<Begin Segment 21>

TI: Well, you mentioned that at the point, when you first found out, you didn't know what to think. It's been decades later --

HM: Yeah, well this kind of thing as you evolve later on, and then you start thinking about the fact that -- Mike Nakata used to tell me the reason why Nikkei don't get ahead is because we don't make noise, we don't dispute things, we don't call them to task on things like the evacuation. And this kind of stuff kinda over the years started to -- I used to look back at the major's drunken exposure of all his activities, and all the stuff I saw in the Central Records Facility and all this stuff started to come together. And this is why maybe I got so obsessed, according to my, one of the attorneys that I knew, obsessed with this feeling of going after redress.

TI: Because it was clear to you -- I mean I don't want to put words in your mouth -- but because it was clear to you that it wasn't a mistake. I mean it was a very, almost calculated government act --

HM: Well, even the start of World War II, from Roosevelt's standpoint was a calculated situation. And I look at history in terms of what actual events took place. How Roosevelt, well they used to call, have the ABCD powers, America, Britain, China and Dutch, ABCD, and they used to have this formal organization saying, "Okay, we wanna keep Japan as it is and wanna keep them as a secondary power, we don't want them to become a world power, and therefore we're gonna do all these things to them." So to me it was a matter of time between war with U.S. and Japan. And Japan did the U.S. a hell of a big favor by bombing Pearl Harbor. Had they gone on their merry way and infiltrated into French Indochina, and Thailand, and Burma and these different places, it would be hard-pressed for the President of the United States to ask the Congress to declare war on Japan. And there was so much dissention at that point about getting the U.S. involved in any war that the whole episode of these things that happened later on would have probably been different.

TI: Now I want to go one back now, I'm still sort of reeling from the story about the, when the adjutant, is adjutant, I'm probably mispronouncing it, but, he wanted you to take this major around, wasn't, I mean didn't --

HM: There was no mechanism to take him around because they were not suited for this kind of purpose.

TI: Right, but I'm curious that he asked a Japanese American to do this.

HM: Well, because I wasn't doing anything.

TI: So you don't think it registered with him...

HM: I was goofing around.

TI ...that here it would have --

HM: Walt Partain who happened to be the adjutant at that time and I became good friends. In fact, because I had the car, and his family lived in Chattanooga Tennessee, on three-day passes we used to haul from Fort Holabird all the way down to Chattanooga and spend the weekend down there. And his father owned the Coca-Cola bottling plant and the 7-Up bottling plant, both. And this was unheard of in my way of thinking because you don't operate both franchises, but he operated them as two separate companies, and he owned them both. I mean he was a very wealthy person. And Walt and I became good friends. And all the time I was in that area I used to pick him up. And he used to be a fast pitch softball pitcher, a very good one. And all the time that he was, used to warm up for this softball games, I used to try to hit his fast pitch. I never got a solid hit out of any of those pitches. I mean, he used to really throw a fast pitch.

TI: So you guys had developed a relationship beforehand...

HM: Yeah, yeah.

TI: So he thought that he could trust you to do this, and do it well.

HM: Yeah, and then I used to loan him my car occasionally when he had dates. We used to go on double dates together with the nurses.

TI: Sure. Did you ever talk to him about the major, and were there other people like that that he was aware of in the army?

HM: Well, I told him this guy had a big story. But he was -- at that time we were kinda busy because he was doing a whole -- processing a whole buncha guys for clearances. So he didn't really have the time to spend with me on that stuff. But right towards the end then, I wanted to get down to Fort Meade because I wanted to pick up another guy that was being separated. So I left the post pretty quickly after my separation.

TI: Okay.

HM: Well, he knew these guys were around. It's just that in this guy's case, he didn't have a car, he didn't have transportation, and they didn't want to provide him a driver to haul him around for two days. And it's just a convenience point for him. Had I been around there for a long time, probably there would have been other people that would have been processed through the same way. And the major's story was very interesting. It was -- I had never heard anybody of that type of undercover work to reveal himself in the way he did.

TI: Right. Did you ever get in touch with him after he left?

HM: No.

TI: After he separated?

HM: I kept track of him for awhile, but then I thought well, he's another, he's leading his own life. He's got his own life to lead so forget it.

TI: Okay.

HM: There's other things I had to worry about. But anyway, that kind of set the stage for my exposure to what, behind the scenes what was happening to Japanese Americans. As I, as I look at it today, we were one of the most infiltrated ethnic groups prior to World War II. We were unfortunately not given the benefit of the doubt. We were unfortunately, like in the Supreme Court case, Korematsu case especially, when General John L. DeWitt testified before the Supreme Court saying that we were providing intelligence information from the camps to the Imperial Japanese forces in the Pacific. And the other agencies, knowing that he, he was lying, would not come out of their closets to say that DeWitt had nothing to stand for in terms of his testimony. There was no substantial information indicating that we were doing those kind of activities. And this was one of the profound areas where there, there was no test of that testimony that he provided. So under the books, in the Supreme Court briefs, if you look at it, the testimony by John L. DeWitt, indicates that we did, by his allegations transmit information.

TI: And was, do you think he was basing it on the CIC? Or again, I'm not --

HM: No, he was basing it strictly on his hatred toward the Japanese Americans --

TI: On his hatred. Okay, I just want to be clear, so it wasn't based on any of the undercover work --

HM: No, he was no -- the FBI knew that, the Federal Communications Commission knew that because they were monitoring all this stuff.

TI: And they had access to the same reports coming out?

HM: Yes, but they just kept their mouth shut.

TI: Okay.

HM: And so here is a bunch of government agencies -- ONI knew that too. ONI, Army Intelligence, FBI, and the, the forerunner of the Defense Security Agency, they all knew it, but they wouldn't come out of the closet. They wouldn't testify against DeWitt.

TI: Because in some ways if they did it would blow the cover --

HM: Yes, it would have blown his entire testimony. But they left it in. It's part of the record.

TI: Okay. Well, at this point, I think we're gonna stop. And, this is probably a good stopping point.

HM: Okay.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.