UIC Today : February 18, 2002

AACC PRESENTS: Frank Abe's Conscience and the Constitution — The Untold Story of Japanese Americans Imprisoned For Resisting Draft During World War II

Today, the Asian American Coalition Committee (AACC) will be presenting the independent film CONSCIENCE AND THE CONSTITUTION in the Montgomery Ward Gallery of UIC's Chicago Circle Center at 3:30PM, the second film in a film showing beginning at 3:00PM in the Gallery. This film showing is part of this year's Asian American Film Series presented by AACC.

Long before the civil rights marches of the 1960s, another group of young Americans fought for their basic rights as U.S. citizens. CONSCIENCE AND THE CONSTITUTION is the first television program to tell the complete story of the largest organized resistance to wartime incarceration - the Japanese Americans who, during World War II, resisted the draft and refused to fight for the government that was imprisoning them. An ITVS presentation, CONSCIENCE AND THE CONSTITUTION is produced by Frank Abe, with funding provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund.

"After September 11th the film takes on a new meaning," Abe explained. "Once again the U.S. is attacked on its own soil from overseas by a foreign, non-white power. Once again suspicion and a desire for revenge quickly turned to those in our midst whose only crime was looking like the enemy. But this time politicians, the press and the public did not act on their first impulse, and part of that was the memory of what we did to Japanese Americans in 1942. I'm glad that films like ours keep fresh the memory of what happened before, so we know what mistakes not to make again."

The resisters portrayed in CONSCIENCE AND THE CONSTITUTION - living contradictions to the myth that all Japanese Americans passively complied with government edicts - were willing to fight for their country, but not until the government restored their rights as U.S. citizens and released their families from the camps. Prosecuted by the government as criminals and ostracized as traitors by Japanese American leaders and veterans, these principled protesters served two years in prison and were written out of the popular history of Japanese America for the next 50 years. CONSCIENCE AND THE CONSTITUTION delves into the heart of the Japanese American conscience and into a controversy that divides many in the community even today.

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor shocked the United States and plunged the nation into war. Despite being warned there was no military necessity, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered the mass removal of 120,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast into ten American-style concentration camps - both the Issei, first-generation immigrants who were barred from U.S. citizenship, and their children, the Nisei, born in this country as U. S. citizens.

Stepping forward to speak for the besieged minority was the only national organization of its kind: the Japanese American Citizens League, formed in 1930 from groups of professionals eager to prove their Americanism. Led by national field secretary Mike Masaoka, the JACL, anxious to prove its members were not like the Japanese enemy, urged compliance with the government in exchange for humane treatment. Once the expulsion was complete, Masaoka urged the U.S. government to draft young Nisei out of the camps so they could, in his words, "spill their blood for America" and further prove their loyalty.

When an Army drive for volunteers from the camps fell short, the government instituted the draft. Many answered the call, but for others, it was the last chance to protest their continued incarceration. An engineer named Kiyoshi Okamoto, who called himself the Fair Play Committee of One, began to teach a young grocer named Frank Emi about the Constitution and Bill of Rights. With Okamoto as chair, the Fair Play Committee typed bulletins, held meetings, and elected officers. A Denver journalist, James Omura, editor of the Rocky Shimpo newspaper, threw a lifeline to the resisters through his columns.

When buses came to Heart Mountain and other camps to take inductees to their draft physicals, several failed to show up. Resistance began to spread. The JACL and others branded the resisters as "agitators" and "troublemakers." The FBI picked up the Heart Mountain resisters and transported them - one out of nine refused induction - to county jails.

One week after D-Day, at the Federal Courthouse in Cheyenne, Wyoming, 63 resisters from Heart Mountain stood trial for draft evasion. The trial took two weeks; the men were found guilty and sentenced to three years in a federal penitentiary. Half were sent to Leavenworth, Kansas; the rest to McNeil Island, Washington. Twenty-two more later resisted, bringing the total from Heart Mountain to 85.

CONSCIENCE AND THE CONSTITUTION then examines the case of seven resistance leaders, including Frank Emi (who as the married father of two young children was not even eligible for the draft), and James Omura, who were arrested and put on trial for conspiracy to counsel draft evasion. The leaders were found guilty and sentenced to prison, but Omura was acquitted by virtue of the First Amendment.

Inside prison Frank Emi and others put on judo exhibitions, marking the first time inmates had ever seen the martial art of weaponless self-defense. "The other prisoners were really wide-eyed and surprised and they gave us a round of applause," says Emi. "And we always felt that this was one reason we were left alone."

On Christmas, 1945, the U.S. Court of Appeals threw out the convictions of the seven Fair Play Committee leaders. It ruled their jury improperly ignored civil disobedience as a defense. Frank Emi and the others were given a new suit, $25.00, and a train ticket home. However, the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal from the draft resisters themselves; they served more than two years and were released in 1946. On Christmas 1947, President Truman pardoned all wartime draft resisters. Finally, in 1988, the U.S. government admitted the expulsion and incarceration were wrong and apologized, awarding symbolic compensation of $20,000 to each internee.

Pardoned and apologized to by the U.S. government, the resisters have had a harder time within their own community. The JACL only recently apologized at a meeting this July in Monterey, California, after taking votes in previous years declining to do so. Feelings of resentment and hostility against the resisters still run high.

"The story is about the price you pay for taking a principled stand," says filmmaker Frank Abe, a third-generation Japanese American who lives in Seattle. "It's also about two responses to injustice: collaboration or resistance. The resisters committed an act of civil disobedience to try to clarify the rights of all Japanese Americans. Yet they not only spent two years in prison, they spent 50 years as pariahs in our own community. With this broadcast I hope they will finally be able to take their place in our nation's history."

For more information about CONSCIENCE AND THE CONSTITUTION, please visit The Resisters.