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Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor unleashed rampant racism and distrust towards all things alien, and it raised perplexing questions of national identity that still reverberate. Persons of Japanese ancestry were the victims of racist acts and governmental loyalty investigations, and, finally, of exclusion and imprisonment. The majority of Japanese Americans complied with government actions, including the drafting of Japanese Americans into military service, often viewing such service as an opportunity to display their allegiance to the United States. However, some 200 Japanese Americans drafted into the Army refused to serve in combat while their families languished in internment camps. Here, for the first time, the resisters' story is told in vivid detail, following many of them into the post-war years and assessing the ramifications of their actions on their lives.
The history of Japanese Americans in World War II does not record the stories of these resisters. It does not mention the War Department Special Organization to which many of them were transferred or the individuals who were tried and sentenced by military courts to long prison terms. The 200 conscientious military resisters felt betrayed by the government and viewed the decision to imprison Japanese Americans as an immoral acquiescence to West Coast racism.
Castelnuovo does not abandon the narrative with the end of World War II. Instead, she follows many of the resisters into the post-war years, assessing the ramifications of their actions on their lives as individuals and within the broader context of the Japanese American community. Happily, most of the resisters were eventually re-embraced by their community, but, until now, they have been forgotten by students of World War II. That is an oversight
Soldiers of Conscience will certainly remedy.
List of contents
Foreword
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1. The Presumption of Disloyalty
Chapter 2. The Pre-Detention Inductees: Individual Conscientious Resistance
Chapter 3. The Fort McClellan Conscientious Resisters
Chapter 4. The Response to Fort McClellan
Chapter 5. Renunciation/Repatriation in the Military
Chapter 6. Company of the Damned
Chapter 7. Renunciation/Repatriation at Fort Meade
Chapter 8. Partial Vindication
Chapter 9. The Conscientious Resisters and the Japanese American Community
Chapter 10. Military Service and the Right of Conscience
Notes
About the author
Shirley Castelnuovo is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago, Illinois and Adjunct Professor of Social and Behavioral Science at Saddleback College. For twenty years her work has focused on equal rights for women and the disabled, and the resistance of Japanese Americans to their imprisonment during World War II.
