Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee

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The Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee was a group organized to protest the conscription of Nisei men from Japanese American concentration camps during World War II. Named after the Wyoming camp where it was founded, Kiyoshi Okamoto formed a "Fair Play Committee of One" in response to the War Relocation Authority's controversial loyalty questionnaire in 1943, and was later joined by Frank Emi and other Heart Mountain inmates. With seven older leaders at its core, the Committee's membership grew as draft notices began to arrive in camp, and by June 1944 several dozen young men had been arrested and charged with felony draft evasion. A total of eighty-five Heart Mountain resisters and the Committee leaders were convicted for Selective Service Act violations and sentenced to federal prison. They were later pardoned by President Harry S. Truman, but for decades the Fair Play Committee members were largely seen as traitors and cowards within the Japanese American community (especially when pitted against the famed 442nd Regimental Combat Team — also known as the "Purple Heart Battalion"). They have only more recently come to be recognized as objectors of conscience with an equally important place in the incarceration history, although their legacy remains a point of contention for many. The Japanese American Citizens League, which was a vocal opponent of the Committee and worked with the FBI to prosecute its members during the war, formally apologized for its role in their imprisonment and subsequent ostracization in 2002.

Background and formation of the FPC

File:The "loyalty questionnaire".jpg
Page 4 of the infamous "loyalty questionnaire." Questions 27 and 28 provoked the majority of its opposition, but others, such as the prompt to list membership organizations and magazine subscriptions shown here, were also viewed as thinly veiled attempts to assess whether inmates were "true" Americans. (Densho, Ikeda Collection)
Paul Nakadate, one of the seven Fair Play leaders, with his wife and son in their barracks apartment in Heart Mountain (NARA)

After Japan's December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor pulled the United States into World War II, Japanese Americans quickly became conflated with the enemy. Especially on the West Coast, where the mainland Japanese American population and the nativist groups that lobbied for their incarceration were concentrated, political leaders and well-connected citizens pushed for a solution to the "Japanese problem." On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing military commanders to designate areas from which "any or all persons may be excluded," and over the next few months some 112,000 West Coast Japanese were forcibly removed to inland concentration camps. Heart Mountain, located halfway between the Wyoming towns of Cody and Powell, was one of ten camps run by the War Relocation Authority (WRA), the government agency responsible for administration of the incarceration program. By the start of 1943, Heart Mountain had reached its peak population of 10,767,[1] and the WRA soon after began distributing a leave clearance registration form among adults in all ten camps, hoping to encourage some Japanese Americans to resettle elsewhere and relieve overcrowding in camp. The registration was initially given only to Nisei volunteers for resettlement, but as the need for replacement troops in Europe and North Africa intensified and WRA officials saw an opportunity to assess the loyalty of incarcerated Japanese Americans, the so-called "loyalty questionnaire" was expanded to vet potential enlistees and troublemakers.[2]

The loyalty questionnaire was unpopular in Heart Mountain and every other WRA camp, mostly because of its final two questions, which asked if the respondent would volunteer for military service (Question 27) and if they would forswear their allegiance to the Emperor of Japan (Question 28). Many of the young men targeted by the first were insulted at being asked to risk their lives for a country that had imprisoned them, while the second was largely seen as an accusation that Japanese Americans had at some earlier point been disloyal to the United States. Others were simply confused, fearing that an affirmative answer to Question 27 would be equated with volunteering for dangerous combat duty and that a renunciation of Japanese allegiance, taken as an admission of guilt, would be used to justify deportation or other punishment.[2]

The Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee was organized around initial resistance to the loyalty questionnaire. Frank Emi had refused to answer the questions, instead writing that "under the present circumstances" he was unable to complete the form, and posted fliers around camp advising others to do the same.[3] Kiyoshi Okamoto had already established himself as prominent figure in Heart Mountain, having helped organize a "Congress of American Citizens" to protest the lack of information provided by the WRA and the military in their administration of the "registration" process. Okamoto continued to publicly protest the loyalty questionnaire and the general infringement of Nisei citizens' rights in camp, dubbing himself a "Fair Play Committee of One" in November 1943.[4][5] Emi and several others approached Okamoto later that year and began holding informal meetings to discuss their complaints against the WRA and possible courses of action. The meetings remained fairly small until early 1944, when Nisei men, demoted to 4-C class after Pearl Harbor, were added to the draft pool and began receiving induction notices in camp. The Fair Play Committee formally elected the seven founders (Okamoto, Emi, Sam Horino, Guntaro Kubota, Paul Nakadate, Min Tamesa, and Ben Wakaye) as its steering committee on January 26.[5] Its first public meeting was held in a mess hall on February 8, and sixty young men showed up to listen to Committee leaders' arguments against the forced conscription of citizens who had been stripped of their rights.[4] As the number of Heart Mountain draftees grew, so did interest in the Fair Play Committee, and a March 1 rally attracted over 400 attendees.[5] Public meetings continued, and the Committee became a formal membership organization, with a $2 fee for joining and a requirement that all members be citizens loyal to the United States and willing to serve if their rights were restored.[4]

