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TK: Can you describe your first days as you sort of walked in the door? And what you found there in terms of the staff and what your expectations were? Do you remember those days?

AM: Yes. Well, in some ways it was really quite chaotic. (...) There were a lot of different things going on at the same time and that's partially the nature of what the commission was doing. On one side there was a very big effort to collect a lot of information and documents from the wartime period, particularly from a, quite a wide variety of government agencies. And you know, sometimes they would come in in very large quantities, and it would take a considerable time to digest. Or somebody would tell you there are a lot to be seen at this part of the archives, that part of the archives. At the same time, the hearing process was in full operation. And that also had (...) an enormous amount of human emotion with it. A lot of people wanted to testify. There was a limited amount of time to have hearings and to allow people to testify and there was a lot of jostling and jockeying as to who would be given the opportunity to speak, and why this person should be on the list and not that person. So both of those things were going on at the same time. And at that point... you know, I don't think this is too unusual as a group like this gets a strong feeling of what they're doing and not -- but there was not yet a clear vision of what the basic nature of the report would be. (...) The commissioners, I think, had (...) pretty strong feelings about the nature of what they were looking at. But should this be a twenty-page report? Should this be a five hundred-page report? Should it be a history? Should it be mostly a list of recommendations? What kind of form would we give to what we were working with? That was very uncertain. And that also made it somewhat hard to tell just what people should be doing with some of this material. Another aspect of it was simply getting the testimony typed up and then sent back to people and having them have the opportunity to make sure the language was right and getting it back and so on. And, of course, there was a group of people who had not worked together in the past. So, it was, you know, everybody sort of trying to find their way vis-a-vis each other as well.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.