Densho Digital Archive
Emiko and Chizuko Omori Collection
Title: Mits Koshiyama Interview
Narrator: Mits Koshiyama
Interviewers: Chizu Omori (primary), Emiko Omori (secondary)
Location: San Jose, California
Date: October 2, 1992
Densho ID: denshovh-kmits-02-0005

<Begin Segment 5>

CO: So along comes the registration, the questionnaire. Do you remember that?

MK: I remember. I went along and like the rest of my friends, signed the questionnaires. Since I was eighteen at the time, I didn't question why this or why that. I thought it's strange but, why we had to sign a loyalty oath, but I... I found out later that it was, the loyalty oath was at the urging of Japanese American leaders at that time who wanted to segregate who they thought was disloyal and the loyals. And they, our Japanese American leaders and the WRA got this idea of segregating, segregating these people by the loyalty oath. By the way, everybody says it was unconstitutional, but at that time, who were we to know what was constitutional and unconstitutional, because we were denied every constitutional right and put into concentration camps, so... I think I talked to my brother and we said, "Yeah, let's go and sign the loyalty oath." And so I went, and I signed both questions 27 and 28 with yeses. On question 27, I qualified my answer by saying, "Yes, I would be willing to serve in the United States Army but I would only do so if my constitutional rights were returned to me first and made me a free citizen." Then I felt that only then would I go and join the army. And I knew that the segregated army, I was against it but I said I'll still go if my constitutional rights are clarified and I was a free citizen again. And my family, too, was not interned in a concentration camp. And I said, "How can I fight for democracy in a free world when I'm fighting for the same thing that's denied my family and myself?" That was the issue for me.

CO: You understood that?

MK: Oh yeah. I said, gee, how can I go and fight for democracy when I'm in a, I'm in a concentration camp? My family and friends are in a concentration camp, denied every constitutional rights. And I said, how can I go? I don't think it's right. And I asked, when I went to court, I said, "Give me my rights back as American citizen and I'll be willing to go." I'm like the rest of those eighteen-year-olds; we didn't want, we didn't want to go to jail, that's the last place we wanted to go. But we were willing to stand up for our rights, and we said we're willing to suffer the consequences, we'll take it to court, and we'll see what, how it comes out. We were adamant that we should get our constitutional rights returned to us first.

And before that, we, my first, I think it was, status in the draft was, I became a 4-C, and I was, I was classified as an "enemy alien." And I thought, "Gee, why am I an enemy alien? I'm an American citizen." I just couldn't understand it, what the plan was, why I was a "enemy alien," classified an "enemy alien." And that... why does certain, how can you be an enemy alien one day and then the next day you get a 1-A and then you're a bona fide American citizen, so-called. I couldn't understand the thinking behind that. And all I could think was, "Gee, something's wrong here. I got to get my, clarification on my constitutional rights and my citizenship before I enter the army." That's what really bothered me, was: why am I treated this way? Why am I put into this camp, denied my rights and still asked to fight for the very things that were denied me?

So I think there were sixty-three of us in the first group, mostly young, and we all thought the same, and I can truly say that there was no one in our group that spoke pro-Japan or anything like that. All we talked about was getting our rights back as American citizen and we said that the government illegally put us behind, into concentration camp on false pretenses. And we never had a day in court, which Americans call, all Americans call "due process of law," which entitles all American citizens a day in court to prove their innocence. We never had that. So we said we wanted these things. We were just like any other American citizen. We thought like Americans and the old saying goes, when the colonies fought Great, England for their freedom, they said that they didn't believe in taxation without representation. And in a way, I believe that the draft case was the same. Taxation without representation. Here we didn't have a... we weren't free citizens, and yet we'll, they were trying to force us into a segregated army unit and fight for the very things that were denied us.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 1992, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.