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FC: Would you describe the leave clearance registration form and its impact on Japanese Americans in the camps?

RD: Apart from the initial stupidity -- and it was stupid and counterproductive -- of putting Japanese Americans en masse in camps and leaving alone the whole moral thing, perhaps the most stupid thing, the second most stupid thing was this questionnaire for leave clearance. The motives were not really bad. The WRA, it was a bureaucratic organization, they said, "Well, let's, we can let loyal Japanese Americans go out," so they hand out this goddamn questionnaire, as if that were a way to do it. In addition, they didn't bother to make up their own questionnaire, but they simply adapted a questionnaire that the military was already using to segregate draft age Japanese Americans who had volunteered -- because there was no draft for Japanese Americans at that time -- to make sure that they didn't get the quote "wrong kinds" into the armed forces, you can say about this or that. And they used this questionnaire and gave it to everybody. These were people who hadn't volunteered to do anything, and it created a whole series of problems.

First of all, what Issei or women of any kind would make of the question 27, "Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States," etcetera. Well, that was, that was just ridiculous. The whole question about forswearing allegiance, some people said first of all, "Well, this means if I admit to this, this may be a trap." Remember, these are people who are in no way psychologically ready to trust and believe their government because their government, they were American citizens and they were in a concentration camp, not for any specific act but simply for being Japanese. There was no way to get out and say, "No, this doesn't apply to me, I'm a loyal American." The question was: "Were you born in Japan?" "Were your parents born in Japan?" "Did you live in a, were you living in a certain place at a certain time?" And if your answer to these three questions were "yes," off you went, so why should these people have any great deal of trust? And it divided families, it was absolutely unnecessary, it created fears. There were people who didn't want to go, as some people like to say, "back to America." The America that they had left and been expelled from was, seemed a very hostile place. Many had no assets; they'd lost most of what they had. So this just created all kinds of problems.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 1998, 2005 Frank Abe and Densho. All Rights Reserved.