She did not participate in the testimonies of the 1970s and 1980s redress movement for reparations. Her 2019 “Overlooked No Longer” New York Times obituary says that she spoke about her experiences with her children when asked, but they did not know about her case or its significance for years. She only gave two painfully short interviews about her case, one in 1976 and the other for John Tateishi’s 1984 oral history collection, And Justice For All. As a scholar of Japanese American women’s literature, though, I know that silence has multiple meanings.Īnd without question, Endo wrapped a layer of silence around herself and her case which proved that “concededly loyal” citizens could not be infinitely detained. Layers of silence have veiled Endo and her case for years. It can mean a guarding of privacy. It can also mean refusal to speak on someone else’s terms.
Thanks to writers like Joy Kogawa and scholars like King-Kok Cheung and Traise Yamamoto, I know that silence can mean strength. As a scholar of Japanese American women’s literature, though, I know that silence has multiple meanings. By also featuring a Nisei woman, I hoped to deepen the narratives about who was resisting, and how. Thanks to the work of scholar Mira Shimabukuro, we learned more about-and dramatized the story of-the Issei women who were important to the draft resistance movement. The widely known exceptions to the narrative of Japanese American compliance remain overwhelmingly male: the principled stances of Gordon Hirabayashi, Fred Korematsu, and Minoru Yasui, who took their cases to the Supreme Court alongside Endo the collective organizing behind the Heart Mountain draft resisters, who refused to go from the camp to the U.S. We wanted to share a story of Japanese American resistance: not to the initial eviction, but to the unjust and unconstitutional conditions of their incarceration.
The graphic novel, which became We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration, pushes back against a dominant narrative about the camps: that Japanese Americans not only went there willingly, but stayed there willingly in order to prove their loyalty to the United States. When I was hired as the only woman on a creative team of four to create a graphic novel on one of the most important stories in the history of Japanese America, I knew pretty quickly that I wanted to tell Endo’s story. Why, I wondered, did I know so little about Endo herself, and why didn’t everyone know more about the case that helped lead to the closing of the concentration camps for all Japanese Americans? But while Endo’s case is familiar to those in legal circles and Japanese American studies, her story is largely unknown by the general public. Of the four young Nisei-American-born children of Japanese immigrants-who contested the grounds of their incarceration at the Supreme Court, Endo was the only one who won her case, and unanimously at that.Īs a daughter, granddaughter, and niece of Japanese American camp survivors, I have been reading about my community’s wartime incarceration for most of my life. At the time it was taken, circa 1944, she was incarcerated in an American concentration camp in Topaz, Utah.
Since 2017, a famous black-and-white photo has stayed with me: a young Japanese American woman sitting in front of a typewriter, hands poised in the home position, looking over her left shoulder and directing a close-lipped smile at the camera.
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