<Begin Segment 13>

BF: As you would bring up these points, these errors either in fact, or sort of the incorrect use of words, were other commission members, were they sort of also doing the same? Were they supportive, or were you sort of carrying the burden of doing this?

WM: No, I think something like that, is, you have to be, I think, have a comprehension of what the facts were -- and I knew what the facts were. And I mentioned for example, the term, "repatriation." You don't send a Japanese American Nisei, to Japan and call it repatriation. That's a misnomer. It's a very devious misnomer. As a matter of fact, if you look at the posters -- large letters "JAPANESE" in there -- telling the people they are going to be sent out, shipped out -- if you look on there it says "alien" and "non-alien." Now I know what an alien is, an alien is a person whose citizenship is with some other country than the United States. Tell me, what is a non-alien? Tell me, c'mon.

BF: An American.

WM: Yeah, it's a citizen. And it's a very devious effort on the part of authorities, because they don't want to deal with shipping American citizens into camp, but you can if you call them "non-aliens." Who cares about non-aliens? This actually carries over into other fields, for example, in the war in Korea, for example. Our troops were there not killing Koreans, North Koreans, or whatever it is, we were there killing "gooks," "slopes." What you do is you dehumanize people and then it's easier to kick them around, you dehumanize them. As a matter of fact, if you look at these... what happened in... shortly following Pearl Harbor, the FBI swept out Buddhist priests, head of the businessmen associations in Japantown, teachers, schoolteachers. If you look to see what happened, what happened is that they took all the leaders of our community -- people who had some power, who had control, they removed those. And what did they leave? They left the women and the youngsters, and the people like myself who were still teenagers, hadn't become twenty yet. And we didn't know what to do, I as a teenager wouldn't know what to do. I do now, but not then. And so another tactic is you remove, you remove their leaders and leave them helpless. The Canadian government did something like this. What the Canadian government did is they removed all the men, not just the leaders, all the men away from the women and they did not put the women in prison, behind barbed wire camps, they just said, "Well, you go wherever you want." Very clever.

BF: Very military.

WM: Devious, very devious.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.