One of the panels told the story of the detention of the popular local Episcopal priest, Reverend Hiram Kano, who was confined in multiple internment camps before being paroled and sent to a seminary in Wisconsin. Another detailed how the national anti-Japanese backlash played out in Nebraska. Local residents weren’t rounded up and sent to incarceration camps, but their bank accounts were frozen, travel restricted, and cameras, radios, and guns confiscated. Registration with government authorities was also required.
A major focus of the exhibition was the service of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Ultimately, twenty-two local men of Japanese descent, including three Kuroki brothers, served in the armed forces. Ben’s story was featured in a separate panel that included a photograph of him in his bemedaled uniform and a copy of Ralph G. Martin’s Boy from Nebraska.
The closing panels highlighted the naturalization of Issei residents in Lincoln County. The Issei citizenship legislation that Ben had advocated during his Fifty-Ninth Mission Tour had been approved by Congress and signed into law by President Truman in 1952, and the following year Sam and Naka Kuroki were among twenty-five Lincoln County residents of Japanese ancestry who passed the naturalization test and became American citizens. A photograph of the newly naturalized citizens, Sam and Naka among them, was on display.
As fate would have it, Sam enjoyed the benefits of his American citizenship for only five years. He died in 1958 and was buried in the North Platte cemetery. Naka lived until 1974, and she is buried beside Sam.
Fred Kuroki died in 2002 in North Platte at the age of eighty-two. George died the following year in Hershey.
The rest of Sam and Naka’s children scattered to the winds. When Ben died in 2015, only one of his siblings was still alive: his youngest sister Rose, born in 1926. Like the other Kuroki girls, Rose had lived for a time in Chicago and had married there in 1951. Like Ben, she ended up in California. Thirteen months after Ben’s death, on December 4, 2016, Rose Kuroki Ura—the last of Shosuke and Naka’s ten children—died in Palo Alto, California.
IT’S 467 MILES AS THE CROW FLIES from Hershey, Nebraska, to what remains of the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in northern Wyoming. The small portion of the camp that remains in public hands today has been designated a national historic landmark. Drive north into the Bighorn Basin from the town of Cody on US Highway 14, and about a dozen miles out it suddenly appears on your left.
The site lies only a few hundred yards from the rail line that transported Yosh Kuromiya and other incarcerees to their forced exile in the late summer of 1942. A replica guard tower like those that greeted Ben on his visit rises like a sentry above a cluster of reconstructed barracks. An interpretive center houses interactive exhibits, a gallery, and a small theater.
As I steered my car into an unpaved parking area, dust curling from the powdery soil, I noticed a small building under construction. It’s the future home of the Mineta-Simpson Institute at Heart Mountain, named for two boys who met here in the 1940s and went on to notable careers as public servants. Norman Mineta, a future Democratic congressman and cabinet member under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, was incarcerated with his family at Heart Mountain. Alan Simpson, a future Republican senator, met Mineta through Boy Scout gatherings and sporting events that introduced Cody boys to camp boys. The center named for the friends who became known for bridging their political differences for the common good is envisioned as a retreat space where workshops and programs can be held to “foster empathy, courage, and cooperation in the next generation of leaders,” the Heart Mountain website says.
I arrived during the Heart Mountain Pilgrimage, an annual homecoming in which former inmates and their families bond with old friends and remember the injustices that led to their wartime incarceration. Most of the survivors are now in their eighties, and they made the trip with three, or even four, generations of family members.
Inside the interpretive center, after watching the poignant introductory film, All We Could Carry, and viewing the exhibits, I struck up a conversation with a young woman wearing a staff badge. Her name was Eva Petersen, and when I mentioned that I was writing a biography of Ben Kuroki, she reacted viscerally. She knew he was a Nebraska farm boy who had become a Nisei war hero, and she knew his visit to Heart Mountain had stirred controversy.
Among those attending the Pilgrimage was a bearded historian named Douglas W. Nelson. As a young graduate student at the University of Wyoming in 1968, Nelson had begun research that would eventually become the definitive history of the Heart Mountain camp on its publication in book form in 1976. Eva tracked down Professor Nelson, and, as Pilgrimage participants and other visitors swirled around us in the Interpretive Center, I listened with fascination as the eminent Heart Mountain scholar discussed the significance of Ben’s visit to the camp.
The debate over the resumption of the Nisei draft in January 1944 and the possibility of service in the segregated 442nd Regimental Combat Team was just gaining critical mass when Ben arrived, Nelson said. Ben’s visit galvanized the opposing sides. “It was an important turning point here,” Nelson told me. “Before that, the extent of the division wasn’t as clear as it was during and after Ben’s visit.”
