<Begin Segment 13>

CO: Just in general for our audience, can you describe this organization?

JO: The Japanese American Citizens League was formed in Seattle in 1930. And at the time, they were a fraternal organization. It was not open to every Nisei. And they, because they selected, hand-selected the membership and they only selected big shots like Nisei professionals or scions of business or agriculture, they got this reputation as a elite organization. And at the time all this blew up, the JACL was recognized as simply a social organization because they were known to sponsor, every biennium, a big social dance at extravagant sites like the Seattle Yacht Club or the Biltmore in Los Angeles. And this was all being done when the bulk of the Japanese Americans were suffering the Great Depression.

CO: Nevertheless, they were taking on some other involvements, active in some of these cases, as you say.

JO: Well, they weren't directly. We're coming to that, but they weren't directly. Because when the Nye-Lea bill for Oriental veterans was passed, they never recognized the men who campaigned for it: Tokie Slocum. In fact, they didn't recognize him until I think around 1970 or so. Because Tokie Slocum himself was critical of the JACL and of course, he had made me his confidante and they didn't like that either.

CO: Tell us about Tokie Slocum.

JO: Tokie Slocum was a yobiyosei, born in Japan, brought over when he was a child to North Dakota. And a family, a white family named Slocum adopted him and he grew up thinking that he was 100 percent American. He was a stocky sort of a person, he was blunt, that was, talked rough. I don't think anyone today could stand him, the way he spoke about the Japanese. He didn't call them Japanese, he called them "Japs;" you, me, the rest of us. But it bothered me a great deal in the beginning, but later on I began to rationalize that he did this in order to shame the white, biased officials and congressmen. He did obtain the goodwill of the American Legion which was bitterly anti-Japanese at that time and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. And they supported the drive for Oriental veterans of the first world war. You have to remember that after the first great war, the United States had promised to give immigrant Japanese who fought with them their citizenship rights.

[Interruption]

CO: ...to explain this whole thing about World War I.

JO: Well, the United States government had promised the Japanese who entered the World War on their side, when the war was over, they would be granted citizenship. The United States kept that promise, but the Supreme Court shot it down. And as a result, the World War I veterans couldn't get their citizenship. Now, some did get their citizenship before the Supreme Court ruled against it. And so they maintained their citizenship. But all future ones couldn't get their citizenship. And the Nye-Lea bill, in, passed in 1935, which Tokie Slocum worked to obtain, which was presumably a JACL measure, which the JACL did not support financially, granted citizenship to all Oriental veterans, numbering some 700.

Now we come to the point of our second brouhaha, which was on the Oriental Veterans Citizenship Act. And because I was very closely identified with Tokie Slocum, I editorially wrote that the Japanese American Citizens League did not financially support the measure. The national JACL issued a report indicating these people who contributed to the fund and said that, "We have supported the measure financially." I looked through the names, every name, where Oriental veterans who were contributing their money to the fund, there was not one penny from the JACL. So I took the position that the Japanese American Citizen League was not backing Tokie Slocum in the campaign for Oriental veterans. This, of course, caused a big commotion because, and continued this confrontation with the JACL. They did not respond to my accusation that they had, line by line that these were veterans contributing. They did not respond to that.

CO: So what was the aftermath of that?

JO: It merely increased the tension between myself and the national JACL.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 1994, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.