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TI: Right. Henry, I'm gonna bring us back to the -- it would be fun to talk about Frank and the program but let's get back to the research and the information that you got at the library now that you'd been there, and your thinking at this point.

HM: Well, the more I looked into this -- the records at the law library indicated to me that there were a lot of things that were done to us as a ethnic group that I don't think had enough publicity. For one thing, the fact that the government, in July of 1941, instituted the Enemy Trading Act, which by executive order placed us in the realm of being enemies of the United States. And this was a law that they passed in 1917, the first version, and they passed another version in 1918. And this was relative to the German economic situation between Germany and the U.S. And we weren't in a state of war at the initial time period when they thought about this Enemy Trading Act, but it was a method of stopping all commercial trade between the U.S. and Germany in essence. And the same law was still in force, and it was instituted against us in July of '41. And this is what caused the commerce between U.S. and Japan to terminate altogether in that time period. So all the banks that were doing business with Japan, they were closed down like Yokohama Species Bank and the Sumitomo Bank in Seattle. And --

TI: And so as you came across this information, what did that make you feel? I mean how did you feel, or what were you thinking as you came across this information?

HM: Well, it brought back all the things that transpired during that time period, and I remember that reported it. We used -- used to be at our house, and so I thought gee, all these things are starting to come into play here. We were designated as enemies before even the war started. To me, that was the declaration of war when you do that, when you say -- you take a class of people and say we're -- those guys are now enemies and we're now gonna institute the Enemy Trading Act against these individuals. Well, that's like a declaration of war. So all these different thoughts start coming back to me and I thought well, the government was knowingly doing this. And of course when I was in the Counterintelligence Corps, all this was very evident and -- but the information now started to become correlated. And the further I went with the stuff, the more I got interested in what methods or approaches we could take to circumvent the kind of actions that they took against us. And during this time period Mike Nakata... well when we were on the SST program, we were the two Asians in that specialist team for structures, for SST program. And he was as outspoken as I was in some of our positions that we took. And Mike would keep telling me, "Well, you keep talking about this stuff, but what the hell are you gonna do about it?" And this was his position. He says --

TI: So when you say, "talking about that stuff," you mean about the internment and the information that you were getting?

HM: Yeah, about like Enemy Trading Act situation and other, well...

TI: So you would discuss and share this with Mike and talk about it?

HM: Yeah. Mike was, Mike's family was totally involved with the Enemy Trading Act when they shut down the commerce between U.S. and Japan. Mike's father's business, which was a timber, lumber export to Japan, that was closed down altogether. So he couldn't do any of the business. So that was the culmination, or the termination of all the commercial activity, so things like that really was more devastating to his family than my own family. But he knew all this because he had firsthand experience with it. So his position was, "I keep hearing you tell me about these things." And he would say to me, "Well, what are you gonna do about it?" But a couple of our main positions were that Nikkei didn't provide an adversarial position on some of these things and we, everybody walked all over us, which was true. And he felt that unless we did something, we're not gonna be treated otherwise at the Boeing Company and in various other scientific and technological areas.

TI: So how did you react when Mike said, "What are you gonna go about it, Henry?"

HM: Well...

TI: You'd been doing all this research...

HM: I didn't know what to do. So I used to have discussions with Tony Hoare, and Tony would say well, you been doing some of your homework here. There is the legal method of approaching this thing, and there is also a legislative approach to the thing. And at that time he directed me to Professor Morris who was head of constitutional law at the University of Washington Law School.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.