<Begin Segment 9>

FC: Tolan Committee, Mike Masaoka, Jimmie Omura, tell me about that.

AH: Well, the Tolan committee was in February of 1942. And by the time they had the so-called hearings to gather information on which they were going to allegedly decide if they were going to have an evacuation or not, they'd already made a decision to have an evacuation. So the Tolan Committee hearings were at bottom, a farce. But they were interesting nonetheless for some of the things that came up at them, and Mike Masaoka and Jimmie Omura both testified at the San Francisco hearings. And Mike testified very early in the hearings and was not as embarrassing as Tokie Slocum was when he testified in Los Angeles at the Tolan Committee hearings, but was fairly embarrassing in the sense that he was so obsequious and so accommodating to the, to the testifiers and gave out the idea that Japanese Americans would do anything. Anything.

Jimmie Omura was not even originally scheduled to be in the hearings and he was working for a florist and he was in his work clothes and he got a, he got a call to come to the hearings and his wife and he came to the hearings and he did testify. And it was at the end of a long day of testifying, and the most famous statement attributed to Jimmie Omura was not really said: "Has the Gestapo come to America..." was not said at the hearings itself. It was written into the record afterwards because he hadn't had a chance to be able to finish his, his testimony. But it's still a part of the record. Everybody else had the chance to put things into the record, too, which they did.

FC: Could you please go back to the most famous statement that was not in the record?

AH: His most famous statement, which is in the record for the Tolan Committee hearings was, when Jimmie said, you know, that, here we are raising a protest of what is going on in Europe with the Jews and yet it seems as though the Gestapo has come to America. He asked the question, "Has the Gestapo come to America?" And it was, it was a powerful sort of question. It did not receive an answer because, as I say, it was entered in after the actual hearing was held. But it still hasn't received a satisfactory answer fifty years later.

FA: How many voices at the Tolan Committee hearings were raised in protest to the evacuation?

AH: One.

FA: Who was that?

AH: Well, actually, James Omura. His wife, Carole, you know, her testimony was so brief and it wasn't pointed like Jimmie's. So a person who said, "This is wrong and we should protest it," there was one voice that said it, and it was Jimmie Omura.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 1998, 2005 Frank Abe and Densho. All Rights Reserved.