We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration

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 US 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 US Supreme Court.

Based upon painstaking research, We Hereby Refuse presents an original vision of America’s past with disturbing links to the American present.