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During World War II Japanese Americans were taken from their homes and placed into internment camps. Here they had to fill out a questionnaire and the last two questions are what bring the term No-No boy to life.

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These camps were basically concentration camps. however due to the negative stigma surrounding that word concentration camp the name was changed.

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Executive Order 9066

On February 19, 1942, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japanese forces, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 with the stated intention of preventing espionage on American shores.

Military zones were created in California, Washington and Oregon-states with a large population of Japanese Americans. Then Roosevelt's executive order forcibly removed Americans of Japanese ancestry from their homes. Executive Order 9066 affected the lives about 120,000 people-the majority of whom were American citizens.

Canada soon followed suit, forcibly removing 21,000 of its residents of Japanese descent from its west coast. Mexico enacted its own version, and eventually 2,264 more people of Japanese descent were forcibly removed from Peru, Brazil, Chile and Argentina to the United States.

Anti-Japanese American Activity

Weeks before the order, the Navy removed citizens of Japanese descent from Terminal Island near the Port of Los Angeles.

On December 7, 1941, just hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the FBI rounded-up 1,291 Japanese American community and religious leaders, arresting them without evidence and freezing their assets.

In January, the arrestees were transferred to prison camps in Montana, New Mexico and North Dakota, many unable to inform their families and most remaining for the duration of the war.

Concurrently, the FBI searched the private homes of thousands of Japanese American residents on the West Coast, seizing items considered contraband.

One-third of Hawaii's population was of Japanese descent. In a panic, some politicians called for their mass incarceration. Japanese-owned fishing boats were impounded.

Some Japanese American residents were arrested and 1,500 people-one percent of the Japanese population in Hawaii-were sent to prison camps on the U.S. mainland.

Photos of Japanese American Relocation and Incarceration

John DeWitt

Lt. General John L. DeWitt, leader of the Western Defense Command, believed that the civilian population needed to be taken control of to prevent a repeat of Pearl Harbor.

To argue his case, DeWitt prepared a report filled with known falsehoods, such as examples of sabotage that were later revealed to be the result of cattle damaging power lines.

DeWitt suggested the creation of the military zones and Japanese detainment to Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Attorney General Francis Biddle. His original plan included Italians and Germans, though the idea of rounding-up Americans of European descent was not as popular.

At Congressional hearings in February 1942, a majority of the testimonies, including those from California Governor Culbert L. Olson and State Attorney General Earl Warren, declared that all Japanese should be removed.

Biddle pleaded with the president that mass incarceration of citizens was not required, preferring smaller, more targeted security measures. Regardless, Roosevelt signed the order.

War Relocation Authority

After much organizational chaos, about 15,000 Japanese Americans willingly moved out of prohibited areas. Inland state citizens were not keen for new Japanese American residents, and they were met with racist resistance.

Ten state governors voiced opposition, fearing the Japanese Americans might never leave, and demanded they be locked up if the states were forced to accept them.

A civilian organization called the War Relocation Authority was set up in March 1942 to administer the plan, with Milton S. Eisenhower from the Department of Agriculture to lead it. Eisenhower only lasted until June 1942, resigning in protest over what he characterized as incarcerating innocent citizens.

Relocation to 'Assembly Centers'

Army-directed removals began on March 24. People had six days notice to dispose of their belongings other than what they could carry.

Anyone who was at least 1/16th Japanese was evacuated, including 17,000 children under age 10, as well as several thousand elderly and disabled residents.

Japanese Americans reported to "Assembly Centers" near their homes. From there they were transported to a "Relocation Center" where they might live for months before transfer to a permanent "Wartime Residence."

Assembly Centers were located in remote areas, often reconfigured fairgrounds and racetracks featuring buildings not meant for human habitation, like horse stalls or cow sheds, that had been converted for that purpose. In Portland, Oregon, 3,000 people stayed in the livestock pavilion of the Pacific International Livestock Exposition Facilities.

The Santa Anita Assembly Center, just several miles northeast of Los Angeles, was a de-facto city with 18,000 incarcerated, 8,500 of whom lived in stables. Food shortages and substandard sanitation were prevalent in these facilities.

Life in 'Assembly Centers'

Assembly Centers offered work to prisoners with the policy that they should not be paid more than an Army private. Jobs ranged from doctors to teachers to laborers and mechanics. A couple were the sites of camouflage net factories, which provided work.

