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[Ed. note: This transcript has been extensively edited by the narrator]

MN: We have to talk about Jimmie Omura. When did you first get to know him?

AH: Well, let me go back just a little bit before then, because I'm still on Jimmie and I can finish with that. I think that one of the things that I made the major contribution to was the idea of looking at the Japanese American community as not just a community of consensus but one that had contestation in it. I was always interested in radicalism of one sort or another. I wasn't a radical myself, I wasn't a heavy participant in demonstrations, but I always admired radical action. I admired people who had the guts to stand up and say what they thought rather than to just go along with the crowd in order to sustain their popularity and their preferments. So the fact that I first did my work on the Manzanar Riot deepened this proclivity because I right away jumped into the heart of contestation. This was a roiling, disputatious, murderous kind of atmosphere in Manzanar during the time of the riot. So to get multiple perspectives on that event gave me a much better sense of the community. So rather than seeing the imprisoned population en bloc, I could see them in terms of issues, too. And so after Sue Embrey and I did the interview with Harry Ueno, the central figure in the Manzanar Riot, in 1976, I gravitated towards doing interviews with people who were at odds in one way or another. One of the people who I naturally came into contact with when I started reading up on the Heart Mountain experience was Douglas Nelson -- and just two days ago, Doug Nelson was over at a conference here in Little Tokyo at the Japanese American National Museum. And he said to me, "Gee, Art, I haven't seen you since we were both kids together." That was in 1973. He and Gary Okihiro and I were on a panel about resistance in Albuquerque for an Asian Studies conference and it was back when Asian American Studies took the position at conferences in the back of the bus. We had the last session of the entire three-day conference on a Sunday morning. Asian American Studies were looked at as so rank that without any warning they turned the light off in the room and deadened our mikes, and we couldn't even finish the session that we had. But Douglas Nelson had just submitted his manuscript on Heart Mountain for publication consideration. You know, it's interesting.

That the two Jewish Americans who have made some really great contributions about Heart Mountain both had the experience of working in Wyoming. Roger Daniels went out there as a Professor of History at the University of Wyoming, and then Eric Muller went out there a few decades later as a professor in the school of law at the University of Wyoming. And they both must have thought, "What kind of place is this Wyoming? We've got to have some place that's a little bit more active and evolving than this." Then they ran across Heart Mountain and the whole business with the draft resistance movement, and they both got involved with researching it. And look at their marvelous contributions. Just think, out of that provincial kind of environment, you get somebody like Roger or Eric who is different, somebody who is smart, and somebody who wants to get at the nub of things rather than the bullshit. And Roger writes his 1972 book, Concentration Camps U.S.A.: Japanese Americans and World War II, and Eric writes his 2001 book, Free to Die for Their Country: The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II. Fantastic titles, and in your face kind of titles, too. Not a lot of people were using "concentration camp" when Roger published his book and stuck this term right on his book's cover. And then Eric's Free to Die for Their Country. It's such a great book. And Gary Okihiro and I both helped to get Doug Nelson's 1976 book Heart Mountain: The History of an American Concentration Camp published. It was a master's thesis that he did under Roger Daniels's direction at the University of Wyoming. Then Doug went to the University of Wisconsin to get his doctorate, and when he was there they encouraged him, "You ought to try to get your master's thesis published." So Doug asked Gary and I to write letters of endorsement for him and it ended up that his thesis was published as a book. This is a fantastic kind of thing. And I read this book and I was so excited about it. And one of the people who figures in Doub's book is Jimmie Omura, because Jimmie Omura is the only editor who is really writing about draft resistance in the camps. And it seems so ironic because here he is being a hero in my eyes for what he's doing for the Japanese American community, when it turns out that he's absolutely a bete noire in the eyes of most of the people in the Japanese American community. So what explains this strange kind of thing? So I always wanted to meet Jimmie somehow or other.

