Densho Digital Archive - Grant Ujifusa Interview I

<Begin Segment 1>

BF: This is a Densho interview. The narrator is Mr. Grant Ujifusa. The interviewers are Cherry Kinoshita and Becky Fukuda, and it is September 13, 1997 and we are at the UCLA Campus for the Redress Conference. Grant, I'm going to ask you just a couple of background questions for the viewer to get an idea of, of who you are. What do you do for a living?

GU: I'm a magazine editor and I do original stories for Reader's Digest magazine. I've been there for about nine years and before that I was in book publishing. I was an editor of general interest books at Random House in New York City, and Macmillan in New York City, and earlier with Houghton Mifflin in Boston.

BF: And you're also the author of the Almanac of American Politics, as I understand.

GU: Actually, I'm the co-author of the Almanac of American Politics with a college friend, Michael Barone, and we've been publishing that reference book on Congress every two years since 1972.

BF: Wow. And so you're still doing that, it's...

GU: We're still doing, we still do it. We had one idea and the nice thing about that book is that you never have to think of another idea, it's the same idea over and over again.

BF: But it always needs to be new.

GU: That's right, every time there's an election, Congressional election, there are new members and so, the more turnover -- that's why I'm for term limits -- the more turnover, the better off we sell.

BF: All right. [Laughs] And do you have a family?

GU: I do. I've been married for nineteen years to a woman whose name is Amy Brooks. We have two children, the younger is a boy, sixteen, in high school and the older is eighteen, and I'm very happy to say that he's just started his freshman year at Harvard.

BF: Oh, congratulations. And where does the family reside? Where do you live?

GU: We live in a suburb about twenty miles north of New York City called Chappaqua. It's a typical bedroom community north of New York City.

<Begin Segment 2>

BF: Now, many of the individuals involved in the redress movement have a very specific personal connection to the issue, so I'm gonna ask you the question I've been asking everyone. Were you and your family interned during the war, World War II?

GU: Actually not. Both my mother's side -- my mother grew up in Southern Colorado, not far from Amache as a matter of fact, but they were residing there. My grandfather, my maternal grandfather, worked for almost forty years as a machinist on the Santa Fe Railroad. My paternal grandfather and grandmother lived in northern Wyoming since they had immigrated. And this is in fact ironically, not very far from Heart Mountain. So that neither, neither my mother's family or my father's family were interned. In fact, my maternal grandfather, whom I love and miss to this very day, would say to me as a child -- and we all lived together since my father was the eldest and we all lived on the same farm, in the same house -- he would say, "Masashi," and he would say to me in Japanese, which I then understood, "Masashi, you have to be very careful in life because you come from a dumb family." And I'd say, "Well, why do you say that, Grandpa?" And Grandpa would say, "Because I voluntarily chose to settle a part of the world to which 10,000 people were involuntarily removed. Figure it out." [Laughs]

BF: [Laughs] And so was it... so Wyoming?

GU: Wyoming.

BF: Wyoming, not Colorado.

GU: Wyoming. I grew up about 90 miles from Heart Mountain.

BF: Where, I assume before then, aside from the camp there weren't very many Japanese Americans in the area.

GU: There, there were not, there were some. And so, we occasionally had picnics on the Fourth of July. And the radius encompassed all of southern Montana and northern Wyoming, so we would choose some middle point and we would get maybe a hundred Japanese Americans from an enormous geographical expanse. And there were maybe five or six families in my small town called Worland in northern Wyoming.

<Begin Segment 3>

BF: So did you have much of a, what they called the, the identity, the Asian American identity, when you were growing up? Or were you one of those Nikkeis who said, "You know, I never really thought of myself as being Japanese"?

GU: I thought of myself as Japanese, because you know, every, everybody in high school except me and maybe three others, were, were white. There were some Hispanics. But my mother was one of those very diligent students, so she went to Japanese school during the summer and she was completely proficient in the language, the reading and the writing. There was Japanese food on the table every day. So that even if I went to school and regard, and would try to regard myself as something other than Japanese, my whole life at home, including the language spoken by my grandparents who lived with us, was Japanese.

BF: So did you speak very much Japanese when you were that age?

GU: I was, I was, I'm told that I was completely bilingual until I was six or seven, and then I lost it. I still understand very simple, kitchen Japanese. I can understand, for example, the chitchat behind, behind the sushi bar. But once it gets into, even a Japanese television quiz show, that level I'm out of it. I don't, I don't understand it.

