“If anybody’s here to watch the Super Bowl, you’ve come to the wrong place,” historian Charles Wollenberg joked to a crowd gathered at the Berkeley Historical Society and Museum. The event, on Sunday, Feb. 9, 2025, was a screening and discussion of the film “One Fighting Irishman” by Sharon Yamato.
The 30-minute film documents the life and legacy of Wayne M. Collins, a San Francisco lawyer who spent 23 years fighting for the rights of Japanese Americans who had been sent to Tule Lake Segregation Center during World War II.
Tule Lake became especially notorious as the place where the U.S. Government sent Japanese American incarcerees deemed “disloyal.” People were determined “disloyal” based on their answers to a confusing questionnaire, which asked whether they were willing to serve in the military and to give up any allegiance to other countries that were not the U.S., specifically Japan. There are many reasons that incarcerees may have answered “no.” Some were confused or fearful about the implications of saying “yes” and what exactly they were agreeing to, and others may have been saying “no” as a form of resistance.
No-sayers from incarceration camps all over America were sent to Tule Lake, where tensions formed with other incarcerees who had answered “yes” to the loyalty questions and who felt that the resistors were undermining the possibility of eventual full reintegration into American society.
In an attempt to do away with the resistors in Tule Lake, the U.S. Government offered the incarcerees the opportunity to renounce their American citizenship, advertising it as a way for them to be able to leave the camps and be sent to Japan.
One of the factions at Tule Lake was a group called the Hoshi Dan. They renounced their citizenship and wanted to return to Japan. They pressured fellow incarcerees into renouncing their citizenships and even threatened and inflicted violence upon incarcerees whom they suspected to be too passive or pro-administration. According to the film, the U.S. government effectively enabled and encouraged this violence. In Tule Lake, 5,461 Japanese Americans renounced their American citizenship. Only 128 others renounced their citizenship in all the other camps combined. What the incarcerees were not told was that they would be marked as “enemy aliens” once they renounced their citizenship. Those who were only citizens of the U.S. would have become stateless.
As Satsuki Ina, another presenter at the event, explained, “People like my parents who felt hopeless and in despair renounced because they thought that (Japan)was the only place where their children would have survived with hope. (The U.S. government) managed to get … people to sign this renunciation offering but it turns out that it’s unconstitutional during wartime for people to renounce their citizenship. So that’s the basis on which Wayne M. Collins argued his case.”
The film depicts Collins’s legal work and his fiery character. He was passionate, with an unwavering outrage on behalf of the Japanese Americans whose constitutional rights had been violated. As Yamato, the filmmaker, emphasized, “He was a Caucasian attorney who fought on behalf of the Japanese Americans when nobody else was doing it.”
Collins, born in 1899, attended San Francisco Law School at night. During his time working for the Japanese American incarcerees, he also represented Fred Korematsu, who famously resisted reporting for detainment, and defended Iva Toguri D’Aquino, falsely accused of broadcasting wartime Japanese propaganda over the radio as “Tokyo Rose.” For the renunciants, Collins would sometimes work without pay.
At the event, Wollenberg, who chronicled Collins’s work in his book Rebel Lawyer, said, “(Collins) was the most determined and uncompromising defender of Japanese American rights and liberties during and immediately after World War II.”
Yamato noted that “(Collins was) getting a lot of resistance. … The story that intrigued me was that he was getting so much resistance from organizations like the Japanese American Citizens League and the national American Civil Liberties Union which was what I had always thought was a very civil liberties-minded organization.”
The Japanese American Citizens League had not aided Collins because they feared, like many of the people who did not resist at Tule Lake, that any alliance with resistors would jeopardize their standing as “good” American citizens.
The film highlights the little-known story of resistance by Japanese Americans as well as their gratitude towards Collins. In the film, Margaret Weeks Collins, Wayne M. Collins’s daughter, laughs, “There’s a lot of Waynes out there. Not all of them are named after him, but many Japanese Waynes are named after him.”
The film is narrated by George Takei, an actor whose mother was defended by Collins. Takei says in the film, “If it weren’t for Wayne Collins, I might not be standing here today. Just two weeks before my mother, an American Citizen born in the USA, was scheduled to board a ship to Japan, Mr. Collins stepped in to stop her deportation.”
In the crowd were many descendants of Japanese American incarcerees, some of whom were at Tule Lake. After the screening, Yamato was approached by several who expressed their gratitude for the view into the lives of their ancestors.
The story of Wayne M. Collins is also chillingly relevant to the current moment, with the Trump Administration embarking upon a new program of mass deportations and establishing new detainment centers. Yamato hopes that this time there will be a difference in Americans’ response. “I think there’s more awareness today and I’m hoping that there are more people who are fighting the government and not allowing it to happen. I hope there are more Wayne Collinses today.”