<Begin Segment 2>

Q: Can you tell Jane about the background of Korematsu, about what his family was up to? Could we also go over a little bit more with the girlfriend and the plastic surgery?

PI: You want me to talk about that, plastic surgery?

Q: Why he did it and did he get away with it?

PI: Okay. Fred was in a much different position than either Gordon or Min. For one thing, his family background didn't dispose him to thinking about the internment issue in terms of either morality or legal principles. It was really a very personal decision. He had become more separated from his family, he had moved away on his own when he went to work. There was not a lot of family discussion about this. Fred had another very personal reason, which was that he was then engaged to a Caucasian girl. He didn't want to be separated from her; he felt that he had a right to stay there with her. And his response to that was to change his appearance or attempt to, by having plastic surgery done on his eyes and his nose, thinking that it would make him look Caucasian. He forged a new draft card with a different name. So he, in a sense, tried to evade the internment, partly out of his own feeling that it was wrong, but also because he thought that he could pass as someone who wasn't Japanese American. And so those factors, I think, made his decision to resist the internment not a more personal one, but one that was based less on having thought out the issues, the moral or the legal issues, reacting really as somebody who was more isolated from the Japanese American community than either Gordon or Min was.

Q: Can you tell Jane about the transition, perhaps, with Fred from very personal reasons to going through the whole trial process? Why anyone who just did it for a girlfriend would go and put themselves through all this?

PI: I think when Fred decided to evade the internment, to stay in San Leandro, a lot of that, of course, reflected his own wish to stay with his girlfriend. But as, after he got arrested and he was approached by a lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union along with three or four other young men who had been picked up for resisting, or for violating the exclusion orders, Fred was the only one who was willing to risk going to jail, bringing a test case, being exposed to the publicity that would obviously result from that. And I think that as he thought about the consequences of that stand, particularly when he was put in the camp awaiting his trial, and he was under a lot of pressure from other internees, "Don't rock the boat, don't bring down a lot of publicity on us," public hostility, he became more and more firm in his conviction that somebody had to stand up and bring a test case. He thought through these issues and I think developed a position that was close to both Gordon's and Min's in its motivation, that is, he had a legal right as an American citizen to be free, he had a moral duty to support his principles...

[Interruption]

Q: Could you tell us about Fred's reason for continuing to put up a fight, even though it was just for personal reasons he resisted the evacuation?

PI: When Fred was first arrested, I don't think he thought through the implications of what he was doing. it was a personal decision on his part, but he reached it without consulting anybody else, talking to his family about it. But as he was approached by the ACLU as a potential test case and decided to go ahead with it, he became, I think, more firm in his convictions and developed a position that was really very much like Gordon's and Min's both, the moral feeling that he had a right as an American citizen to stay where he was, and the feeling that there were, he was standing up for the legal rights of Japanese Americans.

Q: What happened to the girlfriend?

PI: What happened to her? Fred's girlfriend at the time was approached by the FBI who sort of intimated that she might be in danger for harboring a criminal, and their relationship broke up when he went off to the camp. He didn't see her after that.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 1983, 2010 Densho and Steven Okazaki. All Rights Reserved.