Imagine, a parade, people waving the flag, Boy Scouts in uniform in a concentration camp. Could make a good TV drama which could show how a small group (JACL) with the help of the WRA can control a helpless minority. Also, can you imagine a person coming into a camp and be blind to the fact that these innocent people were incarcerated behind barbed-wire fences, watch towers with armed guards. He should have protested the treatment that his fellow Japanese Americans were forced to endure. All he thought was that he was such a great war hero that he became blind to the injustices dealt to a group of unfortunate people. I wonder what he went to fight for.” Letter from Mits Koshiyama, former Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee draft resister, to Arthur A. Hansen, 28 October 1994. Housed in the archives of the Japanese American Project of the Oral History Program at California State University, Fullerton.

“My military experience was filled with variety. Shortly after I returned from Europe, Washington ordered me to visit three internment camps in Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah. My job was public relations. . . . I was shocked when I approached the entrance of the Wyoming camp. The armed guards were wearing the same uniform I was wearing. And inside, behind barbed wire, were ‘my own people.’ They were from three West Coast states, two-thirds of them American citizens and the remainder their alien parents or kin. They were uprooted overnight and denied their rights. Many lost everything in property they took years to accumulate. The Smithsonian Institution, which now has a huge exhibit on the internment, termed it the worst violation of civil rights in the 200 years of the U.S. Constitution.” Ben Kuroki, Nebraska State Historical Society Newsletter 44 (January 1992), 3.

Handout 6
Comments by and about James Omura

“The removal of Jim Omura as editor of the English edition of the Rocky Shimpo was acclaimed, generally, as a very fine thing by Heart Mountain people. Most of them were disgusted with his editorials and apparently were very glad that he was terminated.” Memorandum, dated 22 April 1944, from Guy Robertson, Heart Mountain Director, to Dillon Myer, War Relocation Authority National Director.

“By an odd twist, the Japanese American Citizens League, which had gone down the tube with its collaboration policy [during World War II], rose [in the postwar era] out of the shambles to a position of considerable power and influence unmatched in Asian American circles. . . . The League maintains its current prominence by control of the essential process of politics and the media. The major sources of communication are either owned by League officials or beholden to it. Others are easily intimidated by JACL advertisers whose withdrawal of ads means death to the small newspapers of our small minority. In such a deleterious climate, Nikkei news has become managed if not censored.” James Omura, “Japanese American Journalism during World War ll,” in Gail M. Nomura, et al, eds., Frontiers of Asian American Studies: Writing, Research, and Commentary (Pullman, Wash.: Washington State University Press, 1989), 75.

“A lot of you may not know Jimmie’s name because he has been written out of history by those who have written our histories for us. I think it’s important for us as journalists and writers to go back and discover what is true and what is fake. Know the difference. Go back and recover what has been lost.” Frank Abe, as quoted in the Hokubei Mainichi, 12 April 1989. Comments derive from the introduction of James Omura by Abe, a reporter for KIRO News radio in Seattle, Washington, on the occasion of Omura being presented a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Asian American Journalists Association on 6 April 1989, in San Francisco, California.

Questions

From Handout 1-Chronology

l. What actions taken by the U.S. government prior to the restoration of the draft in late January 1944 might have led some Nisei to feel that their American citizenship was practically worthless?

2. Defenders of American democracy have argued that, while the system sometimes breaks down in times of crises, the damage is invariably repaired over time in a peaceable manner. Discuss this point in terms of the total chronology.

3. Based on the events covered by the chronology, do you agree with Justice Frank Murphy’s dissenting opinion in the Korematsu case that the World War II eviction of Japanese Americans constituted “a legalization of racism”?

From Handout 2-Map

1. Students of history must pay careful attention to maps, for they as well as written narratives “tell a story.” What story/stories does this map tell?

