<Begin Segment 18>

EO: Do you remember that moment that you, when you and Peter decided this was, that this was it?

AH: Yes, I was, when I saw it, I just about hit the ceiling, I just couldn't believe that this -- and I'm not a professional researcher, so a professional researcher may have had a different kind of high, but I did experience a high that I couldn't believe I had, I had made this discovery. It was all the more surprising, because I had operated for the past few years under the assumption that there were no more of these copies, so it was like finding a little gold nugget. That doesn't happen too often, I think, to researchers, and I think when it happens in the archives you can just feel an explosion, and that's the way I felt.

There was another incident similar to that and it also involved Dr. Peter Irons. He was looking for a particular oral transcript in the 1943, 1944 trial of Korematsu, and he is a dogged, determined researcher. He even looked up what stenographic company had taken the notes down in 1944 of that trial. Because we didn't have the tape recorder or video camera at the time. So we relied on shorthand notes for trials at the time and we tried to trace the stenographic company, I called them, he found out the name of the company, he found out they had gone out of business and of course, anything that was older than thirty, forty years, they had discarded. So that was out, but he, for several years he kept looking for this one oral transcript of the solicitor general in the Korematsu trial, that was Charles Fahey. He never gave up hope, one day when he was in the archives -- and he traveled quite often from wherever he was -- whether it was Washington, or San Diego or New Hampshire or someplace, to go to the archives to dig up, try to locate this one transcript. One day he found a little 3 x 5 or 5 x 8 card in the archives that said it might, this might be what he's looking for. And he didn't have time to look for it, he had to go back to teaching class, so he gave the assignment to Jack and me to follow up on it. So we did what was necessary, got a little bit of resistance from the Justice Department, but we were able to track that down to the record center in Suitland, Maryland. The Justice Department lawyer who was fighting Dr. Irons in these coram nobis cases didn't want us to be the first one to handle it. He himself had been looking for it, this Justice Department lawyer. It was a very important document. He himself was looking for it. And so when we told him, "We think we found it," he said, "Well, when I find it, you give me the citation for where it is, when I find it, I'll send it to you." I said, "No, no. We'll meet you at the archives over there in Suitland, and then we'll look at it together." Of course, he couldn't say no.

The next day, we got to the archives and sat near a window where we could watch everybody coming up and we saw him sauntering up, sort of trotting up. We followed him, no matter where he went we were right on his tail to make sure that he wasn't going to get rid of the, the document and finally when he, there were a lot of little things that happened in-between time, but the bottom line was when he finally opened up the box, the important document of which there was only one copy was in a box thrown in with all kinds of unrelated materials and this made me think that archives is, it's a hard search. You will find sometime like this little, I call the second nugget, gold nugget, in a box with other information, other materials, other publications, totally unrelated to the subject. But here was this wonderful, oral transcript of Solicitor General Fahey which proved that the Justice Department, in defending the War Department in the Korematsu case back in 1944, sort of instructed the Supreme Court Justices to rely upon General DeWitt's report as truth. Therefore justifying the action taken against Japanese Americans.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 1994, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.