[00:04:41] Host: -or the series for PBS, both of these things are about that loyalty questionnaire. What did you learn through your research on these projects that shocked you or surprised you or made you wonder why you never knew that before? I'm only asking that because when I read We Hereby Refuse, there were so many things where I'm like, "How did I not know this? How were we not taught this?"

[00:05:08] Frank: The simple answer is my parents' generation simply silenced that whole subject. They did not talk about it and they did not share it with us. I, in fact, grew up with a couple of these guys in San Jose, California. Mits Koshiyama, a Heart Mountain draft resistor, happened to have been an acquaintance of my mother's in a Minyo Japanese folk singing group, as it turned out later. I was introduced to the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee, the draft resisters of Heart Mountain, by a fellow named Frank Chin, a Chinese-American playwright, first Asian-American to have a play produced off-Broadway on the legitimate stage in New York.

Frank had founded the Asian-American Theatre Workshop in San Francisco in 1973 and we'd stayed in touch over the years. He actually recruited me into the redress campaign here in Seattle in 1978 and we worked on that successfully. When redress reparations was signed by President Reagan in 1988, the Civil Liberties Act, Frank then introduced me to Mits Koshiyama, Frank Emi, James Omura, the leaders of the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee. 

The idea that there was a principled resistance inside Heart Mountain, which happened to be my father's camp, a principled resistance, was not only news to me, but it also helped make sense of me. I finally discovered that oh, the idea that there was a constitution-- The constitution wasn’t an invention of my generation. It actually existed in 1944. I phrase it that way because when people of my generation would go to our parents, and this is a very common story, and ask, "I read about these camps in these books, and I learned about it in school perhaps, why didn't you tell me about these camps?" Then they explain their story. Then we ask, "Gee, if they told me to leave home, and leave my college campus, and our business, I wouldn't go. Why didn't you resist?" The response in the '50s and '60s and '70s was a pat on the head. "You're too young, you weren't born yet, times were different then. You don't understand how things were, you can't judge us," basically is what they're saying.

Discovering the fact that there was a principled resistance inside Heart Mountain, suddenly I felt like I located myself in this experience and understood that there were people who broke the law in order to bring a test case into federal court and that this was something that was marginalized in the Japanese American community. The draft resisters, for example, were ostracized, vilified, belittled in the camp newspaper and in the mess hall of conversations, and essentially written out of history by the gatekeepers in the Japanese American community.

Going back to the question of when did I learn about the camps, I didn't learn about the camps until I was a sophomore in college, UC Santa Cruz. My father had a book on the bookshelf by a fellow named Bill Hosokawa, the journalist for the JACL and Denver Post, I think, and a book called Nisei: The Quiet Americans. It was a historiography that elevated the idea that the Japanese Americans were loyal, that they were cooperative without protest or resistance because it was the right thing to do, and that the JACL encouraged cooperation and, in fact, collaborated with the government in incarceration both to prevent bloodshed and to ensure humane treatment inside these camps, and long-term.

They really saw themselves as visionary, long-term, to ensure a successful-- “Someday this war will end, and we want to be sure that we can keep our place in American society such as it is. We need to ensure we can assimilate into the American mainstream by demonstrations of loyalty, cooperation, volunteering for the army out of camp, and so on.” Finally, the vision was, we don't want to be bitter about this experience because we don't want to pass on that bitterness to our children, as some say.

This is the underlying ideas that go into the complaint you will hear from your other interviewees on the subject of, "Oh, my parents never talked about it. Oh, there was silence, and oh, we had to break the silence." Well, maybe that silence was created by a narrative in the community of wanting to assimilate, wanting to forget, and marginalizing any talk about those guys who resisted or protested or who failed to answer yes on the government's failed loyalty questionnaire or those who brought test cases to the Supreme Court. That's a long answer to the simple story of why Japanese Americans didn't talk about it.

[00:10:30] Host: In your book, We Hereby Refuse, it's a graphic novel about the stories of Jim Akutsu and his family and Mitsuye Endo and Hiroshi-

[00:10:47] Frank: Kashiwagi.

[00:10:47] Host: -Kashiwagi and their experiences in the camp and their resistance. How did this project come together and really what was the purpose of creating a graphic novel as opposed to any other medium?

[00:11:14] Frank: That's a great question. The project basically fell in my lap. The Wing Luke Museum in Seattle had a call for proposals and they got a grant from the National Park Service for a series of free graphic novels. What's interesting is that the first one was about, then nisei soldiers, very safe, popular subject. The third one was about White allies, those who helped us. Again, another familiar topic.