<Begin Segment 4>

BF: I'm gonna skip a bit ahead, skip a few years, to when you got involved in the redress movement. What were you doing at the time and where were you, where were you living?

GU: I was living in New York City on the West Side. I was then a book editor at Random House. And this was, I believe 1981, and Min Yasui came to town. And Min lived in Denver, but he would occasionally come up to Worland, which is 450 miles away, make sure that everybody up there, all the Japanese Americans up there, were okay. And he'd visit. So, our family got to know Min and my mother was from Colorado, and from, spent a lot of time in Denver, so we knew Min. So Min, Min knew me as a kid. And then I went off to, back East to go to school, and Min learned that I -- from Mike Masaoka -- that I did the Almanac and that I also did books in New York. And so he came to visit me, and he said, "I have this, we're involved in this really crazy idea." And I said, "Oh no Min, you're too old for a crazy idea." And he said, "Here's the idea..." And I said, "You are really old, and you are really crazy." [Laughs] And then, he took me to a couple of meetings at the New York JACL, and I said, "Yeah, this is something I may want to get involved in." Then there was a commission hearing in New York, and everyone was crying and so was I. And then when Min and I went down to Washington, some time after the commission hearing, and Mike and I, and Min, had lunch at a Japanese restaurant in Washington, and they said, "We'd like you to help." And I said, "Okay."

<Begin Segment 5>

BF: There's, there's so many obviously persuasive reasons why people joined the effort, but do you remember anything in particular, something that someone said, or an argument, or a part of testimony that really changed it, or, or made the difference for you?

GU: I... well, the total impact of the, of the emotional impact of the commission hearings in New York I think convinced me. It didn't convince me on a rational level, I heard these stories, and I said, these are the stories that were told to me by my mother. Understand that she was not interned, but the experience that she had that always stuck in my craw, which was in some part related to the experience of people who were put in camp. She worked very hard in high school in La Junta, Colorado. She earned valedictorian, valedictorian honors. And the kids liked her, the kids in her class liked her. But the teachers and the administration and the school board announced that, "There would be no Jap speaking at graduation this year and, and we have a Jap valedictorian, so we're not going to have any speeches." And that, that I remembered and it hurt Mom. Mom didn't get a chance to go on to college. This meant a lot to her, and she was denied that. And so, when I heard the stories at the commission, I said, "Gee, Mom had it tough, but other people had it tougher." But her story kind of paralleled those that I heard, and that had a great impact on me.

BF: Wow.

CK: How much of the hearings did you listen to? Was it one day, one full day?

GU: I think it was a one-day hearing in New York. And I stayed for the entire -- I think it was morning and afternoon -- and I stayed for the whole day. I took the day off from work. And like a lot of people there, I was crying.

CK: Yeah, it wasn't just a smattering, like an hour...

GU: No, I, I stayed for the, I stayed for the whole thing. And I said, "Oh, my God. This is what this is about."

BK: You weren't... I guess I shouldn't assume this, but were you involved in Japanese American community groups, or clubs, or politics, previous to your conversation with, with Min Yasui and getting involved?

GU: No, I really wasn't. Not in college... in fact, in my class -- I drove my son to Harvard last week and a Harvard class of 1,600 is 20 percent Asian. So that means in excess of 360 Asians, okay, out of a class of 1,600. In my (Harvard) class, there were four Japanese Americans and three Chinese Americans, all right? So there was not, there was, there was nothing to be associated with. I think the association was from my childhood, in which there was a very small JACL chapter in my hometown that took in a whole lot of northern Wyoming. And my mother was very active and she was ferocious. And she would, there was a local private swimming pool that wouldn't let Japanese Americans swim in it. And so, she took those people on, and Min helped. And then as late as 1968, there was an anti-miscegenation law in Wyoming. And so, if I wanted to marry the cheerleader of Worland High School, I had to go to Montana, so she took that on. And so, she has a... Mom is ferocious. She's not arrogant, but she's ferocious.

BF: She sounds sort of atypical, of what you usually think of Issei women.

GU: She was actually a Nisei. She was a Nisei. And she was conventionally a good and obedient wife, and mother, and daughter-in-law but she, like many Nisei women, a powerhouse.

<Begin Segment 6>

BF: You -- in the little I've, I've heard you speak -- you strike me as a realist and a pragmatist. And I know that, well, it's obvious, redress is one of those issues that's loaded with emotions and big moral values and things like that. When you got involved with JACL, was there sort of a learning curve where you had to figure out how to work within this organization, and within this community, and still be yourself and get things done? I mean, did, was there ever a time when you were really frustrated?