Draft resistance and prosecution

Rocky Shimpo article on the Fair Play Committee and opposition to the draft in Heart Mountain (NARA)

The Fair Play Committee began to meet regularly in February 1944, holding evening meetings in Heart Mountain mess halls well attended by young men questioning whether to report for their pre-induction physicals as mandated by the government. These early meetings addressed the unconstitutionality of their eviction from the West Coast, the discrimination in allowing Nisei to serve only in a segregated battalion, and the lack of information on if and when they would be released from camp. Okamoto, Emi and the other FPC leaders at first avoided directly advising against compliance with the draft, fearing reprisal from military or WRA officials (then busy removing "disloyal" Japanese Americans to the maximum security Tule Lake Segregation Center); however, on March 4 the Committee changed tactics and publicized their intention to "refuse to go to the physical examination or to the induction if or when we are called in order to contest the issue." On March 6, the first two resisters refused to report for their physicals, and by the end of the week they were joined by ten others.[4]

Judgement and commitment against Kiyoshi Okamoto after his conviction (NARA)

Many in and, as the story spread, out of Heart Mountain were critical of the organization's stance and the individual decisions to disobey draft orders. The Heart Mountain Sentinel published editorials and public letters railing against the Fair Play Committee, and the JACL's national paper, the Pacific Citizen, likewise editorialized against the resisters. As attendance at the FPC meetings and the number of unheeded draft orders grew, Sentinel articles described Fair Play members as "warp-minded" and "deluded youths" who "lacked both physical and moral courage,"[6] while a Pacific Citizen editorial published on April 8, 1944 (by which time the number of Heart Mountain inmates refusing induction had topped forty) referred to them as "draft dodgers" who had "injured the cause of loyal Japanese Americans everywhere."[7] Ben Kuroki, a Japanese American war hero who had earlier paid a WRA- and JACL-sponsored visit to Heart Mountain to help with recruitment, said of the resisters: "These men are Fascists in my estimation and no good to my country. They have torn down all the rest of us have tried to do."[8] At the same time, however, James Omura of the Denver-based Rocky Shimpo countered these pro-administration publications with a series of editorials of his own, arguing in support of the FPC demand that Nisei rights be restored prior to their conscription.[9]

After close to a month of inaction from the government, the first twelve draft resisters were arrested by U.S. Marshals on March 25, 1944.[10] While the arrested resisters awaited hearings in local jails, Frank Emi and two other Fair Play leaders tried to walk out of Heart Mountain (knowing they would be stopped) to protest their status as prisoners,[10] and camp administrators had Kiyoshi Okamoto transferred to Tule Lake.[4] The number of young men disobeying draft orders swelled throughout April, reaching sixty-three by June. In the largest trial in Wyoming history, they were convicted of felony draft evasion and, at the JACL's suggestion, sedition, and sentenced to three years in prison by Judge Thomas Blake Kennedy (who referred to the defendants as "you Jap boys").[4][11][12] The Heart Mountain Sentinel's July 1, 1944 edition included an editorial on the trial called "Years of Uselessness," in which it described "the action of the 63 defendants as being as serious an attack on the integrity of all nisei as the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor."[6] Twenty-two young men were prosecuted in a subsequent trial and received the same sentence, bringing the total number of draft resisters in Heart Mountain to eighty-five. On May 10, 1944, the seven leaders of the Fair Play Committee and James Omura, who had been forced to resign from the Rocky Shimpo in April, were indicted by a Wyoming grand jury, and in July they were arrested for unlawful conspiracy to counsel, aid and abet violations of the Selective Service Act.[9] (Omura and the FPC leaders were older than the eighty-five others and had not technically violated any induction orders because they were not subject to the draft; the conspiracy charge allowed the government to prosecute them anyway.) Their case was heard before a Cheyenne jury in October 1944; Omura was acquitted, while the seven Fair Play leaders were found guilty and sentenced to two to four years in federal prison.[4]

