Densho Digital Archive - Roger Daniels Interview (denshovh-droger-02-0010)

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Q: Roger, could you comment on Mike Masaoka's stance to, for instance, Min Yasui, and to the others at Minidoka about supporting Min's effort in other acts of dissent like Min?

RD: Well, the attitude that Mike Masaoka and other JACL leaders took toward these early dissidents and later, I might add, to the draft resisters, was certainly one that is hard for some people today to understand. It seems to me that the resisters were, in a way, the heroes, or some of the heroes of the relocation. Yet you must understand that the JACL leadership, Masaoka included, had taken a very hard position, a very difficult position, I mean, they were between the rock and the hard place. Anything they did was wrong. But they would've said, "Yes, we will go along." And maybe in an ideal world, they also would've said, "But if you want to dissent, peace be with you, brother," or some such thing. But they didn't do that. And I think they saw the line that Yasui took as dangerous. I think they were afraid that large numbers of people might follow his example and there were petitions around to support him and this sort of thing. I think that's not true, by the way, I don't think there was any way there were ever going to be large numbers of this kind of dissident. But they saw that as perhaps threatening their whole program. And that if there were mass resistance, their notion of communal rehabilitation would have been out the window and down the tubes. So in a way... and this is what oppression does. Instead of being united against the real enemy, you know, the people who put them in the concentration camps, Roosevelt, the army, Bendetsen, the politicians, the general public, etcetera, here they are fighting with each other over how they should respond. Well, I think there are a number of ways that free men can respond to oppression. Certainly one of them, and a very politic way, was the JACL way, alright, we'll do what our government says. We'll go, we'll do what it says and I hope they make it up to us after the war. But there is another way for free men to respond, and women, to respond to what they think is oppression and that is to say, no, I'm an American citizen, here I stand, I won't do anything else. And that's what a very few people do, early on, more do later in the draft resistance. But I think it's understandable that the... what had become suddenly the Japanese American establishment, the JACL, which had its party line: all right, we'll cooperate now and it'll mean that we'll have a better life after the war. And that was an accurate scenario. That, in fact, did happen. But there are other scenarios too and they didn't, and they resented those other scenarios very much because, of course, the dissent was an implied criticism of them. It's almost like Thoreau, you know, Thoreau's in prison objecting to the Mexican War and won't pay his taxes, it's symbolic. And his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson comes and asks him, "Henry, why are you in there?" And Thoreau says, "Ralph, why are you out there?" Well, that's what Min Yasui and Gordon Hirabayashi were saying to the to the JACL leadership: "We're here. Why are you there? Why aren't you in here with us? So that's part of it.