<Begin Segment 1>

PW: Good morning.

MY: Good morning.

PW: My name is Patricia Wakida. I'm here with Michael Yoshii today. Today is Friday, May 19, 2023, and we're at the studio of Shaun Daniels at 1151 Harbor Bay Parkway in Alameda, California. I'm interviewing former pastor Michael Yoshii to discuss his experience with the Buena Vista United Methodist church of Alameda. So I'm ready to start. I have this perception that there are a significant number of Japanese American United Methodist churches around the country. Is this true, and why is that?

MY: Yeah, we have a significant number of Methodist churches, mostly on the West Coast, though, I would say. Northern California, Southern California, Pacific Northwest and Colorado.

PW: Was there a specific mission that was driving that number of churches to be formed here?

MY: If you look at it, there are a number of Presbyterian Japanese American churches and there are a number of Methodist Japanese American churches. That was based on the denomination outreach that took place from the time the churches started.

PW: And was your family always a Methodist church-going family?

MY: No, my family was not.

PW: Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

MY: My mother's parents were part of the Christian Layman Church in Berkeley, and that's where I was introduced to Christian faith at that particular church. And my father's side was not connected to any churches, although they connected to the Christian Layman Church after the wartime.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 2>

PW: So can you just share a very brief history of the Buena Vista Methodist church? I know that it's a lot of history, but for those of us who aren't familiar with Buena Vista, can you tell me a little bit more?

MY: I think there's going to be a lot of the history with this Densho project that's going to be recorded, but I'll just give you like a thirty-second snapshot. It was founded in 1898 with an outreach to immigrant men from Japan coming into the city of Alameda. And there were missionaries who outreached to them to help teach English, help support them for looking for employment and also for housing. And that sort of grew over the years into a fellowship and then eventually into a church, into the congregation. And they found a Victorian home on 2311 Buena Vista Avenue, which is the current location of the church.

PW: So it's always been in the same location?

MY: No. Well, I mean, I think the outreach started like in the house ministry or something, but I think it was like 1907 or so that they found the current location. So a few years after the initial outreach.

PW: So let's start with your beginning with Buena Vista. When were you first appointed?

MY: I was first appointed half time in 1986, which is when I graduated from Pacific School of Religion with my MDiv. But my primary appointment was to the Berkeley Methodist Church. And I was there under an arrangement where I was going to be an associate to do social justice work and outreach to young families. I was there for two years and then I was appointed full-time pastor in 1988 to Buena Vista, in July of 1988.

PW: And then what was it like when you first arrived?

MY: You know, I grew up in the Bay Area but I wasn't that familiar with Alameda. And Alameda's got its own unique culture and history. And so it was something new for me, and something different. So just getting acclimated to the community as well as to this particular congregation was something new for me.

PW: And was it predominately a Japanese American congregation?

MY: Yes. Because from its beginnings in 1898, we were serving Isseis, it was a primarily Issei and Nisei congregation. Although at that particular time in '88, there had been a Sansei generation that were born and raised there, but most of them had moved out of the area. So when I arrived there, it was a small congregation, primarily of Nisei, but a small handful of Issei as well.

PW: And for people who aren't that familiar with Alameda, it's kind of an island, right? I mean, it is an island.

MY: It is an island, yeah.

PW: And the people that generally have lived here for many generations, the Japanese Americans, I should say, were in the same kind of industries over a long period of time? Like I'm just kind of curious to get that feeling...

MY: Kind of what the economy was?

PW: Yeah, or just what the culture was when you said you came here and it was a little bit different?

MY: Yeah. Well, one of the things that... there was a navy identity in Alameda that got started during the war, because they opened up the navy base there at that particular time. So there was definitely that kind of feeling of a military identity of a portion of the city. But it's also been kind of a suburban outlier for San Francisco, you know, people who maybe commuted to San Francisco. But then also there's kind of the rural aspects of Alameda, too, where you've heard of Bay Farm Island where there actually were farms prior to them developing homes in the particular area. So it was kind of a unique history. And because it's an island, and also, at the time I came, I think there were about maybe seventy thousand population or so, kind of a small city that has kind of a character that's kind of quaint in some sense. And as you get to know people, you get a sense that it's a very tight-knit community as well. And one of the things that one of the members told me is that, "Well, you're a newcomer here, it's going to take you a long time to become an Alamedan." And I said, "What do you mean by that?" And he says, "Well, I've been here for like twenty years, and I'm still a newcomer." And I would learn that as I began to meet people in Alameda along the way, that there are Alamedans that go back many generations, and that there's that sense of Alameda identity that was there throughout the community. And I think that was also mirrored in the Japanese American community as well, that there had been generations that go back. Which is a different feeling than, say, if you think about churches that are in Oakland or Berkeley or L.A., they're a different kind of sensibility.

PW: It makes a lot of sense, the navy piece especially. Because my father was actually stationed in Alameda with the Navy for twenty years.

MY: No kidding? Oh, really?

