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FA: Tell me what happened in November of 1942.

AH: In November of 1942 there was an all-camp conference in Salt Lake City. And Salt Lake City is important because it's where the JACL moved its headquarters during World War II. And as it turned out, these people who went were not popularly elected by the communities that they so-called represented, and almost all of them were JACL. None of them would have won representation if there had been any kind of democracy at work. But they went back there, and what they did was represent the community, not necessarily their interests, their desires or anything else, but they represented the community in terms of their own likes. And their own likes happened to be likes similar to the government and the War Relocation Authority. And the bottom line from that whole thing that came out of it, which set in motion the trouble, is the idea of drafting the Nisei. Or starting some kind of combat team, segregated combat team. I mean, the draft thing really doesn't get instituted for another year but immediately what they want to do is to get the Nisei into the armed forces. Now this is very interesting because after Pearl Harbor the Nisei who had been in the armed forces are all of sudden getting cashiered out and given a new sort of designation, which makes them into effectively "enemy aliens" even though they're American citizens. So when the representatives from this conference come back to their camps, etcetera, they get a very warm reception.

And the most dramatic example of it is the Manzanar riot, because one of the representatives there was Fred Tayama. And Fred Tayama was somebody who was already not liked because of his prominent role in the leadership of the southwest district JACL, and when he gets back there he ends up being beaten almost to death. And then the arrest of the person that was charged with leading the attack on him, Harry Ueno, a kitchen worker, led to a series of mass demonstrations, and these demonstrations curdled into a, a confrontation whereby military police who were called onto the camp ended up being trigger-happy, shooting a couple of people, two of whom died, nine others who were wounded, and all reports that I've been able to ascertain was that these people were shot in the back, they weren't shot in the front. Teargas had been, had been released, the people ran away from the teargas and they were shot as they were running away. Dr. James Goto, who is now the late James Goto, testified at the redress hearings but he would not say anything about this. And Frank Chuman, who was the head of the hospital, the administrator of the hospital, has told me and others in published interviews that he saw the reports and what they wanted Goto to do was to sign a report, you know, which contradicted the very facts of the thing and say that they, the bullet entries were frontal rather than, than the opposite. I've never been able to get an interview, I was never able when he was alive to get an interview although I persisted over the years to try to get an interview with Dr. Goto. After the riot, Goto was transferred to another camp.

FC: At that all-camp meeting in Utah, did the delegates address the issue of restoration of civil rights for the internees?

AH: Yeah. I think that, in fact, I was a little surprised. I had not read the proceedings of that all-camp conference until recently. It was probably about three or four months ago I got a copy of the whole transcript of it and read through it. And I was a little bit surprised that first of all, more variety in the point of view of the people who were representing the JACL, which goes back to the idea that this organization is not monolithic. They represent the social context of wherever they come from. And there were a number of people who felt that the restoration of rights was important, but they were overwhelmed by the way in which Mike Masaoka, the executive secretary, ran the meeting. It seemed that debate oftentimes was stillborn because he had an insistent voice about moving the thing along, or a loud voice in being able to say, you know, "We don't want to raise these things now." So, I felt it was a managed meeting. It was a very managed meeting. And so dissent that was there got orchestrated into assent by the way in which the meeting was operated.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 1998, 2005 Frank Abe and Densho. All Rights Reserved.