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AI: And of course, here you were, already eighteen going on nineteen years old, so you were right -- draft age at that time.

FY: Yes, yes.

AI: And after the volunteering period then in 1944, January, government decided to draft --

FY: Yeah.

AI: -- Nisei out of camp.

FY: Yeah.

AI: And you were back in camp by then?

FY: By then I -- what happened is I was -- it sounds ironical when I say "home," in going back to Minidoka, but I was homesick. And I asked the doctor if I can go home. And -- in fact, I asked him if I could be released. And he says, "No, you haven't finished" -- they say exercise ten. But anyway, long story short, he says that he'll let, give me a, what they call a conditional release, and the hospital would be available for me anytime. So -- so I went home, and then a whole new chapter started there. [Laughs]

AI: Yes, right. And so as you described in your earlier interview, you did receive your draft notice --

FY: Yes.

AI: -- probably in April or so, spring of 1944.

FY: Yes, yes.

AI: And you made your decision.

FY: I made my decision. "Give me liberty or give me death." [Laughs] The, I think I could -- I, I probably mentioned what happened, being, the sheriff coming to pick us up and taking us to Twin Falls. And then from Twin Falls, we were taken to (Emmett) County and from there to Boise. And we had a trial in Boise. And there is a very good book written by Eric Muller, which is recently published, and in reading the book, I'm finding out more about my situation than I ever knew myself.

My action, my stand was purely on a gut-level basis. I was very politically naive. I had no concept of legal status. Many of the words was new to me. I even had to ask someone later when the, at the trial, when the defense attorney came up and says -- bringing out the Constitution and pointing to the section where it says it's completely illegal what they done to us, and the judge says, come out and says, "That's immaterial, irrelevant," and something else. And I had to ask, I had no idea what he was talking about. Jury went out, and -- this is, of course, later I found out that the jury was supposed to go into a jury chamber. None of those thing I knew. I had no idea. They went out in the hall, and I could see the door over there, open there, and they're smoking cigarettes, talking to each other. And then throw it down, then coming back in and, "Guilty," and that was it. It was -- it was a farce. Since then, I've learned a great deal.

AI: Well, it must have been quite an experience for you to -- so many years later -- to be reading in Eric Muller's book --

FY: Yeah.

AI: -- and I believe the title is Free to Die for Their Country.

FY: Yes.

AI: And it, it describes, in some of the legal terms, your cases for being tried for draft evasion --

FY: Yes.

AI: -- and refusing to respond to your draft notice. What -- can you tell me what -- what did you feel when you started reading about your own trial, your, and reading about your own experience?

FY: It -- I don't think I'm, I've, I'm getting any kind of a emotional response from it. The... how can I explain it? It's... I, I smiled to myself at times, looking at something that somebody else wrote about me, and I'm finding out, oh, this is what it was about. At that time, I was so naive. I had no concept of what is a courtroom? What is a defense attorney? All this, and such thing as civil rights and Constitution. This all came later when I, after I got out of prison.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2001 Densho. All Rights Reserved.