PW: Long time.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 3>

PW: So going back to when you were first appointed, that happened to be 1988, which is a significant year for Japanese American history since it's the year that the Civil Liberties Act was passed. Tell me a little bit about how that impacted your congregation and your actions as a church. What happened?

MY: Well, the Civil Liberties Act was passed, actually, on my birthday, August 10th. And I was at a youth camp that year called Lake Sequoia Youth Camp. And we got the news and so we celebrated my birthday and also celebrated the victory there at the camp. But immediately, in terms of the ministry, I think there's a... there was a critical need to begin to do what I call theological understanding of what did this mean for our congregation, for our people in general as well. And that's what I could call "civil liberties theology." We've heard about "civil rights theology," but what is "civil liberties theology"? It's about how do we understand what has taken place for us as people of faith in terms of what is God doing with us and for us and our people? And so that would start to come out in terms of preaching. He would be there in the form of content and Bible studies and activities of the church as well. And what I recognized right away was that a lot of our folks had not talked about the experience. There maybe had been a few that had been really engaged with things, but not a whole lot. And so I began to organize things for people to tell their own stories and be able to have opportunities within congregational life to share their own stories, which was not an easy thing for people to do. I think what was clear to me was that there are people who are in the forefront of working on the redress and reparations movement, but there were still places like this in Alameda where a lot of folks had not talked about their experiences.

PW: Can you give me an example of people in the congregation who were involved with the redress and reparations movement?

MY: Well, I think there were key people, say, who were, maybe would go to meetings where the redress movement was going on. Prior to my going to the ministry, I was involved in volunteering for the redress hearings in San Francisco. So in 1981, I was not yet in seminary, but I was going out to churches, and that was kind of my task, to go out and encourage people to get involved and come to meetings and so forth. And I don't remember going to Buena Vista at that time. I remember going to Berkeley Methodist and to Lake Park Methodist. I don't remember going to Buena Vista Methodist. But they typically would have maybe somebody who was a representative to go to informational meetings and so forth.

PW: Do you know if there were people in your congregation who testified during the NCRR hearings?

MY: None of them testified. The one Methodist who I remember who testified, who made a big impression on me was Lester Suzuki, I think he was a pastor at Berkeley Methodist at a particular point in time. But he really made an impression upon me with his humor and his exhortation around why redress had to be passed.

PW: Am I correct that Mr. Suzuki was also, or Reverend Suzuki has written a book?

MY: Yes. He wrote the book about ministry in the camps. I can't remember the exact title of it. In fact, he brought that book to the hearings, and he had a box of books, and he gave his testimony and he quoted scripture as to why there needed to be monetary redress as well. Of course, he was making that all up, because there was no such thing in the scripture about that. But it was his humor that struck me. Then he held up his book, and he says, "I've got a book here about ministry in the camps," and he was going to give a complimentary copy to everybody on the commission, and then he turned and said, "I have a special for you today for $9.95." [Laughs]

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 4>

PW: This makes me think that we should take a step back and talk about what actually happened to Buena Vista during the war? So 1942, do you know anything about the history of what happened and how it was impacted?

MY: Most of that congregation went to Tanforan and to Topaz. And so there's a photo that's going to be part of the Densho Alameda Japantown history, I think, that shows their last worship service at the church before they left.

PW: And what happened to the building itself during...

MY: The building was taken care of by a man named John Cobb, who was a Methodist pastor, and so he was assigned to be the caretaker of the building while people were gone, but there were no worship services during the war.

PW: I understand that there, part of the actions of the church this movement to enfold civil liberties theology into the congregation was to talk to the Alameda City Council. Can you tell me a little bit about what happened?

MY: Well, I was talking with some of the members and I said, "What we should do is have a commemoration of the, commemoration celebration of the passage of the Civil Liberties Act." And so one of the members said, "I know one of the council members, let's go talk to him." And his response was, "Well, we don't do those kinds of things in Alameda." And I said, "What do you mean, those kind of things?" He says, "Well, you know, those kind of things. That's more for, like, Berkeley or something." And that kind of gave me a clue to the kind of politics and the social ambiance in the city of Alameda, that they weren't going to celebrate a civil rights victory in the community. And so we just had to do one on our own. We asked another congregation that was much bigger that had capacity to help us host that and do a community celebration for that. And we, along with other folks in the community, had our own commemoration celebration. But what the councilman did come back and say is, "What I can do for you is I would like to help support maybe a commemoration of the old ATK Japanese baseball team," which is a segregated baseball team that had existed prewar and continued on after the war. And so that was actually very exciting for Shiz Kawamura, who was the member at Buena Vista who was the point person on this. And he got really excited and they had a little reunion of the old ATK baseball team, and had a commemorative plaque put at the baseball park where they used to play.

PW: Which is where? Where is this baseball field?

MY: It's over near McKinley Park in Alameda, I can't quite describe for you how to place it. But it's not too far from the church. And then they used to play there in segregated leagues, and sometimes had people coming in from Japan, they played baseball with. But they also belonged to the circuit of Japanese American sports network. So they probably played with some of your relatives in Fresno, for that matter.

