<Begin Segment 10>

FA: Tell me about Mike Masaoka and Jimmie Omura, Mike being, what Mike's position was, what Jimmie's position was when the talk of evacuation started coming down.

AH: Well, Jimmie's position was that people needed to get together and to discuss this and to be upfront about what it was that they thought was, was a policy and they should discuss this importantly. And they had this Bay Region Committee for Unity and there were some famous people represented there, most notably Isamu Noguchi and then Lincoln Kanai, and Karl Yoneda and James Omura. And at first they protested the fact that Omura was even there because they only wanted representatives from organizations, and Omura was from Current Life. And then Karl Yoneda said, "Well, I'm a representative from a publication Doho," which was a communist newspaper, and so they decided, well, they could all stay. And they had a couple of meetings but at the most important meeting that they had, Mike Masaoka came in in the middle of the meeting and the meeting was starting to have an interesting discussion with different points of view. And he came in and when he came in to the meeting, he essentially took over the meeting. And he hob-goblinized the people that were at the meeting, he gave the "inside dopester" sort of information and that he was, he was certain that there was going to be a mass slaughter of people of Japanese American ancestry and that therefore what they needed to do immediately was to demonstrate their, their allegiance to the U.S. government in as vocal and as forthright a way as possible. You know, and he and Jimmie got into a little bit of a difference but he just overwhelmed Jimmie, and I think the sense of the meeting overwhelmed Jimmie, and Lincoln Kanai also sort of ended up leaving the meeting because he thought that Masaoka had buffaloed the other people that were there.

FA: So the two, Masaoka and Omura show up again at the Tolan Committee hearings.

AH: I don't think that Masaoka was still at the hearings when Jimmie got there. Jimmie came, as I say, very late in the day, and it was at the end of about eight hours. Masaoka spoke much earlier in the proceedings so there was no confrontation between the two of them at the meetings. But when they had the account in the papers after that of what had happened at the meetings, it was obvious that the JACL leaders were outraged over Omura's statement, thought he was grandstanding, and that he was creating a rift instead of closing ranks. And so there was, there was a bad taste in their mouth after the hearings, but nothing specifically.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 1998, 2005 Frank Abe and Densho. All Rights Reserved.