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William Minoru Hohri: Visionary, Writer and Activist for Resisters of Injustice

Those who stand up to injustice do not always win. Given the odds against them, they often lose. What they gain, however, is the ability to look themselves in the eye each morning, and the ability to face death without would-haves, should-haves and could-haves.

Mits Koshiyama, one of the Heart Mountain draft resisters featured in William Minoru Hohri’s new book, Resistance: Challenging America’s Wartime Internment of Japanese-Americans, speaks a sad truth not only about Japanese Americans but about other people when he says: “I recall that after [World War II] started, a few Nisei [second generation Japanese Americans] and I, who wouldn’t accept racism at school were harassed, had fights, and had to quit school. The Nisei who wouldn’t fight racism were allowed to continue school until the evacuation. This seems to be at the heart of the Japanese American wartime story. Our wartime leaders who accepted racism were the winners, while the dissidents who fought racism were the losers. Is there a lesson to be learned here?”

The lesson for William Hohri, born in San Francisco in 1927, and a longtime leader of the Japanese American redress movement, has been to be equal parts visionary, activist, writer and historian in his lifelong pursuit of justice. Whether opposing the Vietnam War, fighting for affirmative action, pushing for women’s rights, or challenging apartheid in South Africa, he has lent his considerable talents and energy to numerous causes over the years. Although a member of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), he has not been afraid to challenge that group’s unfortunate role in support of the wartime internment, and the opposition of its wartime leaders to any challenge to the constitutionality of the mass incarceration.

I first remember Bill Hohri from the late 1970s, because he wrote a letter to the now-defunct New York Nichi Bei newspaper, saying that Japanese Americans should receive monetary compensation for the injustice they suffered in the wartime exclusion and detention. What particularly galled me was that he stated that everyone should be individually compensated and able to take the money and use it for any purpose they liked. He, himself, would take his money and buy a sports car.

A sports car? I was so mad that I wrote a reply that was printed in the next issue. My basic thought: How dare he belittle the injustice suffered by my family. He should be supporting a monument, or some other token compensation.

Hohri’s reply the following week was succinct and jarring: Token but substantial redress was needed for each injured individual. In an Anglo-American jurisprudential system where damages for lost cars, lives, and opportunities are all quantified with money, each individual should get individualized redress — much as a person would if there had been a fire or industrial accident.

I was so bowled over by the audacity of his thinking and the clarity of his writing that I, like dozens of others, became a convert to the cause. The National Council for Japanese American Redress (NCJAR), which he chaired out of his longtime base in Chicago, became the instigator of the class action lawsuit, William Hohri, et al versus United States. While the class action ultimately failed on technical issues in an appeals court, I can attest from personal experience lobbying on the Hill in the 1980s, that the threat of the class action lawsuit, and the possibility of far-larger pay-outs to each interned individual, played a big role in convincing some Congressmen to vote for the redress bill that ultimately was signed in 1988. The role of NCJAR and other redress groups was detailed in Hohri’s first book, Repairing America: An Account of the Movement for Japanese American Redress (Washington State University Press, 1988).

In his new book, which should be required reading for college students, historians, and activists of all ages, Hohri reminds us of the young men in the Heart Mountain War Relocation Center who refused to be drafted into the United States Army, while their freedoms were curtailed by being involuntarily locked behind barbed wire. While other historians have made much of the 100th Battalion and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which brought honor to Japanese Americans by sustaining huge losses on the battlefields of Europe, Hohri reminds us of the patriotism of those who chose incarceration, and a subsequent lifetime of ostracism, rather than see the Constitution undermined.

While the book does not provide an introduction to the mass incarceration like Michi Weglyn’s Years of Infamy, it does provide sometimes gripping accounts of the human cost of standing up for justice. As resister Yosh Kuromiya said, “It is easy to blame the government for what happened during those trying years ... [However,] the enemy is our own fear and complacency, our reluctance to be personally responsive to that which we find untenable.”

To get a copy of the book, send an email to wmhohri@aol.com. For more information on the Resisters, visit www.resisters.com , or www.javoice.com .