<Begin Segment 11>

CO: I'm sure your family understood Gordon's stand and all. Do you recall at all how your family felt about Gordon's position?

JH: Yeah, subsequently I learned that there was considerable discussion between Gordon and my parents on him taking his stand. But all of this is subsequent to the event, and since I was, well, actually, I guess when the war started, I may have been fourteen because I was fifteen at the time of internment. And when you're that age, there was no discussion that I can recall, no family counselor or anything like that. I think Gordon discussed all these things with my parents and that was it. I don't recall anything that brought me into the conversation. Did you want me to talk about that? Well, Gordon, of course, was concerned about what would happen to the family if he were to take his stand. And this is something that he discussed with his roommate quite a bit, a fellow named Bill Makino. And Makino was also considering taking a stand as well. But he was the only son and his parents were elderly so they decided that maybe he should go along with the parents. And since my next brother Ed was a senior in high school, that I think he just graduated that year. So Gordon felt that the family would have enough support from my brother Ed so that he could take his stand. And I think my mother, particularly, didn't want him to do so, do what he was planning to do because she was worried about what would happen to him. But I think his convictions were strong enough that he had to do what he intended to do.

EO: What was that?

JH: To refuse to be interned. And so what Gordon did was, at first, he was obeying the curfew law. And then when he noticed that his other friends weren't having to abide by curfew, he decided not to pay any attention to it. And then he helped the people pack up their goods, he was working with the Quakers then. And when everybody was gone, he just reported to the local FBI office and said he's not going, and gave his reasons. They tried to talk him out of it. Tried to... and Gordon felt sympathetic and said, "Well, if you really want me..." the officer, the army officer who was in charge of internment in that Seattle area said, "Well everybody else is 100 percent and I'm the only area that isn't 100 percent because of you." And Gordon felt sorry for him, he says, "Well, all you have to do is get somebody, your husky people here, pick me up and drive me down to Puyallup and put me inside the fence." And the fellow says, well, he couldn't really do that so that was just a kind of a sideline during his discussion with the army.

And so he was jailed in the King County jail. During the trial, some interesting things happened. They wanted my parents up there for the trial and so they sent the deputies down to Tule Lake, picked them up and drove them up. My brother's friends wanted to take them in, but it was Military Zone A, so they wouldn't allow that. And they put my father in the same cell with my brother. My brother was sitting there one evening and the guard comes up and says, "There's someone to see you," and he looks up and it's my father. And so they stayed together. And, of course, my father probably would have preferred that anyway. And there was a problem about my brother -- my mother. So they put my mother in women's jail, and she was horrified, of course, having this proper Christian upbringing, to be incarcerated with prostitutes, murderers and whatever, thieves. And she was in the rec. room one day, and playing the piano. My mother is more or less self-taught on the piano. She, I just remember from the days growing up that there was this big square grand piano in the parlor. And she learned to play two kinds of songs: hymns for the services and Stephen Foster songs. So she started playing Stephen Foster songs in the rec. room and all the women gathered around and sang and they kept making her play over and over again, singing with tears coming down their eyes. And then the first time Gordon saw her was during the trial. She came in from a side door. And he said that she looked like she had stepped out of a beauty parlor. What had happened is all the women pooled their resources and fixed her up. And so that's why she looked like she had just stepped out of a beauty parlor. And after that incident I guess my mother changed her mind about women in prison considerably.

All they needed, my parents -- my mother never was called to testify. My father was merely called to testify to the fact that indeed that this was his son Gordon, 'cause they wanted to establish the fact that he's Japanese American who was of Japanese ancestry and who refused to be interned. And, of course, my father had problems understanding English, and since there was no one else around, Gordon became the court interpreter, which is kind of ironic. But anyway, those are the kinds of things that happened.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 1992, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.