Densho Digital Archive
Frank Abe Collection
Title: Art Hansen Interview
Narrator: Art Hansen
Interviewers: Frank Abe (primary); Frank Chin (secondary)
Location: Los Angeles, California
Date: February 22, 1998
Densho ID: denshovh-hart-01-0002

<Begin Segment 2>

FC: Why are we interested in Jim? Why would someone just reading be interested in James Omura?

AH: Because I think that he was the most important sort of voice against, raised against the Japanese American evacuation during World War II. He's a heroic figure. I mean, he took a course that was highly atypical and that it was a, that it was a course that, you know, has had tremendous implications since that time. And he paid a steep price for it in terms of being marginalized by his own, own community, but as I told people up in Bainbridge Island that as you make light of Jimmie Omura, he's probably going to be emblematic of the Japanese American evacuation along with a couple of other, other people. He's an important native son.

FC: What was the medium of his voice? How did he, how did he spread his voice around? How did he express himself to reach the people?

AH: He was a journalist. And he was a crusading journalist, and he had a lot of models in that sort of area. But what he liked to do was to be able to use the columns of the various vernacular newspapers he worked for, the most famous one being the Rocky Shimpo in Denver. And this is the place where he registered the strongest voice, not against the evacuation alone, but really against those people who were trying to impose an unconscionable burden on people behind barbed wire, and that was to have them, you know, be drafted and to accept the draft in the name of patriotism. And when there were people at Heart Mountain who were opposed to that, he gave over his newspaper to be able to allow them to have their announcements and he provided tacit support for them and came out with some very, very strong editorials. He was a warrior with his, with his pen and with his conscience. And so I think that was the thing that was important. And then after going into relative oblivion for forty years, he came back very strongly at the time, after his retirement, when the redress movement was going, he became a strong voice in that. And again he uses his pen. When the Smithsonian Institution put up a exhibit on the Japanese American evacuation and he looked at the, you know, the exhibit script, he felt that it did not encompass certain groups, it was driven by certain political ideas, some collective memory ideas within the Japanese American community that he felt were narrow and restraining and so he entered into the record things about people who had resisted.

[Interruption]

FC: Were there consequences for his being the conscience and spreading the news about the resistance?

AH: Yeah, there were, there were consequences that were negative for him and very positive, I think, for the rest of the society. And the negative consequences for him was that in a sense, his career of choice as a journalist was pretty much, you know, scrapped. He did come back after World War II for six months and served as the editor of the Rocky Shimpo, but again he was just a constant source of community disdain and criticism. And eventually he turned to landscape gardening and he became, you know, quite a successful landscape gardener, but this is not really what he set out to do. But even when he tried to play in bowling leagues, and he loved sports, he absolutely loved sports. Even in bowling leagues he was made to feel very uncomfortable. And even within the context of his own family, that he was made to feel uncomfortable. That his wife, who had been interned when Jimmie hadn't, did not want to hear about internment. And after the war when Jimmie used to come out to the coast here, his wife felt, according to Jimmie, quite resentful that he would come out here and thought he was doing it for an ego trip. And she was right in a sense, that it was an ego trip. He had an ego that hadn't been fulfilled and a recognition that hadn't come about, and he was getting it now. He was coming out and participating in these dramatizations that were being put on on the coast and it filled him up. Now, the good consequences, of course, of him registering his voice of dissent was that we have a usable past to be able to draw upon when we think about, you know, the refurbishment of American and constitutional ideals. And if he hadn't registered that voice, it would have been lost. And so it was very important in the same way that the draft resisters' actions were very important.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 1998, 2005 Frank Abe and Densho. All Rights Reserved.