We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration by Frank Abe and Tamiko Nimura (review)

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Reviewed by:

• We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration by Frank Abe and Tamiko Nimura
• Mika Kennedy

Frank Abe and Tamiko Nimura, art by Ross Ishikawa and Matt Sasaki, We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration. Wing Luke Museum and Chin Music Press, 2021. 151 pp. Paper, $19.95; e-book, $9.95.

We Hereby Refuse begins with a series of sharp intrusions into the lives of three Japanese Americans coming of age on the West Coast: a domestic afternoon is interrupted by the FBI; a traffic stop turns into an accusation of espionage; and a shopping trip stalls after an accusation of loyalty to the Japanese emperor. These three protagonists, Hajime Jim Akutsu, Hiroshi Kashiwagi, and Mitsuye Endo, are all historical figures who were forcibly removed and incarcerated in the United States' Japanese American incarceration camps during World War II. As one of the most heavily documented topics in twentieth-century western history, Japanese Americans have been able to shift the incarceration narrative from the state's notion of an unfortunate but inevitable wartime necessity to a story of active injustice perpetrated by the United States. But this was not a historical repair executed in hindsight, after the war was over. It has always been ongoing. With its three interwoven stories, We Hereby Refuse spotlights critical early examples of Japanese American resistance—and most importantly, the multitudinous, even contradictory visions of what that "resistance" looks like.

In a graphic narrative like We Hereby Refuse, to "look like" is both a discursive and literally visual quality. Joining an exciting plenitude of recent incarceration graphic texts, among them George Takei's They Called Us Enemy (2019), Kiku Hughes's Displacement (2019), and Molly Murakami's Tide Goes Out (2022), We Hereby Refuse features the work of two different artists with dynamically different illustration [End Page 89] styles. Their work in concert emphasizes the polyvocal quality of the text, through which We Hereby Refuse makes clear that however remote the camps or "alien" their inhabitants, the state is always present. To experience incarceration is to be in constant negotiation with the many faces of the state, and these negotiations must be met by as many faces of resistance.

In Endo's and Akutsu's stories these negotiations are rendered with clean lines, flat colors, and rectangular panels as the US state attempts to put Japanese Americans in boxes both figurative (legislative management) and literal (prison), and Endo and Akutsu respond by using the United States' boxes against itself. Endo brings a court case against the US government as the tactically "perfect plaintiff" by the United States' own standards (38)—she doesn't speak Japanese and is not Buddhist or Shinto. Similarly, Akutsu argues he should be ineligible for military draft due to the United States' own claim that he is an "enemy alien." By contrast, Kashiwagi's story plays out in very different visuals—wavering chisel-tipped lines and unbounded grayscale tones slashed with single-color accents. The art refuses easily delineable causalities: firing squads don't result in death, yet signing "no-no" on a questionnaire results in imprisonment by the United States, as well as ostracization by one's own community. Birthright citizenship becomes something that can be lost. The state and all its boxes and promises are fragile things.

The great strength of We Hereby Refuse is its reminder that there is no singular narrative of refusal, nor universally correct way to meet national injustice, whether by usurpation of the master's tools or via more radical refusals of state conventions. We Hereby Refuse renders Japanese American incarcerees as politicized and political bodies rather than as vague ghosts disappeared to more vague desert. This history is personal; it is political. Its conflicts exist between the people and the US federal government, but also within psyches; within families and communities. Not all actions constitute resistance, however. The Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) emerges as a clear villain in We Hereby Refuse, eager to "ferret out those disloyal to the government" and to demonstrate loyalty to the US state with "payment in blood, if necessary" (53–54; emphasis original). This characterization is a raw subject for the...