<Begin Segment 15>

TI: You mentioned earlier about Min Yasui.

GU: Yeah.

TI: And how Min and Mike really got you involved in redress. And I just, it's just curious to me because in my research, Min Yasui defied the curfew order and wanted to test the constitutionality of that, And back during those war years, this was 1942, Mike Masaoka essentially opposed the concept of, of having these test cases. And so here, in essence, during the war, these two were on opposite sides on this issue and yet they worked closely together with you. Did you ever talk to them about that?

GU: I didn't talk to them directly about that. But when they tried to recruit -- I did The Almanac of American Politics. This is a kind of a Washington specialist book. But I'm famous in Washington. I mean I'm not famous in Seattle, but there's one place -- and I'm not famous in New York or even in Cheyenne, Wyoming. But I'm famous in Washington because of this book. That gives me access. It gives me access to Ken Duberstein and Tom Kean and Newt Gingrich. I got Newt and Dick Cheney, who were both in Congress at the time, to vote for redress. I wanted the firewall on the right. And how would I do it? I said well, here I am with the Almanac and be nice to me because I can say something bad about you and... that's sort of illegitimate use of the press, but that's okay. Mike knew that I had access. Mike knew that Norm was a Democrat, liberal Democrat, so was Bob, so was Sparky, so was Danny, and they didn't have any access on the Republican side. Campus radicals are not gonna have access on the Republican side, and we had a Republican president who was very popular. So Mike said, "You ought to do it." And Min said, "You ought to do it." And one time when I was in Washington we all went out, the three of us went out to a Japanese restaurant. And they said, (you) ought to do it. And this is sort of like, I don't know, seventeenth century Europe or, I don't know, nineteenth century Japan, where community elders say, "Well, you better do it, because we don't have access to the White House or to Newt or anybody else unless you say..." and so I said, "Well, I'll do it." Now, Mike and Min got along very well. They got along very well really beginning, I think, in '44. Because as you recall, Min went out to Heart Mountain and said, "Hey, don't do 'no-no' stuff."

TI: Let's, let me --

GU: "Sign up."

TI: Let me give some background on this, because I want to ask you a question. So, this whole issue in terms of one of the things that we want to talk about, oftentimes with students, are the individual sort of rights and responsibilities as a citizen of the United States and as part of that there's a, sort of American tradition of civil disobedience. And here we had Min Yasui who defied the curfew orders, an act civil disobedience. You had Gordon Hirabayashi who did a similar thing in Seattle, and you also have the Heart Mountain resisters who you just mentioned in terms of Min trying to, at this point, convince them to, to not resist the draft.

GU: Yeah.

TI: What I'm trying to, what would be good would be for you to sort of again, frame the issue in terms of talking about the role of dissent and civil disobedience in this case, because this is a controversial issue within the community.

GU: Okay, origins matter. Where you come from, matters. So if you're a seventeenth century immigrant to the United States it mattered whether you came from East Anglia where there are a lot of Puritans, whether you're Scots-Irish up of York, whether you came from Wales like Thomas Jefferson. It matters. It matters. Well, that's kind of an obscure reference. It matters where you come from if you're Japanese American. You came from, largely from the west, which is to say the inaka prefectures of Hiroshima and Okayama, (Wakayama), these places. They're probably fifty years behind Tokyo. Now one of the things that happened in the Tokugawa era, which is the era that fell when Perry came with the black ships. The Tokugawas imposed in some ways the most psychologically totalitarian state that the world has ever seen. I mean, they sort of controlled everything. They had little neighborhoods of five households and they all watched each other because before the Tokugawas took power all these Japanese people did was fight and kill each other. And they could not consolidate power (and create civil order). See, you have this, you come from this society in which there are no f___in' rights, there are only obligations. And you're asking the Nisei to say, hey, let's fast forward to (Gandhi) in the late 1940s and do passive civil disobedience. "Are you kidding? We don't even know what that is." They say, and for me too, say, "We have the First Amendment. We can say anything we want. But even to this day in our community, do we, like the Jews, say any goddamn thing we want? No. We don't because of where we come from in our historical origins." All right, how could Mike and Gordon in particular say, "Hell no, I ain't goin'"?

TI: You mean Min and Gordon.

GU: Min and Gordon

TI: Right

GU: Okay? So Min graduates number one in the law school from Oregon. He's number one. He's a genius. I mean, his father knew that he was a prodigy at age five. He didn't have to pick so many apples. He could study. He was a genius. He's a prodigy. So he goes to law school and says, "I get it. This is not the Meiji Constitution of 1889. This is America." Do you think my old man understood that? No, my old man kept his mouth shut. And he did what his father told him to do. So, to expect... and Gordon was a Quaker. Gordon's Quakerism said, "I have a conscience. I cannot defy my conscience. This is sacrilege." You think the Tokugawas instilled in the average Japanese in 1850 -- which is about where our ancestors came from, 1860 -- an ocean of individual conscience -- that is crazy. That leads to insurrection. That leads to heads being chopped off. That leads to what used to happen before Tokugawa.

TI: So it seems, let me see if I can frame this. It almost sounds like, in some ways what I'm hearing. So it was extraordinary what Min and Gordon did.

GU: Extraordinary, given our culture.

TI: Given your culture.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.