Densho Digital Archive - Louise Kashino - Sadaichi Kubota - Bill Thompson Interview (denshovh-klouise

<Begin Segment 11>

TI: And how did you feel at that point, when they said they weren't going to change it?

LK: Well, we did our best. And we had, I think they did everything they could have done. There was no other evidence that we could have sought. So that was the point where we would just have to accept it. And Shiro was gone, and so... didn't mean anything any more if we couldn't get it overturned.

TI: And why didn't you stop?

LK: Well, I would have stopped, but Bill and Sadaichi kept saying, "We can't give up," or "we gotta do something else." And at that point, Bill helped me draft this letter. And that was, that's what did it.

SK: The good part is that in Suro's affidavit, he says that he phoned the battalion commander -- well, he used another word for battalion commander -- with Chaplain Yamada on line, so Chaplain Yamada was listening too, that: "I wanted the charges dropped." Those words were very, very important to us. And I believe that that's the thing that turned the whole thing over you know. Because the thing is that he wasn't there to be the accuser at the court-martial. And the two, or the three remaining fellows, what do you call... Tadao Hayashi was killed, of course. The three remaining guys, I don't think that they had any representative, a lawyer, on their side. So they couldn't do anything. And as Shiro said, he didn't plead guilty, but yet on the papers it said he was, he pled guilty to these charges. We sent Suro that paper...

BT: What's that?

SK: The court-martial paper. You didn't know?

BT: You see, there was that one clause that said, "After two years you have to appeal..."

SK: Oh, yeah, yeah.

BT: ...for certain period." That's it. You know, you can't appeal, period. Unless new evidence that wasn't available at that time, you can produce that new evidence. Well, that's why almost everything that we had was--like Chaplain Yamada's conversation, and the Officer (Lt.) Wheatley was going to help -- all the things was apparent during the trial. But it was only that... Suro wasn't there, and we didn't know that outside of what the chaplain said, which was nothing but hearsay because we couldn't prove it, and that's why we appealed in the letter -- that this is new evidence. I guess the first person that looked at it said, "Well, yeah, they didn't have counsel, but they had chance to appeal." You know, "Three months, yeah, but they could have appealed at that time." So once they said you had new evidence, then they could look at the whole thing. Now it counts that you didn't have defense counsel. Yeah, the other thing was -- delayed three months. So that new evidence was critical to the conviction dismissal. See we got the records, the stripes back, you know, on all, everything that we had so far. But that conviction we knew was going to be a tough one. We had to get it dismissed, and we had to find that new, vital evidence.