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FA: Did you ask your parents that? Did you ask them?

RS:Well, actually I never had to ask them that because I understood fundamentally a little bit more than some people, maybe because of the fact that I was born in the camps, spent an year and a half as a child growing up in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the postwar late '40s early '50s, racism was very real to me. I had people, kids run up and yell, "Dirty Jap," "Pearl Harbor sneak attack," hit me in the stomach, all that. I grew up with that directly because I was, you know, in a white society in Minnesota, the only, a handful of Asians there, a few Japanese. So I have had tremendous, the minority experience more than people who grew up in a Japanese or Asian community out here. I didn't have that privilege, I guess, of having my own community behind me, so I learned racism very directly. I understood what that was all about. It didn't have to be taught to me in Asian American studies courses, I lived it.

FA: Did you ever ask your parents why didn't they resist?

RS: I did, and I understood because my father volunteered for the service right after Pearl Harbor, and he was classified as an "enemy alien." They wouldn't take him, like a lot of Filipinos and others did. And so then when he was put in the camps, they came around and tried to draft him. And I was already born, and he was very bitter. He said, "When I volunteered, you didn't want me, now I have a family behind barbed wire and you are asking me to go now?" So I respect my father for the stand he took. I have uncles who were in the 442nd. My brother resisted the Vietnam War and went to Canada for many years because of what he believed in. The reason he did that was because of what happened to my parents, he told me. That's the reason he did not go fight in Vietnam against other Asians. So, my family, we lived it, the legacy was a living thing in our hearts. I didn't need to be told or questioned why they went to camp, because I knew they really didn't have much of a choice. There was not a cadre of Asian American lawyers running around at that time. [Laughs] Or enough people to articulate and defend the principles of the Constitution. Except that's why I really feel a lot of respect and courage for the resisters because of that. It took a helluva lot of courage to do this and take that stand in your own community.

FA: You said your father resisted the draft?

RS: No, he didn't resist the draft. Well, let me put it this way. He sent him a letter, and he said he was unable to go, and then he got out on a medical discharge because he had an ear infection and almost died on the operating table in camp, and came out with loss in one ear. But yes, he did volunteer, they turned him down, and then went after him when he was in camp. And I'll always remember some of the things, you know, 'cause my uncles, who fought, and valiantly, and also the older guys in the Military Intelligence Service whom I tremendously respect and spent time supporting their concerns when I was director, what I realized on the other side of the coin was there were a handful of other people who paid a price to the, 'til the day they went to their grave, and never got the recognition they deserved for the courageous stance they took defending the same constitutional principles that they, others went to war for.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 1996, 2005 Frank Abe and Densho. All Rights Reserved.