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MN: Now, when the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians had, they had a house and a senate meeting... hearing, I'm sorry. And you were making a presentation at the house hearing in Los Angeles. Can you share with us, first of all, who Larry Boss was, and what happened at that house hearing?

JM: Well, first of all, nobody wanted to sign up for the testimony. Number one, you had to submit a total written package, and the Issei weren't about to do that, 'cause they didn't, they didn't... they couldn't write, you know, I mean, they couldn't write in English. Nisei was like, "Shouldn't try to beat a mule," you know. They just weren't ready for it at the time. And so we, it was us and the JACL, and me and Bert were --

MN: Bert Nakano.

JM: Bert Nakano, we got together and we said, "Well, how many people do we have, Bert?" And he says, "I don't think we have any, but we may have one or two." "And how many does JACL have?" "Hopefully they have twenty." "They have six maybe." I said, "They had seven, and they're bringing down the whole, we're gonna have a presidential commission hearing and there's gonna be seven testimonies? That's gonna be a major defeat." So at the next meeting, I said, they called for a report from the, from Bert and my's committee, I said, "We only have one or two. We're gonna have to throw workshops to, and we're gonna have to ask you to volunteer so that you could write down what these people tell you to write down. And not only that, I'm gonna ask each and every one of you to submit a request on your own behalf and I will do so on my own." So that's what we did. There was about ten or twelve of us in the room, and I got twelve persons to immediately volunteer to testify. Then we held the workshop, and I'm like, telling Bert, I'm like, "Well, gee, I wonder if anybody will show up." And just like that mochitsuki, before you know it, we were inundated. So I had to get on the phone and call people, "Can you come down here and help us?" We were writing all evening, getting the things in there. So we got, we got another, oh, maybe another twelve people, and we had twelve, all of a sudden, we had twenty-four of our own. JACL got rolling on their own, too. So by that time, things began to really roll. We found people, and I was getting calls at my office at Long Beach. I got a call from the lady whose son was killed in Manzanar. It was a long discussion. I picked up the phone and she says, "Are you Mr. Matsuoka?" I said, "Yes, I am. Speaking," and I just thought it was a counselee. And she says, "I got your name from the NCRR." I said, "Oh, okay." "And I was just wondering what to do." I said, "Well, maybe you could tell me a little bit about something." She said, "Well, we just buried his, we buried his t-shirt today." I said, "His t-shirt?" She said, "Yes, my brother" -- is it brother or nephew? Is it nephew? I think it's nephew, I forgot. I think her name was Mrs. Ogata -- "was the one who was shot in the back, and we kept his t-shirt all these years to prove that he was shot in the back, that he was running away when they shot him in the back. That he wasn't charging in the Manzanar 'riots,' he wasn't charging the MPs, he was running away from him and they shot him in the back. And we kept that t-shirt, and we finally buried it." And I'm condensing what essentially was a forty-five minute discussion. I just let her speak. I said, "You have to speak. You have to, 'cause people need to know that." So anyway, things like that, people were coming out of the woodworks, you know, and it was really something.

And the question came up was, "On what basis are you asking for $25,000?" And I said, "Well, there was this study made by the National, I think, National Reserve or something like that, Federal Reserve in San Francisco estimating that there was a billion or so, or something, I don't know, four hundred million or something of that nature, lost by the Japanese property owners. That's all we really had. And it was sort of like, 'Is that all you have?'" I said, "That's all we got." Then the word kind of filtered through to me that this young graduate student by the name of Larry Boss had did a detailed study on the Long Beach community in which he went in there as a master's, as his master's thesis. And he took everything apart and he quantified it and he put the dollar value on those things. And we could show that just the Long Beach community alone, we were talking into the millions of dollars, let alone any of these other communities, the totality of it. So I said, "We got to have that testimony. This is testimony we must have." So I got on the line and I talked to his friend, Lloyd Inui, and Lloyd says, Lloyd says, "I'll talk to Larry and we'll see." So time was running out. And to make a long story short in a way, we really had to put the pressure on him. And I made a trip to his house specifically, I said, "Larry, we got to have your testimony. We have to have it. We've got to be able to show why we want $25,000. It isn't something we just plucked out of the air, you've got the study and you've got to make the testimony." And he says, "Okay, I'll do it." And I said, "You've got, you've only got a few days to submit the, this is how you do it." And he did it.

So our turn came to testify, and I happened to be on the same table and same panel, but I consider my job done. I got Larry Boss there, my job was done, and my wife was waiting for me to go eat. That's all I wanted to do, was talk about how they stole my father's life savings, that's all I wanted to talk about. And once I said that, I'm out of there. I'm done, let me go eat. But Larry Boss is the centerpiece. So it comes our time to testify, and all of a sudden, I think it was Judge Marutani, says, "Well, in the interest of time, we don't have time. I'm asking this table to just submit their testimony and we'll read it later on." And I'm like, "Oh my god, this is the, this is what a lot of people were waiting to hear, especially detail people that want things, and they need to hear of this." So Lillian is sitting in the seat behind me, right behind me.

MN: Nakano.

JM: Nakano. I could hear, "Jim, do something. Do something." And I have this flashback to the time, this attack on Hody's, like I could almost hear, "Aren't you gonna come with us?" My first thought was, "Why me?" Why me? I'm like, "Oh, lord, I knew it was gonna happen. Why me?" All I wanted to do was give my quick testimony and get the hell out of here and go eat. What am I gonna do? So just, I just went berserk. I pounded the table and I told Marutani, I said, "No," I said, "you're not gonna shut me down." I said, "I waited too long to speak and you're not gonna tell me I can't speak." And I was sick and tired of hearing all this crap. I went into a tirade and I told 'em, "You people," I said, "I'm warning you. The next time you ever try to get away with forming an all-minority brigade, you better watch out where that brigade's gonna head for. It may head for Washington, D.C.," I said. And I ended up saying, "If I ever get any of this money at all, first thing I'm gonna do is buy a ticket to that guy that keeps claiming that his skin crawls all the time that we ask for money, S.I. Hayakawa. I'm sick and tired of his crawling. He's crawling here, crawling there, he's crawling too much for me. The crawling stops right here." Said, "I'm gonna give him a ticket to get the hell out of here and go back to Canada." And the audience went wild. The flashbulbs went off and I was on the L.A. Times, I was on the front page of the California section. One of the reporters asked me, "Did you do this on purpose?" And I said, "Hell, no." I said, "I was just begging to get the hell out of there." I said, "I couldn't make this up if I wanted to." So then I became sort of like an iconic figure. So every time during our early years, they would run tapes of the hearings, you would see me pound, going berserk. But those were very interesting times.

<End Segment 39> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.