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INTRODUCTION “A Footstep in the Sand of Time” L ATE ONE EVENING, early in May 2002, I sat in a hotel room with a colleague, historical archaeologist Nicole Branton, after a very long day of traveling and conducting interviews. Together, we read from the wartime diary that Joe Norikane had so generously lent to us. Norikane stood defiantly against the government’s attempts to force Nisei (Americans of Japanese ancestry) to accept partial, second-class citizenship during World War II when he resisted the draft, ultimately becoming part of a group of resisters who called themselves “the Tucsonians.” We read the diary he kept from 1943 through 1944, believing that its pages would reveal the idealistic mindset of a young man preparing to take on his government in a courageous act of civil disobedience . What we found instead was a book chronicling Norikane’s doubt and insecurity not about the war, the draft, or his civil rights, but about a girl. We read page after page about his social life, sports, and a whole lot of dancing.1 When we met with Norikane the next day to record an interview, he apologized for not having written about more important issues in his diary. We assured him that our impression was quite the opposite, because he wrote about the most important issue he was personally facing as a young man. He recorded the life of a young man coming of age, and he focused on what might be seen as the typical obsessions of a young man despite the fact that he was living behind barbed wire. What he wrote was far more important and eye opening than standard treatises on civil rights or the injustices of the draft ever could have been.2 Norikane, like the rest of the Nisei draft resisters of World War II, did not resist in a vacuum. His decision to challenge the government’s restoration of his military obligations—after the assault on his citizenship rights that had come with the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans—was shaped by the totality of his life experiences. His resistance represented a nuanced choice to defend a personal definition of his citizenship rights that stood in direct conflict with the state’s understanding of his obligations. In the heat of 2 INTRODUCTION the draft crisis of 1944, young Nisei men would either be called patriots for obeying the draft law despite their lack of citizenship rights or be accused of disloyalty, cowardice, and even sedition after being sent to prison for civil disobedience and noncompliance. Norikane chose prison, but he did so for complex reasons. He was devoted to the country of his birth, loyal to his family obligations, and insistent that the rights and the obligations of citizenship should remain in balance. As Norikane sat down to be interviewed about his life and his resistance, he recalled that when he was in jail with some of the other resisters from the camp they all called “Amache”—one of ten government detention centers built to hold Japanese Americans after their forced removal from the West Coast and lower third of Arizona—none of them believed that they would get fair hearings or that their struggle for civil rights would be remembered. For decades they were forgotten, but Norikane always hoped that the stand he took in defense of his constitutional rights during the war might someday be recognized. If he left “a footstep in the sand of time,” Norikane said, “somebody might look back on what was going on during the war and get curious.”3 He hoped historians and students might preserve the memory of his wartime stand for civil rights and, someday, finally understand why he went to prison during World War II for resisting the draft even though in his heart he remained a patriot and a loyal citizen. He stood against the draft not as a coward or a draft dodger but as a man who believed that the Constitution should be colorblind and should protect all Americans equally and without prejudice. Yet like others who resisted the draft, he had more reasons for his civil disobedience. As the eldest son in his family, he refused to risk death on the battlefield, which would mean leaving his aging parents without any means of support. He was disillusioned by his wartime treatment as an enemy alien when he had been taught his whole life that he was 100 percent American. By the time...

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