<Begin Segment 18>

FA: I need you to do something, a simple factual thing. Back in Denver in 1944 what did Jimmie Omura -- tell me -- do in January 1944? Tell me that he accepted the job at the Rocky Shimpo.

AH: [Laughs] In 1944, Jimmie Omura became the English language editor and effectively the publisher of the Rocky Shimpo newspaper. And the reason that the vacancy existed was because the previous publisher had been seen as writing seditious sentiments in the paper. He was without citizenship, he was an alien, he was picked up and sent to an alien internment camp. He had a daughter and the daughter was very young and very unsophisticated about journalistic and business matters, and so Jimmie became pretty much the person in charge of the paper and in every respect. So in 1944 -- and it's right about the time that the, the draft of the Nisei is reinstituted, it's within days of it. So the 20th of January, the draft is reinstituted and there is an announcement by the Secretary of War Stimson and then within four or five days, Jimmie becomes the editor of the Rocky Shimpo. And we really got the makings of a historical drama.

FA: When did, how did Jimmie Omura's tenure as editor of the Rocky Shimpo end?

AH: Ended basically by him being cashiered by the government.

FA: Tell me about that.

AH: Well, the short version is that he wrote a series of editorials that, you know, caused the government to be very suspicious of not only what he was saying but what effect what he was saying was having on other people in the camps. And it wasn't just that there was a burgeoning in the ranks of formal dissent groups like the Fair Play Committee at Heart Mountain, but the examination of the sales of the Rocky Shimpo just escalated. I mean, it was a huge business success for that paper because he was saying some things that were striking a responsive chord with a lot of people, especially a lot of people who were draft age and everything. And so there is comparative statistics of the sale of that particular paper in the various camps during that time and the government was very concerned about this. And you had people hawking the paper at the different camps and everything and the word was getting out. And the main thing that that did was that it effectively ends the idea of a controlled press and a controlled community. There was a relative amount of freedom because people could get their version of the truth from different sort of sources and then make up their own minds, and this was not what the WRA wanted, it was not what the government wanted, it was not what the JACL wanted. They wanted a party line. And this represented a break from the party line.

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