PW: Very possible.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 5>

PW: So going back to redress, of course, the act was passed, and then over time, checks started to come in to people, and that was something that sometimes impacted people in different personal ways. Did you have any stories about that?

MY: Yeah. What I noticed about that was when people started getting the checks, there was a range of responses to getting the checks. And some were not so happy or thrilled that they're getting this check, but there was some sense of disbelief or others, I could see their eyes welling up. I think some couldn't believe that this was actually happening. And I recognized, because of work I'd done before, that there's a sense of trauma that's involved, and that the actual paper, of the letters, can be a visceral trigger for the memories that people had maybe kind of suppressed for many years, depending upon what their particular family situation was and so forth. And I remember one family in particular -- and I believe that it's okay for me to talk about now on this interview -- she had shared with us in a Bible study at one point that the whole story was very difficult for her because she had one brother who was a Heart Mountain resister, and the other brother was a 442 veteran and well-decorated. But their family never talked about the wartime out of respect for the brother that had been in prison, he was sent to Leavenworth for the duration of the war. So the one brother who was a 442 veteran, he always respected his brother as well for his decision that he made, and she always talked about how painful it was for her to have that memory but no discussion about it ever at family gatherings and what have you. And that didn't come out until the early '90s about the Heart Mountain resister stories. And so then their children found out about it at that point in time because there were kind of public forums where they shared their stories. And so those kinds of stories were not part of the whole collection of stories during the hearings, because there was a tactic about not having those stories prominently told.

PW: I'm nodding my head because I understand what you're saying, but maybe explain a little bit more about that for somebody who may not understand that there was some, there were "desirable stories" maybe, but I'm not sure exactly how to explain this, but there was a narrative that was important to make sure that this...

MY: My understanding of it was that there was much more encouragement of highlighting the experience of the 442 veterans in terms of the narrative during the whole process of the redress movement, but that there was, in some sense, a suppression of the resister stories, or the stories of "no-no boys." Because those wouldn't play well in terms of the national audience and also a congressional audience to get the redress bill passed. That's kind of my understanding of what took place. And so there was a deliberate kind of, how should we say, shaping of the narrative, but the reality is that there had been multiple stories in the Japanese American community. And so even though stories were being told during the decade of the '80s, after redress was won, then other stories began to emerge because it was okay for people now to kind of come forth with their stories. And this is a case in point where I had that experience with a particular family where this was the situation. And it was quite painful in many respects, but also quite liberating in another respect because, for me, there was a sense of empowerment that went on as I met her family and me her brother who was Heart Mountain resister. It was great to be involved with them and encouraging him to go ahead and speak his truth as well, which he finally did after people began to organize for that.

PW: Did this impact your sermons?

MY: Absolutely, absolutely. Because we're speaking about truths that are needing to be told and heard, and also the fact that different people have their own stories. So there's not one narrative, there's multiple narratives to the Japanese American story. And we were all talking about our narrative needs to be part of the larger narrative of American history, right? So what goes for us too as a community operates within the community in terms of our intracommunity dynamics as well.

PW: You had discussed earlier that there were support kinds of systems and ways for people to tell their stories in a safe space within the church. But I think... I guess I just would love you to explain that more. Like what did that look like? Did it look like after church there were sessions, or were they one-on-one, were they group, I'm curious.

MY: I started to initiate our own Day of Remembrance program, so we would have a Day of Remembrance worship. The community had Day of Remembrance programs in San Francisco annually, but we would start to have our own within the congregation because there's a different dynamic when you're sharing a story within your own family so to speak, your own community. So I remember there were key people who were really wanting to share their stories. I remember Mas Nakata, who made these facsimiles of the barracks in Topaz, and he would come and he would share the story with the children, and he would show them this facsimile of the barracks and kind of share their stories with folks. Sadie Tajima who was our organist who was in Topaz, and kind of accompanied, what was his name, Goro Suzuki, in camp when he sang, she would talk story about she would accompany him and the songs that he would sing and so forth. And so there was a variety of ways that people experienced being able to share their stories and their narratives. And I think, so that's for the congregation, and then also became therefore families, too, for the families who were sometimes here for the first time with their parents wanted to talk about the things that they wanted to share with their families in the larger community.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 6>

PW: You told me about two specific support programs or groups, I should say, that were founded out of Buena Vista's work, and one of them was called the Wounded Healer support group. Can you tell me about that group?

MY: The Wounded Healer group was something I convened. As I remember it, I did a series of workshops on posttraumatic stress disorder. I did a series of sermons on it, and then post-worship conversations around what is PTSD. And so I was trying to help give people a framing that if they're experiencing certain things, it's not unusual, and to help people not feel out of sorts, and to be able to identify what we're feeling and then be able to take that energy and move with it in a positive way. And I considered that part of a healing ministry. And out of that series of workshops came a small support group that we decided to go ongoing, and we called it Wounded Healers. It was named after a book called Wounded Healer by Henri Nouwen, who was a Catholic writer and theologian. And so the idea around it for Christian theology is that Jesus was a "wounded healer" himself. And when he came to see the disciples after he was resurrected, he said, "Look at the wounds in my hands and my side." And the visceral wounds kind of were a jarring visual, but at the same time, evoked the sense of places of woundedness that people had for themselves to own their wounds and then to also move into a process of healing. So we had a support group that went on for some time and a handful of people that participated in that. And then from there, there was some interest in Sansei specific groups to talk about things that were, people were addressing and looking at from the standpoint of the third generation, or for that matter folks that had not been in camp but had inherited the experience. So kind of the notion of us looking at transgenerational trauma, and the ways in which we were impacted by that. And I personally felt that myself, and so it was natural for me to support that idea of us convening Sansei together to talk about things.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 7>

PW: The Sansei Legacy is kind of legend for me, hearing about it from other Sansei. I don't know if other congregations or other groups like that were being formed around the country. Do you know?

