<Begin Segment 29>

AI: I wanted to turn now to ask you about your uncovering of some govern-, government documents...

BH: Yes.

AI: ...in recent years. In fact, I'm not sure when you got this information or what motivated you to find the information, but that there were some government memos dating back to World War II that did describe you as a subversive and actually did document that your fam-, you and your family's removal to Heart Mountain, separating you from your community, was designed to punish you. How, how did you happen to find these documents, and what was your reaction when you saw them?

BH: Frank Chin sent them to me. I didn't even know they existed. And it sort of disturbed me at the time, but I also kind of laughed at it, saying, "This is the level of American military intelligence at, at that time." I don't know where they got that information. Actually I was called before the grand jury in (Seattle) before, long before the evacuation. And that was at the time that Thomas Masuda, an attorney, and Kenji Ito, also an attorney, were called before the grand jury. And as I recall, Tom was, the charge against Tom was that he was taking movies of the Armistice Day Parade in November of 1941. And the charge against Kenji was that he made speeches defending Japan's policy in Asia about the same time. And both of them were indicted, but they were acquitted. The charge against me was that when I was working for the Japanese Consulate, I wrote a letter to the, the Bellingham, not Bellingham, what's the naval base across here?

DM: Oh. Bremerton?

BH: Huh?

DM: Is it Bremerton?

BH: Yeah, Bremerton. Bremerton Sun, I think, that they, this newspaper was. That I had written them a letter on Japanese Consulate paper, stationery, and signed the letter. And the letter had asked if they had a copy of a particular edition, issue, that they could send to me. We wanted to buy it. And the story that they were looking at was the, some kind of a table showing such aircraft carriers had come in and others had left Bremerton out in public. Well, the grand jury figured that it was not an indictable offense to write to a newspaper to ask for a specific issue. [Laughs] So I was not tried.

I, I don't know where they got the idea that I was subversive in, or possibly subversive in "Camp Harmony" in Puyallup. I was outspoken. My son caught the mumps there, and there was no hospital. And his illness was not severe enough for them to take him out of the camp and put him into a public hospital. So they put him in a, one of those big barns out there, and that was the isolation ward. There was nobody else there. And my wife had to take care of him. And I went up to the director of the camp and said, "This is wrong. You can't, you shouldn't be able, you shouldn't be doing this sort of thing." And I don't think anything came out, came of my protest because, when the kid got well, he was allowed to come back. But it could've been that I was quite outspoken and protesting what I thought were wrongs, correctable wrongs, puny wrongs, picayunish wrongs, that hurt us, that could've been avoided. And because I was outspoken, I suppose somebody said, "Oh, he's a subversive. He's pro-Jap."

<End Segment 29> - Copyright © 2001 Densho. All Rights Reserved.