Over 1,000 incarcerated Japanese Americans were sent to other states to do seasonal farm work. Over 4,000 of the incarcerated population were allowed to leave to attend college.

Conditions in 'Relocation Centers'

There were a total of 10 prison camps, called "Relocation Centers." Typically the camps included some form of barracks with communal eating areas. Several families were housed together. Residents who were labeled as dissidents were forced to a special prison camp in Tule Lake, California.

Two prison camps in Arizona were located on Native American reservations, despite the protests of tribal councils, who were overruled by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Each Relocation Center was its own "town," and included schools, post offices and work facilities, as well as farmland for growing food and keeping livestock. Each prison camp "town" was completely surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers.

Net factories offered work at several Relocation Centers. One housed a naval ship model factory. There were also factories in different Relocation Centers that manufactured items for use in other prison camps, including garments, mattresses and cabinets. Several housed agricultural processing plants.

Violence in Prison Camps

Violence occasionally occurred in the prison camps. In Lordsburg, New Mexico, prisoners were delivered by trains and forced to march two miles at night to the camp. On July 27, 1942, during a night march, two Japanese Americans, Toshio Kobata and Hirota Isomura, were shot and killed by a sentry who claimed they were attempting to escape. Japanese Americans testified later that the two elderly men were disabled and had been struggling during the march to Lordsburg. The sentry was found not guilty by the army court martial board.

On August 4, 1942, a riot broke out in the Santa Anita Assembly Center, the result of anger about insufficient rations and overcrowding. At California's Manzanar War Relocation Center, tensions resulted in the beating of Fred Tayama, a Japanese American Citizen's League (JACL) leader, by six men. JACL members were believed to be supporters of the prison camp's administration.

Fearing a riot, police tear-gassed crowds that had gathered at the police station to demand the release of Harry Ueno. Ueno had been arrested for allegedly assaulting Tayama. James Ito was killed instantly and several others were wounded. Among those injured was Jim Kanegawa, 21, who died of complications five days later.

At the Topaz Relocation Center, 63-year-old prisoner James Hatsuki Wakasa was shot and killed by military police after walking near the perimeter fence. Two months later, a couple was shot at for strolling near the fence.

In October 1943, the Army deployed tanks and soldiers to Tule Lake Segregation Center in northern California to crack down on protests. Japanese American prisoners at Tule Lake had been striking over food shortages and unsafe conditions that had led to an accidental death in October 1943. At the same camp, on May 24, 1943, James Okamoto, a 30-year-old prisoner who drove a construction truck, was shot and killed by a guard.

Fred Korematsu

In 1942, 23-year-old Japanese-American Fred Korematsu was arrested for refusing to relocate to a Japanese prison camp. His case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, where his attorneys argued in Korematsu v. United States that Executive Order 9066 violated the Fifth Amendment.

Korematsu lost the case, but he went on to become a civil rights activist and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998. With the creation of California's Fred Korematsu Day, the United States saw its first U.S. holiday named for an Asian American. But it took another Supreme Court decision to halt the incarceration of Japanese Americans.

Mitsuye Endo

The prison camps ended in 1945 following the Supreme Court decision, Ex parte Mitsuye Endo. In this case, justices ruled unanimously that the War Relocation Authority "has no authority to subject citizens who are concededly loyal to its leave procedure."

The case was brought on behalf of Mitsuye Endo, the daughter of Japanese immigrants from Sacramento, California. After filing a habeas corpus petition, the government offered to free her, but Endo refused, wanting her case to address the entire issue of Japanese incarceration.

One year later, the Supreme Court made the decision, but gave President Truman the chance to begin camp closures before the announcement. One day after Truman made his announcement, the Supreme Court revealed its decision.

Reparations

The last Japanese internment camp closed in March 1946. President Gerald Ford officially repealed Executive Order 9066 in 1976, and in 1988, Congress issued a formal apology and passed the Civil Liberties Act awarding $20,000 each to over 80,000 Japanese Americans as reparations for their treatment.

Sources

Japanese Relocation During World War II. National Archives.
Confinement and Ethnicity: An Overview of World War II Japanese American Relocation Sites. J. Burton, M. Farrell, F. Lord and R. Lord.
Lordsburg Internment POW Camp. Historical Society of New Mexico.
Smithsonian Institute.