The second one was camp resistance. That is a subject that I'm sure would not have been included in the trilogy of graphic novels were it not for the work we did 20, 25 years ago, 30 years ago to recover the story of camp resistance. Myself, Frank Chin, the Omori sisters with their film, Rabbit in the Moon, Eric Muller with his book, Free to Die for Their Country all came out around 1999, 2000. The turn of the Millennium. That was the turning point in reframing the narrative of Japanese American history, I believe, to include the narrative that it wasn't just shikata ga nai, it wasn't just Go for Broke, but there was also this legacy of protest and resistance.

The Wing Luke puts up a call for proposals, and because I had this history with my PBS film, Conscience and the Constitution, year 2000, and myself and another writer named Tamiko Nimura were commissioned to do the story. We wanted to collaborate on the story. I wrote the script. They hired two artists who we didn't know. It was a team that was put together, a committee, as it were. Ross Ishikawa did the color and Matt Sasaki did the Kashiwagi story in black and white.

It could have been deadly. It could have been another bland work written by a committee which tends to homogenize ideas and homogenize content. You see that a lot in a lot of school district projects. Fortunately, we were able to align behind the proposals I made for Kashiwagi, Endo, and Akutsu and the idea of telling this as an epic narrative and not just three separate chapters. I should add quickly that Tamiko Nimura's uncle is Hiroshi Kashiwagi and so that was a natural story to include.

The vision of the story is, it's not just three chapters. It's not just three "heroes," if you will, but it's a narrative of people who shared an underlying anger and rage at their mass eviction and incarceration, didn't know how to express it, and also were betrayed in many ways by their unelected leadership, the Japanese American Citizens League, who pulled the rug out from under the people by immediately urging the policy of cooperation and waving the momentum for protest early on in February '42 by urging cooperation and waiving test cases and protest. I want to quickly add the JACL of 1942 is different from the JACL of today. Just want to make sure that that's really clear.

[00:14:30] Host: I'd started with a question of why a graphic novel. Was there a concept that this could be anything other than a graphic novel or that's what this was going to be? If so, then what was the understanding behind that or the purpose behind that?

[00:14:55] Frank: Well, the Wing Luke Museum correctly understands that graphic novels have the power to reach all kinds of readers, including young people. As a museum, that's their mission, is to reach a lot of young people and to help them enter history through a visual medium so they commissioned a series of graphic novels. While we did write it in language that can be understood by people of any age, it is not written down to children or young people, but it can be read with an eighth-grade-age vocabulary. I think that really helps a lot.

What's interesting about the graphic novel form is that it frees the imagination to tell any kind of story with any kind of imagery you want. In other words, it's like the storyboard for a motion picture without the need to raise millions of dollars to make a motion picture. The graphic novel We Hereby Refuse is, in my mind, the great camp movie because it brings you from the pre-war Seattle, pre-war Sacramento lives of our characters through the executive order, through their removal from their homes under armed guard, through their removal to their movement to first to an assembly center and then to more permanent war relocation center inland, and then to, this our three characters, their decision to refuse. Mitsuye Endo agrees to file a class action lawsuit with her name on it contesting the lack of due process in imprisoning admittedly loyal US citizens without hearing or any kind of trial.

[00:16:57] Host: She had to remain in the camp in order for that to continue.

[00:17:00] Frank: Yes. I started to say her refusal. That was her refusal, is that she refused to leave Topaz when offered the chance to leave camp individually which would therefore moot her lawsuit. Her lawsuit would just disappear because she was no longer being imprisoned. Rightfully, she said, "This is about more than just me and my personal freedom. I'm going to see this thing through. I am committed to see this case all the way to the Supreme Court," and she did.

The second set of characters are those young men who refused to be drafted when the government reinstituted the draft, the selective service for young men in camp in 1943, about a year after their first movement into assembly centers. In 1943, the government opens the army to volunteers. The JACL has been pleading with the Army to start drafting young men from the camp in order, again, for the Japanese Americans to demonstrate through the spilling of their blood for America, that they are just as American as everyone else. Our blood is just as red as yours is.

The Army says, "We're not going to draft right now, but we will take volunteers." The Army reopens the army to nisei volunteers in early 43, and the response is not as overwhelming as expected. A year later, in 1944 January, the Army accepts the JACL's recommendation, their strong recommendation to reinstitute the draft of young men from these concentration camps. Again, many young men felt this was a chance to do their duty, perform their service for their country, and fight fascism.

