Ben arrived at Heart Mountain with only the vaguest idea of the ordeal the inhabitants of the camp had experienced, and no concept of the conditions under which they had been confined. Now he was shaken by the sight of men, women, and children who looked like him, packed into flimsy wooden barracks in this windswept place, guarded by rifle-toting US Army soldiers as if they were enemy combatants.
As Ben tried to process his surroundings, the Heart Mountain camp director and a community council representative fawned over him in a brief formal ceremony. The crowd of camp residents applauded politely, as if they were attending a ribbon-cutting ceremony back in their California hometowns. Later that evening, Ben was feted at a banquet attended by two hundred Japanese American community leaders.
The warm welcome Ben received at Heart Mountain belied the fault lines that had fractured the camp community. Moderate elements committed to cooperation with the federal government on the military draft and other matters were at ever sharper odds with the growing faction of militants who had now dedicated themselves to opposing the incarceration regime on all fronts.
Passions within the camp had been further inflamed by a rolling government crackdown on the resistance movement in the weeks since the arrests of Yosh Kuromiya and several dozen other men on federal draft evasion charges. In early April, federal agents abruptly transferred Kiyoshi Okamoto, the Fair Play Committee founder, to the segregation center for “disloyal” Japanese at Tule Lake, California. By late April, federal authorities had arrested fifty-three men at the Heart Mountain camp. These young men, Yosh Kuromiya among them, were now being held in scattered Wyoming county jails awaiting trial on federal draft evasion charges.
Despite all this, hundreds of Heart Mountain residents continued to support the draft resisters. Fair Play Committee leaders urged other men to defy the draft as they received their physical exam summons. But the militants had gone beyond words. In recent days, they had denounced the editors of the Heart Mountain Sentinel as collaborators who had cast their lot with their government oppressors, and a number of violent clashes had put the camp on edge.
Ben knew none of this when he arrived at the Heart Mountain camp.
AWAKENING AT HEART MOUNTAIN ON Tuesday, April 25, Ben was hustled by his handlers to speaking events and meet-and-greets arranged by administrators and community leaders. He toured the camp’s wooden barracks, mess halls, schools, churches, baseball fields, basketball courts, and other recreation areas.
Within a day or so, Ben understood why he was there. He was to encourage Nisei men to enlist, or at least not resist the draft. In conversations with small groups of draft-age men and in public speeches, Ben shared his story of patriotism, perseverance, and courage. Many young men hung on every word, and mesmerized children sat at his feet. “A lot of boys and girls—especially the girls—were asking for [Ben’s] autograph,” recalled camp resident Eiichi Sakauye.4
Although he was treated like a movie star by many inmates, Ben quickly became aware of the deep divisions within the camp. He was shocked when members of the Fair Play Committee began to interrupt and heckle him during his speeches. They accused Ben of collaborating with the very people who had deprived camp residents of their rights. “While most Nisei treated me as their first war hero, the dissidents seemingly despised me and some even resorted to derogatory name-calling,” Ben recalled. “Their leader called me a bull-shitter.”5
Camp administrators and community leaders asked Ben to talk to a group of Fair Play Committee members in hopes of persuading them to drop their resistance to the draft. “There might be trouble,” Ben was told, and so extra guards were assigned. He gave his talk without disruption, but he wasn’t changing many minds.
At one of his meetings with Heart Mountain dissidents, Ben bluntly told his hostile audience that if they thought Japan was going to win the war, as some did, they were “crazy.” Bluntly, Ben warned them of a looming catastrophe for the land of their ancestry. “Japan is gonna get bombed off the map,” Ben flatly declared.6
Some of the audience members booed and hissed his words.
The hostile reactions pained Ben. He fervently believed that the Nisei inmates should follow his example and prove their loyalty to America through military service. In the case of the Heart Mountain Nisei, joining the army and serving with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team “was going to help” the people of Japanese ancestry in America, Ben insisted.7
His words infuriated the Heart Mountain militants. Most of them were Californians and better educated than Ben. They viewed him as unsophisticated and uninformed. Their families had lost nearly everything but their lives. Ben and his family hadn’t experienced anything like the harm they had suffered.
Even worse, in their eyes, Ben seemed oblivious to the anguish felt by some of the incarcerees, and that infuriated them. “He’d never been in camp,” said Jack Tono, a Heart Mountain dissident who was eventually convicted of draft evasion and spent two years in a federal prison. “He’s a Nebraska boy, and here we’d lost everything and then [were] thrown into camp. He’s coming out, preaching to us what the hell we should be doing.”8
The fury toward Ben built during the week. In the eyes of the resisters, Ben was a race-traitor who had broken faith with his own people for a few medals and the approval of their oppressors. “There was guys in camp wanna kill [Kuroki],” said Tono. “He’s lucky he went out of there alive.”9
ON THURSDAY, APRIL 27, BEN ADDRESSED a large mass meeting at the camp high school. There were more events on Friday and Saturday. After a full weekend of activities, he delivered his final speech on Sunday, April 30, at a farewell ceremony in his honor. Standing on an outdoor platform before an American flag poster, he thanked the residents for their hospitality and called for young men in the audience to honor Japanese Americans by joining the army.
