<Begin Segment 9>

FA: Is there anything else that you want to say, Fred, that we haven't given you a chance to say? Again, I wanted to come here to give you a change to get it all off your chest and give it to me, yeah, give me both barrels.

FH: You know, I'm ninety years old. I'm way over the hill. And there was a time, maybe I would have been more explosive, more aggressive in what I say and do. I'm past that now. I'm just too old. I wish I were twenty years younger, I'd give you a good fight. But all in all, the whole darn thing boils down to this: we had to look out for our group, and our kids in American society after the war. That should have been our main cause, our main, for everything we did. To try to make it easy for them to try to get back into American society. And if we had made all these protests, lawsuits, not participated in American, I think we were, would never have come back to where we are today. I think today, you and I and our kids owe something to JACL for that. You were going to talk about Mike Masaoka? I think he was the, if there's one man who did more for the Japanese American group as a whole, that was Mike Masaoka. As I say, there were many times I disagreed with him. Many times I fought with him openly. But on the whole, he was good for us. You know, when the JACL opened the draft, sought to have the draft from 4-C to 1-A, all right, now, the guys that went to that Salt Lake meeting, Yatabe, Kido, Inagaki and others, when they went back to camp, they were beaten. Beaten up. And yet, if the draft had not been open, if we had remained 4-C all during the war, and not participated in the military, where would we have been? I, myself, thirty-four years old, three little kids, a wife, mother and father, sister, sister-in-law, I had a 4-C classification. I wrote to my draft board, number 124 in Fresno and told them, "I want my 4-C classification changed. I am an American citizen." Well, they changed it, and they gave me a draft deferment, because of age, family, and the work that I was in. So that's why I was never in the military service.

FC: You said something I just want to clarify. Are you crediting the JACL with getting the draft restored, or are you just saying the JACL made a great effort to get the draft restored?

FH: I think it was the influence of JACL has a great deal.

FC: Could you give that to us in a whole sentence? The influence of the JACL had a great deal...

FH: To do the opening up of the draft.

FC: One more time, please. So we have a complete sentence.

FH: The JACL had something, a great deal to do with opening up the draft to Japanese Americans.

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