A handful-- Not a handful. 300 young men, however, said, "Wait a minute. This is the last chance for us to take a stand against not the army, but the incarceration, the fact that we are here, still here after two years in these camps and we've yet to mount an effective protest." Breaking the Selective Service law was seen by the Fair Play Committee at Heart Mountain. They organized around the idea of breaking the Selective Service law in order to bring a test case into federal court to challenge the underlying constitutionality of incarceration and imprisonment.

Unfortunately, they become demonized by the mainstream of campers, residents who dismiss them as draft dodgers and disloyals, draft delinquents, and call for them to seize their protest. Ultimately 63 young men at Heart Mountain failed to board the bus, refused to board the bus for their pre-induction physical, and that is their act, their predicate act of crossing the line from protest to resistance.

The government indicts them for draft evasion. Tries them in federal court in Cheyenne and summarily, the young men are convicted and sentenced to three years and three months in federal prison. Their constitutional arguments being dismissed by the federal judge who presided in the case. The judge simply ruled, "Did you receive a draft notice? Did you fail to report? Bingo. That's it. You're guilty of draft evasion. Here's your sentence. Three years three months." That's the second form of draft resistance in our book.

The third is a much more complicated, and as you can see from the 2019 resolution, still controversial resistance of those who answered no and no on the government's leave clearance questionnaire, AKA, the loyalty oath. When the government in January '43 reopened the army for volunteers, they needed some way to clear the young men for service, because the government had spent a year demonizing Japanese Americans as being possibly spies or saboteurs who required removal from their west coast and imprisonment inland in these camps. Labeling all 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry as untrustworthy, deserving of imprisonment.

At the same time, the War Relocation Authority is trying to move out young nisei into jobs and college in the East and Midwest. In both cases, volunteers and relocatees, they needed some way to cleanse, if you will, the reputations of these people as being "loyal" Americans. Again, with air quotes, because if you are in Ohio, if you live in Cleveland, for example, do you want these young nisei to come out, to go to college at Case Western University? Because these were people from these camps. If these people were in a concentration camp in Wyoming, why do we want them coming into Cleveland and Case Western? Because isn't there something wrong with them, for them to have been in prison in the first place?

The War Relocation Authority and The War Department came up with a questionnaire. A questionnaire to determine one's loyalty. Now, if you stop and think about it, Jon-Barrett, the idea of determining the loyalty of an individual citizen through a questionnaire is, on its face, ludicrous. If I were a Japanese sleeper agent, sent from the emperor, to hide out on the West Coast, wait for war-

[00:22:42] Host: Spy on America.

[00:22:43] Frank: -and spy on America, I'm sent to a camp, am I going to take this questionnaire and say, "Oh, yes, I'm a spy."

[00:22:50] Host: Yes, I'm a spy.

[00:22:51] Frank: "I'm spy and I'm disloyal. You can't trust me." That is the basis, the essence of this questionnaire. The War Department and WRA administered this questionnaire, and no one understands the consequences of a yes or no answer on these questionnaires. I go to great lengths on this point, because even in my own community, even to this day, people think that if you answer “no” to one of those questions, there was something wrong with you. That you were disloyal. Because the questionnaire is a binary question, yes or no. Black and white.

When you answer “no,” and there are many reasons for answering “no,” you get put in the no pile. It's a binary yes or no. If you are no pile, then you are automatically regarded as disloyal, when in fact you wouldn't lift a finger to hurt America or anyone. This is the government's reverse PR campaign, the loyalty questionnaire, reverse PR campaign to clear young men for service in the army, and young men and women for release, relocation into the eastern Midwest for education and jobs.

[00:24:02] Host: This is also encouraged from leaders of the JACL at the time as well.

[00:24:08] Frank: The JACL wanted some program for segregating the bad apples, or as Mike called it, the troublemakers and agitators separating them from the loyal. His immediate problem was that there were JACL leaders being beaten up at Manzanar and at Poston. Internally, Mike was having to fend off more right-wing appeals from inside his group. They wanted spies inside the camps to rat out troublemakers and agitators, as they call them, agitators and troublemakers for further government sanctions. Literally, the quote is we need our own gangs to protect our people, our leaders in camp.

[00:24:47] Host: Wow.