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Japanese Internment Camps: WWII, Life & Conditions | HISTORY

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Japanese internment camps were established during World War II by President Franklin D. Roosevelt through his Executive Order 9066. From 1942 to 1945, it was the policy of the U.S. government that people of Japanese descent, including U.S. citizens, be incarcerated.

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It was wrong for America to take and separate these families and it took decades for them to admit it.

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When former First Lady Laura Bush denounced the border policy that has led to the separation of about 2,000 children from their families, in a Washington Post op-ed on Sunday, she drew a parallel between today's news and a hard-learned lesson from the American past. The images of children being detained in a converted Walmart and a tent city on the Texas border, she wrote, "are eerily reminiscent of the Japanese American internment camps of World War II, now considered to have been one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history."

Her use of the phrase "now considered" is worth noting. In that case, it took decades for the White House and lawmakers to admit that the U.S. government had been wrong.

It's been just about 30 years since President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. That law paid out reparations of about $20,000 to every survivor of those internment camps "to right a grave wrong," as he put it, which the law blamed on "racial prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership." But, as noted by Mae Ngai, professor of Asian American Studies and professor of History at Columbia University, the apology and reparations came more than a generation after President Franklin Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 led to the rounding up of 120,000 Japanese-Americans, most of whom were U.S. citizens.

"At the time of the internment, almost nobody opposed it," says Ngai. "There was widespread support for the internment because of racism and because of government's claim that Japanese-Americans were a national security threat."

In early 1942, when Roosevelt signed that now-infamous order, the attack on Pearl Harbor of Dec. 7, 1941, was at the top of Americans' minds. Many worried that, though actual sabotage was confined to rumor, the tens of thousands of American citizens whose families had come from Japan would turn on them. Roosevelt's order allowed the military to exclude people from certain areas in the name of national security, and that translated to removing the Japanese-American population from much of the West Coast and putting them in camps for years.

Some protested at the start. Sen. Robert Taft was notably, according to historian Eric Foner's overview of the debate, the only person to speak out in Congress against the order. The Quaker community opposed the move too, and TIME carried a reader letter that asked rhetorically whether there were any "greater atrocity in the annals of American history." But the decision generally went down well in Washington. Groups like the NAACP and the American Jewish Committee that might be assumed to have opposed the internment did not speak up, and TIME described the mood on the West Coast as a "sigh of relief" that Roosevelt was protecting the people. Sen. Taft eventually stopped his protest. And in 1944, in the case of Fred Korematsu, an Oakland-born steel welder who tried and failed to resist the order to relocate, the Supreme Court upheld the idea behind the internment camps.
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It was after the war ended, amid a shift in post-war relations with Japan, Ngai says, that public opinion began to change - slowly.

"As early as the 1950s, once the Communist revolution happened in China, and the Korean War, the U.S. considered Japan its number-one ally," says Ngai.

By the early 1960s, TIME referred to the internment camps as "an ugly footnote" to the story of the war. Even so, the public apology was still decades away; acknowledging that the camps were "ugly" was not the same as saying they were a bad decision. When the government settled claims for property lost during that period, it avoided passing judgment on FDR's choice.

"Even though [Japan] was a geopolitical ally, you had, in the '70s and '80s, a protectionist movement similar to what you see today - blaming Japanese imports for loss of American jobs, people taking sledgehammers to Toyotas in parking lots and beating up Asian-Americans, like Vincent Chin, the Chinese-American bludgeoned by two auto workers in Detroit," Ngai says. "The U.S. has always had a complicated relationship with Japan."

It was later in the 1980s, after Congress established a Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, that the public learned the grisly details of the relocation process and life inside the camps, as internees testified at public hearings.

A turning point came when Peter Irons, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego, obtained key documents through a Freedom of Information Act request. The records detailed an internal investigation revealing that the federal government knew that Japanese-Americans weren't actually a national security threat at all. In one document, "FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover stated that he could find no evidence to support the War Department's contention that West Coast Japanese were signaling Japanese warships off the coast," according to TIME's reporting back then.

Those revelations formed the basis of a new case for Fred Korematsu. Nearly 40 years later after the original judgment in his case, he was able to show that the government lied to justify the evacuation. The claim that the internment of Japanese-Americans was justified by security concerns had never been based on serious threats.