MY: So, Sansei Legacy convened, I convened that with a friend of mine who is an Episcopal priest, Diana Akiyama. We had met in seminary, and we had talked about this question of trauma, and we convened the Sansei Legacy project in 1990, I think it was 1990, just called Sansei together that we knew might be interested as we kind of formed a mailing list of people that might be interested to come together. And we convened in the social hall of Buena Vista, so it was not specifically church members, although church members were part of it as well. And people came together, and the very first meeting we had, we said we were creating a safe space for people to talk about how you feel about the legacy of the camp experience in your families and different things that you'd like to explore around that to create a safe and inclusive space for us to talk about whatever we bring. And it took us two hours to just go around the room for people to have introductions and to share the things that they wanted to talk about. And so we decided to continue to do that on a monthly basis. And we ended up hiring Jill Shiraki from Southern California, she was part of the Methodist church down in Southern California, I can't remember the name. West L.A. United Methodist, yeah. And I had met her at one of our Japanese caucus meetings, and she was interested in what we were doing. So she came up, we got a grant, she started working with us part time, and she really took the project to its fruition so to speak in many respects. And then Audrey Shoji was another person -- Audrey was from Central Valley, and she took the helm after Jill, I think. Jill left to go the Japanese Community Center in San Francisco. But because we were connected in the Methodist church and we had a caucus, we would share with other churches what we were doing out of Buena Vista. And I don't know if others started similar things per se, but I think I know that there was conversation about what did this mean for us to work on transgenerational trauma. And I think different pastors would take different approaches in terms of how they wanted to look at that as a tool for helping what we would call healing ministry. So I think there were times where we'd have caucus meetings, our national caucus would meet with representatives from all the churches, and we'd make some presentations about, "Here's what we're doing," and have dialogue about how you can think about how you want to use that yourself in your own congregation.

PW: You spoke to this right now, which was the need for intergenerational healing, but maybe go a little bit more into why Sansei? Not everybody thinks because they weren't in camp or they were babies in camp, I'm just kind of curious what your response to that is or your thoughts?

MY: I think I can speak from a personal standpoint, being a Sansei myself and growing up and not having very comfortable conversations about camp with my parents, or not having much conversation at all. And I think I learned about the experience in junior high when there was some discussion at school from somebody who was part of Junior JACL. And I came home and asked my parents about it, and there was, like, it wasn't like it was a comfortable conversation, and I could feel that there was something uncomfortable for them, and that stayed with me for a long time. And then I realized, too, that that was the case out in the community, that there were people not talking about this. And so when the redress movement started, I really was drawn to that, because there were people there who were being proactive about speaking about it and then organizing to address the reparative justice issue around it. But then at the same time, I recognized that in many places where Japanese Americans were, there still was not conversation about this, it wasn't prominent. So it wasn't until the hearings took place that I was floored by the number of people that came out to the hearings in San Francisco, and just that we were all there for this one particular purpose. And I think what was happening was, as I would talk to other Sansei about their feelings about it, we felt a lot of things in common around the feelings that we had. My testimony to the commission was about that emotional feeling and the psychological losses that I felt that were there implicit in the camp experience that we hadn't talked about. That's what I testified about, and others that I would meet along the way would verify that, too. And that's the conversation I had with Diana in seminary where we were feeling this similar kind of feeling that there were things we needed to unpack, and things we needed to understand or learn about this for ourselves. And I think that was the, kind of the framework for, the draw for people who also needed space to kind of talk about things. So that we could check in with each other and say, "You know, what I'm experiencing is normal." It's part of what our collective experience is, and that, "I'm not an oddball in this, but there's something to this."

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 8>

PW: I accidentally skipped over this. So you testified yourself in '81, is that correct?

MY: Yeah, that's right.

PW: Where, and tell me about that experience.

MY: The San Francisco hearings in 1981, August, I think it was.

PW: And where was the hearing held?

MY: I can't remember. I think it was at Golden Gate law school or something. Big auditorium, there were about five hundred people there. There were three days of hearings, and I testified partly because of my parents. As I said, I was doing outreach to churches to invite people to come to the hearings and get involved and speak. And my parents were not enthused about testifying. But they came to the hearings, and my uncle came, too, and my uncle was in the 442. They were all really glued to the testimony, and it was a very catalytic experience, I think, in our lives, and particularly in my life. And that was probably a key, not the only, but a key catalyst for my going to seminary and then later becoming a pastor.

