<Begin Segment 26>

FC: At Heart Mountain, was the resistance activity at Heart Mountain reported in the Heart Mountain Sentinel as it was happening?

AH: Some of it was because there were some letters to the editor, like Frank Emi wrote a couple of part, I think a two-part editorial in there, and there were other people before him even. I'm blanking on Frank's last name.

FC: Inouye.

AH: Inouye yeah, Frank Inouye, who had been essentially robbed of his graduation from UCLA. I mean, Frank Inouye spoke very eloquently, I think, against some of the developments at Heart Mountain in advance of the restitution of the draft. And so, but, you know, it was, you've got to always see it in relationship to what the editorials were saying. And then, not only the editorials but the editorial policy sort of prevailed in most of the columns that appeared. So these are letters to the editor where you could bracket that off and say, "These are the dissidents who are writing," and it almost, it can help your sort of cause. Because you show the illusion of free press when it's really a highly sort of managed press.

FC: Have you talked to any resisters or resistance leaders who actually went to see or hear Ben Kuroki speak?

AH: I have not. I have not spoken to one. It's either that they --

FC: Give me a whole sentence.

AH: Yeah. I have not talked to a single Heart Mountain resister -- and I've asked them every time I have spoken to 'em -- if they have actually seen Ben Kuroki speak. I got some letters from people who said they were there and they saw it as a bizarre sort of thing. But I haven't actually, you know, taped somebody where I got -- Mits Koshiyama and George Nozawa and almost all the people I've talked to really knew of him coming there and thought badly of it, but were not ones who were challenging to fisticuffs or were really witnessing as such. I think they were in jail by that time.

FC: So no one who you talked to or anyone who has identified themselves as a resister to you has said that they were there?

AH: No, and in fact, even one person who said that he was there and described it in graphic detail, as far as I can figure out, he wasn't even in camp at the time, and this was Inouye. I think he was, already left. And yet -- I think what a lot of people did in their minds was that they conflated to appearances of an officer in full uniform who was a Japanese American. And in February of '43 when they had the registration, and there was always a Nisei sergeant that came. And I think that's who Inouye saw, and not, not Ben Kuroki. And Kuroki doesn't come until the spring of '44.

FC: Did, has Kuroki named any resister or resistance leader who he met or was at any of his talks?

AH: No. I think for him it's they're fascists, they're blackguards or something, but they're not, they're not people that he had an acquaintanceship with. And even when I've confronted him with different kinds of evidence, he doesn't feel it happened.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 1998, 2005 Frank Abe and Densho. All Rights Reserved.