Kenji Taguma

My Father’s Journey of Resistance

We find our heroes wherever we can, sometimes not by choice. They could be Super Bowl MVPs, or even more iconic figures like MLK, Malcolm X or Rosa Parks. But some heroes are not necessarily found in history books.

But what my dad taught me is that ordinary people can do extraordinary things in the face of adversity. Even a simple, unsophisticated farm boy like my father.

Growing up, I was ashamed of my heritage, as I was constantly teased for my slanted eyes, and called “Nip,” “Jap” or “Chink” all too frequently. I used to run away from my own mother as she yelled my name in Japanese at the local supermarket. I just wanted to be a “regular” American. But now I realize that “America” is indeed in the heart, and that people of color, who have been marginalized in history textbooks, do have their rightful place in the great American mosaic.

My father’s story saved me. It gave me a sense of purpose. It instilled an unbreakable sense of pride, an unshakeable sense of principle.

My personal relationship with my father, however, actually wasn’t always so great, particularly in my teens, when I saw him as an easily irritable old man. It was probably partially my fault, however, that he appeared so mean. The fifth of five kids, I took it upon myself to rebel from the examples set before me by my other siblings, who were exceptional students, athletes, or both. One day, my English teacher took me outside of class, concerned about my academic performance when compared to my other siblings. I just laughed at him. I knew I wasn’t dumb—I became the editor of our school yearbook, after all—but I felt more at ease goofing off in high school. Instead of the 4.0 GPAs of my siblings, sometimes I barely made a 2.0.

At home, I was a lazy, unfilial son. I wouldn’t be quick to do any chores, and intentionally wouldn’t try hard with homework. In addition, my father must have been disappointed with me, as I got into trouble with the law twice. He never even heard of my other run-ins with the law, including another time when police guns were drawn upon me.

Because of my lack of ambition, he kept yelling at me “Prido ga nai! Prido ga nai!”—or “You have no pride!” He also kept saying “They don’t know about us guys. They don’t know about us resisters” like a mantra.

It wasn’t until my chance enrollment in an Asian American studies class at California State University, Sacramento that I started to understand what my father meant, and I began to discover the true heroism in his wartime actions. My semester-long project for Wayne Maeda’s class was to interview my father, and research my father’s history. 

Noboru Taguma was born and raised in Broderick, California, directly across the Sacramento River from Sacramento. He was the eldest son—and second of seven children—born to Iwakichi and Iwa Taguma, two Issei immigrants from Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan. In 1942, at the age of 19, he and his family were imprisoned first at the Merced Assembly Center, and then at the Granada (Amache) concentration camp in Colorado. Like two-thirds of the 120,000 incarcerees, he was an American citizen, with the constitutional right not to be imprisoned without charge. In 1944, when the U.S. Army began drafting U.S. citizens directly out of the camps, my father became one of some 300 who resisted. As one of just 35 draft resisters at the Granada camp, he wrote a letter declaring that imprisonment without due process was unconstitutional, and he refused to serve in a segregated military unit. For his courage, he was sent to a Federal Labor Camp in the Catalina Mountains overseeing Tucson—the very same camp that Gordon Hirabayashi, himself a draft resister, would serve time at. 

After my father was released for “good behavior,” he relocated to the town of Granada, where he worked at a fish market. Banned from entering the camp where his family was still held, every night for a month he would either hitchhike or walk the 2- to 3-mile journey to the camp, sneak under the barbed wire fence, time the searchlights for his dash along the cesspool, and enter the mess hall to visit family, eat some musubi and maybe watch a movie. When told that the “MPs were coming,” he would again sneak under the searchlights on his journey out of the camp. I call this a “reverse Hogan’s Heroes”—instead of sneaking “out” of a detention camp, like in the popular TV show set in wartime, dad was actually sneaking “into” the camp. All at the obvious risk of getting shot on the spot. As the eldest son, he maintained a deep sense of obligation to his family.

Wanting to get his family closer to home at Tule Lake, dad renounced his citizenship. One day, staying with his friend Joe Norikane in Denver, he returned to the apartment to find Joe singing in Japanese: “You picked a bad time to come home, you picked a bad time to come home…” “Joe, what kind of song is that,” dad would ask, as he peered behind the opening door to find two well-dressed FBI agents waiting to take him away. Instead of heading to Tule Lake with his family, he earned a one-way ticket to the Department of Justice camp at Santa Fe, New Mexico. After that camp closed, he was sent to the family reunification camp at Crystal City, Texas—ironically, without his family.

He was then paroled to Seabrook Farms, New Jersey, and was not free to return to California until September 20, 1947.

This research, which became part of Prof. Maeda’s exhibit at the Sacramento History Museum, was an epiphany for me. I was about the age my father had been when he took his courageous stand. Learning his story transformed me from a relatively shy 20-something in danger of dropping out of college. It gave me my new calling as an activist. I changed my major from International Business to Ethnic Studies, and began organizing programs on the California State University, Sacramento campus—first on Nisei draft resistance during World War II and then forums on hate crimes, anti-immigrant legislation Proposition 187, anti-affirmative action Proposition 209, Asian Heritage Weeks and film festivals, while publishing three editions of my own Asian American newspaper. Within the course of eighteen months, this once painfully shy country boy was transformed to the most active student on campus, inspired by my father’s own fight for social justice.

My father’s story gave me a voice, and I committed to give his story the voice that he had been yearning for all these years. In spite of some community opposition, the story of the resisters began to be rediscovered on a local, national, and even international level. Books, videos and forums would come out. The Florin JACL would honor the local resisters in 1994, and the recognition of this once-shunned group would culminate with the National JACL’s Resisters Reconciliation Ceremony in 2002. Dad and I attended event after event together.

Now he could no longer say “They don’t know about us guys.”

Through it all, our family was by his side, even traveling to the former federal labor camp he was sentenced to near Tucson, Arizona. It is a testament to my father that his kids truly supported him every step of the way, as he finally received recognition for his gutsy stand some five decades earlier. The uncovering of his story, coupled with the arrival of his first granddaughter Cheryl, helped to peel off layers upon layers of his tough exterior, and truly made him a happy Papa Bear.

His story continues to inspire me.

When the Nichi Bei Times, one of the last Japanese American newspapers in the country, was folding in September of 2009, it took a tremendous will for me as its editor to launch the first nonprofit ethnic newspaper of its kind in the country—especially in the worst of economic times in decades. It took courage and determination that I didn’t even know I had. And while my family and others were supportive of this inspiring community movement, I believe that it was my father’s resistance that gave me the courage to resist the demise of a treasured community institution, and the fight to move forward to give a voice to the voiceless.

My father’s pride and principle, no doubt, will continue to inspire us as the years pass. He will forever be a guiding light as we face adversity. His love of family and his hard work ethic will forever be a part of our fabric, interwoven with the huge generosity and faith that is inherited from our mother.

On March 11, 2011, as Japan was losing so much in the devastating earthquake and tsunami, I lost my personal hero. But I’m sure that his spirit will live on in each of us who were touched by him.

His spirit certainly continues to drive me, each and every day.

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A version of this was first posted on https://taguma.org/2015/03/11/3-11-2015.