We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration

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This graphic novel about Japanese Americans is co-authored with Frank Abe and artists Ross Ishikawa and Matt Sasaki.

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

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

About the Author: Tamiko Nimura is an Asian American writer living in Tacoma, Washington. Her training in literature and American ethnic studies (MA, PhD, University of Washington) prepared her to research, document, and tell the stories of people of color. In 2014, Tamiko began to research the history of Japanese Americans in Tacoma. Since 2016, she has organized an annual Day of Remembrance commemorating the eviction of Japanese Americans from Tacoma. Together with her husband Josh Parmenter and historian Michael Sullivan, she created an app with a self-guided walking tour of Tacoma’s historic Japantown. In 2020, her family history and its connections to her public history work were featured on public television (KBTC Profiles).

Tamiko is also the 2021 recipient of the Tacoma Historical Society’s Murray Morgan Award for notable achievements in researching and preserving local history.

For more information about this event, contact Dr. Nalini Iyer, [email protected]