Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Peter Irons Interview II
Narrator: Peter Irons
Interviewers: Alice Ito (primary), Lorraine Bannai (secondary)
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: October 27, 2000
Densho ID: denshovh-ipeter-02-0010

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PI: Now, back in those days, researchers, or at least those who had connections to the staff were allowed to go back in the stacks of the National Archives and sort of rummage around. If you found a collection, you could look at the boxes and see if there were things you wanted to use, and they would send them down to the reading room where you could make notes. So Mary Walton took me through the stacks to where the solicitor's files would be for the War Relocation Authority. And they weren't there. And I thought, "Oh, this is not going to work." And so she went and looked up and said, "Well, somebody actually has them out right now down in the reading room. They're checked out to someone down in the reading room." In the National Archives, they have document boxes, these file boxes of documents. And they put them on carts and take them down to the reading room. So I said, "Well, at the very least I can find out who's doing this and what they're doing, and decide whether I've got to go back and find another project. So Mary Walton said, she looked at the checkout card and said, "Well, there's a woman down there. Her name is Aiko Yoshinaga." And I thought, "Well, she's probably Japanese American. I will go down to the reading room and look around."

So I went down to the reading room. It was a very large room in the National Archives, lots of desks. And people sit there all day long, making notes on documents. Back then they didn't let you make Xerox copies of things. You had to make hand-written notes. So I looked around, and there was one person in the reading room who looked Asian. And I walked over and very tentatively -- I think I tapped her on the shoulder or something to get her attention -- I said, "Excuse me. I understand that you're using the records of the solicitor's office in the War Relocation Authority." And she said, "Yes." I said, "Can I ask you what you're doing with them? Are you writing a book?" She said, "No. I'm with the Commission on Wartime Relocation, and I'm a researcher and I'm doing research for the commission." I'd never heard of the commission. And in fact, I hadn't even decided until that very day to work on these cases and the internment. So I knew literally nothing. And my first thought was, "Well, probably, whatever, there's going to be something written before I have a chance to do anything." But then Aiko said to me, "Can you, what's your interest?" And I said, "Well, I was thinking of writing a book about the internment cases, the legal issues." And she said, "Well, I, a lot of these legal documents from the solicitor's office I don't even understand. Maybe you could help me." And I said, "Well, are you writing a book about this?" She said, "No, I'm not." I said, "Well, I'll tell you what -- " And I don't recall every word of this conversation, but I remember sitting down with her.

And we made an agreement that, she told me what the commission was doing, that they were doing a report for Congress and they were looking at all the documents in the federal government that they could find dealing with the internment, that they had access to all of these documents -- Congress had given them that authority -- and that they were conducting hearings around the country for people to testify about their experiences and every aspect of the internment. So Aiko and I made an agreement that I would work on the legal issues with a book in mind, that she would -- and that I would look for other records outside the archives, particularly in the Department of Justice, and that whatever we found that was of interest to each other, we would trade. Now, this was a very informal deal. First of all, she wasn't supposed to open commission records to anyone outside, but at the same time, someone was offering to help her. So this was really a mutual advantage kind of thing. And very, very quickly over the next week or so, we started working very closely together. And I would go over to the commission offices and she would show me things that she thought might interest me. At the very beginning it was, everything was coming from her. I didn't have any records to offer in exchange. What I had was some legal training to help her understand the documents dealing with the lawsuits that came out of the internment and the legal issues, how, all of that kind of stuff.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.