Piece of Resistance

For Paul Tsuneishi, an ugly part of America’s past must not be forgotten. He saw it, lived it, and now has set out to capture it.

The 73-year-old Sunland resident’s mission is to collect the oral histories of the Japanese Americans who were interned with him at Heart Mountain, Wyo., one of 10 camps used to incarcerate people of Japanese ancestry during World War II.

Of particular interest to Tsuneishi are the Heart Mountain internees who resisted the government’s efforts to draft them, prompting at least 63 of them to be sentenced to federal prison.

How could they serve in the armed forces, they asked, of a country that had violated their civil rights by throwing them and their families into remote internment camps?

So far, Tsuneishi has taken oral histories from six of the Heart Mountain resistors, who along with resistors at other camps became known as the “No-No Boys” because they answered no to key questions on a government-administered loyalty oath. And he continues to search for additional survivors with the hope that their histories may one day be used at a proposed interpretive center to be built on the site of the Heart Mountain camp.

“My interest in this is not to memorialize the camp experience, which is easy to do,” Tsuneishi said, “but rather to use the experience to educate adults and children on how important it is to keep this country’s constitutional guarantees alive.”

Many scholars now agree that the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II is one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history. On Feb. 19, 1942--10 weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor--President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the exclusion of anyone from a region of the country on the basis of military necessity.

The order paved the way for the internment of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast, two-thirds of whom were American citizens. A half-century later, the government apologized and issued $20,000 to each camp survivor.

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But former internees such as Tsuneishi, who is the only California resident on the board of the newly formed Heart Mountain, Wyoming, Foundation, are not ready to let this now-infamous chapter of U.S. history die along with the aging internees.

Tsuneishi said his foundation hopes to one day house a collection of oral histories from Heart Mountain internees that would include interviews previously compiled by author Frank Chin, who is now writing a book on the resistors.

Plans are also underway to collect the oral histories of members of the non-Asian community who were living in Heart Mountain during the internment period.

Tsuneishi, who received training in oral interviewing before embarking on his mission, has traveled up and down the West Coast meeting with internees such as Mits Koshiyama, a Heart Mountain No-No Boy whom Tsuneishi interviewed in San Jose.

Koshiyama’s oral history, which is neatly bound in a folder, recounts the evolution of the Fair Play movement, which sought to fight the internment of citizens on constitutional grounds and attracted hundreds to its meetings. The Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee, which formed out of the movement, subsequently mounted lawsuits against the draft and the internment.

In his interview with Tsuneishi, Koshiyama recalled the events leading to his arrest for resisting the draft and the trial that followed. The judge, Koshiyama said, referred to him and his co-defendants as “You Jap boys.”

Koshiyama and at least 62 others from Heart Mountain were convicted of draft evasion and seven others were convicted of conspiracy against the draft. Koshiyama was sentenced to three years in prison, but was released after spending about two years at McNeil Island Penitentiary in Washington state.

“This was a constitutional issue. . . . I asked, ‘How can I go and fight for a free world, democracy and all that when my family and friends were all incarcerated in this concentration camp being denied the very things I was supposed to fight for?’ ” Koshiyama said. “It just didn’t make sense to me so that’s the reason I resisted.”

Earlier this week Tsuneishi forged ahead with his mission in the living room of a West Hills home where he interviewed 76-year-old Jim Akutsu, a No-No Boy who was sentenced to nearly four years in prison.

Many believe the highly regarded novel “No-No Boy” by John Okada was based on Akutsu. The book captured the bitter disillusionment of a young Japanese American man trying to survive in the postwar world.

During their session, Akutsu told Tsuneishi of how he and Okada attended high school together in Seattle and how after the war they met again and became friends. He also spoke of events leading to his internment, including his unsuccessful attempts to enlist in the military.

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Instead of embracing him, the government labeled him an alien and shipped him to the Minidoka internment camp in southern Idaho. It was at the camp that Akutsu was asked to sign a loyalty oath, which the government used to separate the so-called disloyals from the loyals.

Questions 27 and 28 in the oaths asked them whether they would fight for the United States and forswear loyalty to the Japanese emperor. Those who wanted to prove their loyalty to the United States answered yes.

But, bothered by the wording of the question that presupposed loyalty to Japan, Akutsu answered no to Question 28. He was eventually arrested and convicted of draft evasion along with 44 other Minidoka internees, who were sent to McNeil Island Penitentiary.

Akutsu, now a Seattle resident who was in town this week visiting family, maintained that when the government classified him as an alien and interned him, he was no longer obligated to serve in the military.

“I followed the government, I did not resist,” said Akutsu, who also contends that he was not properly notified that he had been drafted.

When asked by Tsuneishi what he hopes the public will remember, Akutsu stated the mantra he said he has lived his life by: “The price of freedom and liberty is a constant vigil.”

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“The government was setting a very dangerous precedent when they took our citizenship away from us and then gave it back when they wanted to,” Akutsu said.

During the war, the No-No Boys were shunned by many of their fellow internees, as well as the public at large. The internees who cooperated with authorities--and there were dozens of young men who volunteered for combat service--said they did so to prove Executive Order 9066 wrong, to prove through service that they were loyal Americans. And that is why they also shunned the No-No Boys.

But as the movement demanding reparations grew during the 1970s and continued into the 1980s, some members of the Japanese American community came to accept, and even admire, the No-No Boys. Tsuneishi’s project, former internees say, will help foster understanding through education.

“I have to give people like Paul Tsuneishi a lot of credit,” Koshiyama said. “Because they want a true history to be written.”

At the time of the draft controversy, Tsuneishi, who answered yes to Questions 27 and 28 and was later drafted, was indifferent toward the resistors. But he said a pivotal turning point came during the 1980s when he learned his father had supported the resistors, as well as his father’s unsuccessful attempts to testify on their behalf when they went to trial.

“At the time it was irrelevant to, because I wanted to be drafted,” Tsuneishi said of the resistance movement. “But in later years, once I understood their story, I came to accept, honor and respect them because they placed the Constitution above the state.

“Heart Mountain was the only one of the 10 camps where there was an organized resistance,” Tsuneishi said. “It’s a very important history lesson.”