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FA: What is your observation of the Japanese American community and the way that it has treated draft -- Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee, Jimmie Omura, draft resisters?

AH: Well, I think that my opinion is that some of these things take a long time to get over and if your community is beholden to a line, etcetera, that seems to have plus and minus signs where the plus is military service and the whole basis for the so-called success of the community is because of that military service, somebody who resisted, there's no room for them really except to demonize them and put 'em in the opposite valance, which is what I think happened to Jimmie. Now, no community is monolithic and there have been lots of pockets of people who -- and the pockets have gotten larger in which people have moved towards a reconciliation with the idea that there are different ways in which people can express their patriotism, and some of 'em did it by fighting the good fight on the battlefield and some of 'em did it by fighting the good fight sometimes in Leavenworth prison or in a courtroom in Cheyenne, Wyoming, wherever it happened to be.

FA: As a historian, is there -- [laughs] -- as a historian, have you observed that there is a party line, if you will, in Japanese America? And now things are changing? I'm trying to get the historiography aspect.

AH: Yeah, I think that there was a very strong party line and I think it was sort of driven by the major spokespeople in the community, and was the leadership of the Japanese American Citizens League. And I think they had a story, a version, a narrative, a master narrative that they guarded. And people who violated that got punished. And I think they had access to publishing houses largely because they told the story that the country wanted to hear told. It resonated with what they wanted to believe about America. America did not have concentration camps. You know, America was the home of the free and the brave and etcetera. And so these other sort of narratives were extruded because the master narrative was there. And so, but I think this again is changing. We are having a poly-vocal situation there where lots of different voices are coming out, lots of different narratives. And there have been so many contradictions to the master narrative that it's collapsing. And that it's being replaced by a richer, fuller, truer, I think, narrative. And...

FA: As a historian, isn't, but isn't this what some people call "historical revisionism"?

AH: It is, which is a very healthy sort of thing, in the sense that the past is always being revised because of the changing nature of the present. The past is written from the standpoint of the present; it's not written from the standpoint of the past, and so we see different things. When Jimmie comes out or is brought out, etcetera, his story then which has been suppressed and forgotten, etcetera, reenters the data that people look at and so what they have to do is to rearticulate a different story or set of stories. And so when the resisters are silenced and sometimes are complicit in their own silence because of different kinds of community and family pressures, then their story's not there. But when people bring them out or when circumstances like the redress movement bring them out, then all of a sudden we have the basis for a retelling, a recasting.

FA: Which is -- but which is, which is real? We've changing representation of past reality. Which is real?

AH: To whom? Actually, I mean, in other words, what is real? There is, there is no sort of absolute truth that we have in history books or films or anything else because what happens is reality occurs, but only so much of reality is seen and only so much of what is seen is documented and then only so much of the documentation gets salvaged, etcetera. So what's happening in oral histories, like people did with the resisters and with Jimmie, is that we're reconstituting data, etcetera, and this data is being reconstituted retrospectively but it enters into that story and everything. And so it's not simple to say that this, this story replaces that, but now we have a new set of perspectives.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 1998, 2005 Frank Abe and Densho. All Rights Reserved.