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TI: So in the last interview you talked a little bit about the help you got from Stetson Conn, getting his notes, and so we talked a little bit about the creation of the book. I wanted to ask a little bit about the reaction to the book after it was published.

RD: Well, the reaction to the book was very, very good. I did a preview of it at an American Historical Association meeting in Boston. My friend Walter Johnson was there, thought it was stunning, and, being a wheeler-dealer, he had since moved to the University of Hawaii, sort of retirement. And he made arrangements, without my knowledge, although he told me about it later, and he went to Holt, which was a publisher, and got an advance copy of the book, and arranged to have the chapter dealing with the, part of the book dealing with the draft resisters printed in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.

TI: That's interesting. I didn't know that.

RD: And then Walter Johnson, if you look at the pictures in Concentration Camps USA, you'll see a page showing the pictures in the story that appeared in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. And then I was invited out that summer to lecture at the University of Hawaii. The first lecture that had ever been given in Hawaii on what happened to the stateside Japanese Americans. And I was really treated royally there. Somebody you know arranged the social part of the visit.

TI: Professor Ogawa?

RD: Yes, Dennis arranged the social part of the visit, Dennis Ogawa, which was very nice. But the department spokesman, spokesperson, told me that, "You're going to be talking in a big auditorium, and we just don't get big audiences." They'd just had the distinguished University of Chicago professor William McNeill, who was a world class historian. And apart from a few faculty, there were eight people at the lecture. When we got there, the fire marshals were clearing the aisles which had been filled with people. It was absolutely packed, more than eight hundred people. There were all kinds of questions.

TI: And who, how would you characterize the audience? Who was there?

RD: Nisei and some haoles, but it was mostly Nisei who wanted to hear what was going on. And in addition, the picture that appeared in the Star-Bulletin, and the story appeared in the Star-Bulletin, was the material about the "draft dodgers," so-called, the draft resisters. And lo and behold, there were a number of them who had wound up in Hawaii and none of them were Hawaiians, they just wound up there. And several of them came to see me, they had some of their documents about their cases and this sort of thing. They had been pardoned, Truman pardoned them all, but the Department of Justice never notified anybody, never tried to. The fact that Nisei had been pardoned wasn't publicized, and these people hadn't known that they were citizens.

TI: Until they read your book?

RD: Until the read the excerpt from my book that appeared on the front page, the story started on the front page of the Star-Bulletin. It was big news in Hawaii.

TI: And so up to then, these men were kind of living under this cloud.

RD: Yes. Actually, people who lose their citizenship, for instance, like the renunciants, if they wanted to, they could just go somewhere and say, "Here's my birth certificate, I was born here," which was evidence of it. They don't go out and tear their birth certificates up. There's no way really to enforce that, and they don't try. So that any renunciants who wanted to could vote, could do all sorts of things.

TI: That's interesting. I never thought of that. And here... well, but the renunciants went through this horrendous legal process to get their citizenship back.

RD: That's right.

TI: Even though they had, you're right, they had birth certificates.

RD: And most of them had been turned loose. And neither Wayne Collins -- and I write about this in the book that will be published in November -- neither Wayne Collins nor the Justice Department had the foggiest idea where most of them were. Which is one of the reasons why it took so long. All Wayne Collins had to do, once the principle had been established, was to get them to sign an affidavit. He gave them samples, and the affidavit, they had to say that they were in fear of their lives and a few other things like that that he laid out for them in these sample affidavits. That's all they had to do, they had to file the affidavit. The Justice Department didn't have any information on which to base a counter file. All they knew was they'd made an application that had been approved so that it was just automatic. But because of the way Judge Denman had granted the original petition, they had to be established. Well, let me be more precise. [Interruption] The minors were all cleared automatically by the clerk. But everybody else had to file an affidavit, have it presented to the Justice Department, and had to have the Justice Department make a response, and in most cases they had no response to make. And if they had no response to make then the judge would say, "All right, done." But it took until 1968 to get all of that done. If they'd kept names and addresses, it could have been done a lot quicker, but that's why the procedure took so long. Now, how many of these people actually suffered, other than psychic injury, because of this is not clear.

TI: So that's similar to the draft resisters, where they were pardoned even though they didn't know it.

RD: Yes, that's the other way it led.

TI: So going back to that talk you did in Hawaii? So what were some of the questions? I'm curious what people were asking.

RD: Oh, the most basic questions: "Did that really happen?" I mean, they didn't know anything about it. Did I talk about the students in my class last time?

TI: You did, about that two that...

RD: Well, if that was true in Los Angeles, imagine what was true out in Hawaii. I mean, obviously there was some knowledge of it, but the crowd was just incredible.

TI: Now, did you get any pushback from any of the Nisei veterans who served with West Coast Japanese Americans who perhaps had a very negative view of the draft resisters?

RD: Not there, not there. I didn't see anybody who looked like a veteran. I certainly at meetings have had verbal conflicts with veterans, by people who feel that I'm too soft, etcetera. The fact that I served in Korea sometimes helps shut 'em up. [Laughs]

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.