SAKAMOTO SENDS ROOSEVELT PLEA

An appeal to President Roosevelt against passage of any measure which would deprive American-born Japanese of American citizenship, has been made by letter by James Sakamoto, general chairman of the Emergency Defense Council of the Seattle Japanese-American Citizens' League, formerly of Seattle but now at Twin Falls, Idaho.

Before the evacuation of Japanese, Sakamoto was editor and publisher of The Japanese-American Courier in Seattle.

Pointing out that the House of Representatives had passed a bill "designed to deprive the American-born Japanese of their citizenship," Sakamoto urged the President to obstruct the measure.

'Strikes at Democracy'

"That such a measure, discriminatory and un-American to say the least, should find its way to introduction and passage before an august body of our Congress is not only sorely disappointing but surprising beyond understanding," Sakamoto wrote. "It is needless to mention that this measure, which would deprive some 80,000 to 85,000 American-born Japanese off their birthright, strikes at the very core of our democratic institutions and at the immortal concept of human equality so nobly expressed in the Fourteenth Amendment of our Constitution."

"The greatest evil of this measure is not its direct attempt to deprive us of our American heritage," Sakamoto continued. "It is the dangerous precedent it proposes to set by initiating the principle of race distinction that may some day divide race and class against class.

This Is Our Land

"This is our land no friend or foe can force us to disown, no more than we can alter the fundamental truth of our birth on this soil."

Sakamoto asked the President's support of the issue involved "as a cause no less American than the war we are fighting today against Japan and the Axis nations."