<Begin Segment 18>

EO: Well, Frank, I know you've been pretty active in recent times in all of this. What kind of reception have you been receiving when you tell your story?

FE: Well, I've been active with the NCRR in LA, and that's how I got to get contacts to speak at different places and then from there on sort of kept going from mouth to mouth, I guess. But I've been getting very good reception from these meetings, talks that I've given, and actually, I haven't felt any antagonism or animosity or ostracism from any group. In fact, in L.A. in 1988 or '9, I think the L.A. chapter of the JACL did sponsor a resisters' forum there. And Peter Irons was there and Mits Koshiyama came down from San Jose and we gave a talk there and the only person there that I had a little difficulty there was with Chris Nakagawa, who was president of the JACL at that time, and he sort of challenged my mentioning about Mike Masaoka's suicide battalion which I later showed him the article, you know.

EO: How do you answer the charge that you guys were just being cowards and didn't want to go fight?

FE: Well, we told them that in that particular case, personally, I told them that I didn't have to worry about going into the army, because I was never in danger of being drafted. And I says, "It just got so where you got pissed off so badly that you couldn't stay still, if you wanted to keep your self-respect." That what the government did was just like throwin' you down and spittin' on you. And the evacuation and the internment was bad enough after losing your business and everything, homes and business. But to compound that by drafting you as if nothing ever happened was sort of a bare-faced blatant injustice. So if you people felt, if those that went into the army from the camps that felt that that was their... will, that was their choice, then we respect them for it. Same way, they should respect our position. There shouldn't be any arguments. In fact, this is what I told them at the Oakland forum on February the 5th. That we had no argument with what they did, and they shouldn't have any argument with what we did. --

[Interruption]

EO: ...that you maybe wanted, just to talk about principles. That you, well, you can just say anything about it --

FE: I think, I guess those of us that were involved in this really felt that maybe we didn't have such high ideals as such, but we were just fed up with the crap that the government had forced on us, one after another, that we figured at some point you just have to get on your hind legs and speak up. And fortunately, there was a few there that felt the same way, you know. It would have been hard for just one man like Kiyoshi Okamoto to go around and speak, but there was a half a dozen or so of us that felt strongly enough that we were willing to make a statement. And we really had no illusions that maybe we'll... steppin' on the government's toes, so we might get charged with something, but well, we figured what the hell, we're in camp, you know, what's the difference? If we get sent up for what we were going to do, but figured at, at least morally, what we're doing is right, and we had a very big question about the legality of the draft law as it applied to the concentration camps. So we thought we had pretty fair grounds there to fight a battle.

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