<Begin Segment 8>

FA: The all-camp meeting in November, who led the meeting and what was his message?

AH: The leader of the meeting was Mike Masaoka, and he was the executive secretary of the Japanese American Citizens League. He had not been in that position very long, and he was the first paid employee for the JACL. He came from Utah and he was a Mormon by religion and he was a well-connected person with politicians and professors over at the University of Utah because he had been a debater and a golden-throated speaker. And he was somebody who had not been brought up around too many other Japanese Americans and yet he was catapulted into this position of the head of the Japanese American Citizens League. Which means that he did not have a lot of community restraint, and he did have -- because of his Mormonism -- a hyper Americanism. And because of his speech background he also had a tendency to be able to sacrifice descriptions of reality for rhetorical flourish. And when the meeting was held in November of 1942 there was an urgency and an insistence and a manipulation in the way that the meeting was conducted. In reading over the transcript, I thought that there were some interesting debates starting about the various dimensions, but when the debate started to move in a direction that was unfavorable to the pre-debate question, then Masaoka brought closure on the debate using one or another techniques. And so I didn't think it was the kind of discussion that should have prevailed, given the seriousness of the issues that they were discussing.

FA: That person, what, what was his message... what was Mike Masaoka's message at the November 1942 meeting?

AH: I think his message was --

FA: Could you say his name?

AH: Uh-huh. I think Mike Masaoka's message, more than anything else, was that we have a contract with the government. And that contract, not legally or economic things, but an understanding that we will do our part and make any sacrifice that needs to be made. And one of the best things that we could do at this particular time is to be able to be willing to shed our blood for the United States. And even though we have been mistreated in the army as well as generally, we need to be prepared to be able to serve, and if necessarily, if necessary, to serve within a segregated unit. Because if we had a segregated unit there would be more attention to us as a group and it wouldn't be diffused if we were in an integrated group. So this was a strategic kind of consideration. And this was what they were supposed to go back to their respective camps and sell to the camps. And it did not sell very well.

FA: How was that message received by, in the camps?

AH: Poorly, because within a couple of months -- I'm not just talking about the "Manzanar riot," other kinds of, you know, resistance outcroppings -- but in a couple of months they were approached by the military to try to get them to agree to volunteer for the army. And they expected to get 3,000 volunteers out of the camps and they ended up getting 800. And they got a lot of flack, they, they ended up having the camp all riled up over the situation. So it didn't play very well at all.

FA: What about Mike Masaoka? What did Mike Masaoka do in the middle of 1943, his own service?

[Interruption]

FA: Mike, of course, having set this policy in motion, was obliged to be able to sort of deliver the goods in the terms of his own. So he was the first person to volunteer for the, for the military, and he and his brothers all served. And the difference was that Mike never served in a combat position. Mike was, by his own acknowledgement, a person cut out to be a, not cut out to be a soldier, and that anybody who put in a press release that he was fighting in the war was providing misinformation, that he was definitely a desk jockey. And this is his own description and he didn't try to glorify, I didn't think, from reading the stuff, he didn't try to glorify what his role was in the military.

FA: What was Mike Masaoka's role, mission in the 442?

AH: In the 442, he was, he was just basically just a publicist. He was not a, he was not any kind of combatant.

FC: Never under fire?

AH: No, never under fire. Not even close. I think one time when he was in a jeep somewhere going from one place to another, a shot grazed the jeep, but that's as, that's as close as he got to it. I'm not quite sure on the details on that, but, but that's pretty much it.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 1998, 2005 Frank Abe and Densho. All Rights Reserved.