<Begin Segment 18>

FA: Tell me what, you must remember the first sight you had of Leavenworth coming into view, prison, penitentiary.

FE: Well, it was a big building, I don't remember what color it was now. Big, big iron gate in the front.

FA: How did it make you feel going into the gate?

FE: Well, we were ready for it. So we just thought, "Well, this is part of the game," you know.

FC: Here you were gonna go in and spend the next four years of your life with murderers, rapists...

FA: Racketeers.

FC: Thieves, pirates, binglers and banglers, what did you think of that?

FE: Well, we had one advantage. There was thirty-three -- no, there was about thirty draft resisters already there, waiting for us, our welcoming party. So in that respect we figured, well, we'll be there with people we know, so we didn't feel too badly about it. We knew this was part of the price we had to pay for our resistance.

[Interruption]

FC: Were there any prisoners there, any Japanese American prisoners there not connected with the Fair Play Committee or the draft or camp issues?

FE: Yeah, there was one, his name was, I forget his first name but his last name was Fukumoto. And he was there for going to the banks and going to the stores and doing fast change artist. He would give them a five dollar bill or ten dollar bill, whatever, and get 'em into conversation or something, and then he'd say, "Oh, I gave you a twenty dollar bill," or whatever. He did that once or twice too often and he got caught and got put in the federal prison. And I think he was in there for five years or something because he had pulled something like that before.

FA: Tell me about the judo demonstration inside prison.

FE: Yeah, a few months after we got there, they had a sports day at Leavenworth. And during that sports day the officials asked us if we would like to participate in that and if we had any sports that we'd like to exhibit. So there were several of us that were into judo at that time so we said, "Yeah, we'll put on a judo demonstration." So it was like a big football field with bleachers and we had, they provided mats. And after we got warmed up we would have, throwing each other and have the little guys throwing the big guys. And this is the first time these inmates ever saw anything like that. And they were really wide-eyed and really surprised and they gave us, gave a round of applause. We always felt that that was one reason maybe we were left alone. They didn't, everybody treated us pretty well. Especially when the other inmates found out why we were there after we were in concentration camps and they tried to draft us so we said we would not go until our rights were restored, they sympathized with us. They really supported us, so we didn't have any problems.

FC: So all the warnings of Yasui, they're going to be kangaroo courts, kangaroo courts, they're going to beat you with two by fours, there are super patriots in prison waiting for you...

FE: That was all a bunch of bullshit.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 1998, 2005 Frank Abe and Densho. All Rights Reserved.