<Begin Segment 3>

FC: What was the result of the, in the courts, of the Japanese American organized resistance? Did they remain condemned, convicted, and remain outlaws, essentially?

RD: Well, all draft resisters... people ask what happened to the draft resisters. They did some of their sentences, a typical sentence was three years, but after the war, in a series of proclamations, President Truman pardoned all draft resisters, including the draft resisters from Heart Mountain, I think eighty-eight were convicted at Heart Mountain, and all of the other Japanese American draft resisters, and these pardons restored their citizenship. Their legal status was that they were people who were convicted, tried, indicted, tried, convicted, served some of their sentences, and were later pardoned. What was unpardonable, I think, was the fact that for a long, long time they were simply erased from Japanese American history and were unknown from memory.

I will never forget my shock and surprise when I began investigating the history of Heart Mountain, that I picked Heart Mountain was really an accident. I started this work when I was in California at UCLA and knew I was gonna write a book that would largely focus on overall government decisions. But I wanted to look at one ordinary camp in some detail. I couldn't do ten. Tule Lake was out because of what Tule Lake became after the so-called "segregation," and if I'd stayed at UCLA I'd probably have picked Manzanar and might not have seen the draft resistance at all, but I got a job at Wyoming. So they had copies of the Heart Mountain Sentinel and other materials and I'd read everything that had been published and nobody said anything abut draft resistance. It turns out later, when I found out about the draft resistance and went back and looked, there is one small table and one six-line paragraph in one of the nine volumes of the official history of the WRA that does talk about Selective Service violations, but no one would understand from reading that paragraph or looking at that chart -- unless they were lot smarter than I was -- that this involved an organized resistance. So that this was -- I think this was an important part, I wrote this in the early 1970s, I think it was important to understand that the Japanese people, like almost any other segment of the American people, were not a monolithic group, everybody doing the same, and that there was a dissent tradition.

Later this became much more important when, partially as a result of the Civil Rights movement and the Great Society programs and even more as a result of our misbegotten war in Vietnam and the eventual reactions against it, that suddenly protest became "in" as in the '50s protest was "out." And I think it was very important for younger Japanese Americans, the Sansei, even the Yonsei, to understand that there had been a minority protest movement, and protest movements are by definition minority movements, but that even at the time when apparently there was more consensus among the Japanese American people than at any other, that there was a protest movement and that this is an important part of Japanese American history and the traditions of the Japanese American people, and to ignore it is to, is to distort that history.

On the other hand, it has to be seen as what it was: a minority phenomenon, a protest, in my view, a perfectly reasonable protest although perhaps an unpolitic protest in the sense that if everybody had done this I think the results would have been serious. As it was, I do not think in any way it can be argued that this protest damaged Japanese American people, and you can even argue that its very existence even -- for those who wanted to seek conformity and patriotism -- that the very fact of this resistance even highlighted more the acquiescence, the compliance, what's usually called good citizenship of the majority of the people.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 1998, 2005 Frank Abe and Densho. All Rights Reserved.