PW: Can you tell me about the process of applying to be a testifier, to do this? Because I've never asked anyone that.

MY: I was volunteering with NCRR at the time, and they were organizing outreach in a sense to the Bay Area. So there were volunteers like myself who would, we would sign up to go to different places and do outreach with folks. And then if people were interested to sign up, then we would forward them to the organizing group. And there were handfuls of folks who said, "Yeah, I'd like to testify." I know that in the Berkeley Methodist church, there were a number of people that testified.

PW: Did you go to multiple days of the hearings, or just...

MY: I went to all three of the days, yes. I was just gripped by everything.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 9>

PW: Going back to Sansei Legacy, though, you alluded to the things that other members of this group were sharing and saying, "This is normal," reasserting the same patterns. Can you tell me a little bit about those patterns or things, needing big groupings of things that you were learning and seeing as a group together with more specifics?

MY: Well, I think one key thing was people feeling this commonality around having this gap in our family histories, the personal histories. Because if our parents didn't talk about that period in their lives, then we did not have understanding of it. And so we would feel -- and here's the thing that I began to understand, too. This was not universal among all Sansei, but that, in a family systems perspective in terms of psychological framing, that oftentimes there may be a particular person in the family who's carrying that feeling, that maybe they had three or four siblings, and none of the rest of the family members are feeling that at all. And that's another common thing that we would discover, that we might be ones in our families who are carrying this sense of painfulness or gap in our family history, but that we might be carrying that on behalf of the whole family. Because as we would raise the question, that it would change the family dynamics and family conversations, sometimes not comfortably initially, but eventually what we learned over time was that, as we poke around the edges, then stuff begins to come out. But we had to understand. I mean, we had to have spaces to understand, too, what were the dynamics for our parents, and what were the multiple layers of why they may not have talked about things. And I think now there's been many studies that have been done that people can understand a little bit better what happens when people go through collective trauma, and then also how does it play out in a cultural way in a particular group of people so that, say, today when we talk about what's going on with Black lives and with folks in a legacy of slavery, how African Americans have transmitted the legacies of slavery in different ways, where certain conversations haven't taking place within their families and where the legacies still continue to manifest themselves, they are doing so within the African American culture. For us who were dealing with it within the Japanese American culture, which is definitely clear differences in that experience.

So kind of a process of discovering and learning, and doing it in a way where we're naming it for ourselves. So we're not asking some other person to come in and name it for us, but we were kind of taking ownership for ourselves about experiences that we've had collectively. And I think from there, then things began to open up into all kinds of other conversations. Because people would come, folks who were, say, LGBTQ identified, and saying, "I've always felt marginalized in the Japanese community and I need to talk about it," so we'd create space for that. People who were mixed race, hapa, would say, "I've always felt marginalized in the Japanese community because I'm, quote, 'not pure,'" and we would create space for that as well. So it became a place where there were multiple experiences that people were having that we were trying to have a safe, inclusive space for people to talk about different things that people were carrying.

PW: And the two support groups and this whole thing around redress, this is maybe a five year process, roughly?

MY: You mean after redress?

PW: Yeah, I don't know. I'm just trying to imagine...

MY: Well, for me personally, so the redress act was passed in '88, we started Sansei Legacy in 1990. Jill and Audrey came on board somewhere in there, and we were actively doing work for several years. For me, I had to start pulling back on that project, but particularly as others were staffing it and running with it. Because other things were going on, for me and a lot of the congregation, but I continued to support the work. I can't remember how long it continued on, but I think probably for that whole decade in the '90s at least. There was strong participation, because new people were coming to find the project at the same time. And then I would always be checking in with folks about where is it going, because we were kind of operating under the 501c3 of the church.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 10>

PW: This is a perfect segue, then, too, though, to explore that your spiritual work with the church went beyond the church walls. You were starting to go out further into the community to other racial groups and other social causes. And I'm guessing this is maybe in the mid- to late-'90s. So in earlier conversation we had, there was a spate of racist incidents that were happening in Alameda and that were becoming something that you just couldn't ignore. Tell me a little bit about that.

MY: Yeah, I think that was in 1991, there were a couple of key racial incidences that took place. One with the school district, where there was an Asian administrator, his name was Niel Tam. And he was kind of the center of a firestorm at a school where he was serving as administrative intern, but that population of Asians was really growing in the city of Alameda. And their school, I'm not exactly sure on the demographics, but I think was becoming almost fifty percent Asian, Amelia Earhart Elementary School. And there were parents and grandparents who really loved him, but he was being, planned to be moved on to another school. He had taken over for the principal who was on pregnancy leave. So he became a lightning rod and kind of a catalyst for Asians to begin to speak up about the lack of Asian representation. Not only around administrators, but also teachers across the board, and just this feeling that the district just didn't have cultural competency. And so that was one issue that took place, and then later that year, there was a racial incident that was really targeting the Black community where Alameda police officers made some comments, disparaging comments over computer terminals that were brand new, they were kind of being distributed in the police department about putting their KKK hoods on or something and getting, meeting down at Johnny's Bar down on the west end, and "barbequing some Ns." And it was quite inflammatory and quite disturbing for a lot of folks, particularly for the historic Black community in Alameda. And so that was kind of, '91 was kind of a key year that took place.

