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FC: When you began studying the camps, this period of Japanese American history, did you expect to find resistance in the population? Or were you surprised when the general consensus was there was none?

RD: I was always -- I'm always suspicious of things that are too neat. And, of course, everybody knew the, everybody knew about the constitutional cases, which after Hirabayashi and Yasui and one or two others that never got very far. Then Korematsu, then finally the one successful case, the Endo case. I mean, everybody knew about those, everybody knew that there was that range of protest. And I would not have been surprised to find pockets of protest on other issues here and there, and we know that there were other kinds of protests in relocation centers. What really surprised me was the size and strength of the movement in two places in particular, at Heart Mountain, that I know a lot about, and at Poston that I don't know a lot about, because nobody's really done Poston yet. And I was surprised at the, at the successful way in which this had been suppressed. This had been just sort of written, written out of history, it had gone into what George Orwell would call in 1948 a "memory hole." But happily, there were ways to reach into the memory hole and pull it out.

And by now, I think everyone who was interested in the question, does any serious reading about the Japanese American experience, is now aware of dimensions of this protest. I never expected to find no protest, but I really was surprised -- remember, this is 1970, this is a quarter of a century after it's over, I was really surprised to discover that this kind of a well-organized movement, a mass trial for draft resistance of sixty-three people, that's still the largest mass trial for draft resistance in our history, that this could be absolutely ignored, that you could, that it could have had, as it were, almost disappeared without trace, unless you went back beyond the other accounts. And there had been -- I'm not going to list them now -- but there had been any number of books written about the Japanese American experience, some by insiders who knew very well what had happened.

And although I don't do oral history in the formal sense, I've over the years talked to and made notes on discussions with about 2,000 individual Japanese Americans and I've got 'em arranged in various ways. And on one of my trips back to Los Angeles after I discovered the draft resistance, I went to see some of my Heart Mountain informants, a couple, and I would get the... I didn't start out, "Why didn't you tell me about this?" That's not the way you work with people. But I went back, I asked about this and that, in one or two cases, I says, "Look, I found this about you," or, "I found this about your son, or about your brother, in the Heart Mountain Sentinel," because I Xeroxed a lot of stuff, and then I would ask, "What about that draft resistance movement, the Fair Play movement?" And I would get answers like, "Oh that. Yes, I remember that, that was so unpleasant, you wanted to know about that? I'm sorry, if I had known I would have told you, but I didn't think it was important." In other words, there's just this, this had become, and I think that there are... I don't want to get into stereotyping here, but there are such things as cultural traditions, and there was established in the Japanese American community, as in the Japanese community, a kind of... present an overall consensus to the outside world, not to stick up like the odd thumb. Individualism was not in, especially in first-, second-generation Japanese American culture, individualism was not particularly stressed, so people stayed away from this kind of thing. And when they talked about it, they really wanted to improve in their notion the image, and they thought that this would improve the image. In fact, the opposite was true, for by the -- because by the time the '70s came around, this myth of the overly compliant Japanese Americans was really one of the things that helped pull generations apart. So that, and this is a very historic kind of thing.

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