Densho Digital Archive - Art Hansen Interview (denshovh-hart-01-0023)

<Begin Segment 23>

FA: Tell me about his meetings with, his encounters with the Fair Play Committee at Heart Mountain.

AH: He had either asked for a meeting with the Fair Play Committee or this was imposed upon him, but he had a meeting with them and it turned out to be a very tempestuous meeting and in fact, he was challenged to a fistfight. And this is quite amazing when you think about it. Here is a war hero with a record of thirty bombing missions, etcetera, comes into a quote/unquote "relocation center" and finds himself about to be sort of chosen off by some people who take a quite a different perspective on things. Thought that he was a stooge and everything and this is why they wanted -- and a dangerous stooge to boot.

[Interruption]

FA: Tell me, did Kuroki's tour of duty have the desired effect?

AH: Some people would argue that it did in the sense that he represented to a sector of the camp, you know, the fact that military service was glorious and noble and he probably did end up recruiting some people. But I think it did not have the desired effect if you think about quelling some of the discontent because the discontent got escalated as a result of that. I think it steeled people to take an even stronger stand because they thought that the JACL and the government, the administration were pulling out all stops and trying to play fairly dirty by bringing this war hero in there dividing them in their sentiments against themselves. And so, but it didn't have the desired effect. No, I don't think so.

FA: Tell me what Guy Robertson wrote to Dillon Myer.

AH: Guy Robertson, I think was anxious to get rid of any kind of troublemaking and that was the bottom line for most of the administrators. Their marks as administrators, as camp directors, was how little trouble they had. And what this leads to is a falsification of reality. The reports that they send back then become reports that the Washington office and the government wants to hear. And so when he sends back after Kuroki had been at Heart Mountain and says that everything is under control here and stuff like that and the Fair Play Committee has spent it's, it's energy and everything, is not true. Because the very day that Kuroki leaves, six more people refuse to report for their induction. And so I just think it was 1984-ish kind of information that he was, he was spreading.

[Interruption]

FA: Tell me about the next -- when was the next time that Ben Kuroki encounters the Fair Play Committee?

AH: He doesn't encounter the entire committee, he encounters just the leaders at the trial in November of 1944. He was called as a government witness based upon the fact that he had interacted with them in this stormy way that we just were talking about. And so here he was, an impeccable sort of source to provide them with information about the "un-American" kinds of things that they were saying and I think that's why he was asked to appear. Now, he never did testify. Most of the witnesses that were called there was just standbys in case they were needed but they weren't. They ended up getting convicted without having to call those witnesses.

FA: Can you use his name and tell me that Ben was called to testify as a government witness?

AH: Ben Kuroki was called as -- and I've seen the papers that he was served -- to come as a witness to Cheyenne for the, for the trial. And his behavior at that trial is almost absent from anything I've ever seen. I've seen no other accounts of it. The only thing I see is a newspaper article that was done after the trial in which he is quoted in a way of calling the leaders fascists, the leaders of the Fair Play Committee, which tends to give you a sense of it. And I don't think that the reporter in this case made it up. There's no motivation, I think he actually felt that way. I think he was, he was a very naive person, he was a captive of patriotism, his socialization was all in that direction. And it's, in the 1950s, people were seeing communists under every bed. And I think Kuroki was a person at that particular time that was seeing fascists in a lot of places.