Densho Digital Archive
Frank Abe Collection
Title: Bill Hosokawa Interview
Narrator: Bill Hosokawa
Interviewer: Frank Abe
Location: Salt Lake City, Utah
Date: August 4, 1994
Densho ID: denshovh-hbill-02-0004

<Begin Segment 4>

FA: In a book, you talk about Mike's position that good publicity is more important than good law.

BH: Do I say that in so many words?

FA: I think Mike says that. Or at least, if not in the autobiography, then at least in all of Mike's statements, that good publicity is more important than good law. And the 442 was a, was a publicity measure.

BH: I'm not aware that he ever said, "Good publicity is better than good law."

FA: Well, if he didn't say it, then, as a principle, it certainly was his guiding principle. And that certainly was his strategy. Why was that a good strategy?

BH: Well, let's say it worked, did it not? When you look around today and see where the Japanese Americans are in this society today, and it's interesting to contemplate where we would be today if 115,000 of us in 19', early 1942 said, "Screw you, government, we're going to stand by our rights and shoot us down if you will." That would have been a very difficult time. And you have to have gone through the experience of that time to realize, to understand the hostility that we faced overnight. Suddenly we were the enemy. There were cases where a Issei fellow had a grocery store twenty years in the same corner, people had been coming in, they say, "Hey, we've done business with Joe Yamada here for twenty years. He's a nice guy, we think he's okay, but who knows? He might have been spying for the emperor here for twenty years. Blood is thicker than water. You can't trust these slant-eyed Japs." And that was the tenor of the times. In Seattle, there were about twenty young Nisei girls, eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old, working as secretaries in grade school offices, offices of the principal. They were fired because the president of the city PTA said, "These are the girls who will be answering the phone when the warning comes that the Japanese are going to bomb Seattle. Do you think that they will spread the alarm? No. There's a good chance that they will conceal that information. And for the safety of children, we've got to get rid of these girls."

FA: No question there's a lot of hysteria, a lot of prejudice. The JACL and yourself just keep going to back to, it was either/or. We had to cooperate willingly and cheerfully, or there would be bloodshed. What about cooperation under protest?

BH: I think that would have been a good thing. I don't think that there was a lot of cheerful cooperation. There might have been a lot of putting on a cheerful front. Now, there were pictures of young kids waving goodbye to their friends as they ride out on the train to the concentration camps. What are they supposed to do? Cry? You put on a face. There was not a lot of cheerfulness. There was anger and frustration and bitterness and despair, a tremendous amount of that. But there was the feeling that, "By God, if this is what we are called on to do, we will do it."

FA: But again, there was cooperation.

BH: Yes, there was cooperation.

FA: Why not cooperation under protest? The test cases, the resisters were a form of protest. Why did the JACL say --

BH: I don't know. I did not make JACL policy.

FA: Okay. But Mike Masaoka -- I can't give you an exact quote -- but he did talk about willful and cheerful cooperation.

BH: Yes, I think he did in the Tolan Committee hearings.

FA: Was that the right thing to do?

BH: In retrospect, I think it would have been better if he had said, "We feel this is unjust, but as our sacrifice to the national war effort, we will accept this as our sacrifice."

FA: That was his strategy at the time?

BH: No, I'm saying that I think it would have been better if he said that, rather than to have said, "We will march cheerfully into the, out of our homes," or whatever it was that he said.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 1994, 2005 Frank Abe and Densho. All Rights Reserved.