But Hansen couldn’t get Ben out of his thoughts. He decided he wanted to write a book about Ben. But first, Hansen had another commitment to fulfill. He was crafting a book from the papers of James Omura, the Japanese American journalist who had supported the Heart Mountain draft resisters and had been acquitted of federal charges during his 1944 trial with the leaders of the Fair Play Committee. Hansen figured he would complete his Omura book in a year or two and then write the story of Ben’s life.
In the year after his interview with Ben, Hansen wrote a groundbreaking article about Ben’s 1944 visit to Heart Mountain. In 1995, he was invited to an event at Heart Mountain where he discussed Ben’s visit and the article he had written about Ben’s visits to the camps and his encounters with draft resisters and their supporters. Hansen had essentially concluded that Nisei soldiers like Ben and the Nisei camp inmates who resisted the draft to protest their unjust incarceration represented two strains of patriotism, each worthy of recognition and respect. After his 1995 Heart Mountain presentation, several people approached Hansen to introduce themselves. One of them was convicted draft resister Yosh Kuromiya. They connected immediately, the beginning of a long and cherished friendship.
Hansen continued to think about his Ben Kuroki biography. He and his wife traveled to Nebraska to understand Ben’s world in preparation for writing the book. But Hansen was struggling to complete his book on James Omura. He had a heavy course load as a Cal State Fullerton history professor, and there were other competing demands in his life. The two years he had allotted for the Omura project became five, and then five became ten, and ten became fifteen. And still the book defied completion. Finally, in 2018, Hansen held in his hands a copy of Nisei Naysayer: The Memoir of Militant Japanese American Journalist Jimmie Omura.
By then, events had overtaken the biography of Ben Kuroki that Art Hansen had been writing in his head for years.
AT THE SAME TIME ARTHUR HANSEN had taken an interest in Ben’s story, Ben’s friend Cal Stewart had been hard at work for years on the definitive history of the 93rd Bomb Group, the first US Army Air Forces B-24 unit to join the Eighth Air Force in England and the outfit that Stewart had christened Ted’s Travelling Circus. Stewart had already made one successful foray into book publishing. In 1959, he sold his weekly newspaper in O’Neill to work full-time on a project he had undertaken with James Dugan, an old army buddy who had published four nonfiction books and forged a profitable writing and film collaboration with the undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau.4 The topic of the Dugan-Stewart collaboration was a book on the low-level Ploiesti mission of August 1, 1943. For two years, Stewart drove around the country with his family, interviewing Ploiesti veterans. Dugan focused on the writing, and the result was a 1962 Random House release, hailed as the definitive account of the raid.
After completing his work on the Ploiesti book, Stewart moved to Lincoln, where he started a weekly paper and a successful printing business. He was active in the 93rd veterans’ association, and in the 1980s began work on his book on the group. The 93rd had flown more missions than any other Eighth Air Force outfit during the war, and the sheer scope of Stewart’s effort was staggering. As word of Stewart’s project circulated, a mountain of first-person accounts, unpublished memoirs, diaries, letters, and other primary source material found its way to him. Stewart kept chipping away. Finally, in 1996, Cal Stewart’s opus—Ted’s Travelling Circus—rolled off the presses at his Lincoln printing business. Once again, Stewart had done his part to honor Ben’s war record, this time by devoting an entire chapter to his story in the book.
Not long after the publication of Stewart’s book, two Japanese American journalists became interested in Ben’s story. They both had personal connections to it: Frank Abe’s father, George, had been incarcerated at Heart Mountain and never forgot Ben’s visit in April 1944. Bill Kubota’s father, James, had been incarcerated with his family at the Minidoka camp in Idaho and vividly remembered Ben’s visit to that camp.
George Abe had immigrated to the US as an unaccompanied thirteen-year-old in 1937, contracted to work on a walnut farm near San Jose, California. When the roundup got underway in 1942, he was sent to the Pomona Assembly Camp in Southern California, then to Heart Mountain. George had been a nineteen-year-old mess hall worker at the time of Ben’s visit to Heart Mountain. When the camp closed, a War Relocation Authority officer sent George to Cleveland, Ohio, for resettlement. He married Emma Kiyono Abe, a Japanese woman from his home village in Japan, and they had a son, Frank, in 1951. When Frank was ten, the family moved to Santa Clara, California, where George worked as a landscaper and Emma worked as a dental technician.5
After graduating from Cupertino High School, Frank Abe entered the University of California at Santa Cruz and earned his bachelor’s degree in theater directing in 1973. He joined playwright Frank Chin’s new Asian American Theater Workshop in San Francisco, part of a broader effort by young writers, scholars, and artists to forge an identity rooted in their Asian ancestry. Their effort was known as the Combined Asian American Resources Project (CARP).