And then in 1983, they had this conference at Salt Lake City. And we stayed at places downtown like the Marriott Hotel, but we had the conference out at the University of Utah campus. So this conference was put together by Roger Daniels with Harry Kitano. Those two had been riding sidesaddle for years, since their time together on the faculty at UCLA. And then Sandra Taylor, who was then a professor at University of Utah, joined up with them, and they put this conference on and it was called "From Relocation to Redress." That's when "relocation" still passed muster as a word, along with "evacuation" and other euphemisms. And so each morning of the conference, what they would do is to drive by all the hotels and pick up the people and then they would take them out to the university site where the conference sessions were held. On the first morning of the conference, I got picked up at the Marriott and then we went and stopped at a couple more hotels and motels. And they picked up this older gentleman at one of them and he was sitting in front of me in this mini bus thing, and then he turned around to shake hands with me and I spotted his name tag, which said, "James Omura." I said, "You're not the Jimmie Omura, are you?" And he said, "Yes." I said, "I thought you were dead." And he said, "I'm very much alive." And this was when he was just getting started on writing his memoir. He had retired from his job and he hadn't done anything on Japanese American stuff for all those many years, from about 1947 when he last edited the Rocky Shimpo in Denver for six months. Then what he did was to go into landscape gardening, and he had a pretty successful business. He lived in Denver and there were people like Larry Tajiri and Bill Hosokawa living in Denver, too, but he didn't have anything really to do with them. But anyway, he was just starting on his memoir. He'd gone out to Seattle for the CWRIC redress hearings, congressional hearings, in 1981. In fact, where he testified was at the high school that he had graduated from in 1933, which is Broadway High School. He made his testimony there -- it was by then a community college -- and there he met Frank Chin and Lawson Inada, and they were so excited to see him, and they had pretty much the same experience as I would two years later, "Thought you were dead." "No, I'm very much alive." Then got introduced to Frank Emi. He'd only known Frank Emi in 1944 at the time of their federal trial in Cheyenne for conspiracy to counsel draft evasion and subversion. He'd only known Frank Emi in 1944 at the time of their trial. And then he and Frank Emi and all these people, mostly World War II Nisei draft resisters, got together, and Frank Chin and Lawson Inada did so much to be able to quicken the historical reconstitution and revitalization of the draft resistance movement in the wartime camps.

So when I came along, it's a couple of years after that in 1983, so I said, "Jimmie," I said, "I'd really like you to come out to Orange County when you're out in the coast," because he'd been then going back and forth between Colorado and California. Sometimes he would just leave his house, not even tell his wife he'd be flying out to California. He was so involved with this whole development. So he said, "Yeah, I'd like to do that." A year later, in 1984, the chairman of the history department, Jim Woodward, at Cal State Fullerton, called me on the telephone and said, "Arthur, get down to the department office. I want to talk to you." And I wondered, "What the hell is he mad about?" So I went down there, and Jim is 6'6" and he's a pretty formidable sort of guy who teaches history of science. And he says to me, "What are you doing leaving this old Japanese man out at the Ontario airport?" I said, "What are you talking about?" He said, "There's a guy called James Omura, he said you said you wanted to interview him." I said, "Yeah, but we don't have an appointment or anything. I didn't even know he was coming out here." So they told me the hotel that Jimmie was going to stay at in Los Angeles. The interview with him didn't occur at that time but I wrote to him and I said, "My goodness, I didn't know you were coming to southern California. I would have gone to the airport to pick you up with bells on and brought you to my home." So then we made formal arrangements, and he later on flew out to California and I picked him up at a hotel in Hollywood, and then brought him in to Orange County, and he stayed at my house in Yorba Linda for about four days. We had a very long interview, and even then, he was so self-encapsulated or involved in his story that, once, when the tape recorder experienced mechanical problems and I had to call Cal State Fullerton and have someone from the Oral History Program bring me a new tape recorder, I couldn't turn Jimmie off. And then each morning I would get up, Jimmie would be sitting on the couch down in my living room ready to start being interviewed again. He was really anxious to tell his story. Apparently he had done the same thing with Frank Chin. He'd given a long interview with Frank Chin for about four or five days. And so in any event, Jimmie and I really did have a good bonding, and we ultimately got the interview done.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.