In November of 1983, a federal judge in California vacated his conviction. As TIME summed up the legal perspective on both sides, "The Justice Department did not acknowledge any Government misconduct, but decided against fighting the case on the ground that the evacuation program was 'an unfortunate episode in our nation's history' that would best be 'put behind us.' U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel pronounced the Government's mealymouthed statement 'tantamount to a confession of error.' She added that the Supreme Court's decision was 'based on unsubstantiated facts, distortions and misrepresentations.'" Though the Supreme Court precedent technically still stands, Korematsu was effectively overturned.

Five years later, more than four decades after one of his predecessors signed the original order, President Reagan signed the official apology.

And that apology was about something bigger than one moment in time. As Congress drafted the legislation for the apology in the spring of 1988, TIME noted, "The country is also apologizing to itself for trampling its own core values."

Ngai notes that there are some key differences between situation today and how Japanese-Americans were detained during World War II, but she says she sees value in Bush's having drawn the connection. After all, a lesson that took 40 years to be confirmed is one that ought not be forgotten quickly.

"I don't think it's an exact analogy," she says. "In general children were not taken from their families in the camps. The families were kept together. But I think the extent to which Mrs. Bush is pointing to a racially motivated attack on people's human rights, that's certainly valid. Good for her."

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Family Separation Is Being Compared to Japanese Internment. It Took Decades for the U.S. to Admit That Policy Was Wrong

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When former First Lady Laura Bush denounced the border policy that has led to the separation of about 2,000 children from their families, in a Washington Post op-ed on Sunday, she drew a parallel between today's news and a hard-learned lesson from the American past.

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Many Japanese Americans fought to gain equality once again claiming what the American government was unconstitutional and needed to change.

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In his speech to Congress, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, was "a date which will live in infamy." The attack launched the United States fully into the two theaters of World War II - Europe and the Pacific. Prior to Pearl Harbor, the United States had been involved in a non-combat role, through the Lend-Lease Program that supplied England, China, Russia, and other anti-fascist countries of Europe with munitions.

The attack on Pearl Harbor also launched a rash of fear about national security, especially on the West Coast. In February 1942, just two months later, President Roosevelt, as commander-in-chief, issued Executive Order 9066 that resulted in the internment of Japanese Americans. The order authorized the Secretary of War and military commanders to evacuate all persons deemed a threat from the West Coast to internment camps, that the government called "relocation centers," further inland. Read more...

Primary Sources
Links go to DocsTeach, the online tool for teaching with documents from the National Archives.
Teaching Activity

Additional Background Information

Prior to the outbreak of World War II, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had identified German, Italian, and Japanese aliens who were suspected of being potential enemy agents; and they were kept under surveillance. Following the attack at Pearl Harbor, government suspicion arose not only around aliens who came from enemy nations, but around all persons of Japanese descent, whether foreign born ( issei) or American citizens ( nisei). During congressional committee hearings, representatives of the Department of Justice raised logistical, constitutional, and ethical objections. Regardless, the task was turned over to the U.S. Army as a security matter.

The entire West Coast was deemed a military area and was divided into military zones. Executive Order 9066 authorized military commanders to exclude civilians from military areas. Although the language of the order did not specify any ethnic group, Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt of the Western Defense Command proceeded to announce curfews that included only Japanese Americans. Next, he encouraged voluntary evacuation by Japanese Americans from a limited number of areas; about seven percent of the total Japanese American population in these areas complied.

On March 29, 1942, under the authority of the executive order, DeWitt issued Public Proclamation No. 4, which began the forced evacuation and detention of Japanese-American West Coast residents on a 48-hour notice. Only a few days prior to the proclamation, on March 21, Congress had passed Public Law 503, which made violation of Executive Order 9066 a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in prison and a $5,000 fine.

Because of the perception of "public danger," all Japanese Americans within varied distances from the Pacific coast were targeted. Unless they were able to dispose of or make arrangements for care of their property within a few days, their homes, farms, businesses, and most of their private belongings were lost forever.

From the end of March to August, approximately 112,000 persons were sent to "assembly centers" - often racetracks or fairgrounds - where they waited and were tagged to indicate the location of a long-term "relocation center" that would be their home for the rest of the war. Nearly 70,000 of the evacuees were American citizens. There were no charges of disloyalty against any of these citizens, nor was there any vehicle by which they could appeal their loss of property and personal liberty.

