Densho Digital Archive - William Marutani Interview (denshovh-mwilliam-01-0012)

<Begin Segment 12>

BF: Now, you were the only Japanese American on the commission. Do you have any opinions or speculations as to why there weren't more?

WM: Oh, no. I think there's no question that if you have too many on there, they'll say, "Well, they awarded this money of $20,000 -- what do you expect?" But you gotta have at least one Japanese American on there, because if the result is to the dislike of some people, they'll say, "Well, what do you expect, they didn't appoint any Japanese American on there, and they ran roughshod over it -- there, they did it again." And you have to cut out that kind of vulnerability.

BF: Did you find yourself ever sort of forced, or asked by the other commissioners to play the role of being the resident expert on the commission, to clarify things?

WM: Oh, I think to a large extent, sure. Not constantly, but periodically. And if they didn't and if they stepped out of line, I would speak up. I remember one time when one of the staff persons was writing a report, preparing the final report of the commission itself. And it was very preliminary. And I looked at the draft and I said, my goodness. I asked this person, "Where did you get this information?" One of the information she had written was that on each of the trains there was a nurse -- all trains had a nurse. And I knew that wasn't so. I said, "Where did you get that information?" And she said, "I got it from the final report of General DeWitt." I said, "My goodness." And so I stepped in, I said, "Oh no." I also stepped in, frankly, on the matter of using the word "evacuation," "relocation camps," "assembly centers," -- this sounds like we're going on a Boy Scout jamboree, not to a barbed wire concentration camp with guard towers with machine guns and you're held in there. "Assembly center," "Tule Lake," there's no lake at Tule. Pinedale Assembly Center, there were no trees, no trees or any vegetation. I also objected to words like, "voluntary evacuation." You don't force people out and call it voluntary because they left, "If you don't go, we're gonna do this to you." And the jargon... so you will notice that in the report, in the very beginning of the report they refer to the fact that we understand that some of these terms are inappropriate, but were gonna use them because they were used in the context of that time of 1942. But that's a warning at the beginning, that this, it was not really an evacuation, it was an uprooting and expulsion, that's what it was, and so on.