<Begin Segment 9>

EO: Could you go back to the Fair Play Committee itself?

FE: Yes.

EO: Describe it. Like, who were... who constituted the committee?

FE: Okay, the steering committee, which more or less set the policies of the Fair Play Committee, was, included myself, Mr. Okamoto, Paul Nakadate, Minoru Tamesa, Ben Wakaye, Sam Horino... and let's see, there was seven of us. Well, Guntaro Kubota, but Kubota wasn't a citizen so he actually wasn't a member of the committee although he got indicted with us because he helped us by translating these bulletins into Japanese for the parents of the boys that didn't know too much English. So he was the seventh member, he wasn't actually a member but he was indicted with us. We were the ones that set the policies of the committee and we held meetings and some of us gave talks at these mass meetings and answered questions -- there's a lot of questions came up. And usually, maybe we had one or two that spoke in opposition and these were people that were in the ROTC at UCLA, and maybe a very strong JACL member, but I actually, I can't recall any JACL member there speaking up against it. It was mostly the people that were in ROTC at college that said that we shouldn't oppose this drafting.

EO: Did a lot of people come to meetings?

FE: We used to have a full house at these meetings that we held in the mess halls. The mess halls held three or four hundred people and I guess many times we had standing room only because this interest was so great, you know, this affected everybody in a very certain way that everybody was very aware of the seriousness of the situation, so they came out. Well, at the third, after the third bulletin was issued, we presented this resolution to the body at large and the response was unanimous to go along with this resolution of refusing to go. I think 99 percent. And even at this meeting there was one or two that were in ROTC that spoke up against it. Well, actually, we thought that we would probably get a great majority to refuse to answer their draft notices, but as it turned out, why, not everybody resisted. When their notices started to come, then many of them kind of got afraid of going to jail, so they answered the draft hoping maybe they won't pass the physical. In our case, there was in the Fair Play Committee, boys that refused to go, there was many in there that would have failed the draft because they had stomach ulcers, high blood pressure, bad eyes and things like that, but because they felt so strongly about it, they, instead of going to the physical to fail it, they just stood up for a principle and went to jail instead.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 1994, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.