"Relocation centers" were situated many miles inland, often in remote and desolate locales. Sites included Tule Lake and Manzanar in California; Gila River and Poston in Arizona; Jerome and Rohwer in Arkansas, Minidoka in Idaho; Topaz in Utah; Heart Mountain in Wyoming; and Granada in Colorado. (Incarceration rates were significantly lower in the territory of Hawaii, where Japanese Americans made up over one-third of the population and their labor was needed to sustain the economy. However, martial law had been declared in Hawaii immediately following the Pearl Harbor attack, and the Army issued hundreds of military orders, some applicable only to persons of Japanese ancestry.)

In the "relocation centers" (also called "internment camps"), four or five families, with their sparse collections of clothing and possessions, shared tar-papered army-style barracks. Most lived in these conditions for nearly three years or more until the end of the war. Gradually some insulation was added to the barracks and lightweight partitions were added to make them a little more comfortable and somewhat private. Life took on some familiar routines of socializing and school. However, eating in common facilities, using shared restrooms, and having limited opportunities for work interrupted other social and cultural patterns. Persons who resisted were sent to a special camp at Tule Lake, CA, where dissidents were housed.

In 1943 and 1944, the government assembled a combat unit of Japanese Americans for the European theater. It became the 442d Regimental Combat Team and gained fame as the most highly decorated of World War II. Their military record bespoke their patriotism.

As the war drew to a close, "internment camps" were slowly evacuated. While some persons of Japanese ancestry returned to their hometowns, others sought new surroundings. For example, the Japanese-American community of Tacoma, WA, had been sent to three different centers; only 30 percent returned to Tacoma after the war. Japanese Americans from Fresno had gone to Manzanar; 80 percent returned to their hometown.

The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II sparked constitutional and political debate. During this period, three Japanese-American citizens challenged the constitutionality of the forced relocation and curfew orders through legal actions: Gordon Hirabayashi, Fred Korematsu, and Mitsuye Endo. Hirabayashi and Korematsu received negative judgments; but Mitsuye Endo, after a lengthy battle through lesser courts, was determined to be "loyal" and allowed to leave the Topaz, Utah, facility.

Justice Murphy of the Supreme Court expressed the following opinion in Ex parte Mitsuye Endo:

I join in the opinion of the Court, but I am of the view that detention in Relocation Centers of persons of Japanese ancestry regardless of loyalty is not only unauthorized by Congress or the Executive but is another example of the unconstitutional resort to racism inherent in the entire evacuation program. As stated more fully in my dissenting opinion in Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 , 65 S.Ct. 193, racial discrimination of this nature bears no reasonable relation to military necessity and is utterly foreign to the ideals and traditions of the American people.

In 1988, Congress passed, and President Reagan signed, Public Law 100-383 - the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 - that acknowledged the injustice of "internment," apologized for it, and provided a $20,000 cash payment to each person who was incarcerated.

One of the most stunning ironies in this episode of denied civil liberties was articulated by an internee who, when told that Japanese Americans were put in those camps for their own protection, countered "If we were put there for our protection, why were the guns at the guard towers pointed inward, instead of outward?"

A note on terminology: The historical primary source documents included on this page reflect the terminology that the government used at the time, such as alien, evacuation, relocation, relocation centers, internment, and Japanese (as opposed to Japanese American).
Materials created by the National Archives and Records Administration are in the public domain.

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Japanese-American Incarceration During World War II

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In his speech to Congress, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, was "a date which will live in infamy." The attack launched the United States fully into the two theaters of World War II - Europe and the Pacific.

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There were many Japanese Americans who did not say no and joined the army. They chose to fight for the country willingly and when they returned they were celebrated as heroes

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Courage takes many forms. Frank Emi, who died in California on Dec. 1, age 94, had the steadfast kind, well suited for lonely struggles and ostracism.

He was a young Japanese-American man sent to an internment camp in Wyoming after Pearl Harbor. He could have gotten out by signing a loyalty oath and enlisting in the Army, proving his patriotism the way so many other Japanese-Americans did - honorably, irrefutably, with their blood, limbs and lives.

Mr. Emi marched in exactly the opposite direction. After receiving draft notices in the camp, he and six other young men created the Fair Play Committee. In March 1944, they signed a declaration challenging the internment policy and their conscription as shameful affronts to the Constitution and American ideals.

