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Q: Tell us, though, how did the community view, or what was their opinion of the JACL line in '42 and how it may have continued today, up until the present.

RD: Well again, you know, the notion that there is a community thing... I would suggest that in the weeks immediately after the promulgation of Executive Order 9066, and then the Tolan Committee came out and various Japanese American community leaders, almost all of whom were JACL members, spoke for the community. What they did there was they sort of stepped into a vacuum, because there were no other leaders left. And they kind of assumed the role of leaders of the community, and there was not too much resistance to grabbing that role. It wasn't a good time to become a community leader; there weren't many competitors for it. Right from the start, there were some who resented this. Leaders are always resented. And some of that resentment breaks out at Santa Anita, at Manzanar, and then of course, at Tule Lake is, is an entirely different kind of, different kind of proposition. There were certainly segments of the community which supported the JACL right down the line. There were other segments that said, "Well, I'll go along with what they're doing." And then there's a small but vocal segment who says, "No, they're not doing it right." Now there's, I think there was both a left opposition, people who were America-oriented who said no, that's not right, because they're giving up our constitutional rights too easy. There was what we could call a right opposition or a Japan-oriented opposition. Some Issei, some Nisei, some Kibei, not all of any group, who said well, look. Japan's gonna win this war or for one reason or another, we're identified with Japan, and what we ought to be is prisoners of war, and this notion of cooperating with our oppressors is, it just doesn't make a great deal of sense. So that the opposition comes in two different ways. But there's a big hunk of the community that' s largely passive. They'll go along until things get terribly bad. And they, most of the time, they don't get terribly bad, but you look at the Manzanar, at the Manzanar disturbances, which got people killed in December of '42. There, there's one example of this sort of thing.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 1983, 2010 Densho and Steven Okazaki. All Rights Reserved.