<Begin Segment 4>

Q: Rick, you said you have a story.

RS: It's a line from my play, no. I think it's interesting, a couple of other aspects about the life of Gordon Hirabayashi in that period of time is that, to me, there was a lot of what I consider dark comedy or it's almost like theater of the absurd, because there's a lot of role reversals, there's a lot of bizarre things like Gordon to my mind was more American than the Americans, right? He, in fact, was holding them to their word and their word was in the Constitution and the rights and all that. And so Gordon said, "If you've written down these, all these things, and you believe in them, then of course given my case, then I shouldn't be put away like this." And little did he know, of course, that that's just all rhetoric and that in fact, America works by a whole different set of rules than those rules, to my mind, anyways. And so what happened is that, an example of that was that when he was in jail and he had heard about his court case and the decision, he was being kept in jail, he was supposed to be sent to a road camp and he was in the county jail and he said, "I'm not supposed to be kept here, I would like to be sent to the road camp." And the warden said that, "You can't because there's no openings." And Gordon had learned through the grapevine in the prison that there was in fact one in Tucson, Arizona. So he said, "I can go there," and the warden said, "Well, no you can't because we haven't got anybody to send you." And he said, "You don't have send anybody with me, I'll go by myself." And so the warden said, "Well, we can't really do that because you would also have to go through the restricted zone. The very reason that you are in this jail is because you decided you wanted to stay in the restricted zone." So Gordon says, "No, no, I'll hitchhike my way around." So they let him go. And so he hitchhiked through the restricted zone, got down to the jail in Tucson, and said, "Here I am, I'm Gordon Hirabayashi, I'm gonna turn myself in." And of course at that point, the guard there or the person there said, "Well, we don't know who Gordon Hirabayashi is, so you can't get in here, right?" So he had to literally go down the road, spend the night in a motel, go back the next day and say, "I'm here," and then the guy said, "Oh yes, we checked out the records, and in fact, we had misplaced your file. We're gonna let you in," right? And so they took him into the jail, and I, this is, this is kind of a joke. This is a bizarre joke that's being played on America, in a way. And I think those kinds of things, when he told me some of those stories, I thought, there's gotta be something here to write about, you know.

JH: And actually, Tucson is in Military Zone A so that he ended up in a restricted military zone.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 1983, 2010 Densho and Steven Okazaki. All Rights Reserved.