<Begin Segment 13>

FA: One quick question. The government brought in Ben Kuroki, a war hero, to try and turn public opinion back towards the JACL and the draft. Tell me about Ben's visit to Heart Mountain.

FE: Well we heard, we heard that Ben Kuroki was coming and most of us leaders of the Fair Play Committee didn't pay much attention to it. We just thought that he was an asshole for coming into camp for trying to persuade the young men to enlist in the army when he himself was a Nebraska boy, never knew anything about the camp, never was forced out of his home, and for him to come into these camps and try to influence the people there to respond to the draft was totally stupid of him, I thought. So none of us went. I understand that he gave a talk and some of the resisters might have gone to listen to him but none of the leaders were there.

FA: Ben Kuroki talks about discrimination, bigotry, and how he was doing this for Japanese Americans and he considers himself, he is a Japanese American. And he says he came to, he fought in the army to try to overcome bigotry. Don't you think that he was doing something good for the cause of our community?

FE: Well, he might have been a good propaganda tool for the government as far as the public was concerned, but I don't think he had, really had any business coming into these camps to persuade people to go into the, into the military. If anything, I think he should have been a little more understanding of the situation that the Niseis were in, American citizens being kicked out of their homes, put into concentration camps. If anything, if he had any sense at all, he would have been a little more sympathetic towards that instead of following the government line of trying to get as many of these people into the army as possible under these circumstances. If these were ordinary times, sure, he would've been considered a war hero and everything by us, but under those circumstances, I don't think he was looked by us as a war hero. He might have been a war hero but he was certainly not a friend or sympathetic to the Japanese population that were imprisoned.

FA: That was great. Tell me again why you think Ben Kuroki was not qualified or not, did not represent you.

FE: He wouldn't represent us because he was just like any other Caucasian that was never in camp. He was a Nebraska boy as I said before, and he didn't know the things that we went through. And for him to come in and blandly say that we should be in the army and that we should obey everything the army told us to do was totally uncalled for.

FC: Are you saying there's a difference between the West Coast Japanese Americans and the few Japanese Americans in Nebraska?

FE: It was like black and white. The West Coast Japanese were all treated like enemy aliens, put in camps. And here he was a free American, he didn't have to endure what we had to go through. And for him to use his notoriety as a war hero bombardier, use that influence to come in the camps and try to influence the young men to go into the military under those pretenses was totally uncalled for and very idiotic, I think.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 1998, 2005 Frank Abe and Densho. All Rights Reserved.