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FA: Tell me about who was Ben Kuroki.

AH: Ben Kuroki was the first war hero of the Nisei. He was somebody who was brought up outside of the Japanese American community like Mike Masaoka. Only instead of being brought up in Salt Lake City he was brought up in a town, a very small town called Hershey, Nebraska. There were very few Japanese people there. The Platte River Valley is where the family lived and Ben Kuroki played sports in high school and he was just going to be a farmer. And what he did after he got out of high school was to drive a truck and that was pretty much his prewar situation. And then he happened to be at a meeting in the basement of a -- was it West Platte?

FA: North Platte.

AH: North Platte. North Platte , Nebraska, they... Mike Masaoka comes into North Platte because he was on one of his new jobs here as the executive secretary, is something that Mike did very well, and that was evangelical work, you know, spreading the gospel. Whether it's Mormonism and in this case he's spreading the gospel of JACLism. And so he goes out to get members. Remember, the JACL said they had 20,000 members when they had 5,000. So he's closing the gap between, for instance, what he purports that they have and what they actually have. So a fertile field is out there in these pockets of the United States where there are Japanese Americans. And so they have this meeting at (North) Platte and it's not just the people from that immediate area but from all over that general area. And they're coming and they're having this meeting and Ben Kuroki and his brother are at this particular meeting. And Mike Masaoka is giving his pitch when all of sudden, in come the FBIs crashing into that and tell Masaoka he's under arrest. Now Ben Kuroki witnesses this situation. Although when I interviewed him he didn't remember it very well, but he was there for sure. And so you have this linkage between the two. And then right after that time when Masaoka gets arrested, right after that Kuroki and his brother try to enlist in the army. And the nearest draft board doesn't want anything to do with them, they're objects of suspicion, but they end up filling a quota in another draft board and they not only get into the army, but they get into the, Ben Kuroki gets into the army air force. Now why did he get into the air force? He had had some pilot, some training as a pilot. He wasn't a certified pilot yet but he had been interested in the air force.

FA: Thank you. That's who Ben Kuroki is.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 1998, 2005 Frank Abe and Densho. All Rights Reserved.