Prisoners of conscience

"This was a concentration camp. They wanted to draft me. I thought that was wrong."-Yosh Kuromiya, resister

It is by way of such blunt, unemotional testimony that documentary filmmaker Frank Abe brings to light the story of a littleknown episode in American history — the prosecution and incarceration of 85 interned Japanese Americans who, in 1944, refused to be drafted into the U. S. military unless their rights as citizens were restored.

"Conscience and the Constitution," airing at 10 tonight on KCTS-TV, attempts to write back into history a long-ignored conflict that has sharply divided Japanese America for more than 50 years.

It is a complicated story told in a straightforward chronological style devoid of melodrama and sentimentality.

"We took a no-tears approach," Abe says. "Even off-camera these guys never cried. They are comfortable with the knowledge that they did something."

Abe, a former KIROTV news reporter, grew up as many Japanese Americans did, believing that his parents’ generation surrendered their constitutional rights without question after the outbreak of World War II. As a journalist, he discovered the stories of resisters not mentioned in history books. "We grew up being denied knowledge of their courage," he says.

In 1943, the United States government relocated 120,000 people of Japanese descent to 10 internment camps across the West, surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. The Japanese American Citizens League, a group formed in 1930 by business leaders devoted to Americanism, represented the prevailing attitude among Japanese Americans that loyalty had to be proven through cooperation. The JACL pushed first for the rights of second-generation Japanese-Americans to volunteer for combat duty, then called upon the government to draft men from the camps.

Though the majority went along, Kiyoshi Okamoto, who called himself the Fair Play Committee of One, together with former grocer Frank Emi, began a protest movement at the Heart Mountain camp in Wyoming. For these resisters, challenging the draft was their one chance to address the validity of the internment camps in court.

"We went quietly when they forced us from our homes," Emi recalls, "But now they wanted us to risk our lives for something that we weren’t privy to, for democracy that was denied us."

At Heart Mountain, 63 young men who refused to board the inductee buses were taken into custody. They were tried, convicted and sent to prison for draft evasion, eventually serving more than two years. Twenty-two more convictions followed. Eventually the leaders of the Fair Play committee were also arrested and imprisoned.

After the war, the camps were abandoned and the JACL set about re-integrating Japanese Americans into American society. Those who had served on the battlefield returned to a heroes’ welcome. The resisters, who fought their battle in the courts, were released from prison to find themselves scorned as draft-dodgers and traitors, their families ostracized. Seattle native Jim Akutsu calmly tells of his mother, who took her own life shortly after being told she was not even welcome to go to church with her neighbors.

It wasn’t until 1988 that the U. S. government finally admitted that the internment camps were wrong. It took another 12 years before the JACL made a formal apology for turning their backs on the Heart Mountain resisters.

Abe says he is not trying to make heroes or legends out of these men, maintaining that they were "ordinary men thrust into extraordinary circumstances." After 50 years, those men and their circumstances are finally on record.