Ben had done everything asked of him at Heart Mountain. He had done his best to convince draft-age inmates that they should enlist, or at least not resist the draft. Some men heeded his exhortations and enlisted. Others complied with their draft summons under duress, fearing the costs of challenging the federal government. At one point, Ben had boarded a bus loaded with departing Heart Mountain recruits to wish them luck. “I was met with stony silence,” Ben said, laughing nervously at the memory of the tense encounter.10
While Ben’s visit was judged a success by camp administrators and the army, he had not broken the spirit of resistance that coursed through Heart Mountain and was spreading. On the day Ben climbed into the back of an army sedan and rolled back through the barbed wire that confined the camp inmates, another six Heart Mountain incarcerees refused to report for their pre-induction physicals.11
Chapter 41
A TURNING POINT
Ben spent the remainder of the spring of 1944 on the road, doing recruiting and public relations work for the War Department and the War Relocation Authority. His itinerary took him to other incarceration camps and to Chicago, where a growing number of Japanese Americans had settled after their early release from confinement over the past year. At each stop, Ben delivered speeches recounting his personal story of patriotism, perseverance, and combat valor.
More controversially, Ben urged Nisei men in his audiences to enlist in the army as the ultimate answer to those critics who questioned their love for America or their loyalty to its cause. Although he didn’t face physical threats in the camps he visited after Heart Mountain, Ben encountered resistance to his argument that unconditional military service was the antidote to the prevailing bigotry and prejudice. Increasingly, these unpleasant encounters weighed on him.
The next stop for Ben after Heart Mountain was the Minidoka Relocation Center near Hunt, Idaho. As Ben quickly discovered, there was a dreary monotony to the camps: bleak locations; flimsy wooden barracks, mess halls, and other crude facilities; carefully tended vegetable gardens and flower beds; and arts and cultural displays that reflected the brave efforts of incarcerees to celebrate their heritage and resurrect pieces of the lives they had lost.
Among the Minidoka incarcerees on hand to witness Ben’s arrival was a twenty-eight-year-old Southern Californian named Minoru (James) Sakoda. At the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, Sakoda had been studying psychology at the University of California at Berkeley.
His parents had returned to Japan in the previous decade, and so Sakoda went to Los Angeles to reunite with his siblings. When the West Coast roundup began in March, he and his siblings were first sent to the Tulare Assembly Center in California’s San Joaquin Valley and then to the permanent incarceration camp at Tule Lake in the state’s northern extremes.
Not long after arriving at Tule Lake, James Sakoda was hired by a Cal Berkeley acquaintance, sociologist Dorothy Swaine Thomas, who had launched a multidisciplinary project known as the Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study (JERS). Sakoda was one of more than two dozen field-workers assigned to gather data from four assembly centers, six incarceration camps, and several resettlement communities outside the exclusion zone. The project would eventually produce three books published by the University of California Press.1
When Tule Lake became the segregation facility for perceived “disloyals” from other WRA facilities, Sakoda asked to be transferred to the Minidoka camp in Idaho to be with his fiancée. He arrived there in September 1943 and was married shortly afterward. In the months since, Sakoda had focused his research for the Cal Berkeley study on incarcerees who chose to remain in the camp rather than accept offers to work or study in the outside world.2
As Ben made his recruiting rounds at Minidoka, Sakoda was struck by the airman’s unwillingness to consider the views of his audience members—especially the immigrant Issei who still harbored a deep reverence for their homeland. Many of these people believed that Japan was winning the war and would ultimately prevail and free them from the camps.3
Ben repeated his comments about Japan not only facing defeat, but destruction from American bombs. His words shocked the Issei inmates and hardened attitudes against him, especially since many viewed Ben as the face of the Washington war machine that would send their sons to their deaths. Nisei men didn’t share their parents’ reverence for Japan, but they considered rejecting the draft a principled stand against a profound injustice.4
Although Ben received a warm welcome from some inmates and signed scores of autographs, he “wasn’t a hero” to many others, Sakoda said. “He was something—somebody—they despised. The ones who really welcomed Ben Kuroki as a hero were the young kids and the young girls who saw him as he was supposed to be seen.”5
Despite the backlash, Ben continued to insist that combat service by Nisei men was the surest way to change American attitudes toward people of Japanese descent.
“I’d much rather be fighting than doing this civilian work, but I’d like to do what I can to help,” Ben told Sakoda. “I won’t be discouraged.”6
AFTER SPENDING THE FIRST WEEK OF MAY at Minidoka, Ben traveled to Chicago to address employees of the War Relocation Authority and former incarcerees who had been allowed to resettle in Illinois. The visit was especially joyous for Ben because he got to see four of his five sisters—Fuji, Cecile, Wilma, and Beatrice—who had married and were living in Chicago.
While Ben was in Chicago, the legal case involving Yosh Kuromiya and other Heart Mountain draft resisters took a dramatic turn. On May 10, a grand jury in Cheyenne, Wyoming, indicted sixty-three resisters on federal draft evasion charges. The grand jury also indicted seven leaders of the Fair Play Committee and Rocky Shimpo journalist James Omura on federal charges of conspiracy to counsel draft evasion. A trial date for the resisters was set for June.
After several pleasant days in Chicago, Ben headed home to Nebraska to visit his parents. He arrived in Hershey on Monday, May 15, for what was supposed to be a fifteen-day furlough, but he had been home only a day when an army telegram ordered him back to his base in Colorado. The abrupt change of plans had been triggered by developments in Italy. The five-month battle for Monte Cassino, western anchor of the German army’s Gustav Line south of Rome, had reached a climax.
During the initial January-February assaults on Monte Cassino, the all-Nisei 100th Battalion had become known as the Purple Heart Battalion because of its heavy losses. Throughout the spring, the army had replenished the 100th with men from another all-Nisei unit training in Mississippi, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. On May 1, all but the 442nd’s depleted 1st Battalion had sailed for Italy. Once Monte Cassino was captured, the 442nd would join forces with the 100th for the push up the Italian peninsula.
