Audience members leapt to their feet and unleashed a thunderous ovation. For ten minutes, the room pulsed with applause. Tears streamed down the cheeks of Henry Kaiser and others. Twice, Ben was summoned back to the podium to acknowledge the crowd’s appreciation. Afterward, Kaiser, Dorothea Lange, and other famous and powerful people crowded around Ben to shake his hand, acknowledge his service, and wish him well.1
Ben’s speech had been a spectacular success. The national wire services and Bay Area newspapers carried his words across the country. His star soared. He was not only a war hero, but a fearless opponent of injustice and bigotry at home. Overnight, he became a focal point of the national discussion over America’s treatment of Japanese Americans. It was one of the most thrilling moments of his life, but it didn’t last long. Even as Ben left San Francisco, the government was taking aim at Nisei militants in the Heart Mountain camp who had vowed to resist the military draft. Ben was about to be thrust into the cross fire.
Chapter 39
“NO TURNING BACK”
On February 8, as Ben basked in the triumph of his Commonwealth Club speech, sixty Nisei men convened an urgent public meeting in a mess hall at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming. The men were members of the camp’s Fair Play Committee, and many of them had received draft notices by mail in the previous days.
The committee leaders resolved to contest the army’s conscription of Japanese American men on two grounds: It was illegal for the government to compel military service by men who had been stripped of their constitutional rights, and it was illegal to force the men to serve in racially segregated army units. Members of the Fair Play Committee were eager to force a legal test of their arguments. Their challenge wasn’t based in disloyalty or pacifism. They simply believed they shouldn’t be required to serve the same government that was denying their basic rights.
Among the men who attended the meeting was twenty-year-old Yosh Kuromiya. A little less than two years earlier, on June 30, 1942, Yosh had registered for the draft during the first weeks of his family’s initial incarceration at the Pomona Assembly Camp. The back of Yosh’s draft card listed the same basic information as that of any of the millions of men serving America around the globe: race (“Oriental”); height (five-feet-five-inches); weight (110 pounds); eye color (brown); hair color (black); and complexion (light brown).
What Yosh’s draft card didn’t reflect was the fact that he and other Nisei men had been physically fit yet declared ineligible for service for no other reason than their Japanese ancestry. But circumstances had changed. Now the army needed Nisei men to fight and die on the Allied front lines in Italy.
The government had undergone a change of heart about the desirability of the military service of these men, but the men themselves now held radically different views about their willingness to serve. Held under armed guard like prisoners of war by their own government, Yosh and many of the other Nisei men at Heart Mountain now regretted their acquiescence to the evacuation orders of 1942. “I was quite determined that I could not, in good conscience, bear arms under the existing conditions,” Yosh later recalled. “But I also had trepidations about protesting alone.”
Yosh decided that he needed to attend a Fair Play Committee meeting to hear the thoughts of other Nisei men facing the draft.1
AS YOSH APPROACHED THE MESS HALL for the meeting in early February 1944, he was struck by “the absence of the usual clatter of dishes, pots, and pans. There were no familiar shrieks of children nor incessant chatter of gossip. Also missing was the pungent aroma of steaming rice, homemade takuan [pickled radish] and not-so-fresh fish, which would escape every time someone would open a door to enter or leave. There was only a deep rumbling of subdued voices, interrupted occasionally by the squeal of a table or bench dragging on the concrete floor.”2
Cigarette smoke hung heavily in the air as Yosh entered the room. Failing to spot any familiar faces, he slipped between two strangers on a wooden bench near the back of the mess hall. At the front of the room, Fair Play Committee leaders sat at two tables, conversing and exchanging papers.3
A slight, middle-aged man called the meeting to order. Kiyoshi Okamoto was the pugnacious founder of the original Fair Play Committee of One and an early advocate of resistance to the incarceration regime. “He was so atypical of the quiet, contained Japanese image, I was immediately enthralled by his demeanor, his forthrightness, animation, and (hopefully) his sincerity,” Yosh recalled. “His language was brutally crude, sprinkled generously with four-letter expletives, but the content was essentially an articulation of my own deeper thoughts, values, and feelings.”4
Yosh left his first meeting of the Fair Play Committee preoccupied with the momentous choice that confronted him. He began regularly attending committee meetings in camp mess halls whose managers were sympathetic to the resistance cause. He paid $2 to formally join the group, and at each subsequent gathering moved closer to the front so he wouldn’t miss a word spoken by the leaders.5
Yosh and many other young men inside the camp were deeply impressed by what they viewed as the courage and selflessness of the Fair Play Committee leaders. But the editors of the camp newspaper, the Heart Mountain Sentinel—fundamentally conservative men who were ideologically aligned with the views of the Japanese American Citizens League and committed to cooperation with camp administrators—denounced the draft resistance movement as dangerously misguided. Opposition to the draft resistance became a fault line within the camp community.
