<Begin Segment 6>

FC: You had no contact with the JACL during war?

FO: No. I must, I must confess, I didn't know anything about the JACL. Didn't even know it existed until after the war. After the war, we did a lot of work for, with Japanese and with the JACL, and I became acquainted. As a matter of fact, Saburo Kido for a while was in our office, after the war, as a lawyer.

FC: Gallagher and Wirin...

FO: Well, Gallagher was long gone. That's another story. [Laughs] No, Al was there and Frank Chuman.

FC: Oh, yes.

FO: Do you know who the... Frank Chuman was in the office, then I came and Saburo Kido was there and for a while, John Mayeno. Mayeno, another Japanese lawyer. And for a while... forget his first name, he's the father of Mike Yamamoto, who's the present president of the Japanese American Bar Association, we did work with him. So we had a lot of, of Japanese clients, both for domestic problems and over, lot of Japanese were caught, the Kibei were caught in Japan when war came. And we had a lot of work for them, getting them back to the United States. They were first refused by the State Department, the State Department said they had lost their United States citizenship. We had hundreds of cases involving those people. So that's, that's my... so as I say, I became very familiar with Japanese people in general, and with the JACL, Mike, Mike Masaoka.

FC: What did you think of Mike?

FO: Well, I must tell you, I've read some very serious criticism of Mike, but he's probably one of the finest lobbyists that anybody ever had. I mean, he was, he was just great at getting people who would, you'd think would be against what the Japanese were doing, to get, and they got a number of laws passed. You know, the Nationality Act, the First Compensation Act, he was a great lobbyist. I thought he was a great person. I understand the criticism that has been leveled at him by those who felt that the JACL was counterproductive and all that sort of thing, but he was very capable individual. Absolutely.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 1995, 2005 Frank Abe and Densho. All Rights Reserved.