GU: That's a, that's a very good question and Cherry, among others, tried to guide me. Sometimes more successfully than others. Yeah, one of the problems, of course, is that here's this, here's the JACL, it's a longstanding institution. There are people who put in lots of time. It's based mostly on the West Coast, and now we're doing the most important project, maybe in the history of the organization, and there's this guy that we had never heard of, who's been given this position and a lot of power. Right?

BF: Uh-huh.

GU: And so there was of, there was of... this guy, who is this guy? We've never heard of this guy, he's not paid his dues, what is going on here? So that I think was the, one of my big, one of my big problems. And there were some, like Denny Yasuhara, and Grayce Uyehara, and Cherry, who got to know me a little bit, and then... but they recognized also pragmatically, that the reason I was offered this position is, number one, I was willing to do it and number two, I co-authored this book that provided access in Congress and in Washington generally.

BF: The Almanac.

GU: The Almanac. That's gonna, that's... if I may say so, in white, male, Washington, that book is a big deal. So, they understood that, that I brought something to the effort that they needed. And also, my powers of persuasions were... Wyoming is a very Republican state. I was, I was a liberal, even a radical in college. And then, I thought about it a little bit, and I thought about how I grew up on the farm, and some of the ranchers, ranchers that I knew, and their sons with whom I played football. And I came back around to thinking, the people in Wyoming are right about life, and about their politics, and the people on the West Side of New York are wrong. Nobody gives you anything in life and, and you gotta work hard and keep your nose clean and take care of your kids. It's a question of personal responsibility, not of social responsibility and so that led me in a conservative direction. And that conservative direction also helped me as I talked to people who were conservatives and on the ascendancy in Capitol Hill, and also in the Reagan White House. In other words, I could speak their language convincingly.

<Begin Segment 7>

CK: You said that happened during your Harvard years, that you made this turn around from liberal to conservative?

GU: No, I was pretty liberal in college. I was never, I was never, I would never regard myself, even during the height of the Vietnam War protest, as a radical. But I was pretty far left of center, I think, if you wanted to put me on any kind of spectrum. I suppose the thing that made me go back a little bit, to my Wyoming roots, was an experience, were experiences in New York book publishing. The people in New York book publishing -- and I don't want to generalize, this is just my personal experience -- are for the most part, very liberal and often radical, and I thought, "Gee, you know, they have the right idea about life." And then, I saw them in action day-to-day, with the knives out, the brutality, the bureaucratic viciousness. And I said, "Now, wait a minute, these people are my heroes. These were the liberals, and the liberals are this ruthless or this immoral?" Pinch, in a pinch, I just as soon be with my white conservative rancher. If I were to be on a desert island and it was a really tough situation, give me Grandpa, and give me a couple of these Wyoming ranchers. Who may not be correct in a lot of ways, but they're not gonna, their, their whole lives and their outlook on life is not what I saw inside New York book publishing. And I suppose, therefore, the answer is no, it wasn't until I moved to New York and I got involved in rock em', sock em', big-time book publishing, that I decided that I was somebody other than I thought I was politically. But that didn't change my personal views.

CK: I believe you said that Min Yasui was a hero, Mike Masaoka.

GU: Yes.

CK: Aren't they, wouldn't they both be considered liberal?

GU: Correct, correct.

CK: And yet, how do you...

GU: Well that's a good question, I've never thought of it. I... the answer I think is that the way people are, and the way people live, and their personal values, are the basics. All right? What's on top of that are the politics. And so, if I love Mike and I love Min, and I respected them as people and their politics were liberal, it's okay. There are some conservatives whom I know, politically conservative, who are just as equally vicious and ruthless as some of the liberals in, in the book publishing business that I was part of. So, the answer is personal beliefs and how one really lives. And you can sort of tell from people. It, it doesn't matter. So you're a Democrat, you're a Republican, you're a liberal, you're conservative, you're black, you're Jewish. Come on.

CK: So, you separate the personal from the political?