As Professor Nelson rushed off to an event, Eva and I resumed our conversation. I mentioned that one of the individuals whose story I was drawn to as I did my research on Heart Mountain was the young artist who became a convicted draft resister, Yoshito Kuromiya. “Yosh’s daughter is here!” Eva excitedly said. “I’ll text her so you can meet her.” Before long, the third of Yosh Kuromiya’s four daughters appeared.
Gail Kuromiya had a warm and thoughtful way about her. She briefly told me the story of her father’s journey after Heart Mountain. Yosh never could have reclaimed his old life, even if he had wanted to, as Gail explained it. Many in the Japanese American community shunned the resisters because they had brought controversy and, in the eyes of many, shame, upon the community. It was the sort of thinking that had prompted Ben to denounce the resisters and the Fair Play Committee leaders as fascists. Yet Yosh remained true to his principles. “Writing and speaking out for the resisters—this was his life,” Gail told me.
Yosh worried about how his path might affect his daughters as they grew older, but the girls were strong and they found their way. They inherited Yosh’s artistic talent—some of his drawings and watercolor paintings are now held by the Smithsonian National Museum of American History—and they all became graphic designers. As the years passed, they encouraged their father to weave his essays and other pieces on his painful Heart Mountain experience into a book. He finished the manuscript in early 2018 and died within six months. “He handed it off to us and said, ‘You girls do what you think is best,’” Gail said.
The daughters found the perfect advocate in Arthur A. Hansen, emeritus professor of history at California State University, Fullerton, and founding director of the Japanese American Project of the Oral History Program and the Center for Oral and Public History. He edited Yosh’s memoir, pro bono, and in 2021 the book was published by the University Press of Colorado. Beyond the Betrayal: The Memoir of a World War II Japanese American Draft Resister of Conscience was the first book-length account of the Nisei draft resistance movement by an insider.
For the daughters of Yosh Kuromiya, the book was a monument to the role model at the center of their lives. I bought a copy in the Interpretive Center bookstore and asked Gail to sign it. I had told Gail that I intended to tell a small part of her father’s story in my book on Ben Kuroki, and she seemed pleased. She penned a gracious inscription in her father’s honor. “Best wishes on your new writing endeavor,” she wrote. “I think dad would be proud and flattered!”
Before leaving Heart Mountain, I made my way up the hill from the Interpretive Center to a memorial where there are a series of plaques dedicated to those incarcerated in the camp and the 750 men and women who served in the armed forces during the war. Some had been inspired to serve by Ben’s exhortations in April 1944, and some had died in combat.
The area around the memorial offers a dramatic view of Heart Mountain, the limestone pillar that rises 8,123 feet above sea level and looms over the area. But something was off as I gazed to the west at the mountain that had given this camp its evocative name.
While doing research at NARA II—the cavernous National Archives and Records Administration facility in College Park, Maryland—I had come across a War Relocation Authority file in the Still Pictures Research Room that contained about two hundred images of daily life at the Heart Mountain camp. I spent hours examining and scanning every image, in part to burn into my memory what it looked like, and in part to fix in my mind the faces of some of the fourteen thousand people who were unjustly confined in this place during America’s crusade against global fascism. In the photos I had examined that were taken outside the buildings, the landscape was dusty and barren as it stretched toward Heart Mountain.
Except now, I was gazing out at lush, green fields of alfalfa. How had this happened?
As I puzzled over this mystery, a woman in a floppy hat that shielded her head from the blazing sun power-walked past me along the road. I greeted her and we struck up a conversation. Her name was Cally Steussy, and she was the director of the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center.
The camp had been carved from the federal Bureau of Reclamation’s Heart Mountain Irrigation Project, an ambitious endeavor to transform the parched landscape using water from the nearby Shoshone River. In 1937, the Bureau began work on the Heart Mountain Canal, but construction was halted when the war began. After the camp opened, Heart Mountain inmates resumed work on the canal, extending it by a mile and eventually cultivating seventeen hundred acres of land reclaimed from the barren high desert.
Heart Mountain inmates began to leave the camp in January 1945, and the final incarcerees departed on November 10 of that year. By 1946, farmers began to establish homesteads on the former Heart Mountain camp lands. The irrigation project was completed and the barren ground that once lay inside the barbed wire became cultivated fields.3
Now the windswept desolation that once greeted camp inmates every day of their incarceration was an undulating blanket of green sprinkled with yellow blossoms and white butterflies, as vivid as a Van Gogh painting. The passage of time couldn’t change the tragic history of this place, but the transformation of this desert spoke to the possibility of healing.
As I stood beside the road, looking out at the fields and the dramatic peak eight miles distant, I thought about Ben and his remarkable life. Sam Kuroki had ended up in Nebraska so he could cultivate fields like this, and he had raised his family in an enclave largely insulated from the bigotry and hate that was inflicted on immigrants from China, Japan, the Philippines, and other Asian countries throughout the fifty years leading up to World War II. But the attack on Pearl Harbor had unleashed a tidal wave of pent-up prejudice and bigotry, and this had set Ben on his epic quest to prove himself as a loyal and worthy American. Eventually, his journey led him to this place where the American covenant had been so cruelly betrayed.
