<Begin Segment 19>

TI: Because you didn't think forming this organization was going to be enough? That the organization had to do...

HM: No, no.

TI: ...something. That there had to be something --

HM: It has to be more than just the engineers. It has to be a big, broad network of people in the Seattle area. And even interfacing the company and saying, "You guys are not giving us the respect." But beyond that, he felt that because the Nikkei weren't speaking up, that they're going to keep walking on us anyway. And that really set my mind to thinking. And then I used to have these discussions with our attorney. We were making some limited partnership agreements. And, and there was a real estate guy involved, Paul Sakai and myself, and I had a lot of people that wanted to become part of a limited partnership because we had a pretty good track record on the real estate transactions we were doing. And we usually tripled their money in a matter of about three or four years. So anyway, when we went to this attorney, and this guy's name was Anthony Hoare, he says, "You know, you guys have a very strange draft of what limited partnership you want me to draw up." And he says, "This is the first time I've ever heard of a limited partnership that wants the distribution first to the limited partners, and then the profits to the general partners at the end." He says, "I've never heard of this kind of stuff."

TI: Because usually the general partners get their money out...

HM: First. Yeah.

TI: ...first. And then --

HM: Yeah. So I, I said to Tony, "Well, we got a lot of limited partners in this thing that, would like to have their money first before the generals get it." And he thought this was real strange. And he says to Paul, "Do you agree with what Henry's saying?" And Paul says, "Well, not really, but he's, he's pushing it. He's got more guys investing in this thing than we do. So he's got the majority function here." And anyway this, the real estate guy said the same thing roughly. So he says, "Okay. I'll draft it up, and I'll -- let's have another meeting. And you guys can review it." And that's what we did. Anyways, Tony thought that I was kind of strange in that way because we're not taking the skim off the top. So I says, "Well, I feel empathetic towards limited partners because I'm one of them." [Laughs]

And then we got into a discussion about the evacuation. I forgot what the lead-in to it was, but anyway he had studied the evacuation very thoroughly in his law school time period. And he had a great deal of knowledge about it. And I talked to him about Gordon Hirabayashi. And he knew about the concurrency situation of the test case. And he was also able to (try cases and) be at the Supreme Court. And he had been approved for that level of legal contest. Usually you're approved for certain levels, superior court, appellate court, appeals court. But he had, he had something to do with one of the cases in the Supreme Court. So he was approved for -- and he had a lot of knowledge about this thing. So I started asking him a whole bunch of questions every time we used to meet. I used to get there a little bit early for the purpose of asking him these things. In fact, I wrote 'em down one time. And he says, "Hey, let me see that piece of paper you're referring to." So he says, after he looked at it he says, "I got couple of books here that you should read." And he takes 'em off of his bookcase, and he says, "Here." And he says, "You should read 'em, and then ask your questions after you read these books. Do a little bit of homework first."

And the two books was, the first one was How to Find the Law, and the other one was the Supreme Court cases where the United States government lost and the plaintiff won. But Millikan, a whole bunch of them in there. It was a good book. So I studied the damn things very thoroughly.

And at the same time my, my son was in Doctor Hughes' gymnastics program at the U of W. And every Saturday (morning) and Wednesday evening they used to have gymnastics for these young kids. And he was trying to groom these kids from junior high school level to high school so that he'd have people to pick from for his U of W program in gymnastics. He wasn't having the down level type guys, able to produce. So the class was on Wednesday evening and Saturday morning. And so I would drop off Robert like Saturday morning, and I'd go to either the main library or one of the other libraries. And I started trying to find this stuff that related to the public laws relating to the evacuation process, and then after the evacuation about the money distribution of the Sumitomo Bank thing, the Yokohama Species Bank, so forth. And I couldn't get into their data system because we had to have a budget for it. So on one occasion I told Tony, "I can't get into that law school database. Can you help me?" And he says, "Yeah." He writes out this thing --

TI: Because Tony was a faculty member or had some connections --

HM: No. He had -- he was a kind of advisor to some of the candidates for the law school. Well, he was interested in trying to get people, especially minorities, into that law school. That was one of his interests. Anyway, so he gives me this authorization. And the authorization was to be able to use that law firm's budget for my, for my investigation work. And gee, I thought that was pretty generous because he wasn't making too much money on our limited partnership deals. And so he said, "The reason why I'm doing this is because I want you to really go and find out what it is that had, had happened, the circumstances. I want you to be able to tell me the various historical points of the thing. And if you really want to do something you're gonna have to know all the facts." And that's what he -- that was the, kind of a catalyst that started all that stuff, investigation in the law school library. And that's what started me on reading all kinds of books and things of this nature.

TI: Okay. That's good.

HM: And then in time, I was able to confront Mike Nakata with a straight face, and says, "Yeah, okay. This is what we're going to do." And that's how we really got started.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.