GU: Yes, to a certain extent. Although, as a manner of social policy, (public) policy, I believed in the '60s that the Vietnam War, as a matter of public policy, was wrong. As a matter of public policy today or as a matter of public policy during the, let's say the '80s; I felt that the defense build-up was correct, all right? As a matter of public policy, in the case of, what, across the board tax reduction, I think, I think everyone, rich, poor and in between, are paying too many taxes. So, so I feel that, I feel that lower taxes are better. Now, the, the nice fall-out from this -- and Bob Matsui and I had an arrangement -- was, okay, this is what I believe, Bob believed something else. Bob believes, I think, that big government often provides solutions for people. I think they probably create more problems. I get along really well with Bob, okay? He's a, he's a buddy of mine. We just happen to disagree on this. But pragmatically and practically what happened is, Bob said, "Okay, I work the liberals, not too many conservatives among Japanese Americans. You work, you can work the conservatives without being a hypocrite, correct?" "Yes." "Okay, that's the division of labor, let's go after Newt."

<Begin Segment 8>

BF: Now, that's sort of, I think, kind of, that's a, a clear, sort of, obvious reason why you were an asset... being Republican. But aside from the contacts maybe being a Republican allowed the JACL to have, do you think your sort of coming from a different point of view than a lot of the organizers in JACL had, sort of added sort of a different philosophical belief or a different value to the movement that was helpful?

GU: I don't know. Maybe, maybe Cherry would have a better answer than that. I think that the... I think that philosophically, we were in the same place. Mainly, that internment was a terrible thing and we needed to right it. So, that was the deepest level of the philosophy. But there was no disagreement on that. If I said, "Well, why are you doing this?" then I should not, I shouldn't have been around, anywhere. So the issue became, once I bought in to what Cherry, and Denny, and Grayce, and Min, and Mike, and Bob, and all the others believed and wanted to do, once I bought into that philosophically, then it became in some sense a -- I don't want to sound bloodless about it, but it became a, for me, a technical exercise. Now that we believe this, how do we get from A to B to C to D? So, so I could be conservative and be Japanese American and believe very strongly in the rightness of redress. So there was no litmus test for me in, in that regard. There are a lot of very good liberals, I'm sure, among Japanese Americans who said, "Yeah, they're doing redress, but I'm not going to do a goddamn thing," and they didn't.

<Begin Segment 9>

BF: Let's back up a little, and why don't you explain for us, well, for the camera, what exactly your position was at JACL and sort of what that entailed.

GU: My position at the JACL was the legislative strategy chair for the legislative education committee of the JACL. And the legislative education committee was formed because a non-profit tax-exempt organization, namely the JACL, cannot directly lobby with tax exempt dollars. So, if we wanted to do straight out lobbying, an adjunct organization had to be created, which accepted non tax-deductible dollars in order to lobby directly in Congress and in the White House. And I was responsible for formulating basic, bare bones strategy, like four things we ought to do, in this order. And on some of those things, I was not only the strategist, but I was the lobbyist. So I went and directly talked to many of the people that I said I talked to this morning.

<Begin Segment 10>

BF: Do you have any other kind of memorable anecdotes regarding some of your lobbying, some of your dealing with people who were particularly opposed?

GU: Opposed? Yeah, I want to talk about someone who was particularly opposed and then I want to talk about someone who was particularly in favor. The man who was particularly opposed was a Senator from my home state, Malcolm Wallop. Malcolm Wallop is descended from some English nobility that settled cattle ranches in my state. In fact, he is loosely related to Queen Elizabeth, who visited Malcolm Wallop's ranch when she came to, came to the United States maybe twenty years ago. And I walked into Malcolm (Wallop's office) and I, I had been working a little bit with one of his aides, who is now at Stanford, and I introduced myself as a friend of Joe Dokes and we started talking. And then I said, "Well, I'm here to ask you for some, for support on Japanese American redress." I was also sort of sniffing around, hoping not to hear that someone like Malcolm or someone like Jesse Helms would filibuster the bill. Okay, 'cause that would've killed it. And what happened was that Malcolm started screaming at me. And I just couldn't believe it. I, I couldn't believe it. I was, I was shaken. And he said things like, "Well, before you get anything, the Northern Cheyenne should get something." The fact is, that his great-great, his great-great grandfather carved a ranch out of Northern Cheyenne territory. Come on now.

BF: That's ironic.

GU: And the real answer, apparently there was, there was someone in Casper or Sheridan, Wyoming who was a Pacific war veteran who had a bee in his bonnet about this issue and had been talking to Malcolm about it for years. So I walked into that.

BF: Well, what did you do? Just turn around and walk out? [Laughs]

GU: I said, "Gee, you know, I've got another meeting here in five minutes." But he screamed at me for maybe a minute or two.

CK: Raised his voice?

