Nearly two decades after passing a resolution addressing its past skeletons, a national Japanese American organization is once again set to confront its controversial actions during the war. The National Council of the Japanese American Citizens League plans to discuss a resolution to apologize to the Tule Lake resisters at the 50th JACL National Convention […]
Japanese American Citizens League considers apology to Tule Lake resisters
July 18, 2019 by Leave a Comment
Memoir offers insights into WWII JA teen’s relationships
January 1, 2017 by Leave a Comment
American Yellow By George Omi (Sarasota, Fla.: First Edition Design Publishing, 2016, 140 pp., $14.95, paperback) George Omi’s “American Yellow†(2016), a memoir on his Japanese American teenage experiences during World War II and incarceration, provides an intimate lens to view his relationships with his family, community and outside world. The memoir offers a glimpse […]
Korematsu Day event honors Asian Pacific American civil rights ‘heroes’
February 7, 2013 by Leave a Comment
San Francisco celebrated its third annual Fred Korematsu Day of Civil Liberties and the Constitution, the first day named after an Asian American in the United States, on Jan. 27 at Herbst Theater in San Francisco. The event celebrates Fred T. Korematsu, who resisted unconstitutional laws that incarcerated nearly 120,000 people of Japanese decent during […]
Gordon Hirabayashi, civil rights icon who resisted wartime incarceration, dies
January 5, 2012 by 2 Comments
Gordon Kiyoshi Hirabayashi, one of three wartime litigants who challenged wartime curfew or exclusion orders and whose legal convictions were vacated four decades later, died on Jan. 2, 2012 after a long bout with Alzheimer’s disease in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, his family said. He was 93. “Dad was slowly declining in health after living 10 […]
A lifelong relationship: Citizens and the state
January 1, 2012 by Leave a Comment
PRISONS AND PATRIOTS: Japanese American Wartime Citizenship, Civil Disobedience, and Historical Memory By Cherstin M. Lyon (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011, 233 pp., $30.95, paperback) “Prisons and Patriots†is Cherstin Lyon’s first book. Its publication catapults Professor Lyon, a historian at California State University, San Bernardino, into the ranks of the premier scholars of World […]
THE GREAT UNKNOWN AND THE UNKNOWN GREAT: A MAN OF PRINCIPLE: Robert Chino, civil rights activist, draft resister and veteran
January 1, 2012 by Leave a Comment
The New Year’s season is a special time for wrap-ups and updates. One interesting, if slightly frustrating, part of doing my Nichi Bei column is that my research does not stop with publication of a given essay. Instead, I continue to discover more information about the people I write about even after the pieces have […]
New book on resisters examines wartime definition of patriotism, civil disobedience
October 20, 2011 by 1 Comment
CHICAGO — A new book being published by Temple University Press in November is re-examining wartime definitions of citizenship, patriotism, prisons, and civil disobedience through the lives of Gordon Hirabayashi and a group of Nisei draft resisters who called themselves the “Tucsonians.†“Prisons and Patriots: Japanese American Wartime Citizenship, Civil Disobedience, and Historical Memory†is […]
Extras in ‘Conscience’ DVD add a fuller, if not more controversial, picture
September 9, 2011 by Leave a Comment
“Conscience and the Constitution,†the documentary on the only organized draft resistance movement to come out of a U.S. concentration camp during World War II, has been re-issued as a two disc DVD set with two hours of additional footage and interviews. When “Conscience†first came out in 2000, it uncovered the untold story of […]
More info visit: Digital.Nichibei.org
STORIES OF RESISTANCE: A centennial of civil liberties and American patriotism
This year is the centennial of a remarkable year for civil liberties in American history. In 1913, Harriet Tubman (the Moses of her people and abolitionist heroine of the Underground Railroad, who led slaves in the south to freedom in the north) died, and Rosa Parks (civil rights activist who challenged the segregated public bus […]