2. Critics of the Japanese American Evacuation have charged that the U.S. government’s World War II term “relocation centers” was more euphemistic than accurate and should be supplanted by the term “detention centers.” Those opposed to this position have said that the wartime terminology used for these places is a historical fact and that, as such, must be retained to uphold historical accuracy. Analyze, being sure to examine the relationship between language and truth in historical inquiry.

3. The map indicates that some Kibei (U.S. born citizen Nisei who received their formative education in Japan) were among the “non-citizen” population interned in camps administered by the Justice Department. What relationship, if any, does this anomaly have to the Nisei draft issue?

From Handout 3-Photographs

1. It is often said that a photograph is worth a thousand words. What words come to mind when you scrutinize the photograph (within the text) of the sixty-three Heart Mountain draft resisters at their spring 1944 federal indictment?

2. Why do you suppose Frank Emi posed for such a formal family photograph on the occasion of his departure from Heart Mountain for his fall 1944 conspiracy trial with six other Fair Play Committee leaders plus James Omura?

3. The official War Relocation Authority photograph taken during Ben Kuroki’s April 1944 tour of Heart Mountain is revealing both for what it shows and for what it omits. Analyze and discuss.

4. The 1993 photo of James Omura at a resisters’ tribute was taken by Nisei Hannah Tomiko Holmes, who also made the banner pictured behind Omura. As a young girl she was removed by the government from the Berkeley [California] School for the Deaf and incarcerated at Manzanar in eastern California, even though that camp lacked special facilities for hearing-impaired children. In the 1980s, Holmes became very active in the movement for redress and reparations. Does knowledge of the photographer’s background have any bearing on her photo’s interpretation?

From Handout 4-Frank Emi

1. It has been observed that customarily in wartime the Constitution gets reduced to “a mere scrap of paper.” Why do you suppose that Frank Emi, in light of his World War II experience, does not appear to agree with this cynical proposition?

2. George Yoshinaga’s commentary raises many interesting questions. One of them is the relationship between popularity and morality. Another is the diversity of opinion found in all communities, including racial-ethnic ones. Still a third one is the role of monuments in depicting the past. What are some others?

3. Frank Emi’s 1993 juxtaposition between “men” and “dogs” can be interpreted as follows: only draft resisters were “men” while all those Nisei at Heart Mountain and the other WRA camps who reported for induction were “dogs”? Does Emi’s quoted passage lend itself to other interpretations? How do you suppose George Yoshinaga would react to Emi’s statement?

From Handout 5-Ben Kuroki

l. A key aspect of historical education is impressing upon students the importance of context. How does “context” help explain the apparent contrast between the wartime and postwar statements by Ben Kuroki?

2. Increasingly historians have come to accept the notion that, while most historical facts can achieve broad agreement, the interpretation of these same facts depends upon the perspective of the interpreter, whether or not that individual is a professional historian? Put another way, history is seen as having both an objective and a subjective nature. How do Mits Koshiyama’s comments about Ben Kuroki’s 1944 visit to Heart Mountain apply to this point?

From Handout 6-James Omura

1. To be either a good historian or a good citizen, one must be able to detect bias and to make allowances for it when assessing past or present actions or utterances. Indicate the bias in each of the three statements relating to James Omura and explain what difference you feel it makes to “historical truth.”

2. In his unpublished autobiography, James Omura complained that those historians who wrote about the World War II draft resistance at Heart Mountain and his role in it had not taken the time to talk to the people involved. Frank Abe was one person who has interviewed Omura and numerous resisters. What value is oral history to the search for the truth of past reality? How do Abe’s comments relate to the role of oral history? And what does he mean, first, when he tells an audience of Asian American journalists that others have written “our histories for us,” and then enjoins this group of writers to ferret out “what is true and what is fake” about the Asian American past?

3. Many contemporary historians employ the concept of “hegemony” (that is, that an elite can establish its power only if it exerts a cultural domination over other social classes) in their work. How does this concept apply to Omura’s 1989 assessment of the JACL postwar power and influence in the Japanese American community, including the interpretation of its World War II history?