GU: Oh, yeah. It was, it was a screaming match, and surprisingly, he screamed even though there was an aide in his office. He was, he had problems, I mean, he had real problems with arrogance. And pretty soon, he barely won re-election a couple of years later and then he retired from the Senate. But he apparently treated that way, treated people who were farmers, and ranchers, and lobbying, with the same kind of arrogance but I'm sure, not screaming. He was a Yale English major and thought of himself as an intellectual in everything. And I didn't like him then and I don't like him now.

<Begin Segment 11>

GU: The guy who was particularly in favor, I have a story about is, is Dan Inouye. And I don't know how candid I can be, but I'll be candid. Spark was the guy who was in favor. Dan didn't think it could be done, all right? Dan, I don't think especially wanted to be associated with a losing issue, so it was all Spark. Also, Dan is very solicitous of his constituency in Hawaii and less solicitous, I think, of the Japanese Americans on the mainland, except for his 442 buddies, Company E in particular, okay? Mike told me that... this is when we discovered that we were four hundred million dollars short. And I was talking to Mike Masaoka about it, and Mike said, "Look, you got to go in and see Dan because this is an appropriations issue. You gotta go in there alone, though, because Dan is very cagey. And he'll play to the lowest common denominator and you gotta set a high common denominator." So I'm in there, and I go in, and he's got this big office and he works in some sort of a side, in a side room. And his, and most of the space is given over to this thing that looks like a huge living room with a very high ceiling. So, I go in there, I'm supposed to be there at 10:00, I'm there at 10:00, I'm cooling my heels for about twenty minutes. And this is... just let the guy cool his heels. So, I'm sitting there and finally from the side door of this big office, suddenly Inouye emerges, the great samurai, right? So he comes toward me, and I get up, and he sticks out his left hand, and, "Very good to see you, Grant." And we're all smiles, but he's telling me, I'm the samurai and you're the guy here asking for something. And I look at him and he's got a cookie crumb, right here. [Gestures to his cheek] So, so while I'm cooling my heels, he's back there snarfing down a couple of cookies, maybe with a little bit of milk.

BF: [Laughs] The great samurai.

GU: This is the great samurai, all right? And so, we talked for a bit, and he knows that all these other people showed up, eligibles. So we walked out and as we were walking out, he says to me, "Grant, look, when is all this gonna stop?" And I said, "I don't know, I don't know." So that was another one.

CK: That was not the initial... are you talking about the appropriations --

GU: No, no, this was, this was the additional money we had to find.

CK: For the appropriations.

GU: Yeah. Bob actually is a hero on that. He found it. He worked with... I don't think we had to work with, with Inouye on that. Bob went to see Darman and Darman did an accounting trick, and the accounting trick left four hundred million dollars in a cookie jar, on the side, that came to us.

<Begin Segment 12>

CK: Could you clarify how Senator Inouye was at the very beginning of the redress, when it first, the concept first started? He was resistant at that time, too.

GU: I think he was resistant and maybe he had good reason to be resistant. He... in fact, he told me this once. I think, like a lot of vets early on, he didn't like the idea. And he didn't like the idea for two reasons. Number one, this asking for money cheapens the contribution of the veterans. And it cheapens what all the people went through in camp, because you've got your hand out and you've got a number on this experience, a dollar figure on the experience, okay? That's kind of tacky. I think he felt that way. And the other thing he said to me at one point is, "Grant, a lot of my buddies are over in France and Italy pushing up daisies, what are they getting out of this?" And in certain terms, the answer was nothing.

BF: Was that rather demoralizing?

GU: No, I don't think it's demoralizing because we knew that, when push came to shove, Dan is going to be with us. It, it did mean that Spark had to, to carry it. And, and Spark was entirely willing to be out front, carrying it, win, lose or draw. In fact, another, another meeting that I had... this is a meeting that I talked about in the Harvard paper right after I talked to Barney. And Barney said we're going to move it, we're going to cut it down from 250 to 50 million on the trust fund, but otherwise, we're going. And I was thrilled after all these years of Hall, and Glickman, and others. And I went right on, and my next meeting was with Dan, and this was in his capitol building in the Senate hideaway office, not in his, not in the Hart office building. So, I sat down and I said, "Hey Dan, you know, I was just talking to Barney Frank, we're finally going to get, we were finally going to get movement on the House side." And he looks at me and he says, "How many co-sponsors does Spark have, Grant?" And I said, "Well, I think, I think he's got about twenty-seven." And he says to me, "I think it's about thirty-five, thirty-six max, don't you, Grant?" And I said, "I don't think so." But two days later -- I talked to Mike about this -- and then, two days later we went to see Spark, who indeed had twenty-seven. And, Dan's a little bit smarter, intellectually. He can play mental games better than Spark. So I think Dan used to play some mental games on Spark. I don't know if this is ever going to become public, but I'm telling you some of the things that maybe I shouldn't be talking about. So Mike and I and Grayce went into see Spark, and I relayed the story, and I said, "Hey, I saw Dan two days ago and he's saying you're going to max out at thirty-five." And he said, "I am not going to max out at thirty-five." And he went from twenty-seven to seventy-one.

