Densho Digital Archive - Peter Irons Interview (denshovh-ipeter-03-0008)

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Q: Can you tell us about the kind of sentence that Min Yasui received?

PI: Min was given a year in prison and a $5,000 fine. And after his sentence was imposed, he was sent to the county jail in Portland. And he spent nine months there in solitary confinement, something that obviously really affected him. And he still talks about rotting in a stinking jail cell for nine months. It must've been a very bad experience. After he was released, I guess at the end of his good time, he was sent to the internment camp in Minidoka, Idaho, and he spent some time there. While he was in the camp, he was reconciled with the JACL, which had not supported his case originally, in fact, had opposed his case. And one of the things he did was to visit the camps in which young men had refused to register for the draft to try to persuade them that it was their patriotic duty to register and go in the army. And he had some very tense and emotional confrontations with these young guys who were being held in jail for resisting the draft. He said, "You have an obligation to support your country. It will show that you are patriotic citizens." And some of these guys said, "But they have my family behind barbed wire. How can I defend a country that's gonna keep my own parents, brothers and sisters, locked up for no good reason?" And so Min had this sort of internal conflict. He opposed the internment, the evacuation, the curfew, as a legal principle, but he also felt the Japanese Americans had a duty to defend the country, to show that they were loyal, patriotic. It's sort of a conflict or contradiction on the surface, but I think what it really reflects is his own feelings that you take a legal stand, but you don't let that stand influence your general duties and obligations to the country.

Q: Can we talk a little about the irony of Min's extreme patriotism and the evacuation and his imprisonment? Do those things really go together?

PI: There is some irony in Min's position, particularly in his initial decision to resist on legal grounds, the curfew, and then trying to persuade the young men to go in the army. But I think it's an irony that is, comes out of his real, his background, his whole approach. I don't think he himself feels that contradiction. He describes himself now as 110% patriot and think that of all of the resisters, he's the one who really displays the most basic attitudes of the Japanese American community, that the whole experience was shameful to them mostly because they were so loyal, they were so patriotic, being singled out, being accused of disloyalty, made them feel humiliated. And I think Min's response to that was to become even more patriotic, even more loyal.