The first comprehensive biography of unjustly forgotten war hero Ben Kuroki, a Japanese American farm boy from Nebraska who flew fifty-eight combat missions, fighting the Axis powers during World War II and battled racism, injustice, and prejudice on the home front. Ben Kuroki was a twenty-four-year-old Japanese American farm boy whose heritage was never a problem in remote Nebraska—until Pearl Harbor. Among the millions of Americans who flocked to military stations to enlist, Ben wanted to avenge the attack, reclaim his family honor, and prove his patriotism. But as anti-Japanese sentiment soared, Ben had to fight to be allowed to fight for America. And fight he did. As a gunner on Army Air Forces bombers, Ben flew fifty-eight missions spanning three combat theaters: Europe, North America, and the Pacific, including the climactic B-29 firebombing campaign against Japan that culminated with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He flew some of the war’s boldest and bloodiest air missions and lived to tell about it. In between his tours in Europe and the Pacific, he challenged FDR’s shameful incarceration of more than one hundred thousand people of Japanese ancestry in America, and he would be credited by some with setting in motion the debate that reversed a grave national dishonor. In the euphoric wake of America’s victory, the decorated war hero used his national platform to carry out what he called his “fifty-ninth mission,” urging his fellow Americans to do more to eliminate bigotry and racism at home. Told in full for the first time, and long overdue, Ben’s extraordinary story is a quintessentially American one of patriotism, principle, perseverance, and courage. It’s about being in the vanguard of history, the bonding of a band of brothers united in a just cause, a timeless and unflinching account of racial bigotry, and one man’s transcendent sense of belonging—in war, in peace, abroad, and at home.

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.

Christology and discipleship have largely remained separate categories in Markan scholarship. This study provides a commentary on the Gospel of Mark that underlines kinship as the nexus between Christology (Jesus and his kinship with God) and discipleship (Jesus and his kinship with disciples). Jesus, designated as the Son of God (1:1), establishes a kinship group of disciples and followers by providing them hospitality, welcoming them into his household, and addressing them in kinship terms as his family. The kinship between Jesus and God and that between Jesus and the disciples are imitative and contestive means for Mark to negotiate the Roman imperial context. In the church today, Christians still refer to their church family and to each other as brothers and sisters because of their relationship to Jesus. In a world that finds people increasingly separated from one another, this study demonstrates Jesus's formation of his own family and its continued impact on Christian identity and community.