And for us, the key thing, I and I go back to this notion of civil liberties theology. It's about how are we understanding what this was in terms of a gift to us from God that we had reparations, how do we now play that forward with other communities? And that becomes a theological pivot point to say that the work is not done. The work of what happened with the Civil Liberties Act does not stop with us getting a check, but it actually begins a new chapter of us being spokespersons for others who are undergoing issues of injustice.

PW: Well, it just sounds like because of the work that you put in to each other over ten years, there was a willingness and an understanding of that, not responsibility per se, but that compelling need to fill that sense of, well, we can actually help others with their civil liberties when they're being violated.

MY: Uh-huh, absolutely.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 11>

PW: So keep telling me more about these stories. So I know that there was an incident that also occurred on Park Street that was specific to Asian Americans?

MY: Yeah. I think that was, I can't remember exactly when that happened, but a friend and I were walking from the church to go have lunch one day, and as we were crossing the crosswalk, a guy in a pickup truck came up right next to us, and it was almost like to shock us, but he rolled down his window and he just yelled at us, "Go back to China, you damn Chinamen!" And we were just shocked. I mean, we were shocked that this guy came that close to us, but we were also shocked that he was saying this out loud in public. And so that said something to me about something going on in the city of Alameda. Then when, I think that happened before the incident with Niel Tam at the schools, but I think it set the course for an understanding that there were some racial dynamics going on in Alameda that it was important for us to address and look at. And when I look back on it, we think about that whole era that proceeded it, the Vincent Chin killing in Detroit, the anti-Japan, Japan-bashing, there were remnants of that, I think, still going on in a place like Alameda, but there were this dynamic of Alamedans coming in to, I mean, Asians coming in to Alameda. So what I began to understand from other people, particularly those in the white community, that there was a big backlash to the number of Asians that were coming into Alameda, because they were the fastest growing ethnic minority group in Alameda that had been, too, in some senses, more predominately white over its history.

PW: And add to that the whole military culture. And thinking about it, I hadn't reflected on it before, but I can see that having a place in that. So what do you do then? So you know that you're acknowledging these things within the congregation and you're discussing it. So how did it get moved out?

MY: There were two simultaneous kind of things going on. One was with the issue with Niel and the Asian American community. We had a couple of members, Roy Mita and his wife Joyce, who were involved at that school, and they created a committee to support Niel, and they wanted to retain him there. And they asked me to get involved in that, so I joined their meetings. And then Niel was actually blackballed from the district as a result of his being in the center of the storm, because district folks were really upset that he allowed himself to be kind of the center of this controversy. But they didn't deny the issues that were preeminent there around the lack of representation. And we ended up connecting as a church with what is called a community development program in the Methodist church. It's community organizing work that started kind of on the heels of the civil rights movement. It actually started after Martin Luther King was assassinated, and they started this fund with a program to help local churches do community organizing. So there was a particular methodology that came out of the Civil Rights Movement that then got supported for not only Black churches, but Asian, Latino and Native American churches as well. And so we had some consultants come out to talk with us about their methodology of organizing.

And so out of the incident with the Asian community, we formed a committee of community members and church members to work together on this particular issue. And what happened was people decided they needed to form a new organization that would have more clout because they felt that people were taking them seriously. When they went to the school board and when they come to public meetings, and that Asians were just dismissed. Whereas they were feeling like they didn't do that to the NAACP. So that kind of became the organizing mechanism. Roy, who was the parent who got me involved in it, he became our community organizer. He had been an organizer for General Motors and had been laid off, and so he had time and space to do that, it was really good. And so he became kind of our part time staff organizer on that particular issue. And there were folks in our church -- I actually want to name them for the record -- Shiz Kawamura was of the older generation, Ki Nomura, and I believe it was George Chin, who are church members who are on a committee working in partnership with community members who are Val Jue, Ben Lee and Arnie Fong. And it's interesting because the whole idea in this methodology is you work with church members and community members together on the issues but share your perspectives on what's going on. So you use the assets of the church and you use the assets of the community members together in partnership. It's not about proselytizing, it's about working in partnership with people. And so it was a way of developing a relationship with community members and also having them develop relationships with the church as well.

Arnie, long passed away, went on to become very prominent in working with the Asian community, not only in Alameda but across the East Bay in terms of empowerment for people in all civic offices from city councils to county boards and agencies and so forth, and really was kind of a driving force for that particular work. And Roy, as our organizer, kind of helped shape the development of this organization called the Organization of Alameda Asians, which then was present at the table for anything that was going on in the city. And it's interesting because our older members, when they first came together, we said, "Just be honest about how you feel about certain things," and they would say things like, "Well, we've been around this community for a long time, we don't expect anything to happen, but you have our blessings, go ahead and do what you need to do." And the folks who got involved with us, they had already been engaged, so they had a lot of energy and a lot of passion for what they want to do. It's an interesting dynamic to see all the church members and newer members of the community working together. And finally, when we were dealing with stuff in the school district, and they began to open the door to recruit more people of color, one of our members' sons, Ki Nomura, who's on the committee, his son Keith Nomura had been a principal in Berkeley. He was recruited to Alameda. He became, I believe, the first Japanese American administrator in Alameda. So there was a celebration at that time, when he got appointed to that position, and they said, "Well, you guys actually did something, more power to you."

