Guntaro Kubota

Guntaro Kubota, an Issei (first-generation immigrant) member who stood with the Nisei leaders despite not being subject to the draft himself, was one of the seven leaders of the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee, the organized draft-resistance movement among Japanese Americans imprisoned at the Heart Mountain concentration camp in Wyoming during World War II. The Committee held that it was unconstitutional to draft incarcerated Nisei — U.S. citizens stripped of their rights and held behind barbed wire with their families — unless those citizenship rights were first restored. In October 1944 the leaders were tried in federal court in Cheyenne for conspiracy to counsel draft evasion; the jury convicted all seven, and on November 2, 1944 Judge Eugene Rice sentenced them to four years at the Leavenworth federal penitentiary. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit overturned the conspiracy convictions in 1945.