"We, the members of the FPC, are not afraid to go to war," they wrote. "We are not afraid to risk our lives for our country. We would gladly sacrifice our lives to protect and uphold the principles and ideals of our country as set forth in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, for on its inviolability depends the freedom, liberty, justice, and protection of all people, including Japanese-Americans and all other minority groups.

"But have we been given such freedom, such liberty, such justice, such protection? NO!!"

Mr. Emi and the six other original signers all refused to serve. More than 300 people in 10 camps joined them. All were prosecuted. Other Japanese-Americans mocked them as the "no-no boys." The Japanese American Citizens League denounced them as seditious. But Mr. Emi, who spent 18 months in a federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kan., was right to speak out.

After the war, Mr. Emi worked as a postal clerk and for the State of California. In the 1980s, he joined the fight for redress for Japanese-Americans who were deprived of their property and freedom.

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human rights and human rights violations

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Courage takes many forms. Frank Emi, a defiant World War II internee, had the steadfast kind.

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Those who did not serve lost their own identities. Being born in America was no longer enough. being Japanese was now two seperate things and either you were american or you were Japanese and there was no in-between.

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The No-No Boys were treated like outsiders, even by other Japanese Americans. They were seen as weak and not a tru American because they would not serve the country

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Japanese-American 'No No Boys'

A patriotic suspect

(Dorathea Lange)

Enlarge This Image

Japanese Americans forced into internment camps during World War II were given a questionnaire on which two questions were of particular importance:

War Relocation Authority newsreel

(U.S. War Relocation Authority (WRA))

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More From Millie Jefferson

Question #27 asked: "Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered?"

Question #28 asked: "Will you swear unqualified allegiances to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, or other foreign government, power or organization?"

Feeling betrayed by their native country, many young American-born Japanese boys answered "no" to both questions. They were segregated into a special camp and considered potential enemies of this country. The name given them was the "No-No Boys."

Bill Nishimura: My name is Bill Nishimura. Number 27: Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty wherever ordered? I answered "No."

Number 28, I answered in blank and wrote a note underneath stating that when my civil rights is restored I will answer this question.

They assumed that was negative -- and so people who answered "No, No" at that time, they were sent to Tule Lake. I wasn't really happy to go there because I didn't want to be called a disloyal. I was still an American and I was just fighting for my civil rights. When I got to Tule Lake, I was just startled -- fenced all around the camp, so many guard towers. "Oh, so this is the segregation center" I thought.

On the war's end, my concern was being deported to Japan. The greatest news while I was in camp was this announcement, the government they said "If you wish to go to Japan, well we won't stop you, but we're not forcing you to go to Japan." I thought to myself, "Uncle Sam still has a warm heart for me."

Gene Akutsu: My name is Gene Akutsu. I answered the questions 27 as "No" and question 28 as "Yes."

They decided to activate the draft in January, I guess it was, and by April I was one of the first to be called in for induction, which I didn't follow. Then the FBI came and off I went. Three years, three months at the Federal Prison in McNeil Island.

The times that used to get to me was in the daytime -- I'd hear the seagulls. I used to get melancholy over that 'cause when I was young, we always lived right close to the sound here, so we hear the seagulls all the time and those thoughts would drift through my mind, in and out.

I got out in 1946. When my mother passed away, I refer to that as a wartime casualty. When my brother and I made it back home, we found out that the church members had told her "Don't come to church any more." One day it all got to her and she took her life.

If she had only lived one more year longer, we would have had a clearance from the president saying that we are all okay and you have all your citizenship back -- that's all she was living for.

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Japanese-American 'No No Boys' : During World War II, Japanese Americans put into internment camps were given a questionnaire. How they answered those questions would determine their quality of life behind the fences -- and the answers to two questions in particular about military service changed the lives of the so-called "No No Boys."

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This looks at what the No-No boys had to go through and how they were mistreated by all people. The majority did not want to affiliate with them at all then there are those who understood the internal struggle the No-No Boys were going through and tried to help

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The No-No boys had the courage to do something that not a lot of people could. They knew they were Americans but fighting against the land that there ancestors came from was not something that they could do either. They made a hard decision and deserved to be recognised for what they have done.

