An American story

[BYNAME]By Robert Rogers
[BYSOURCE]Staff Writer
[BODY]SAN BERNARDINO — They sat reading the words of their own tragic journeys.

The now gray men recounted the pain and terror of their youths, when they morphed into an enemy of the state through no fault of their own, and were summarily ostracized and imprisoned by their birth country.

Their tormentors called them “yellow.”

And now, six decades later, the patriotism of their dissent fully bloomed before students at Cal State San Bernardino’s San Manuel Student Union Theater, not only drawing the crowd’s empathy and respect, but salving wounds between their own people.

In an event billed as both a historic lesson of rights trampled under the passions of war and a healing of persistent divisions among Japanese Americans, five readers dramatized the plight that befell roughly 120,000 people stripped of possessions and interned in military camps during WWII.

Titled “A Divided Community,” the dramatic reading featured three Japanese Americans who lived the harrowing American tragedy, which grew from puerile bigotry to state-sanctioned assaults that stripped them of land, possessions and freedom.

They responded differently, opening up a divide that has never really closed.
While Frank Emi and Yosh Kuromiya resisted compulsory military service for a country that trampled the rights of their families, Paul Tsuneishi served his country, despite his family’s imprisonment in a military camp for Japanese Americans.

The three men, all in their 80s, highlighted for more than 100 attendance the bitterness that has existed between those who chose service and those who chose resistance.

“One doesn’t normally go to prison for liberation,” Kuromiya said. “But strangely enough, that’s where I found it.”

The play’s director and one of its readers, Momo Yashima, opened the performance with an impassioned declaration, saying she brought the play to the university to show young students a vital piece of American history for too long distorted by “political agendas” that “replaced integrity and truth.”

The early stretch of the play was peppered with excerpts of American literature and songs of the pre WWII era, laced with bawdy bigotry and exploitive ideas regarding the Japanese who had begun streaming onto the West coast.

In 1924, Tsuneishi read, Congressional passage of Immigration Act effectively barred immigration by Japanese and other groups. While many older, politically marginalized Japanese-born people opposed the legislation, the younger generation of Japanese Americans opted not to mount any opposition.

“The failure to fight against it started the rift” between the groups, Tsuneishi said.

But it deepened to unforseen levels with Imperial Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in late 1941.

By early 1942, Emi, Kuromiya, Tsuneishi and thousands more were rousted from their homes and land and shipped to camps.

“Back then you didn’t talk back, didn’t make waves, you just held it in,” Emi said.

“A young soldier kept poking me with his bayonet” to keep a line moving, “I knew then that we were in trouble.”

Later, Selective Service began drafting Japanese American men who were interned in camps with their families. Thousands joined, but nearly 300 disobeyed, calling themselves “resisters of conscience,” and were ultimately sentenced to prison stints.

Emi and Kuromiya were among those locked up for a few years in federal prisons.

Those in attendance said the performance, which was also filmed by a Japanese documentarian, was a conscience-tugging tale.

“They had so much respect for this country’s values, they resisted orders that were totally against those values,” said Holly Roy, a senior history major. “Their resistance was heroic.”

Another attendee, John Sorgi, was particularly moved. Sorgi, 72, of San Bernardino, was in an Arizona camp as a small boy.

“It’s hard for me to think about, but it’s important for people to know this history,” he said.