<Begin Segment 16>

FA: Okay, the trial, set the scene for me. Were you taken to the courthouse in handcuffs, shackles, chains?

FE: No, none of us, none of us were ever handcuffed or shackled. But going from, going towards Cheyenne, we put on another passenger, a Caucasian young fellow who had escaped twice, I think, so he was in shackles and handcuffs. And when we'd stop at a restaurant to go eat, he would be clank, clank, clank, clank and there we were going with him, but we weren't handcuffed. It was quite a sight.

FC: Were the leaders ever separated from each other? Any one of them put in solitary confinement for any length of time?

FA: Not that I remember. We were all in one cell, but Okamoto tended to put himself to one side away from us. He was, he was pretty depressed and disappointed that he was incarcerated with us. He really, weren't enjoying, he wasn't enjoying it at all. [Laughs]

FC: But he expected to be arrested? He must have been.

FE: But he was very, very depressed about it. Rest of us weren't as depressed. We knew it was coming. In his case, maybe he was surprised because he was much older than us.

FA: How did you find an attorney? Tell me about...

FE: It was through, I think, Okamoto got in touch with ACLU and we got Wirin, but as a private attorney. The ACLU wouldn't help us at all.

FA: So what did he, how did he advise you? What did he tell you?

FE: Well, he came to the, I don't remember whether he came to the camp or he came to the jail. It's all very kind of cloudy now. I don't remember now. He advised us that we would probably have to go to the appellate courts because during wartime, he says, "You're going to have a hard time winning at the lower district courts." Especially being a constitutional issue.

FC: You expected to lose the first time through.

FE: Right. Although we, see, the sixty-three resisters that had a trial a few weeks prior to us opted for a non-jury trial. And during their trial, the newsmen were so taken by their rights that the WRA had to send a PR man there to convince the newsmen that the camps weren't that way.

FC: You mean the newspapers were sympathetic with the resisters' argument?

FE: The newsmen were sympathetic. In fact, in Douglas Nelson's book, Heart Mountain, History of (an American) Concentration Camp, he quotes one of the newsmen as saying that if he were treated like the evacuees, he'd be damned if he would join the army. We heard about this so we felt with a jury trial we'd get a better, fairer trial so we opted for a jury trial. But really at the end, it didn't make any difference; we were found guilty by the jury.

FA: Your trial was held on October 23rd, what was your strategy when going into court?

FE: We were going to come out and just not deny anything. Just say exactly what we did, and we did it openly and in public. And that kind of took the prosecution by surprise, because they thought we were going to deny everything. That's why they had Jack Nishimoto there to get me to speak up, incriminating me. But when we took our, when our defense came up, we admitted everything, we said it just like we did in the bulletin, that we felt that what the government was doing was unconstitutional.

FA: Did you take the stand in your trial?

FE: Yes.

FA: What did you say?

FE: Gee, I really don't remember. We just responded to what they asked, see. And I told them essentially what we've been talking about here. Not denying anything except when they asked about Jack Nishimoto's thing, I just, I think I told them that what he said was all false.

FA: Did you catch the eye of the jurors? I assume it was an all-white jury.

FE: Right.

FA: Did you look at them, did they look at you? Tell me about that. How did it feel to --

FE: Well, probably you looked at 'em from time to time but mostly at Mr. Wirin, who was our attorney and sort of leading us, questioning us.

FA: How did it feel to sit in the witness box?

FE: We weren't, not impressed too much.

FC: What did you wear?

FE: We all wore a suit.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 1998, 2005 Frank Abe and Densho. All Rights Reserved.