As word of the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee’s draft resistance spread eastward through “free zones” where Japanese Americans had not been incarcerated, a few courageous souls voiced support. In Denver, James Omura, the thirty-one-year-old English-language editor of the influential Rocky Shimpo newspaper, published a February 23 editorial that offered moral support to the Heart Mountain dissidents.
On Sunday morning, February 27, the first group of Heart Mountain draftees boarded an army bus to be driven to their pre-induction physicals. The compliance of the men was a stinging rejection of the Fair Play Committee’s call for resistance. Committee leaders convened a meeting to discuss their next move.
In the first week of March, some four hundred people crowded into one of the Heart Mountain mess halls for the watershed meeting of the Fair Play Committee. By now, the resistance had spread beyond the ranks of draft-age Nisei men to include embittered parents who feared the combat loss of a son in service to the government that had imprisoned them. “After being evacuated to this relocation center from the outside I have lost everything in worldly goods,” said one such parent, the father of two draft-age Nisei sons. “All I have left is my family. I’d rather have [my boys] go to prison and I know that they will come back alive someday.”6
Now Fair Play Committee leaders called for its members to move from words of protest to direct acts of resistance. One of the leaders, a twenty-seven-year-old Los Angeles grocer named Frank Emi, declared that there had been enough rhetoric. It was time to take a stand against the draft. Group members overwhelmingly agreed. In a statement drawn up and printed on fliers and posters, the committee put its advocacy of draft resistance in writing: “We feel the present program of drafting us from this concentration camp is unjust, unconstitutional, and against all principles of civilized usage. Therefore, we members of the Fair Play Committee hereby refuse to go to the physical examination, or to the induction, if or when we are called in order to contest the issue.”7
On March 6, the Fair Play Committee scored its first victory when two Heart Mountain inmates refused to board the army bus that would ferry them to their physical. Before the week was out, twelve Heart Mountain inmates had refused to report for their physicals. With concern soaring in Washington, the FBI opened an investigation of the Fair Play Committee.
YOSH KUROMIYA’S MOMENT OF DECISION arrived a few days later, in mid-March, when he received a notice ordering him to report for his army physical exam. At the next Fair Play Committee meeting, he took a seat in the front of the room. As the meeting progressed, one of the leaders called for a show of hands from those who had received their pre-induction physical notices since the last meeting. Yosh raised his hand. One of the men at the head table asked Yosh to share with the audience what he intended to do.
Rising to his feet, Yosh nervously began to speak. He didn’t share the fact that his father supported his opposition to the draft and his mother was pleading with him to avoid a conflict with the federal government. With all eyes focused on him, Yosh said that he had received a notice from the army ordering him to board a bus for his physical on the morning of March 23. Summoning his courage, Yosh announced his decision: He would not be on that bus when it exited the Heart Mountain camp.
The room erupted in cheers so loud that the windows rattled. “I felt a million eyes on me and as exhilarating as it was, my knees began to buckle,” Yosh recalled.8 Startled by the ovation, he sank to his seat.
As the draft resistance movement gathered force, the federal government finally decided to act. On Wednesday, March 22, federal warrants were issued charging twelve Japanese Americans at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center with failure to report for their army physicals.
