In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

CONCLUSION The Changing Nature of Citizenship W HAT DO GORDON HIRABAYASHI’S and the Tucsonians’ stories tell us about the changing nature of citizenship, civil disobedience, and historical memory? The aim of this book is not only to tell the stories of Hirabayashi and the Tucsonians but also to place their stories in historic and theoretical context. Making sense of their experiences brings together literature on childhood, resistance, citizenship, prisons, punishment, and historical memory. Nisei started life with all the rights of citizenship and few of the responsibilities . Their teachers told them that their race would not prevent them from being 100 percent American, but life taught them that they might have to work harder than their white counterparts to achieve the same level of success. Nisei learned that being American also meant that when their rights were taken away, they were supposed to fight to defend those rights. But defending their rights as the country struggled to fight what some have called the “best war ever” was not always a popular decision.1 As Joe Norikane said, he knew that during the war he was just making “a footstep in the sand of time” but that someday, someone would be curious about the resisters and would search for new meaning in his wartime civil disobedience. The war forced Nisei to put the lessons of their childhood into practice. Would they give more than their white counterparts to prove their loyalty? Would they volunteer for service and obey the draft in the absence of their civil rights? Or would they fight, even against their own government, to defend the rights that had been theirs from birth? The war forced the issue that had been there all along. The lessons Nisei learned about their own citizenship as children were contradictory, and they chose different ways to react to these lessons. The lessons Nisei learned in school provided a moral basis for civil disobedience. THE CHANGING NATURE OF CITIZENSHIP 193 Hirabayashi and the Tucsonians fit into a long history of individuals who dared to resist the overwhelming authority of the state and in doing so more clearly defined for themselves what it meant to be citizens. The United States was shaped as a country by resisters, such as the early Quakers, abolitionists, labor activists, anarchists, suffragists, war resisters, and civil rights activists, not to mention the soldiers of the American Revolution. Hirabayashi and the Tucsonians were self-consciously aware of this history and knew that by resisting they were not alone, even if ultimately each stood alone before a judge. Hirabayashi found strength and inspiration from the writings of Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi, and the independence movement in India. He was supported through fellowship by the Quakers, the Christian Student Movement , and the Fellowship of Reconciliation. The Tucsonians looked to the leaders of the American Revolution for inspiration and cited the Boston Tea Party as a very “American” example of resistance. Some Tucsonians followed Hirabayashi’s story of continued resistance in the newspapers and were proud to follow in his footsteps when they arrived at the Tucson road camp not long after Hirabayashi had left. Hirabayashi and the Tucsonians resisted based on their direct experiences with injustice and their own understandings of the nature of citizenship and civil rights. The individual natures of their resistance make it hard to put them into one category when dominant narratives of heroes and patriots tell simple stories of right and wrong, heroes and villains. But, like those of other famous resisters, their stories are more interesting and ripe for complex analysis because of their diversity. The experiences of Hirabayashi and the Tucsonians demonstrate that citizenship is not static. Historically, the U.S. government has maintained at least two paths to citizenship: the very restrictive version based on earning citizenship and the liberal version based on mere birth in the nation.2 Depending on the needs of the state at any given time, one version seems to gain preference over the other. In the 1920s, the nation needed the children of immigrants to see themselves as full citizens, as nonhyphenated Americans, to defend against the growing fear that immigrants and their children threatened some core essence of Americanism. Nisei who believed they were 100 percent American regardless of ancestry served the needs of the state and built up a reciprocal foundation of trust and loyalty. But war changed everything. Suddenly the state needed to defend itself against enemies, foreign and domestic. Nisei became trapped for a...

Share