COMMUNITY COMMENT : A Half-Century Wait for an Apology

In January, 1944, at the urging of the Japanese American Citizens League, the U.S. government subjected 120,000 Japanese Americans who had been in concentration camps since 1942 to the draft. About 315 internees, supported by the Fair Play Committee of the Heart Mountain, Wyo., camp, refused to fight for their country while deprived of their basic rights and freedoms.

The seven leaders of the committee, including Los Angeles native FRANK EMI, were sentenced to four years in prison for violating the Selective Service Act. They won on appeal and were released in May, 1946, after serving 18 months at Leavenworth, Kan. Other resisters were sentenced to up to five years in prison but pardoned by President Truman in 1947. Although the national JACL has never apologized to the resisters, on Feb. 19 its Pacific Southwest District chapter presented the survivors with a framed apology. Similarly, the Southern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union is considering honoring the resisters.

Emi spoke with Los Angeles journalist and Asian American activist GUY AOKI about the long battle for recognition.

I think the apology had a healing effect on some of the resisters. I really didn’t feel much anger. I just thought they (the Japanese American Citizens League) were pretty disgusting to bend over backward to accommodate the white majority.

The old guard of the JACL have that wartime mentality to this day. They’ll probably never change and they’ll always be against any kind of apology from the national JACL. They were attacking us for being disloyal and unpatriotic. Never once did they comment on the constitutional angle--our basis for resisting the draft.

I would’ve had no problem serving if we had had our freedom. In fact, at least two members of the Fair Play Committee went on to serve in the Korean War.

Before we were drafted into the Army, we wanted to have the constitutional rights of the evacuees restored. Either we were citizens--in which case we shouldn’t be locked up--or we weren’t citizens. Then, the draft shouldn’t apply to us.

Previous to the draft, Kiyoshi Okamoto, who was about 50, went around the camp as a fair-play committee of one. Whenever he could get a little gathering, he would preach to ‘em like a sidewalk preacher and tell them about the Constitution and the lack of due process and all that. So when the draft issue came up, we were already organized and we held mass meetings, one every night, in different blocks.

Some of the resisters would never have passed the Army’s physical anyway--they had bad eyes, stomach ulcers or high blood pressure or were over age. I was married and had a child and the military wasn’t drafting men with children. So I wouldn’t have been affected by the draft. So that shows that we were really fighting on principles, because if we’d stayed quiet, we

could have just waited out the war.

I never thought we’d done anything important, just that we were very angry at the time. The injustice of the government was so great that we just couldn’t keep quiet about it. You know, you put someone in a concentration camp, take away their rights and their homes and everything and then blindly tell them, “OK, we’re going to draft you like everybody else.” It just didn’t sound right! It couldn’t be right!

Some Japanese Americans try to make it an issue between the resisters and the Japanese American veterans of the 442nd. There’s never been an issue between us. They did what they thought was right; the resisters took a different road and stood up for their principles. In fact, after the Los Angeles Times did an article on me in 1987, this white ex-Marine called me up. He said, “I was in the U.S. Navy, I fought the Japanese in the Pacific and in Italy, I met the 442nd boys.” Well, I thought, here it comes. But he said, “You know, I’m sure glad you fought for your rights. You fought for all of us and I really thank you! And if there’s anything I can do to help you pass this redress bill (the congressional action that authorized payments to Japanese Americans who had been interned), let me know. I’m going to get some of my buddies to write to President Reagan.”

I was flabbergasted. We became friends, exchanging letters and Christmas cards.