"One Fighting Irishman" Film and Discussion

One Fighting Irishman is a 30-minute film by Sharon Yamato that tells the story of San Francisco civil rights attorney Wayne M. Collins’s passionate and uncompromising defense of the Constitution that drove him to spend 23 years successfully representing more than 5,000 Japanese Americans who renounced their American citizenship while imprisoned at the embattled Tule Lake Segregation Center, considered the worst of America’s ten WWII concentration camps. Narrated by George Takei, the film describes how Collins saved thousands of people from being deported to a country upon which many of them had never set foot.

As one of only a handful of attorneys who fought on behalf of the rights of Americans of Japanese ancestry while working with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California, Collins also battled the national ACLU and the national Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) in representing Fred Korematsu, one of only a handful of people who refused to report for mass detention. After the war, he also represented Iva Toguri, falsely accused of broadcasting as “Tokyo Rose.”

Charles "Chuck" Wollenberg, BHSM board member and author of Rebel Lawyer: Wayne Collins and the Defense of Japanese American Rights, has invited director/producer Sharon Yamato to present the documentary and will join her and others in discussion of the roles of Wayne Collins and Fred Korematsu, namesake since 2014 of the El Cerrito middle school. Also speaking will be Berkeley psychologist Dr. Satsuki Ina, an activist who was born at Tule Lake and whose family was represented by Collins.

The related exhibit, Roots, Removal and Resistance: Japanese Americans in Berkeley, will be open before the program starting at 1:00 PM.

Host or Publisher Berkeley Historical Society & Museum