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TI: Well, so as more and more people were starting to renounce their citizenship, at some point, after they signed, some of them decided maybe that was not a good idea. I mean, were there things that you would do to help those people?

TN: Well, after the war, they realized that the war was ended in, what was it? August? Yeah.

TI: August 1945.

TN: Then the Justice Department, the WRA was trying to liquidate all of the people out of the camps, you know, they wanted to get everybody out of the camps. And the Justice Department was going to take over, but they were scheduled to deport all these people to Japan who renounced their citizenship. But the people who renounced, some were believers, but most of 'em didn't believe there would be a deportation. But they were going to be involuntary departure, they said. Involuntary departure means deportation.

TI: Oh, so interesting the words they used. "Involuntary departure."

TN: Yeah. So I got out of the camp right after the war, and I saw the situation in San Francisco where all the ships were all lined up to take the people back to Japan or anything like that. And I came back and told people, "They got the ships all lined up, and you fellows are going to be scheduled for deportation unless you fellows do something." And then they started getting worried, you know, the Nisei people who didn't know Japan at all, they didn't want to go to Japan after the war. They didn't know how this thing would turn out.

TI: So, Tex, I want to ask you, so after the war, you left Tule Lake, you saw the ships lined up. When you were in camp before, you advised these people not to renounce their citizenship.

TN: Yeah, yeah.

TI: And so, but they decided to go ahead and do this. Why did you feel compelled to go back and try to help them after you...

TN: Well, the groups in camp who were, later on they became the committeemen in these renunciation cases, asked you to go out and do something, try to find a lawyer that would help us. And there was Issei people, he was a well-established man in southern California, Mr. Sasaki, Mr. Masami Sasaki. He said, "We can't let all these kids go back to Japan. Find a lawyer in San Francisco and see if we could stop the deportations." So I went out and I contacted the, contacted the JACL in Salt Lake City to help these people. And Mr. Saburo Kido wrote to me that, "As much as I'd like to help, we can't do anything." But he suggested that we contact somebody in the American Civil Liberties Union in San Francisco. So I went on and saw Mr. Besig of the Civil Liberties Union, and he suggested I contact Mr. Collins because he handled the Korematsu case -- no, not the Korematsu case, later on. And I talked to Mr. Collins, and he came up to Tule Lake for me, and we started getting a group of people, tell 'em what to do. So what we did was, from each block, we received a representative, and trying to relay the information of what we were planning to do with trying to file suit in San Francisco. And from each block, we nominated a committeeman that would take, relay all this information. And we finally organized a group, that was November 13, 1945, we filed a class action suit in San Francisco, U.S. District Court, one thousand people. And in order to finance this type of operation, you know, it cost us a lot of money. So Mr. Sasaki suggested that, "If you get deported, you could take only three hundred bucks to Japan, you can't take any more money than that. So why don't you gamble and give us at least a hundred dollars of that? Take a chance at it." So we raised a fund of around eighty thousand or ninety thousand dollars.

TI: So, wow, so that's quite a bit of money. So there were about a thousand, you got eighty thousand, so pretty much everyone paid almost a hundred dollars.

TN: Well, yeah. About six hundred people paid a hundred dollars, and then we, anything over fifty dollars, ten dollars. And if they joined, if they didn't have anything, we joined them anyway. So we had our... number was the main weapon for us. And Mr. Collins wove a theory of governmental duress for this litigation.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.