<Begin Segment 7>

FA: At that time, what was your opinion of the Japanese American Citizens League, the authorized representatives of the Japanese American people?

JO: Well, personally I didn't think much of them. I thought they were a confused bunch of leaders and they didn't seem to have the intellectual quality necessary to lead any group that I could see.

FA: The leader of the Japanese American Citizens League, Mike Masaoka, you saw him in San Francisco right before evacuation at a community meeting in San Francisco. You were standing... well, tell me Jimmie, what was your impression of Mike Masaoka at that meeting?

JO: Well, Mike Masaoka was a young man, had wavy hair, very attractive to the girls, you know, and to the public I imagine, but what he was saying, he was using slogans, various slogans, such as "the end justifies the means." And if you analyze that, you know right off the bat that that sounds screwy. Well, that was an old Jesuit saying way back, and the Jesuit was using that to bribe the people so that they would become Catholics. This happened all over Europe, and I'm a student of European history, and they were driven out of England --

FA: Jimmie, let me interrupt you. What else did Jimmie, what else did Mike Masaoka say to the people at the San Francisco meeting?

JO: Oh, he used various other slogans like...

FA: "The greatest good for the greatest number."

JO: "Greatest good for the greatest number," and numerous other things like that, "for the evacuation is good for, for the people to save them from guns and tanks," which I disagreed with.

FA: Tell me, Jimmie, did Mike Masaoka talk about the threats of violence, tanks, guns, against Japanese Americans on the West Coast? Tell me what he said about that and what you thought about that.

JO: Well, he says if we all didn't evacuate, that the army would come in with men, with guns and tanks and assassinate us. I didn't believe that was possible, because the United States government was very sensitive about relations with Japan, Imperial Japan. If any incident occurred of that sort, there was bound to be reprisal and it was afraid of reprisal, and I knew this and I believe that it would have never happened.

FA: You were standing next to Mike Masaoka, you told me?

JO: Eighteen inches behind him.

FA: What did you think about his attitude at that time, at that moment?

JO: I felt at that time... I saw his body tremble as he related about night riders shooting into homes of Japanese and of two aged Japanese couple, farm couple being murdered by Filipinos in the Imperial Valley, and as he related these stories, which was no, it was old story to me because we've already read that in the newspaper, his body was trembling and I thought to myself, "This man is scared."

FA: This man is what?

FA: Scared. Terror-stricken. And he used his fear to encourage the Japanese public to follow the JACL line.

FA: What did you think of that kind of strategy?

JO: Well, fear is something that everybody understands at that period because people were being arrested left and right. There was over five thousand people, Japanese Americans, that were arrested at this time, and even the one who were released were again called back and eventually some of them were arrested and put into internment. So naturally, even the neighbors hearing about these things would be afraid even though they were not directly affected.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 1993, 2005 Frank Abe and Densho. All Rights Reserved.