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FA: In this climate, there was a riot at Manzanar, betrayal after betrayal, lied to. Why did the government institute this questionnaire for leave clearance?

MW: Well, as I told you, leave clearance was the idea of the WRA. As for the recruitment of volunteers, that was the Provost Marshal General, the War Department's idea. I, of course, have my own personal theory as to why this questionnaire was instituted. Because I have come across documents which show that the military, U.S. War Department was enormously impressed with the stoicism of the Japanese soldier. There is a description of this strafing of an American ship and these Japanese prisoners were cool. They went to the aid of American GI, the sailors, who were wounded, who were hysterical, who were terrified of this continuous strafing. And the Japanese soldiers who were prisoners actually, but they took it with no fear, no obvious fear of the fact that the ship was being strafed continuously and they were more than eager to help the wounded American sailors. And they said, "This is an incredible demonstration of the Japanese spirit, the yamato damashi upbringing." And there was something about the Japanese that is remarkable.

And my own theory is that they, although they turned down Mike Masaoka's initial proposal that the Nisei become a suicide unit, with their parents as hostages, I believe that after that first year of war when we were really losing a good part of the Pacific war, 'til Midway, we were going downhill. And the War Department felt that, "We ought to take advantage, we ought to exploit this remarkable stoicism, this esprit de corps, the yamato damashi spirit of the Japanese," of course, they didn't know the difference between an American, a Japanese American and those, our cousins there, our relatives in Japan. Of course, we were brought up pretty much in the same manner. We were instilled with a great deal of stoicism. And we were told of how the Japanese soldiers would walk for thirty miles with, on a lunch of a rice ball with an umeboshi inside. And so we were never allowed to complain about the food we were served because our parents would immediately say, "Think about how the Japanese soldiers are sacrificing themselves, and you have the nerve to complain about food when they can walk 30 miles on just a rice bowl, a ball."

FC: Given this misconception, the stereotype, army, that the government had, what did the government, army propose?

MW: The army proposed that we ought, there are a lot of Japanese Americans which comprise good manpower, going to waste in the concentration camps. And we ought to sort out, at least sort out the sheeps from the goats. We can't trust them all. But we should at least try to get volunteers initially. We cannot trust them to the extent that we institute selective service. After all, they, they'd all been given 4-C status, draft status and so, which was the equivalent of "enemy alien." The Japanese American citizen was considered an alien. And so it was embarrassing to the military that like a few weeks before they instituted the drive for volunteers, they suddenly changed the 4-C to 1-A. And that created a great deal of dissention and suspicion among the Japanese Americans. They said, "My God, right after Pearl Harbor they fired all the Japanese Kibei who had volunteered or who had been already inducted." There were five thousand Japanese Americans who were already in the army and many of them had been moved inland and been given wooden guns, and they were given kitchen duty. And the Kibeis were fired; they weren't to be trusted. And so the whole thing smelled. They saw through it. They said, "This is not legitimate. This stinks. This really does not make sense."

They had sent a team from the War Department, actually from the Provost Marshal General's office, and there was a sergeant who was the head and there were maybe three Caucasians. They always had one Nisei. And they were sent to Washington to get a crash training on the "Japanese mind." They had to study, day after day after day, about why the camp had been established, why it was necessary that it must be maintained. They wanted them to be able to fully explain to the camp audience the hard questions that may be thrown at them. But the end, they were told, that, "You are not to respond with your own theory if any questions are thrown at you that you don't know anything about."

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 1998, 2005 Frank Abe and Densho. All Rights Reserved.