The Constitution that he had sworn to uphold when he entered the military after Pearl Harbor had been trampled in the dust at Heart Mountain, and yet Ben struggled to fully acknowledge the injustice that occurred here and in the other camps. It was a regrettable blind spot in a brave and remarkable life, and yet the sort of blind spot that afflicts nearly all of us. “Who am I to judge those who joined the 442nd or those who resisted?” Gail Kuromiya said to me at Heart Mountain—wise words that remain in my thoughts. With his gallant and selfless service, Ben Kuroki earned the honors and accolades that came his way in time. And in the end, this earnest young man from Nebraska and the principled draft resisters from California, each in their own way, embody the highest ideals of a good and great nation.
AFTERWORD
by Jonathan Eig
Muhammad Ali called himself “The Greatest.” He joked, in fact, that he began calling himself “The Greatest” before he knew it was true. The scholar Michael Eric Dyson has called Martin Luther King, Jr. “the greatest American who ever lived.” I have written biographies of these two superlative figures, as well as baseball’s greatest first baseman, Lou Gehrig, and the greatest gangster of the Prohibition Era, Al Capone.
While I have spent much of my writing exploring the great lives, I’m aware, of course, that we live in an age of distrust, if not contempt, for the great-man (or great-person) approach to history, politics, and biography. Too many of history’s so-called great figures have turned out to be great purveyors of death. Too many have turned out to be great liars and hypocrites. But I don’t see this is as reason to abandon the exploration of great lives. Greatness does not require perfection. Biography serves as exploration of greatness, a careful, nuanced exploration, an exploration of the scope and significance of a life, an exploration of human courage, ambition, and creativity as well as weakness, doubt, and failure.
Ben Kuroki’s story is certainly one of greatness. As Gregg Jones tells us in these fascinating pages, Ben was one of ten children born to Japanese immigrants, a high school graduate who appeared headed for a lifetime on the farm in Nebraska, growing potatoes and sugar beets with his father and brothers, until the events of December 7, 1941 changed everything, until he recognized, as all great men and women do, that he had to make a choice about whether to risk his personal security for something bigger.
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Ben proved his patriotism by joining the Army Air Forces. But he faced brutally racist attacks and ostracism. Rather than earning assignment to a bomber crew, he got kitchen duty. He persisted. He suffered the abuse of peers and superiors until he earned the chance to fight and made good as an aerial gunner. It was almost absurdly dangerous work, a series of nearly impossible missions flown in preposterously unsafe aircraft. On his first combat mission, Ben saw his crewmate suffer a near-fatal head wound. Yet he wanted more action, and he got it. He risked his life and excelled again and again, as a B-24 waist gunner and top turret gunner in Europe and North Africa, and as a B-29 tail gunner in the Pacific.
Our great heroes are not perfect, nor should we expect them to be. Ben failed to recognize the heroism of those Japanese American men who had been forced from their West Coast homes and confined with their families in remote incarceration camps during World War II and who led a draft-resistance movement. The United States sent Ben to three camps in early 1944, using him as a symbol of patriotism, to persuade Japanese American men to serve in the military. Some called him a race traitor and collaborator, criticism that stuck to him the rest of his life and led him to reflect on whether his own enthusiasm to serve had narrowed his vision of what it meant to be a patriot.
The great-person approach to history draws fire in large part because it risks placing too much emphasis on a few leading figures, and because those figures all too often turn out to be white men. The great-person theory also assumes, in some interpretations, that great people are born, not made, but I don’t accept that assumption. In fact, the Ben Kuroki story helps broaden our view of great figures in history. Ben’s story will be unknown to most readers. His greatness stems in large part from his position as an outsider and his courageous effort to use his outsider status to break down prejudice. It’s the ordinary nature of his life that makes it so special. It’s the nuance Jones brings to the saga that makes Kuroki’s tale so moving and so worthy of exploration. It’s the detail that makes the reader feel he’s along for the ride with Kuroki—for a ride that terrifies, troubles, and inspires.
When I was conducting interviews for my Muhammad Ali biography, the comedian and activist Dick Gregory gave me a challenge: Don’t bother writing your book, he said, if you can’t explain what made Ali—a Black child of the Jim Crow South—think he could get away with calling himself The Greatest. It was solid advice. The biographer’s job is to show, first, what makes a person think he can be different. What makes a young man think he can go against the grain, challenge authority, perhaps even change the world? What made Ali think he could fight racism? What made Ben Kuroki think he could prove to all Americans that their Japanese American neighbors could be patriots and even war heroes? What made him think he could be special?
