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TN: And then the, I think... prior to that, we filed the suit in front of Judge Goodman, who was very sympathetic to the Japanese Americans. And he gave, he set the whole renunciation program aside, restored all the citizenships. And the government was panicky about that, so they appealed the cases. That's where we came down, because we figured there was a lot of duress inside the camp, among the Hoshidan people that forced these people to renounce. They didn't want to give the citizenship up to those people, or they didn't want to, they still wanted to deport them. But the treaty, peace treaty made it such that the Alien Enemy Act was not in full force and effect. So after that, we were able to proceed with the citizenship issue.

TI: And that was, in the case in front of Judge Goodman, that was the Abo v. Clark case?

TN: Yeah. Well, see, there were a lot of other... originally, we filed a couple of suits, Mary Kaname Furuya and Abo v. United States. Because we figured, the people between eighteen and twenty-one were minors. So the government never contested the minor cases, their citizenship was restored.

TI: Okay, so if you were under twenty-one...

TN: Yeah, between eighteen to twenty-one.

TI: Eighteen to twenty-one and had signed that, those were all...

TN: After we got the verdict from Judge Goodman, we, Mr. Collins opened up the case again. So we opened up an office in Los Angeles, too, we asked all the renunciants to come in and join the case. So we got five thousand people inside the case.

TI: So five thousand individual cases.

TN: Yeah.

TI: So what happened to this whole idea of more like a class action or --

TN: That was a class action. Then afterward, the government appealed the case, and then they overturned, they figured that there's some... that's where we were running into difficulty with the ACLU. The American Civil Liberties Union of New York, and the Los Angeles Civil Liberties Union missed the boat on the evacuation issue, so they wanted to get into this issue. So they -- I hate to name people, but Mr. Chuman, who was attorney in Los Angeles, he was utilized by Al Wirin to find the test cases. So they found some test cases, and I would go and stop the cases. We kept on doing it, but he did those things secretly, and they filed the Murakami case. Murakami said... the government never contested that case because they figured that... the Murakamis said some other people forced them to renounce. So the judge, appellate court figured that then we have to find out who did apply the pressure. So we had to go through all this process of filing an affidavit with the Justice Department, and we have to do it for all the five thousand people.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.