In 1976, Abe moved to Seattle to join another theater group, the Asian Exclusion Act, and it was there that his interest in the Japanese American incarceration deepened. Under Chin’s guidance, he was one of the organizers of the first Day of Remembrance, in 1978, to draw attention to the injustice of the wartime roundups and kickstart a popular campaign for redress and reparations. Abe helped produce a series of public symposiums on the incarceration camps and was introduced by Chin to the resistance movements inside those camps. The prevailing narrative he had learned in school was that there really hadn’t been any resistance.
Abe continued his activism and scholarship after joining KIRO Newsradio in Seattle as a reporter in 1979. In the early 1990s, he and Chin began work on a film project to document the story of the Fair Play Committee and the sixty-three Heart Mountain draft resisters. A pivotal moment in the Fair Play Committee story was Ben Kuroki’s April 1944 visit.
Over the years, Abe had become good friends with Arthur Hansen and he knew about Hansen’s oral history interview with Ben. Abe needed to get Ben’s story on camera for his film and reached out to him. Although Ben knew that Frank Abe viewed the draft resisters in heroic terms, he agreed to the interview after Abe assured him he was committed to giving voice to both sides of the story. On January 31, 1998, Ben and Shige welcome Frank Abe and Frank Chin into their Southern California home.
BEN AND SHIGE’S INTERVIEW WITH the two filmmakers delved into uncomfortable areas Ben had not spoken about for the public record since his interview with Arthur Hansen. The interview wasn’t contentious, but it was tense at times. One area that intrigued both Abe and Chin was Ben’s feeling that he needed to “prove” his loyalty to America because of Pearl Harbor—a view that Abe and Chin clearly didn’t share. That topic first arose when Chin asked Ben about his decision to fly five bonus missions after completing twenty-five missions with the Eighth Air Force. Ben replied, “Well, I just was—wanted to prove myself a little, little more.” Chin interjected, “Prove yourself as what?” Ben tried to explain. “Well, wanted to prove my loyalty as a Japanese American.”6
Abe later revisited the subject and Ben again tried to explain himself. “Well, first of all, I was the same as the Japanese, as the enemy was also Japanese. And I knew I was different. I think the other thing, that I was so upset. I mean, I just felt that Pearl Harbor was terrible, and I think I felt like a lot of the Caucasian kids that wanted to avenge what happened at Pearl Harbor.”
Abe asked Ben to explain his 1991 comments at the Nebraska Historical Society event when he described feeling “shame” and his “strange guilt complex” over Pearl Harbor.
Ben said his parents had always taught him “not to bring shame to my own family,” and that he viewed the Pearl Harbor attack in that light.
“And yet, you had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor,” Abe interjected.
“No, but my ancestors did and that’s what come[s] back to reflect on me, is what they did,” Ben said.
Abe gently disagreed. “It could be argued that you as a Nebraska-born citizen, American citizen, had your rights, and you had no need to prove anything.”
“Well, I suppose you could say that, but I think, you know, you—all of my friends and my high school buddy Gordy Jorgenson, they were all enlisting and . . . anyone with patriotism in his blood would certainly be willing to join the services, I think, at that time in Nebraska, anyway,” Ben said.
The exchanges between Ben and his interviewers over his 1944 tour of the camps were the most fascinating of the hours-long encounter. At one point, Abe said he had interviewed some Heart Mountain inmates who recalled Ben encouraging them to volunteer, in spite of their loss of homes and constitutional rights. Abe quoted one of the young men as asking Ben, “So you think it’s okay for us to be evacuated and locked up here?”
Ben said he never condoned the roundup and incarceration. “Oh, I didn’t think for a minute that it was fair, the way they got locked up or the tremendous losses that they suffered,” he said. Ben pivoted, praising the government apology and $20,000 reparations payments to incarcerated individuals. “It’s just absolutely great that a country could admit a mistake after so many years,” he said. “And then to apologize, it couldn’t have happened anywhere else except in the United States. It’s a great country.”
