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-01-0029

<Begin Segment 29>

FA: Clarify for me the difference between "no-no boys" and draft resisters.

AH: Well I don't think, you know, in spite of the fact that there is such an effort made to make a distinction between the two, I don't think such a big distinction should be made. I think a lot of the people -- I'll give you what the traditional distinction is, and that is that the "no-no boys" would not have been willing to serve in the armed forces, etcetera, even if there was a clarification or a restoration. The people here who are in the Heart Mountain group, draft resisters, in February of '43 had said usually "yes-yes" on questions 27 and 28. And so it wasn't a question of quote/unquote "loyalty" or "disloyalty," they were quite willing to do these things, but then it was a seizure of conscience of what had happened and how the game was rigged and everything which caused them to take a different point of view. But I would go on record as saying there's a correspondence of feeling. I mean, they're both saying "no" in different ways for different kinds of reasons and sometimes very good reasons. And so, I mean, I think if we make such a, draw such a distinction between the two, we're back to that BS of Americanism versus Japanism or something as though these were not people who were confused like they should have been living in a community where their parents were disallowed American citizenship.

FC: Did the policy of 442nd's sacrifice blood to prove loyalty address any of the constitutional issues raised by camp?

AH: I don't think it addressed the constitutional issues raised by camp, but what I think it did do was in the long run, it made it easier for those issues to be addressed by other people. They provided a kind of a context of perceptual readiness on the part of the general community to hear more what Japanese Americans had to say. Not a great context, because it took a long time before that context was in place.

[Interruption]

FA: Significance of Michi Weglyn's book Years of Infamy?

AH: The significance of Michi Weglyn's book Years of Infamy was that it said what a lot of people had felt. And what it did when it said the "untold story of the, of America's concentration camp," it's not just one story, there were many stories that weren't told and almost anybody who was in those camps had that story. And by her being in camp and then afterwards telling a story like she did, it empowered other people to say, "I can tell my story, too." And I think the ramifications of her book have operated in a predictable sort of way. More people are telling their stories. When I first started I wrote a book called Voices Long Silent; I don't think too many voice are silent any longer. I think the amount of oral history that we have right now, I think there's, there's a chorus of people anxious to tell their stories, anxious to be heard, anxious to be counted.

<End Segment 29> - Copyright © 1998, 2005 Frank Abe and Densho. All Rights Reserved.