<Begin Segment 2>

FA: You asked a question: "What would have happened if everyone, if a mass of Japanese Americans had resisted?" Answer the question. What would have happened?

FH: The army would have come in and forced them into the camps.

FC: How do you know?

FA: That's what they did. That's what happened.

FH: You said, "What would have happened if we had resisted?"

FC: Yes.

FH: That would have happened.

FC: What do you mean by resistance?

FH: Just sitting stance, sitting on your ass and telling 'em, "I'm not gonna move."

FC: Resistance in the legal sense, that we're using the word, means "going to court." It means violating a law, or by other means, going to court to test the law that we object to. Or that we find objectionable.

FH: All right. Now, both of you are much younger than I am. I'm ninety years old, and I was -- 1942 I was thirty-four years old. I had a wife, had three little kids, I had a older mother and father, a sister and a sister-in-law that I had to look out for, and make decisions for. And I told them, "We're gonna go with what the army said to do." Because there was really no other way we can go. You can't, you say, "Go to court." Do you know what the atmosphere is in wartime? When you're facing an enemy like Japan? Going to court? It wouldn't have done anything. It wouldn't have done a thing.

FC: What would happen to you?

FH: What would what happen?

FC: If the Japanese Americans went into camp and went to court. Cooperate with, physically with the evacuation, but challenge it in the courts, like the draft resisters did?

FH: I say that that is not the time to challenge. In wartime, you have constitutional rights, but sometimes you have to forget constitutional rights. There's a time and place for those things, and that wasn't the time, and that wasn't the place. Because if JACL and the Japanese American group as a whole had told everybody in camp, "We're supporting the Heart Mountain resisters, we want all of you not to, to go into the army, not to accept the draft, not volunteer," and they didn't go, what would have happened?

FA: Answer the, answer your own question. What would have happened, Fred?

FH: The American public, if they saw the Japanese Americans who were not cooperating in what they thought should be the manner that they should cooperate, in the progress of the war against Japan, our enemy, and they did not volunteer, did not go into service, they didn't do any of the things to cooperate with the United States army and the military, at the end of the war, they would have told us to get out. They would have deported us. I don't know that, but that's what I think.

FA: They would have deported us?

FH: Taken the whole group and kicked us out. I'm saying this: if we Japanese Americans had not done all we could to help our country, United States, in the war effort against Japan, that would have been their reaction, I think. You had Issei, you had Kibei, you had bilingual Nisei teaching in the different schools, Japanese, for the war effort. You had people in the government with their radio broadcasts talking Japanese to our enemy, Japan. And they, suppose they didn't do that. Suppose they did nothing. Suppose they discouraged people from going into our army, the U.S. Army, and you had no 442, and they did not make that record in Europe that they did. Where do you think you and I would be today? And our kids, especially our kids. Our long-range view should have been this: we should have been thinking about our kids, and their future in this country. And if they were to go back after the war -- and we knew Japanese was going to be defeated after Midway, we knew that -- they come back to the state of California, my kids, and they go to school. They face their classmates: "What did your family do during the war?" "We did nothing." What would their position be? How would you like to be a kid like that? Facing your classmates and saying, "My group, my Japanese Americans did nothing to help United States in the war against Japan. Did absolutely nothing."

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 1998, 2005 Frank Abe and Densho. All Rights Reserved.