TY - BOOK ID - 78647151 TI - Nisei naysayer AU - Omura, James Matsumoto AU - Hansen, Arthur A PY - 2018 SN - 1503606120 9781503606128 9781503604957 1503604950 9781503606111 1503606112 PB - Stanford, California DB - UniCat KW - Japanese American journalists KW - Journalists KW - Japanese Americans KW - Journalists, Japanese American KW - Evacuation and relocation of Japanese Americans, 1942-1945 KW - Internment of Japanese Americans, 1942-1945 KW - Relocation of Japanese Americans, 1942-1945 KW - World War, 1939-1945 KW - Evacuation and relocation, 1942-1945. KW - Evacuation of civilians KW - Omura, James Matsumoto, KW - Omura, Jimmie, KW - Forced removal of Japanese Americans, 1942-1945 KW - Evacuation and relocation, 1942-1945 KW - Forced removal of civilians KW - Forced removal and internment, 1942-1945. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:78647151 AB - Among the fiercest opponents of the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II was journalist James "Jimmie" Matsumoto Omura. In his sharp-penned columns, Omura fearlessly called out leaders in the Nikkei community for what he saw as their complicity with the U.S. government's unjust and unconstitutional policies—particularly the federal decision to draft imprisoned Nisei into the military without first restoring their lost citizenship rights. In 1944, Omura was pushed out of his editorship of the Japanese American newspaper Rocky Shimpo, indicted, arrested, jailed, and forced to stand trial for unlawful conspiracy to counsel, aid, and abet violations of the military draft. He was among the first Nikkei to seek governmental redress and reparations for wartime violations of civil liberties and human rights. In this memoir, which he began writing towards the end of his life, Omura provides a vivid account of his early years: his boyhood on Bainbridge Island; summers spent working in the salmon canneries of Alaska; riding the rails in search of work during the Great Depression; honing his skills as a journalist in Los Angeles and San Francisco. By the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Omura had already developed a reputation as one of the Japanese American Citizens League's most adamant critics, and when the JACL leadership acquiesced to the mass incarceration of American-born Japanese, he refused to remain silent, at great personal and professional cost. Shunned by the Nikkei community and excluded from the standard narrative of Japanese American wartime incarceration until later in life, Omura seeks in this memoir to correct the "cockeyed history to which Japanese America has been exposed." Edited and with an introduction by historian Arthur A. Hansen, and with contributions from Asian American activists and writers Frank Chin, Yosh Kuromiya, and Frank Abe, Nisei Naysayer provides an essential, firsthand account of Japanese American wartime resistance. ER -