The following morning, as the bus rolled out of Heart Mountain without Yosh and the latest group of draft resisters aboard, US Marshals swept through the camp to arrest the first group of a dozen men on federal charges of draft evasion. In the days that followed, Yosh Kuromiya and several dozen other men were arrested on federal warrants.
“I had passed the point of no return,” Yosh recalled years later. “It was cast in stone. There would be no turning back.”9
THE ARRESTS DIDN’T STOP THE DRAFT resistance movement. In fact, with each passing week, the number of Heart Mountain resisters grew, until more than sixty had been charged. The threat of federal prosecution seemed to have a diminishing impact on the spread of the draft rebellion in Heart Mountain. With the need for Nisei recruits growing more urgent by the day, the War Department decided to ramp up its effort to counter the draft resistance movement. By late March, War Department officials had a plan to counter the Heart Mountain draft resistance movement. They would use Ben Kuroki as the poster boy for Japanese American patriotism and send him to Heart Mountain to break the back of the draft resistance.
Chapter 40
HEART MOUNTAIN
Ben’s Commonwealth Club speech won him powerful friends and celebrity status. But he still hadn’t landed the Pacific combat assignment he so publicly sought. Instead, while higher authorities in Washington and the Army Air Forces tried to figure out what to do with their Japanese American hero, Ben found himself shunted from the spotlight in Los Angeles to a temporary assignment at Fresno’s Hammer Field.
But the publicity surrounding Ben’s speech had moved the War Department to reconsider its clumsy handling of the canceled NBC Radio interview in late January. Officials abruptly arranged for Ben to travel to Hollywood for a live February 24 appearance on The Ginny Simms Show. The day before the speech, Ben boarded a train in Fresno for the two-hundred-mile trip to Los Angeles. In the Mojave Desert, heavy rains washed out the tracks, so Ben set off for the nearest highway and hitchhiked the final seventy miles to Hollywood.1
His interview with Ginny Simms was beamed across America, and Ben touched on all the familiar themes of his inspiring story. He described the crews he had fought with as the embodiment of the American melting pot. “We all looked different, but we felt the same, and we were all heading for the same target,” Ben told Simms. “We were Americans.” Ben concluded with another public appeal to be allowed to fly raids against Japan. He couldn’t wait “to head for the Pacific and knock the rice out of my ancestors,” in his pithy description.
But the War Department wouldn’t budge. Shortly after his appearance on The Ginny Simms Show, Ben was transferred to an Army Air base in Pueblo, Colorado, to train B-24 gunners. Ben would later say he found the duty more nerve-racking than flying thirty combat missions in Europe and North Africa. Nearly every day, wailing sirens signaled the crash of another inexperienced pilot and crew. “It was hair-raising,” Ben later recalled. “And I’d go up with them over these turbulent mountains in Colorado to teach the gunners to fire their guns and they would all get airsick and wouldn’t fire a shot.”2
About a month into his Colorado assignment, Ben was summoned to the camp adjutant’s office and given oral instructions. He was to visit three War Relocation Authority camps on behalf of the War Department and the army. He wasn’t shown any written orders or given detailed instructions, and there was only a vague mention of recruiting young men to fight. How he was supposed to do that wasn’t clear. All Ben knew was the names of the three camps he was supposed to visit. First on the list was Heart Mountain, Wyoming, five hundred miles north of Pueblo.
Ben wasn’t aware that the camp was in turmoil or that battle lines had been drawn among camp residents. He certainly didn’t know that militant elements within the camp were contemplating acts of violence against inmates perceived as collaborating with the government responsible for their imprisonment. Thousands of miles from the closest battlefront, Ben was walking into a different kind of war zone.
SHORTLY AFTER MIDDAY ON MONDAY, April 24, some three thousand incarcerees at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center gathered near the front gate of the sprawling Wyoming camp to greet the honored guest. The Heart Mountain Sentinel had written lavish articles and editorials about the visitor. A big handwritten sign was positioned near the gate to make a favorable first impression: “Welcome Sergeant Ben Kuroki.” A dark-colored army sedan approached. Peering out through a back window, Ben was shocked. “The armed guards were wearing the same uniform I was wearing,” he later recalled. “And inside, behind barbed wire, were my own people.”3
