The Heart Mountain Draft Resisters

The story of the Heart Mountain camp includes an act of principled defiance that took decades to be honored. In nineteen forty three the government issued a loyalty questionnaire to the very people it had imprisoned, and then began drafting young men out of the camps into the Army. A group of inmates found this unbearable.

If their citizenship rights had been stripped away, they argued, how could they be compelled to serve. Kiyoshi Okamoto started what he called a Fair Play Committee of One, and he was soon joined by Frank Emi and others. Emi was exempt from the draft himself because he was married with children, but he insisted that full citizenship had to be restored before any Nisei should be forced to fight.

In nineteen forty four, sixty three young men from Heart Mountain refused to report for induction. They were convicted of violating the Selective Service Act and sentenced to three years in federal prison. Seven leaders of the committee, including Emi, were convicted separately of conspiracy.

For years the resisters were shunned even within their own community. Only much later were they recognized as men who had stood on the Constitution when the Constitution had abandoned them.