<Begin Segment 14>

RD: It's not too clear, you know, just how the community viewed the draft resisters, or for that matter, earlier, the people like Gordon Hirabayashi and Min Yasui who posed challenges to the government operations. I suspect that most of those who knew about it, and I think that the Yasui case was much better publicized at first than the Hirabayashi case, tended to feel that they were bringing discredit and calling attention to themselves and were behaving in a, in an unseemly manner. I'm sure also that there were a minority of Nisei college students, etcetera, who felt that Gordon and Min were doing exactly the right thing and were doing things that many of them had at least considered doing, but the pressures not to call attention to oneself were very strong. Family, friends, parents would all counsel against it. There certainly must have been the fear in the back of the mind that, "If I do this, maybe there will be retaliations to my family," because after all, if a whole people were being put in relocation centers just for doing nothing, what might happen to the family and friends of those who did otherwise? Gordon, I think, has told me that a couple of this friends might have protested with him, except that they were the only, the only child or the only son in the family and the whole family was going off. How could they abandon their family? Gordon had had brothers who could fill that role for him. I don't know what Yasui's situation was, so it's very problematic. Later toward the end of the war, a different kind of view ensues. And just as the JACL at one time denigrated not only protests, but the protestants toward the end of the war, they're filing amicus curiae briefs and giving favorable publicity to the very, very same people. But in those crucial days of 1942, dissent of any kind was a very, very lonely proposition, and I would have to guess that the overwhelming majority of the population, Japanese American population, who knew about the dissenters, disapproved of them.

[Interruption]

Q: How did people get to camp?

RD: Well, they were just told to go and they went. The army divided a whole area to be evacuated into a hundred and eight districts. District of an unequal size, but with roughly a thousand, little more or less, Japanese Americans within each district. The first was at Bainbridge Island, Washington, and then up and down the coast it went. And they didn't want everybody coming at once. They didn't have facilities for them and they didn't want them all arriving. But you got notice three, four, a week, three or four days, a week ahead of time. Notices were placed on telephone poles, you were asked the community newspapers to report at such and such a time to such and such an assembly center. You could bring with you what you could carry, you were responsible for bringing your own bedding and your own eating utensils. I mean, the government even furnishes those to prisoners, but not in this case. Japanese Americans had to bring their own. And then you were allowed, not allowed, you were loaded on buses, or trucks, in one or two cases, trains, and taken to the assembly center. The movement from assembly centers, once they had everybody incarcerated, on to the particular relocation camp, those were almost all train movements, and in larger increments.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 1983, 2010 Densho and Steven Okazaki. All Rights Reserved.