We Said No! No!: A Story of Civil Disobedience (film)

Documentary film by Arnold Tadao Maeda that focuses on life at post-segregation Tule Lake .

Narrated in Maeda's first-person voice, We Said No! No! mostly focuses on three interconnected stories: those of poet and dissident Violet Matsuda de Cristoforo (and her then husband Shig), judo instructor and stockade prisoner Tatuso Inouye, and Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study (JERS) anthropologist Rosalie Hankey Wax . Initially inspired by Wax's book Doing Fieldwork , which he says was his introduction to Japanese Americans who resisted their confinement, he explores her role at Tule Lake and the allegations lodged against her by Matsuda, while telling the larger story of post-segregation Tule Lake. Maeda uses actors to recreate many key scenes from the story and also to read from the writings of the diarist Inouye and poet/essayist Matsuda. He also draws on archival interview of Masuda and Wax to augment their writings.

Filmmaker Maeda was born in Manzanar in 1945. His prior film, The Music Man of Manzanar , was based on his older brother Arnold's experience there. We Said No! No! received a Japanese American Confinement Sites grant in 2011 for $113,000 and took ten years to complete. Maeda originally conceptualized the film as a narrative feature and wrote a script, but switched to a documentary format with re-creations for budgetary reasons. Its first preview screening took place on June 9, 2018 at the Santa Monica Library. Its official world premiere took place at the Japanese American National Museum on October 15, 2022.