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To understand who the No-No Boys were, it's first necessary to understand the events of World War II. The United States government's decision to place more than 110,000 individuals of Japanese origin into internment camps without cause during the war marks one of the most disgraceful chapters in American history. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, nearly three months after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

At the time, the federal government argued that separating Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans from their homes and livelihoods was a necessity because such people posed a national security threat, as they were supposedly likely to conspire with the Japanese empire to plan additional attacks on the U.S. Today historians agree that racism and xenophobia against people of Japanese ancestry following the Pearl Harbor attack prompted the executive order. After all, the United States was also at odds with Germany and Italy during World War II, but the federal government did not order mass internment of Americans of German and Italian origin.

Unfortunately, the federal government's egregious actions did not end with the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans. After depriving these Americans of their civil rights, the government then asked them to fight for the country. While some agreed in hopes of proving their loyalty to the U.S., others refused. They were known as No-No Boys. Vilified at the time for their decision, today No-No Boys are largely viewed as heroes for standing up to a government that deprived them of their freedom.

A Survey Tests Loyalty

The No-No Boys received their name by answering no to two questions on a survey given to Japanese Americans forced into concentration camps.

Question #27 asked: "Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered?"

Question #28 asked: "Will you swear unqualified allegiances to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, or other foreign government, power or organization?"

Outraged that the U.S. government demanded that they vow loyalty to the country after flagrantly violating their civil liberties, some Japanese Americans refused to enlist in the armed forces. Frank Emi, an internee at the Heart Mountain camp in Wyoming, was one such young man. Angered that his rights had been trampled on, Emi and a half-dozen other Heart Mountain internees formed the Fair Play Committee (FPC) after receiving draft notices. The FPC declared in March 1944:

"We, the members of the FPC, are not afraid to go to war. We are not afraid to risk our lives for our country. We would gladly sacrifice our lives to protect and uphold the principles and ideals of our country as set forth in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, for on its inviolability depends the freedom, liberty, justice, and protection of all people, including Japanese Americans and all other minority groups. But have we been given such freedom, such liberty, such justice, such protection? NO!"

Punished for Standing Up

For refusing to serve, Emi, his fellow FPC participants, and more than 300 internees at 10 camps were prosecuted. Emi served 18 months in a federal penitentiary in Kansas. The bulk of No-No Boys faced three-year sentences in a federal penitentiary. In addition to felony convictions, internees who refused to serve in the military faced a backlash in Japanese American communities. For example, leaders of the Japanese American Citizens League characterized draft resisters as disloyal cowards and blamed them for giving the American public the idea that Japanese Americans were unpatriotic.

For resisters such as Gene Akutsu, the backlash took a tragic personal toll. While he only answered no to Question #27-that he would not serve in the U.S. armed forces on combat duty wherever ordered-he ultimately ignored the draft noticed received, resulting in him serving more than three years in a federal prison in Washington state. He left prison in 1946, but that wasn't soon enough for his mother. The Japanese American community ostracized her-even telling her not to show up at church-because Akutsu and another son dared defy the federal government.

"One day it all got to her and she took her life," Akutsu told American Public Media (APM) in 2008. "When my mother passed away, I refer to that as a wartime casualty."

President Harry Truman pardoned all of the wartime draft resisters in December 1947. As a result, the criminal records of the young Japanese American men who refused to serve in the military were cleared. Akutsu told APM he wished his mother had been around to hear Truman's decision.

"If she had only lived one more year longer, we would have had a clearance from the president saying that we are all okay and you have all your citizenship back," he explained. "That's all she was living for."

The Legacy of the No-No Boys

The 1957 novel "No-No Boy" by John Okada captures how Japanese American draft-resisters suffered for their defiance. Although Okada himself actually answered yes to both queries on the loyalty questionnaire, enlisting in the Air Force during World War II, he spoke with a No-No Boy named Hajime Akutsu after completing his military service and was moved enough by Akutsu's experiences to tell his story.​

The book has immortalized the emotional turmoil that No-No Boys endured for making a decision that is now largely viewed as heroic. The shift in how No-No Boys are perceived is in part due to the federal government's acknowledgment in 1988 that it had wronged Japanese Americans by interning them without cause. Twelve years later, the JACL apologized for widely vilifying draft resisters.

In November 2015, the musical "Allegiance," which chronicles a No-No Boy, debuted on Broadway.

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Why Japanese-American No-No Boys Were Far More Than Draft Resisters

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To understand who the No-No Boys were, it's first necessary to understand the events of World War II. The United States government's decision to place more than 110,000 individuals of Japanese origin into internment camps without cause during the war marks one of the most disgraceful chapters in American history.