Turning to the prosecution of the Heart Mountain draft resisters, Abe wanted to know what Ben would have said if he had been called to testify at the autumn 1944 federal trial of the Fair Play Committee leaders. Ben initially demurred, but when pressed harder he said, “I certainly wouldn’t have agreed with their stance, for sure.”
Abe also questioned Ben about his condemnation of the resisters as “fascists” who were “doing no good.” Did Ben still feel that way?
“At that time, I think that was the normal reaction for me because, my gosh, the publicity was terrible that was coming out about the trial and everything,” Ben said. “And it was bad enough that the Bataan Death March in the Philippines was being headlined in the newspapers, the Japanese enemy doing those horrible things in the Death March and you know, everything was—there was so much going on at the time that it really made things worse as far as I was concerned.”
As Abe persisted, Ben offered a concession. “Well, I think it was pretty strong stuff. I wouldn’t say that today.” He laughed nervously. “But at the time, being young and gung-ho, you know, waving the flag, being patriotic as I was, I can understand why I said those things.”
Abe and Chin had covered some of this same ground with Shige earlier, and she had explained the culture of conformity that existed in the Japanese American community at the time and how that shaped views of the resisters.
Her view of the resisters had evolved with time, Shige offered. “I think I, I have a feeling more of compassion than I [did], that they had their reasons, and they certainly were—had to be very, very brave to have stood by their principles. That isn’t easy to do, particularly in war.”
Shige added, wistfully it seemed, “In hindsight, don’t we all see the errors that we made then?”7
BEN’S INTERVIEW WITH BILL KUBOTA later in 1998 focused more on his military service. The interview stretched over two days and Ben covered the span of his life to that point. Bill Kubota’s father, James, had been a thirteen-year-old boy in 1944 when Ben visited the Minidoka camp, and he had encouraged his journalist son to tell Ben’s story. Kubota was a producer at the public television station in Detroit, WTVS, and his vision was to get Ben’s story on film and air it nationally on PBS.
While the Frank Abe film on the Heart Mountain resisters and Bill Kubota’s film, tentatively named The Ben Kuroki Story, slowly moved forward, Ben and Shige encountered serious health issues. In a ten-day span in 1999, both of them had heart surgery. “We almost lost Shige,” a shaken Ben recalled a few years later. “Her heart stopped.”
In March 2000, feeling better after their surgeries, Ben and Shige traveled to Honolulu, Hawaii, where Ben addressed the 442nd Regimental Combat Team annual tribute. The heroic story of the 442nd, with its tales of extraordinary valor and “Go For Broke” motto, had eclipsed Ben’s story as the definitive Japanese American World War II saga over the decades. The outfit was the subject of a 1951 Hollywood blockbuster, Go for Broke!, and a number of books. While the 442nd remained in the public eye, Ben’s story had largely receded from public memory. And yet, as Arthur Hansen described it, Ben Kuroki was the 442nd before there was a 442nd.
Ben’s appearance at the 442nd tribute—and the warm reception he received—was especially gratifying for Ben after experiencing some tensions with the group several years earlier. Ben had declined an invitation to address 442nd veterans in the 1990s because of his desire to keep a low profile, and there were hurt feelings among them over that. It was a healing experience for Ben and Shige to spend a few happy days with surviving members of the 442nd and their families.
Two months later, Frank Abe’s film, Conscience and the Constitution, had its world premiere in Los Angeles. It was a powerful piece of work and audiences were moved by the accounts of the Heart Mountain draft resisters and the price they paid for their principled stand, both during the war and in the decades that followed. As Ben had expected, he took some criticism from the resisters who appeared in the film. But, true to his word, Abe had given Ben and his story a fair hearing. Afterward, Ben sent Abe a note “to say he appreciated the way we had conducted the interview and that we were welcome to come back to visit him,” Abe recalled. “That really meant a lot to me.”8
Ben’s comrades, especially 93rd Bomb Group veterans, viewed him in a far more positive light than the resisters and their supporters. His comrades knew what he had endured on the ground and in the skies, and they viewed him as a great American who had never been appropriately honored by his country.
By 2002, Cal Stewart was at the forefront of an effort to change that.
