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Q: Rick, can you tell Jane your motivation for wanting to do Point of Order? What was it about Gordon's story?

RS: Well, to my mind, it was the fact that here was one man who had decided to do something that nobody else had done. Well, there was one or two other people but I knew him personally through work in the community in Canada. And so the idea of this guy who has, had gone against virtually everybody else was fascinating to me. He was basically, to my mind, a loner, and I think I have an interest in people who are loners.

Q: Do you have any thoughts about why he did what he did? Do you have an opinion about that?

RS: When I got involved in the research, and I did interviews with him and friends of his and did some readings of the court cases and all that, it became, it was a very complex question. It's partly his own family. His parents are quite unusual. His mother is, quite, was quite a fighter, quite a, you know, active person. His father was quite religious and they were of an unusual religious sect that in order to remain in that group, they had to sort of endure a lot of social criticism from other groups or... and people like that, so there was that. And he himself ended up being involved with the Quakers who had been involved with sort of civil protests and things like that. So his whole background was leading him to a position where he was able to begin to think about not obeying the government, which a lot of other Japanese hadn't even thought of. They weren't, they were in a position of just thinking, well, the government is telling them what to do, then they better do it.

Q: The other day you said you thought, originally you thought other Japanese Americans would also resist? Can you talk about that?

RS: To a certain degree, because Gordon was involved with Quakers in his university group, he wasn't that involved with the Japanese community itself. So what happened was that when he made his decision, he was making it with his friends in a relatively isolated situation. And the way Gordon thinks is quite logical, and so he thought, "Here is the logic of the situation, that it's wrong, and that I should do something." And he thought a lot of other Japanese would think the same way. To his surprise, it was only until after he had been arrested and everything else that he realized there was only one or two that were gonna do that and so, at that point, he had committed himself, so it was too late for him to turn around personally.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 1983, 2010 Densho and Steven Okazaki. All Rights Reserved.