Densho Digital Archive - Homer Yasui Interview I (denshovh-yhomer-01-0010)

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MR: And your father was arrested. Were there charges against him?

HY: Not immediately. They didn't, they didn't give any of the Issei any reason for their arrest. They says, "Hey, you come with us. You're an enemy alien, and that's good enough." So this massive roundup, there were thousands of Issei. Not only Issei, but you have to understand German aliens, some Italian aliens were rounded up too, and there were very few Issei women, too, that were rounded up. So when you say charges, there were never any formal charges. There was never any trial. So if a charge is pressed during a trial, then there was no charges because none of them ever had a trial. They had hearings. Hearings are not trials. And so I would say that there were no charges pressed against, they didn't say, "You are accused of being disloyal to the United States because you did so and so." They didn't do it that way. They says, "Well, we think that you're a danger to the country," and that was the charge. So I say, no, there were no charges.

MR: Just held.

HY: What?

MR: Just held.

HY: Oh, yeah. Well, they had what they call hearings. They said hearings to determine whether this person should still be kept in custody or not. They had those.

MR: From December to when you were sent to the assembly center, what was the mood?

HY: What was the what?

MR: The mood.

HY: Oh, very somber. Oh, yes, scary too because one thing, the rumors were rife. You know, you read the papers. If you take a look at the newspapers from hindsight of sixty years, my god, they heard that the Japanese army's moving into the Dutch East Indies and threatening Malaysia and so on, and the Philippines are falling, and holy cow, all these bad things are happening. And then every now and then, there'd be such things as "Jap spy arrested." My brother Min, "Jap spy arrested March 28th." And headlines, man, there's a picture of my big brother, the "Jap spy arrested." So hey, these are scary times, very, very, uncertain and unsettled time. And being only seventeen, you're relatively resilient. But can you imagine how it must have felt to the Issei women who didn't even understand what was going on? God, that was pitiable, really terrible.

MR: So the Issei men were gone. Your father --

HY: Well, not all of them, not all of them.

MR: A lot of them were gone. Your father was gone.

HY: Yes.

MR: He being the one who helped people with their paperwork and, so at this time of confusion, how did people get these things taken care of?

HY: Well, in Hood River, there was a chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League. It's called the Mid-Columbia JACL. It still exists. But they got together, and they were pretty helpful in trying to help the Issei obey the regulation. For example, before the curfew law, they had alien registration. There was an alien registration in 1940, but also in 1941. There was two alien registrations. So the Mid-Columbia, they set up maybe graph brochures and pamphlets and so on, and they had, and most of the older Nisei were pretty good in Japanese. There weren't, it wasn't their first language, but they were pretty good, so they could communicate. Like my oldest brother, he could communicate any way he wanted to with the older, with the Issei. I couldn't quite do that. I couldn't quite hack the Japanese that well, but my oldest brothers could, so they helped. They were the biggest help. But after March 20th, whenever it was, 28th I guess when the curfew came along, that almost killed it because most of the valley Japanese Nisei lived in the valley, and that's mostly more than five miles away. So you couldn't go from say Dee to Odell, you could go to Odell, but you couldn't go from Dee to Pine Grove because it's more than five miles. You had to have special military permission to do that, and the military authority almost never granted it, almost never. For whatever reason, they didn't.

MR: You just mentioned your brother got arrested. You'll probably talk about that later, but can you briefly explain his arrest?

HY: Well, my brother Min was an attorney, and he felt that General DeWitt's curfew order was blatantly discriminatory because this curfew order said that all persons of Japanese ancestry, all persons of Japanese ancestry and all alien German and all alien Italian had to be within their domicile, places of residence, between eight p.m. and six a.m. in the morning. And further, they could not travel more than five miles from a radius from their home, and they were not supposed to meet, and there were certain other restrictions. And my brother says, "That's discriminatory because this law says that Japanese American citizens are under this regulation too," and he says, "That's not right. That's incorrect." So he decided to challenge that. He challenged it and he lost. He lost big.

MR: At a time when the JACL was, and most Japanese Americans too were thinking that compliance was the way to show their loyalty, what was it about your brother that just made him stand up for his rights?

HY: Well, this is a very complex problem, but Min was a very idealistic person, and he thought the rule of law superseded everything, you know. And so in this particular case, it was the principle. He said that hey, this law is discriminatory because it singles out only persons of Japanese ancestry who are American citizens who has to obey this curfew, and he was right. He was subsequently proven right on that, but it took forty years to do that. But on the other hand, he also was instrumental... well, not instrumental. He actually did, he advised the Heart Mountain draft resistance of which there was sixty-three, he said, "Obey the law because that's settled law. This has been settled since the American Civil War. So if you violate this law, you're going to go to jail, so, you guys shouldn't do that." But see, that's a very difficult situation. I think that what he said, one was settled law, that is the draft resistance, and the other one was not settled law. It was a challenge to a new law, and the time they're challenged is when it comes up. So I think that's what motivated him, but I never had firsthand discussions to ask him, well, why did you do, one, it seems rather different, doesn't it? I mean, it's contradictory. One, he says, "Obey the law," and the other hand says, "Don't obey the law," how come. So that's, even to this day, there are people who have great trouble reconciling the different stances on that. I think that's the way it worked.