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 12>

PW: I'm curious to hear about, like, Roy Nitta's organizing tactics. How do you go from, you show up at the meeting and not really being taken seriously, or Mr. Tam is being just completely taken down for the work that he's doing. So how do you move from that position to one where it's like, okay, take us seriously? What are some of the strategies that worked to turn...

MY: Roy had a way of working where you knew you had to be taken seriously.

PW: Okay.

MY: So he had a... I mean, he came from a union organizing background. And then one of the beauties of the community development program was the fact that it didn't have a cookie cutter model. So you worked with people in your community, whoever the assets are that you can bring to the table and utilize their gifts and skills to help move forward on what we believe is a possible transformative moment for the community, and a transformative moment for our faith as well. And so Roy had some great experiences in previous places that he worked, and he brought those gifts to this particular organizing effort. And he was very strong in convictions about how to get things done. So I think he was a moving force for us, and we were always thankful that the timing worked that he could be part of what was going on.

PW: I always find that people are the driving force of so much, and I love that you're calling out the names of specific people. Were there other leaders you wanted to describe more?

MY: Let me just give you an example for Roy also. Roy was very outspoken, so he would monitor school board meetings. And there was one moment in time where the existing superintendent was having trouble with an African American woman who was just really livid because of something that happened, I guess, with a child in the schools. And so he called me up and he said, "You know, we're having with this person. I wonder if you could help us have some conversation with her, what have you?" And he said, "Maybe Roy can help us." And when he said, "Roy," it was kind of tongue in cheek because he knew, because Roy was one that would come and be very adamant about things that needed to be done, just like this woman was. And so I told Roy, "Hey, the superintendent wants you to come and talk to this woman about some stuff that she's upset about," and he goes, he just smiled and started laughing and said, "Okay, I'll do it." So he went to that meeting that night and then the next day, I asked them how did it go, and he said, "You know, typical stuff. She's just really mad about what's going on, and she has a right to be mad, and we just talked about why we're both mad. And so we have a new supporter for the work that we're doing and we need to support her." And then, for him, he said, also, "The superintendent kind of owes me something, and I'm doing their work for them." And that was kind of typical of things that Roy did. So kind of bringing his gift to the community and to the congregation. And Roy wasn't particularly strong in the Christian faith. I mean, he would say that he probably didn't deserve to be... he would always make excuses like, "I don't deserve to be a Christian," or whatever. But he also invited people to come to church.

And, in fact, with Niel, Niel wasn't a member of our church at that time. But he invited Niel to come to the church because he knew intuitively that Niel would be a great person to be part of the church, and probably would embrace it, and somewhere he knew Niel had a Christian background. And so Niel started coming and brought his son, Austin, and started getting involved. And Niel, in fact, became one of the leaders of our church over a period of time. He became my worship leader, then he became my staff parish committee leader for a period of time. And at first people... I know people were a little bit taken aback because he had this image of being this troublemaker in the community, but he was the nicest guy. Taught chigong, did tai chi with people, was a reiki master, and he became very beloved over a period of time. And that's the kind of thing about transformation and faith and relationships that I experienced through that part of that organizing period. And Niel coming to the church and then becoming, over a period of time, kind of a beloved leader and well-respected not only in the congregation, but we could see in the community as well. Because he eventually got appointed to a position even though he got blackballed initially. [Laughs]

PW: That's beautiful. Does this Organization of Alameda Asians still exist?

MY: No. I think it went dormant. I think there was some morphing of OAA with the group, understanding it was the Asian American Democratic Caucus of the East Bay, and I think the energy from OAA kind of shifted to that organization, because Arnie began, I think Arnie was convening the East Bay Democratic Asian Caucus. And they were working on, you know, they were really focused on trying to get representation of Asians into different spaces of school boards, city councils, and as I mentioned, the county boards and so forth. And so they began to work regionally and continued up to the time he passed away.

PW: Until Arnie had passed away?

MY: Yeah, until Arnie had passed away.

PW: Tell me a little bit about Arnie Fong. He sounds like an interesting person.

