<Begin Segment 7>

CO: Describe the trial. You were in jail for a while?

MK: Oh, we were in jail for ninety days, county jail, I think it was.

[Interruption]

MK: Before our trial, while we were in camp, when the Fair Play Committee was being organized, they had meetings at the mess halls. At the beginning, WRA let them have meetings, but after the WRA found out it was about the draft issues, they forbid the Fair Play Committee from having meetings, but they still had the meetings. I remember in... I've never, I didn't go to any of the meetings, but I think, I hear that it was all about our constitutional rights and things like that. So I think that at the time, most of the people were sympathetic with the resisters, there were some pro-WRA people that just couldn't understand what we stood for and naturally were against us, and I think that when, when most of the people that were with us went to their physicals and changed their minds, well, the rumor was that so many people were getting 4-F status, you know, not passing their physicals, that even the people that were with us changed their mind and went to the physicals. And the, when more and more people went to the physicals, I think the attitude of the camp changed, and more or less the camp just turned their backs on us. They were greatly influenced by Japanese American leaders and, that we were troublemakers and things like that, and that the right thing to do was not question, not question why, why this or why that. I think that most Japanese Americans realized what the situation was and they... most of them did what their conscience told them to do. Well, my conscience told me that this is really wrong and that I should stick up for my rights. So when we were picked up and put into county jail, everybody, all the young people, we all thought the same. There was never any arguments or anything, we knew what we stood for and we were willing to take it all the way to the Supreme Court, which we did. The JACL sent Min Yasui and Joe Grant Matsuoka to Cheyenne jail where we were, to kind of persuade us to change our mind. And they said that the image of the Japanese American is going to be bad if we stood up for our rights and protest about the draft. They wanted us to blindly follow the orders of what the government did for us.

[Interruption]

MK: We're talking about the draft issue. I think, I think a lot of people were watching the, how our case was going. And a lot of 'em were fence sitters, fence sitters, you know. They, if we, if we won our case, they would have gone along with us, but if we lost our case they were going to go for their physical. They had that choice, see. But since we were the early ones, we didn't have a choice. I wouldn't want a choice, anyway, because my mind was already made up. When we went to trial, I mentioned before, the JACL people from Denver came and tried to change our minds, but nobody would listen to 'em because our minds are made up already. We always thought that good constitutional rights should prevail over a good image and that's the way that a lot of Japanese Americans still think. That instead of fighting for your rights, you should present a good image. If you present a good image, you'll be accepted. But I think that's wrong.

And when our trial started, I believe that our judge's name was T. Blake Kennedy, and I really think that he was very prejudiced then. There was one humorous incident that happened during our court case when the federal prosecutor was rocking on his chair -- he was a pretty big guy -- and I don't know if he fell asleep or, or lost his balance, but he fell over backwards on his back and naturally, we had all young people sitting in the front row of the trial and I think it was only natural that we laughed. And the federal prosecutor jumped up and says, pointed his finger at us and said, "You won't be laughing when you, when you know what the verdict is." So in my mind, they already knew what the verdict was. Another humorous -- not humorous, but another incident happened, I remember, even though it was so many years ago, was that the federal prosecutor accused our attorney of being, I don't know what that word is, but... I'm trying to remember what the words he used, but it was that our lawyer was wrong in defending us. And they got into a huge argument and our lawyer stood up and this prosecutor told, "You better sit down or I'll go over there and sit you down." And our lawyer got mad and he took off his coat and he says, "Come on. If you want to try it, I'll fight you." I thought that was... those two things, I still remember. [Laughs]

And that we were found guilty and sentenced to three years in prison. And our judge's -- we just had a judge, we didn't have a trial, a jury or anything like that. Our judge's verdict was that since we got a 1-A call from the government, that that proves that we're loyal American citizens, that we were good Americans, so that we should fulfill our obligations as Americans, because of the 1-A classification. And that therefore, he found us guilty. And I said, gee, if that verdict came out today, he'd be laughed out of court, because that's such a ridiculous statement, you know? But you gotta understand it was wartime and that they were just about, could say anything to kind of back up their thinking. And that...

Okay, out of the sixty-three, half went to Leavenworth prison, and I and the other half went to McNeil Island in the Puget Sound in the state of Washington. We took our case to a 10th Court of Appeals and another verdict was rendered against us. And the judge's name was Judge Huxman who gave the verdict and he says that, "Two wrongs don't make a right." In other words, he's saying that it was wrong for us to be evacuated and incarcerated in a concentration camp. But he said it was wrong for us to fight the draft, too. So he says, "Two wrongs don't make a right." But he says, they found us guilty because we didn't go for our physical.

So we took our case to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court refused to review our case. No reason was given. But I think that... this is what I think: that since our case was involved in evacuation and incarceration, too, that if we won our case, that the Supreme Court would have to say that the evacuation and incarceration was wrong, and they didn't want to face that issue. So the easiest way out for them was to say that, "We won't review the case." And ours was, our case, I think, was probably one of the most important issues of the time about the Constitution and our citizenship rights. And today the Supreme Court reviews a lot of ridiculous -- to me -- ridiculous cases and they just refused to review ours. So we just said, "Well, that's it. How much further can we go?" We can't go any further so we said, we just serve our sentence and that's it.

CO: What was the jail like?

MK: Well, the jail was not as bad as I thought it would be. Right away, I think the prison officials said, you know, "What are these guys in prison for, anyway?" you know, and right away, they sent us to a, the farm. The farm had no bars, or anything. We were just about -- other than there were set times when we had to be in our squad room and stuff like that, we had a lot of freedom. I became a truck driver and Saturday and Sunday, I used to go all over the island measuring the water and things like that, so it took a, kind of a load off my mind that the prison officials didn't consider us as hardened criminals or things like that, you know. The food was better.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 1992, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.