<Begin Segment 31>

AH: Okay, now, before we proceed with that, there's still a big time gap. And maybe it doesn't seem like such a big gap after half a century, but between the time of the registration in February of 1943 and the reinstitution of the draft in January of 1944, we're talking about eleven months. Now, you've said "yes-no," now what kind of activity went on after... did you have to have some re-hearings or something, or how did you avoid being segregated to Tule Lake? I'm interested in...

JA: Well, I'm curious, too. But from what somebody tells me, one of the reasons why they didn't send me over is because I didn't answer 27 "no." To me, 27 was irrelevant whether they sent me or not. Number one, 28 was very important, because I'm thinking of redress and I didn't want to incriminate myself and make it so that the government would say, hey you signed that 28, you don't get any redress. Or... at that time, I was thinking of redress myself, not as a group, okay?

AH: So probably the "yes" on 27 overrode the "no" on 28?

JA: Well, it could have.

AH: In the minds of the WRA.

JA: Could have, yes.

AH: They went through these things and they look at your "yes" and your "no" and the "yes" overweighs the "no." So nobody approached you about you being sort of having to leave Minidoka and go to Tule Lake. No?

JA: No, because people wonder how come I was not sent to Tule Lake.

AH: It would've seemed like you would have been a candidate for it. You had a father who was in a Department of Justice camp and then you have a split sort of thing -- it seems that would have been a red flag, possibly a white flag with a red circle, in their minds, and say you ought to go to Tule Lake, but they never touched you. Did it affect your employment in any way with doing the work with the Bureau of Reclamation or not?

JA: No, because I was doing a lot of work they wanted... because we're only getting paid, what, eight or ten dollars, and gee, where can you get somebody to do engineering work for that kind of wages?

AH: I wonder if that didn't weigh in the balance a little bit, too, the fact that you had a skill that was usable at that time?

JA: Okay.

<End Segment 31> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.