After the war

In 1945, the Denver Court of Appeals overturned the convictions of the seven Fair Play Committee leaders, after discovering that the jurors in their original trial had been instructed not to consider civil disobedience as a valid defense. The eighty-five younger Fair Play members remained in prison after the Supreme Court declined to hear Min Tamesa's appeal on their behalf, although many received an early release for good behavior in July 1946.[5] The rest of the Heart Mountain resisters, as well as over 200 from other camps, were not released until December 1947, when President Harry Truman granted them a full pardon.[4]

The West Coast was reopened to Japanese Americans on January 2, 1945, and over the next several months the WRA concentration camps slowly emptied as inmates either returned to their prewar homes or resettled in Midwest or East Coast hubs like Chicago and New York. Early returnees faced severe housing and job shortages, which were exacerbated by lingering racial prejudice; upon their release, the Fair Play members encountered not only a difficult job market and discriminatory real estate practices, but widespread hostility from other Japanese Americans. The heroic exploits of the 442nd, such as the rescue of the Lost Battalion and the liberation of Dachau, had been widely publicized during the war, and the Nisei soldiers were credited with helping to end the incarceration by spreading a positive image of patriotic Japanese Americans. The draft resisters, on the other hand, were seen by many as having worked against this goal and creating additional hardships for Japanese Americans who wished to be perceived as loyal. Additionally, the JACL had in February 1946 voted to formally and publicly condemn the Fair Play Committee and all those who had in some way protested their wartime incarceration, a position the organization would maintain for over half a century.[12]

Despite tension within the larger community, former FPC members resettled and went on with their lives, although most kept their wartime resistance largely to themselves. Public opinion remained mostly against the Committee until the 1970s and 1980s, when Sansei activists involved in the movement to obtain redress for the wartime incarceration began to reexamine the circumstances of their resistance. Interest in the Fair Play resisters from community members and Asian American Studies scholars increased in the following decades, and by the 1990s many Nisei veterans associations had come to see the other group as having exercised a different kind of courage and patriotism during the war (although this view was by no means universal).[4]

Around this time the JACL began to move, slowly, toward reconciliation with the resisters. In 1994, Frank Emi and Mits Koshiyama (another Fair Play member) were invited to speak at the organization's national convention, although their attendance sparked no action other than the firing of the JACLers who had invited them. Five years later, a resolution to apologize to draft resisters was introduced at a regional meeting of the Central California branch, but it was quickly killed by opposing members. A successful resolution was finally brought before the national board in 1999 and narrowly passed a vote at the JACL's 2000 convention.[13] In May 2002, the Fair Play Committee and other wartime resisters received their apology at a public ceremony.[12]

The last surviving member of the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee, Frank Emi, died December 1, 2010.[3]

See also

References

  1. ^ Mastumoto, Mieko. "Heart Mountain". Densho Encyclopedia. Retrieved 17 September 2014.
  2. ^ a b Lyon, Cherstin M. "Loyalty questionnaire". Densho Encyclopedia. Retrieved 28 October 2014.
  3. ^ a b Woo, Elaine. "Frank S. Emi dies at 94; Japanese American fought effort to draft WWII internees." (9 December 2010) Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 13 October 2014.
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i Muller, Eric L. "Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee". Densho Encyclopedia. Retrieved 17 September 2014.
  5. ^ a b c d Conscience and the Constitution: "Timeline" (PBS, 2000). Retrieved 23 October 2014.
  6. ^ a b Wakida, Patricia. "Heart Mountain Sentinel (newspaper)". Densho Encyclopedia. Retrieved 29 September 2014.
  7. ^ Tajiri, Larry. "The Bitter Harvest," Pacific Citizen (8 April 1944). Printed in Pacific Citizens: Larry and Guyo Tajiri and Japanese American Journalism in the World War II Era, Greg Robinson (University of Illinois Press, 2012), pp 58-59.
  8. ^ Chin, Frank. Born in the USA: A Story of Japanese America, 1889-1947 (New York: Rowman Littlefield Publishers, 2002), p 452.
  9. ^ a b Hansen, Arthur A. "James Omura". Densho Encyclopedia. Retrieved 29 September 2014.
  10. ^ a b Newman, Esther. "Frank Emi". Densho Encyclopedia. Retrieved 29 September 2014.
  11. ^ Mathers, Gib. "Heart Mountain Japanese Draft Resisters' Pain Brought to Light." (1 July 2014) Powell Tribune. Retrieved 13 October 2014.
  12. ^ a b c Lyon, Cherstin M. "Japanese American Citizens League". Densho Encyclopedia. Retrieved 29 September 2014.
  13. ^ Conscience & the Constitution: "Apology" (PBS, 2000). Retrieved 28 October 2014.

External links

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