[00:24:47] Frank: [chuckles] Segregation, if you answered “no” to question 27 and or “no” to question 28, then you are segregated from Heart Mountain, Topaz, Gila River to Tule Lake. Tule Lake becomes almost a penal colony with 22 more guard towers and an army battalion, a double man-proof fence of razor wire, and then a military police battalion stationed nearby with tanks. This becomes a formula for descent, discontent, the creation of gangs inside Tule Lake, and a turmoil, which we detail in the graphic novel.

[00:25:31] Host: The book showcases a lot of the violence and struggles in the camp that we don't read about in the limited amount of education that we're given on this era and this experience. I think of that fake firing squad of block 42 at Tule Lake. That's such a horrific experience of these men lined up in rows of three with guns pointed at them and the order ready, aim, fire, and then click. It was told so painfully and drawn so painfully. Like I said, this is the history we don't get in our textbooks. How important is it that these stories are told? What role does media, like literature or graphic novels or the entertainment industry play in filling in the gaps that traditional education leaves out?

[00:26:36] Frank: Jon-Barrett, this is material that- these are stories that are told inside the Japanese American community. I've heard these stories for decades. We discussed in symposiums, in workshops, in conversation. They're down in scholarly articles and books that were written in 1950. The Spoilage by Dorothy Swaine Thomas. Years of Infamy by Michi Weglyn, 1976. My two main sources for scripting the Tule Lake violence, as you called it.

The graphic novel allows us simply to bring these stories out, tell them accurately, and really write them very carefully so that they are accurate. To also tell them matter-of-factly. We just show the firing squad. We just show the revolt at Tule Lake, over the theft of food from the warehouse. We just tell it matter-of-factly, and let the chips fall where they will. Let the story tell itself. We tell it straight. We don't try and sensationalize or dramatize it.

Getting back to the graphic novel, it's simply the visualization of these stories, is like watching a movie. It really is like watching the storyboard for a movie, both for young readers and for you and I as adults. It brings the stories to life. I think also hooking them together into a continuous narrative. One of the real tricks of writing the story was, again, not telling it as three discreet chapters, but telling it as one timeline from beginning to end. Start to finish, gives you the sense that this was, as the nisei often said at the time, an epic experience, an epic narrative of an incredible story of 120,000 people going through this tumultuous time in American history.

Of course, there's the center of it caught between two nations, if you will. They knew at the time that this was important and tragic and special and wrong, but they didn't have the language to talk about it to themselves or to the children. They didn't have the leadership to express it because the leadership was saying, "Don't talk about it. Forget it. Let's move on and assimilate into the mainstream."

Having these three stories told together, side by side was really the hardest part to keep the sequences straight, to keep the history, the chronology accurate and yet compelling so that one thing leads to another, leads to another and you get it. I think that one of the accomplishments of the graphic novel is to overwhelm you at the end with a sense that there were a lot of lives lived here in this World War II experience and here's three of them, and the impact that they had in our understanding today of what happened from the perspective of those who did not go along with the program, who did cause friction, who wore the squeaky wheels and who either succeeded or not in their protest.

The renunciants, many of them were tricked by the government into renouncing the US citizenship at Tule Lake. Some of them were expatriated or repatriated to Japan, where they faced starvation and disaster. The draft resistors did not succeed in the sense that it did not prevail in federal court to raise the constitutional issues on the camp and would spend ultimately two years, in federal prison, Leavenworth, Kansas, McNeil Island, Washington. Mitsuye Endo succeeded. She won at the Supreme Court in December of '44, and her victory immediately led to the machinery of closing the camps. It took a year to close the camps but the machinery was put in place with the Supreme Court decision in her favor.

[00:30:33] Host: I guess that there's something to having these human stories that affect a reader or a viewer, if it's a movie or a television series or theater, that we see the humanity of the people experiencing this instead of just reading the figures and just seeing the numbers of people. That there is that human connection of we're able, whether you are of Japanese ancestry or not, you're able to see the humanity of what that experience must have been like.

[00:31:09] Frank: That's the function of all good art, is that it creates that empathy so that you understand that these people were treated as the other. They were demonized by the American government and by the people at large as the other. What you see is the consequence of that kind of othering of those that we do not know or understand, and now we get their story.

[music]

[00:31:40] Host: We want to thank Frank Abe for his time, his expertise, and his passion. Medium History was produced by Chapman University's Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, and Past Forward. For more socially conscious content, visit pastforward.org or follow us at Apple, Spotify, or wherever you podcast.