We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration

Posted: October 4, 2021

By: The Pigott-McCone Endowed Chair in the Humanities and the English Department


We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration
Tuesday, Oct. 26, 12:30 p.m.

Register here »

Three voices. Three acts of defiance. One mass injustice. 
The story of camp as you've never seen it before.

The Pigott-McCone Endowed Chair in the Humanities and the English Department welcome Tamiko Nimura, PhD, who will speak about her recent book We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration.

Japanese Americans complied when evicted from their homes in World War II—but many refused to submit to imprisonment in American concentration camps without a fight. In this groundbreaking graphic novel, meet Jim Akutsu, the inspiration for John Okada’s No-No Boy, who refuses to be drafted from the camp at Minidoka when classified as a non-citizen, an enemy alien; Hiroshi Kashiwagi, who resists government pressure to sign a loyalty oath at Tule Lake, but yields to family pressure to renounce his U.S. citizenship; and Mitsuye Endo, a reluctant recruit to a lawsuit contesting her imprisonment, who refuses a chance to leave the camp at Topaz so that her case could reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

Based upon painstaking research, We Hereby Refuse presents an original vision of America's past with disturbing links to the American present. This event is free and open to all. Please RSVP on Eventbrite. For more information, contact Professor Nalini Iyer, niyer@seattleu.edu.