Renewing the Scholarship on Japanese American Wartime Dissent

One of the obstacles faced by historians who write books on familiar topics is the need to find new, relevant ways to discuss them. Unless the authors are popularizers bent on synthesizing or retelling old stories, they generally seek to add something further to the established narrative. Sometimes this is accomplished by taking on an unfamiliar aspect of the larger narrative. The history of the Civil Rights Movement, for instance, has been enriched by any number of local studies that not only shed light on individual stories but underline the considerable variation in strategies and outcomes for activists across the region. An additional means of renewing history is via the presentation of important new evidence that alters the reader’s understanding of a seemingly familiar person or event. For instance, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the opening of Soviet archives formerly inaccessible to scholars made possible a clearer and more comprehensive view of the Cold War. Another formula is to reshape the historical debate by means of a radically different approach to the existing evidence. This does not necessary imply taking a “revisionist” (or even “counterrevisionist”) stance. It can also mean looking at events from a different direction or extending a classic historical narrative in time or space.

A vast literature explores the wartime removal and confinement of West Coast Japanese Americans (popularly, if inaccurately known as the “Japanese American internment”). This is the single most-covered topic in Asian American history, extensively mined by three generations of scholars. It also remains the subject of a continuing series of memoirs, diaries, and oral histories, plus Day of Remembrance ceremonies, plays, fiction, and art. Over the last decade, the question of confinement has become a flashpoint for popular discussion regarding government power and civil liberties in times of crisis. There has meanwhile been a rebirth of literature on the subject, including widely reviewed works by Louis Fiset, Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, John Howard, Tetsuden Kashima, and Alice Yang Murray, as well as by this reviewer. The new corpus is notable for the general emphasis that authors place on the agency of Japanese American inmates and on their resistance to confinement.

Exhibit “A” of this trend has been the story of the Nisei draft resisters. This was the group of several hundred male Nisei inmates who refused to enroll in the Army after conscription was reestablished in January 1944, claiming that it was unjust to impose on them the duties of citizenship when their civil rights had been violated. Some 250 were convicted of draft evasion and sentenced to prison terms. The story of these inmates—notably the Fair Play Committee at the Heart Mountain Camp—and their stand for their constitutional rights was rediscovered in the 1970s, following a long period of silence. It was featured during the 1990s in texts by chroniclers such as Frank Abe, Arthur Hansen, William Hohri, and Mike Mackey, before receiving authoritative treatment in Eric Muller’s book Free to Die for Their Country (2001).

In Prisons and Patriots, Cherstin M. Lyon attempts the audacious feat of extending the historiography on the Japanese American draft resisters. She is not unmindful of the difficulties of remodeling the subject more than a decade after the primary works devoted to it appeared in print. (The current text is adapted from a Ph.D. thesis that the author produced some years ago). In order to achieve her goal, Lyon pursues, in varying degrees, all three of the aforementioned strategies. On the one hand, she unveils a lesser-known contingent of resisters, the so-called “Tusconians”: individuals from the Amache camp who were sent for imprisonment at the Tuscon Federal Prison Camp. She then intertwines the story of these “Tusconians” with that of Gordon Hirabayashi, who had been incarcerated in Tuscon following his landmark legal challenge to the curfew and registration restrictions imposed on West Coast Japanese Americans prior to removal (and who would in turn...