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TI: And in some ways when you think about the stance of the JACL during the war, you could probably trace their stance back to Japan. That in some ways --

GU: Yes, I think so. And when the authorities said something, when the daimyo, the local shogun (of the prefecture) -- it's a military government. Bakufu means "tent." So it was a military government. The shogun, (the big guy in Edo) was a generalissimo and he said, "We have in this country perpetual marital law. No one can leave Japan." And they didn't for two centuries. And they controlled it from the top to the very bottom. You know where we came from? We came from the bottom of that feudal order. So to this day if you go back to Japan they say, "Oh, iminoko," the child of an immigrant. That means, hey, welcome to Japan but we know you didn't graduate from the University of Tokyo. So here we are. And so all this shit happens. And you say, oh my God it's Pearl Harbor, all my worst fears are confirmed. Please God, Buddha, make it not so. It is so. So you say, well, why couldn't we have Stokely Carmichael and these other guys just say, "F___ you, we're not goin'." Why? Because Mike as a twenty-six year old kid thought about it and said, "You know, if we say 'no' when they've declared essentially martial law and (in) exclusion area. You're gonna get shot." Now one reason Min could say, "Do this," he thought this whole thing through. Unlike my father he understood the Constitution and what flows from it. Okay?

TI: Yet he --

GU: He was, he was a bachelor.

TI: But then he switched, though. I mean you're right, by '44 he was taking the stance of JACL trying to convince the Heart Mountain resisters --

GU: Yes, and so what he did was -- this was an odd thing that he did. He said, "Okay, the thing that really ticked me off was that these sons of bitches called me 4-C, ineligible alien. Now that they reversed that and there's a 442, well, that's all right." Go fight. Mike earlier had said, "No, no, Min don't do this. You and Gordon, you'd make very bad cases. We have a better case. Our case is Mitsuye Endo." And then Min would I think probably say, "Yeah, but that's gonna take years." Now, I'll say something controversial. When did the loyalty questionnaire come in? Probably early '44 sometime. So the "no-no" boys say "no-no" in '44. The war is over in '45. How come they didn't, like Min, say "no-no" and walk the streets of Portland or Yakima or Los Angeles in 1942? Tell you one of the reasons they didn't, I think, and I would've probably been among them. By the time 1944 comes along the course of the war in the Pacific has been settled -- you (knew), in June of '42, that Japan is going to lose. And the casualty reports come back from Italy, these suckers who are over there. And I say -- this is probably very unfair. It's now 1944. They want me in the army. I'm not goin'. And I say, as some of my 442 buddies who volunteered very early on, yeah, I'd say that in '44. This is why I really admire Min and Gordon and feel less respect for Korematsu. Because Korematsu's initial impetus was, "I'm gonna get my eyes changed and stay with my hakujin girlfriend." Now, that's probably what I would've done, too.

So, then, one of the dark sides we don't talk about, didn't talk about it in Washington. And this is understandable. We had a lot of Kibei and we had Tule Lake. Right here, I think probably Bob Sato, he volunteered and that wasn't very popular in camp. And they got, you (know) they just got the shit beat out of 'em, some of 'em. So I don't -- I think it's in some ways... because I'm -- this is like money, like twenty thousand dollars. What is twenty thousand dollars? Twenty thousand dollars is no bullshit. I go over to Italy as an eighteen year old kid and here I'm fighting alongside my eighteen year old buddy, and the next second his brains are (oozing out of) my hands, and this kid's got a bullet in his head, my best buddy. You know what that is? That's no bullshit. And so, had these guys not gone, it would have been hell. Let's say that everybody including Bob Sato and the Masaoka brothers and everybody... these two (local) guys who won Congressional Medals of Honor. Let's say they all said, "We're not goin'." Where would that have left us? So, I grew up in a farm. I went to Harvard. Hell, I had the whole world opened up to me. In part, why? Because these eighteen year old kids went over to Italy and got their brains blown out. Now, I owe those guys. Okay, so the 442 -- so the resisters say in 1944, not 1942, "I ain't goin'," well all right. That's pretty good. But not better than getting your f___in' brains blown out.

So, civil disobedience. How could Min do it? Because he (fully) understood how (the American system was supposed to work). Most people who came from peasant Japan, from the lower ends of the feudal order which still existed, and to this day exists in Japan, had no idea of what their "rights" were. In Japan, there's no sense at that point and even probably to this day of what a (Western) individual is. It's a group. So, in America we say with some bullshit, in part, "This is the important thing, the individual and his rights. The individual and his rights are accompanied by some obligations." In Japan they don't understand this -- (one finger). They understand this, the hand. And they understand obligations which, even to this day, you must feel toward your parents, that the average white person has no conception of. And so, it's the group, and it's obligations and not rights, and you look back into 1942 and you say well, how come we didn't have more Gandhis and Martin Luther Kings and Muhammad Alis? That's just the most vulgar reading of history you could possibly imagine. You're the descendants of Japanese peasants of the nineteenth century whose lives were filled full of drudgery and obligation. And to look back on that period with the sense of white upper middle class entitlement, dishonors my grandma.

So, it's a revisionist understanding of history and we can't today say on the basis of what happened to us in 1942, all Americans should, you know, resist, and they should resist in the same -- if this happened to them they should resist in the same way that Martin Luther King did resist and wrote his letter from the Birmingham Jail. But you can't expect that to have happened, mostly, in the camps of 1942. It did happen in the camps of 1944, (but) a little bit different from what Gordon and Min did in 1942. So, yeah, I admire 'em, I admire the resisters, but I don't admire 'em as much as the poor kid who got his brains blown out so that Grant could go to Harvard.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.