BF: Right.

GU: So maybe he, maybe Dan did us a favor, because he got Spark pissed off.

BF: Kind of motivated him.

GU: Yeah.

CK: Would you say that was the reason it went through two sessions, and it was not 'til the 100th that Spark really went at it and got the seventy-one?

GU: Maybe, I don't know. I can't remember what the sequence was. But I initially talked to, to Barney. When Barney got, assumed the chair, was that '86? Had to be '86, right?

CK: Yeah.

GU: So that's '86, and then the two... five minutes after I saw Barney, I saw Dan and so this was '86 when Dan said, "We're gonna max out at thirty-five." So, two days later I saw Spark.

CK: That ties in.

GU: So, that ties in.

BF: Yeah.

CK: Yeah, that's a 100 session there, '86 to '88.

GU: Yeah, right. That's some of the stuff that maybe shouldn't come out until everybody's dead, but it's on film now.

<Begin Segment 13>

BF: I had, I had one question from -- and we have to start wrapping up here -- but regarding the lesson, the lesson you gave us in the panel about framing the issue.

GU: Right.

BF: And framing the issue to get support.

GU: Right.

BF: And I, I really enjoyed that. And you mentioned how redress was part of the anti-abortion cause.

GU: Yeah. [Laughs]

BF: Could you tell me a little bit about that?

GU: Well, it became part of the anti-abortion movement because Pat Swindle, whom we needed, felt very strongly that two classes of people should have constitutional rights, namely Japanese Americans who were incarcerated during World War II and unborn fetuses. So he's saying, "Now that we've done this for Japanese Americans, we ought to do the next step is for unborn fetuses." And he, he made that argument in a floor speech during the debate on our bill and you, as I said, you can look it up, that's exactly what he said and I'm very happy that he feels that way.

BF: Now, did you frame the issue for him that way? Or he just...

GU: No, he thought that up all by himself.

<Begin Segment 14>

BF: Do you... when you look back in hindsight, what impact -- now, this is talking about you personally -- do you think your involvement had on you, I mean growth, or lessons, or changes?

GU: Well, I think it was the most important and most intense thing I ever did in my life. That's one thing. I never went at anything with as much intensity and feeling as this. Secondly, the nice thing about that feeling is that the people with whom I worked closely, also felt the same way and there was an intense bond that was created between the people with whom I worked, and I love them and I respect them. So that was something I got out of it, I mean, I have some friends. And the third thing is that this was not a great Japanese tragedy like you see in the movies sometimes, but it was a success and it's, this is America, not Japan, so it's always nice to win.

<Begin Segment 15>

BF: Thank you. We are out of time, and I think that's a really nice spot to end, unless Cherry, I'm sorry, I should have asked you, are there any questions you want to...?

CK: No, no, you're have to make it.

BF: Yeah, we have about seven minutes, so...

GU: Yeah, sure.

CK: What were you... this last thing you said...

GU: Yeah.

CK: Oh, I understand there was, there was some feeling that this may be the end of your, your association with any Japanese American project. Is that, is that so, and why would you... do you have that feeling or...

GU: Yeah, I do. I, when I was doing this in the '80s, from roughly '82 to '92, when we finally got this entitlement thing nailed down in the Bush administration, that's ten years. In 1982, my oldest child, my older child, now eighteen, was three. And, that wasn't so nice, not to be around the house when, maybe, I should have been. I also feel that in some ways it maybe negatively affected my career, because I was taking a lot of time doing this. It was a high pressure job at Random House. And I suppose a third reason is that it's time for other people to do it. I mean, we have some remarkable talent and I'm willing to talk to 'em, but I think, I think people like Mitch and others should step forward. And I'm fifty-five years old. I'm tired.

CK: I'm tired.

GU: But you're not so tired, that's the difference. That's the difference between you and me. [Laughs]

CK: Oh, yeah?

BF: That was a nice question.