Densho Digital Archive - Frank Miyamoto Interview (denshovh-mfrank-05-0013)

<Begin Segment 13>

CO: So how did this manifest itself?

FM: You mean the...

CO: What happened?

FM: You mean the conflict between the "no-no" and the "yes-yes"?

CO: Yeah, in what shapes did this conflict show...?

FM: Well, we had these, we had these matters discussed in block meetings and the chairman of our block was a Kibei, a friend of mine... let me back up a minute. The issues were being discussed in the blocks by council representatives to the community council and the council representatives in each block were people who had been elected and who then were represented in the council in the so-called legislative body of the community, the community council. Now this chairman of our, the representative in our block, was a Kibei who as it happened, however, did not favor the characteristic view of a Kibei that they should take a strong anti-administration stance on this issue. He felt that people should be allowed to make their own decisions in their own way, which is the point of view which I wanted to have reflected, of course. But having taken that point of view, then there was a strong protest from the residents of the community -- of the block, particularly Kibei members of the block and some, many of the Issei who felt that a very strong declaration should be made of "no" against the federal government and the WRA on the question. My personal view was that I was not going to respond "no-no" to any such questionnaire and I therefore backed the, publicly, the chairman of the meeting, the council representative in our block, and when I did so, I heard a Kibei fellow whom I happened to know, vaguely, state something like this: "Let's take this guy and sack him." He used a Japanese expression, "throw a sack over him, and throw him in the ditch." And my mother, who was sitting not too far away, heard this fellow make this kind of statement. Later in the evening she came to our house -- to our apartment, so-called -- with a hot pan of water in one hand and a hat needle in the other and she came to defend her son from an attack by these Kibei. This was the kind of situation we found ourselves ultimately in...

CO: Were there many attacks? Do you remember?

FM: There were some attacks, yes. People who got battered by 2 x 4s and this sort of thing. So it was not totally out of the question that this sort of attack might happen. My, one of my friends had a much more stressful situation, prepared his whole apartment so that he'd be ready for an attack. He had a big carving sword under his bed, and this sort of thing, to defend himself, if attacked. So my reaction --

CO: So it was tense.

FM: Extremely tense at some points. And many people felt themselves very thoroughly threatened by... on both sides they felt themselves threatened. And the intensity of the reaction against people like myself was reflected in -- was a reflection of the fact that people felt they were threatened by the federal government with being forced to get out of the community centers, thrown to the wolves, so to speak, without means of support and that was why they were reacting as severely as they were. On the other side, people like myself didn't want to get caught in the situation of having to do something we didn't want to do, and so we felt threatened.