<Begin Segment 17>

FC: What did the Japanese Americans think of Jimmie's editorials in the Rocky Shimpo and what did the FBI think of his editorials?

AH: That they ought to be scrutinized. That surely he was part of a conspiracy and that, that he was anti-American. I think the community bought into the JACL castigation of Jimmie. I think he was a blackguard in their minds. And the take on Jimmie, I think, was that he was a self-serving egotistical know-it-all who essentially was challenging the leadership and operating out of a sense of not having the support of other people in the community. I mean, I think he was, they reviled Jimmie in many quarters. So, at least that's the centralist position. I think there were other people that respected him and admired him, however begrudgingly, for having the independence of his thought, but also knowing that he tapped into things that they believed in, believed in, too, but were too timid to be able to say.

FA: Jimmie's editorials' effect on readers in Heart Mountain.

AH: I think it was --

FA: Start with Jimmie.

AH: I think that Jimmie's editorials were so welcomed by the members of the Fair Play Committee, not just the leaders but the rank and file, because here was somebody that actually was going to give a voice to what they were saying within the camp outside of the camp. And they could not believe this was a person that was not interned, that this person would be so courageous and say the things that he did. I think it was a breath of fresh air in an otherwise sort of airless kind of world. They had a few of their own who were saying those things and that group grew quite substantially at Heart Mountain in the early months of 1944, but here was somebody on the outside who was saying these things, and they wanted to meet him. They wanted to pay tribute to him, and they did pay tribute to him. And I think they've continued to pay tribute to him to honor him fifty years after the fact. I think he was an important person to them.

FC: How have they pay tribute to him?

AH: I think they've paid tribute to him not only by having Jimmie the subject of their tributes and treating him as a member of their resisters community, but I think they've paid tribute to him by honoring what he did and what he wrote. Here you've got somebody like yesterday, Kenji Taguma, whose dad was a resister not even at Heart Mountain. But he's now a journalist and the English language editor of the Nichi Bei Times. Why is he taking a position like this that journalistically might be a dead end that pays peanuts, but because he has some heuristic model, somebody who, an inspiration like Jimmie Omura. And he said it, quite frankly, he is the editor of the Nichi Bei Times working like twelve to sixteen hours a day because he has a role model in Jimmie Omura, that he saw that Jimmie Omura, in spite of the fact of paying a steep price, also made a huge sort of difference because of what he did.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 1998, 2005 Frank Abe and Densho. All Rights Reserved.