<Begin Segment 15>

RP: You mentioned this exchange between Heart Mountain and Tule Lake, for people that left to go to Tule Lake, to make room for those people, people at Tule Lake were moved out to various camps including Heart Mountain. Your father had a lot of friends that ended up leaving for Tule Lake?

TH: My father had a neighbor that farmed close by. They would get together and they'd have an occasional sake. What they used to do is they used to go to one another house around just before dinnertime and they have a sake cocktail or something or a beer together. They were sort of buddies and then this friend says, "You better come along with us or you're going to miss out," because he believed that Japan's going to win the war. In camp they had, somebody had rigged up a shortwave. They used to go and they used to get invited to listen to what was going on. The old people got together and rehashed what they heard, it would become secondhand news but they still knew what was going on. And whether it was propaganda or not, I don't know but my dad wanted to go to Tule Lake. And then I objected and I think I got away by "no-no" or 26 or 27, those number questions? I put one "yes" and one "no" and I don't know which one I answered yes or no but I didn't go "no-no" I went "no-yes" or "yes-no." I told my dad that, "You guys can go and I'll be okay, I'll just move into the bachelor's quarters, just leave some towels and little bit of money and I can get by."

RP: What did he say?

TH: Well, he must have talked to people he knew, so a friend that I knew the parent, the parent came and asked me, "What's your reason, how come you don't want to go with your dad?" So the story got around a little bit that he wanted to go. But I said no, I don't want to go back to Japan. And did you know that this friend that influenced my dad to go, he did go back to Japan, to Kumamoto, Japan, and he had a real hard time and he finally made it back to America and I don't know, maybe, I forgot what year, but it was quite a number of years later. They went almost through starvation and stuff because it was hard for them to come back and recoup what they lost.

RP: That was a pretty strong stand for you to take, especially the father being the authority figure in the family and what he says goes usually.

TH: Uh-huh.

RP: Did he change his mind eventually?

TH: Yeah, he did. If I didn't go he didn't go. My mother had nothing to say to me or anything. She didn't influence one way or another, she didn't say, let's go, let's go or anything. It was my dad that... one thing about between the relationship between my dad and I was that he was from the old school of hard knocks. When we were kids he used to beat us on the noggin, he used to come down hard for discipline purposes. When we got into Pomona, he came at me one evening, I was sitting on my cot and it was filled with straw, and he came at me I leaned back and I was waiting for him to lunge at me and I just straightened out my legs and he went flipping over backwards. From that day on, he tried to reason with me, he never came, or attempted to smack me anymore because he met his challenger. I didn't want to get beat up no more.

RP: Heart Mountain was the center of the largest draft resistance movement in United States history. What do you remember, if anything, about young men who refused to go to their induction because their constitutional rights had been violated, being put in camps, that was their attitude about it? You were getting close to that age?

TH: Yeah, I remember the meetings. I was just too young not to go, be able to attend the meetings. I had sort of mixed feelings. They would go sign up for the army if their constitutional rights were restored, and that was a real big issue that if they became whole citizens again, they would gladly sign up. But then that didn't happen so they all went, some went to Leavenworth, the other went to McNeil Island in Washington. I don't know but those are the two places. And I knew Frank Emi, he was a judo instructor. That really didn't have any bearing as to, because he didn't go at all, he was a married person and he was just a person that has an idea and that was good reasoning. But did you know that if you were on the true draft resisters' side all this time and it was just recently, maybe ten years ago, they sort of got liberated because finally the JACL apologized to the draft resisters and they whole cookie crumbled, there was no more hard feelings except the guys that went to the army and they thought they got the short end of the stick. Even though you were a war resister, the army resister, I know some that went to McNeil Island and he got electrocuted. It was a tragedy there too. That didn't really guarantee that you resisted the draft, that you were going to be scot free. So it was like somebody that survived, he said that he was an electrician, in the prison, and this electrical box wasn't even charged at all, the electricity was cut off in the box, and he was going to come home so he was instructing another inmate how to run it and he went and did something and he got electrocuted by not having gloves and the right equipment. So somebody was after him or something, I don't know, but it's stories like that.

RP: There were a lot of discussions and meetings and a lot of soul searching about these kinds of things.

TH: I think the history of the federal courts building in Cheyenne, Wyoming, it was the biggest case they ever tried, was these war resisters, like forty something, or fifty something of 'em. I wasn't ignorant of it, I just wasn't of age yet. I don't know which way I... I'm sitting on the fence myself today. The 442nd, they established precedence as who we were, and these others, they set up a precedent what they believed. It depend on your own true belief is but I would have liked to gone to Europe and fought. We lost a good family friend that went to the war.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2010 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.