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MA: So I wanted to shift gears a little bit and talk about your brother, Gordon, you know, who was one of only a few individuals to challenge the curfew and removal orders. And I guess the impact of what Gordon did, his decision to protest, on you personally.

JH: Well, you know, I was fifteen at the time of the internment, incarceration. And actually, they took my parents out of Tule Lake to attend the trial just when I applied for work furlough to go to Idaho. Schools weren't any good in Tule, no chairs and no books, nothing. They closed down the school so that we could harvest potatoes in the Klamath Falls area, and then the deputy sheriff came down and got my parents to attend the trial. And my father had arranged with his friends to take me along with them to Idaho, so I just quit school and went to Idaho, and I worked on a farm for a year. They were sugar beets and potatoes, and I'd never seen sugar beet before in my life. If I ever see another potato again, I hope it's cooked and on my plate. [Laughs] Anyway, after a year of working, we stayed there in Idaho and went to high school there for one year. And then Gordon had just left prison for his internment case, or his curfew case. You know that he protested against the incarceration first, and while he was there, they found his diary that he kept at the university, where he just decided not to obey the curfew, and he just stayed in the library and studied at night. They found that... I mean...

MA: Diary?

JH: Diary, and they added the violation of curfew. And so it was two things that he was tried for: internment and curfew. And then I think the judge, I don't know if he felt sorry for him or what, he gave him sentences for both so-called "crimes" to run concurrently. So when it went up to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court didn't want to deal with evacuation, so they dealt with the curfew. Since it was concurrent, they could ignore the other. And it took the Korematsu case for them to have to face it. But so my, I guess, my influence had the same kind of influence as my parents, but I would say that Gordon's situation being the eldest in the family was much stronger in all the kinds of things that they wanted to teach the kids. And particularly important was the fact that they went to an academy in their town before migrating to learn English, and they were converted to Christianity there. I don't know if you know that particular story. But being the eldest in the family, they get different kind of upbringing, I think. And they're the ones that are supposed to carry on the family tradition, particularly the males. And so I think there was a very strong relationship there. By the time I came along, I was the third child, and by then, the kids were speaking English, you know. And so the influence by the parents are not as strong, I think. They're all, we're speaking English to each other, and communicating with our friends and that kind of stuff. And as I say, I was just fifteen at the time. And so I went to church and that kind of stuff, but I was more interested in playing basketball and that kind of stuff. And I don't think my training was near as strong. And then with Gordon, he also belonged to an interdenominational Japanese American group called the Auburn Christian Fellowship. Young people got together and they had meetings and they had conferences, and they had dances, it was a social group as well. I never -- well, of course, I was, just finished my sophomore year in high school, so I wasn't even really into the urban, we lived out in the farm, not even in the urban group of high school kids as yet. I was working into that.

So that I see him as much more of an idealist than I ever was. But certainly, there was influence from him. So that when it came to things like the strike at San Francisco State, I'm sure that Gordon's behavior was somewhat of a model. And with Gordon, when he went off to college, he became a Quaker. And the particular kind of Christianity that my parents were converted to was very similar in pattern, small, intimate groups.

MA: This was the mukyoukai?

JH: Yeah, mukyoukai. So it was no accident, I think, that Gordon decides to become a Quaker. And today he's a Quaker, and he was for a long, long time on the national board. And I went to, I think I went to a Baptist church in Idaho, and I went to a Presbyterian church in Spokane, but that was because they had basketball teams and I played on the basketball team. They wouldn't let me play unless I went to church. [Laughs] But when I went to University of Washington, I never went to church again. Now, my sister belongs to a Methodist church, and she's a couple years younger than me, three years younger than me. But my brother Ed and I, I don't think we ever went to church after that. But my brother Ed was in Tule Lake even shorter than I was, and he went to Utah. And then from Utah, the Quakers got him into Guilford College, which is Quaker college in North Carolina. And he was the best athlete in the whole family, he played on the college team and stuff like that. And he got into philosophy, and he was slated to go to a theological seminary in New England, when my mother, who lived back in Seattle at the time, said to him, "Come on back. I just want the family together." So he comes back, and he goes to the University of Washington instead, and focuses in on psychology and philosophy. And then he ends up at Columbia in the Asian Studies PhD program, but he starts teaching before he finishes his dissertation. He's teaching in the New York system, and from there he goes right into the State Department. So he liked to travel and live in different countries. He was in Brazil and Ecuador, Zaire, Yemen. So he had quite a -- and I'd visit him whenever I could. So Gordon was kind of a, kind of a distant model to emulate, but never, never got up to his standards, I guess.

MA: That's interesting.

JH: I say that the, he might have had quite a bit to do with my various kinds of stands.

MA: Your activism?

JH: Yeah. But when he came to visit me during the strike period, he really didn't understand what was happening down here, because he was in Canada, you know. And then students were kind of using him as a hero and model. And my brother was saying, "Well, I don't know about any of these things and why it's happening like this." I said, "Shut up." [Laughs] "Let the students use you as a model, because they need it for their activities and things like this." And then he came around to understanding why, what we were doing and why we were doing it, and why he was linked into this process.

MA: He's been a model for a lot of people, I think. So can you talk then about his, I guess, historical importance and his legacy?

JH: Well, you know, I think that historically it's quite important. Because particularly the position that the Japanese Americans are put in, and the way in which the majority of the Niseis were reacting in order to prove their Americanism, I guess. So I think it was very important, in a broader sense of civil rights, that Gordon took the stand that he did. And this is what I think his importance is. And as I say, as far as I'm concerned, the battle is far from being over, and so his significance remains. I think it's important for all of us to know and to understand.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.