<Begin Segment 7>

TI: Before we go to that, I just want to back up a little bit. So you would walk to Block (25) to talk about this. How many, do you have a sense of how many meetings you did?

TN: Well, countless meetings. [Laughs]

TI: And you were able to attract about a thousand.

TN: A thousand, yeah.

TI: Out of how many people?

TN: Oh, five thousand, over five thousand renounced.

TI: So about five thousand renounced, and so about twenty percent, you were able to join.

TN: Then the suit, there were two suits. One for habeas corpus, you're released from your detention, and another one was inequity in setting aside the renunciation to restore your United States citizenship. Because Mr. Collins said even if you get out, you'd be released under habeas corpus proceedings. If you don't have citizenship, you don't have anything. So on a theory of governmental duress, we filed both suits. And the number was so huge that the Justice Department couldn't handle the individual hearings. So what they did was they sent the same hearing officer back and they had a mitigation hearing.

TI: I'm sorry, could you say that one more time? I didn't hear that.

TN: The Justice Department team conducted a mitigation hearing because they couldn't handle hearing each individual case. If you're filing one thousand case, you're going to have to hear every, one thousand cases individually. It would be a tremendous burden to us, but it would be a tremendous burden to the government, too. So they decided to conduct a mitigation hearing to see who should be deported or not. And when they conducted that hearing, they asked, naturally, the people who went to these hearings would tell the truth, you know. "Well, gee, we didn't know what was going to happen, we didn't want to be separated from the family. Not that we want to go to Japan." So the government released about eighty percent of them to camp, you know. So the government felt that they didn't, they were able to finish off with this renunciation program, but then you realize they have one thousand cases in restoring citizenship. So that was the only way to protect all these people. Because the Alien Enemy Act was still in full force, in fact, until the peace treaty was signed. And they were all, the rest of 'em were all scheduled for deportation. So Mr. Collins hanged on until the peace treaty was signed, and we were able to get everybody released from camp.

TI: But, I'm sorry, the peace treaty, and that was signed about when?

TN: That was signed. But that was in San Francisco, I remember.

TI: Yeah, I'm trying to remember the...

TN: 19', that was about two years later.

TI: So '47?

TN: '47, yeah.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.