MY: Arnie Fong was a pharmacist, longtime Alameda resident. And I'm not sure how he got involved with the Nial Tam situation, but he was one of the key people in the, what became the Nial Tam Committee, and so that's where I had a chance to meet Arnie. And then he joined the committee when we formed our community organizing committee, development committee, representing the community members. And Arnie was a dear soul, loved him. He also had, his wife, Jean Fong, was very involved with us as well. And Jean went on, I think, to work with Alice Lai Bitker, who was a county supervisor at one period of time. But they were Christians, I think, with the Presbyterian church in Chinatown, I believe. But their kids got involved in our basketball program at the church. And so Arnie also became very much a leader in our basketball program as a community member, because our basketball program was open to having community members come in and partner just like we did with other social justice issues. And I think all three of their boys played basketball with us, and so that even connected him more to our congregation and the community around Buena Vista. And I'd always often joke with Arnie because he'd be in places where he would say, "Oh, my church, Buena Vista," and I'd go, "Arnie, when did you become a member?" He said, "Well, I'm not really a member, but I feel like I'm a member," because he was really a member of a church in Chinatown. He was very much part of what I call the Buena Vista extended community, and Jean as well. Their children Todd and Jason played basketball for us.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 13>

PW: In November 1994, anti-immigrant legislation was on the ballot. Tell me a little bit about how Buena Vista organized pushback against, specifically Proposition 187.

MY: Yeah. We had heard that, and because we were doing organizing both with the CARE group, and also with OAA, and because we were connected to other groups through our church network and other organizing networks, people were asking us to bring it to the city council and asked them to oppose it, actually take a position to oppose it. And so this effort was really led by Juan Saavedra, who was a pastor at the Court Street Methodist Church, and himself an immigrant. And we organized kind of a vigil at the church and then a march over to city council in which our ask of the council was to take a public position against Prop 187 for all the reasons why it needed to be done. And it was a very, very raucous night, and Juan had the plug pulled on him when he was speaking at one point, which was very, very strange. But the long and short of it is that one of our members, George Chin, also spoke. And to me, it was really nice for me to hear him talk about his experience of coming to this country, and his paper status as a Chinese American. And he spoke so eloquently about what it meant for him to come to this country, and if circumstances has been different, he might have not been allowed in because he was technically illegal, according to what the standards would have been at the time we were dealing with this issue. But the council did vote to vote "no" on it. And I can't remember if it was a five to nothing vote or if it was four to one, but it was a major victory, I think, for us, even though the statewide ballot prevailed. But I think it set some stages for the intersection of different issues, that here we were as an Asian congregation kind of taking the lead on this and bringing other folks together in coalition, and beginning to work more in coalition with other groups as well around different issues.

PW: I also find it significant because Japanese Americans very broadly did not have a lot of successive generations of immigrants that come to the country, so kind of tend to consider that we immigrated a long time ago, so there's not always an apparent support system for ongoing immigration to the United States and their feelings about that.

MY: Yeah. And our immigration history gets lost, it kind of gets put way on the back burners of our heritage, right? People forget about it.

PW: Was that ever something that got discussed in the church around that? Because again, it's...

MY: I think one thing in the congregation that people were always very sensitive to the immigrant experience. I don't think this particular congregation ever lost that. And even though during my time all the Isseis passed away, I can't remember when the last one passed, but there was a sense of honoring their experience. So because they were still present in the congregation, they were emblematic of the immigration experience because they lived it, it was their own experience.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 14>

PW: Do you want to share any stories about the convening of the city-wide diversity conference? At this point you're very comfortable now talking with the city council. Or not comfortable, but you're becoming familiar with...

MY: I should preface that with the start of the Coalition of Alamedans for Racial Equality?

PW: Yes, please.

MY: Which got started out of the issue with the racial slurs issue with the police.

PW: Right, this is CARE?

MY: Yeah, CARE. And having us convene that, we had OAA, which was at the table, and we had CARE at the table. CARE was monitoring the police issue, but it was a multicultural response to what was going on, because there were folks who were seeing that it seemed to be looked at as a black/white issue, and there were folks who wanted to be involved and have some multicultural voice around, and that's why CARE got started. So we were monitoring, in the process of monitoring, There was a man by the name of Don Grant who was kind of a key leader in the Black community who was kind of leading CARE in some respect. And he was very clear that the community had to lead this, and it wasn't going to be clergy that were going to lead this, it was community members. And he was very adamant also about the ways in which we work with the city because historically the Black community had really been, I don't know what the word would be. They've always been marginalized, and I was learning so much as a newcomer to the community about their experiences. And long story short, with CARE and OAA at the table, at a certain point, we had some discussions about this issue of diversity being a city-wide thing. It's not just the police, it's not just in the school district. And in fact, the police chief told us that at one point when we had meetings with the chief of police when people were calling for his resignation, he said, "You know, it's not just the police, it's the whole community. We're responding to calls that people are making that are residents of the city, and they're the ones that are racists who are calling us to do certain things that are part of the whole system of racism. And so that's why we called for a citywide diversity conference. And also it juxtaposed with the impending closure of the naval base. And with the naval base being closed, that would be like one-third the mass of the island that would have go through redevelopment, and we knew that there were going to be economic implications of this as well. So we pushed for that, and city agencies came together and said, "Okay, let's do this thing," and they held a citywide diversity conference at the College of Alameda and had representatives from all of the, you know, city manager, from the superintendent of schools, the police department, from various city agencies. And then the College of Alameda provost as a host had their community involved as well.

PW: Was there like a training system?

MY: It was basically a conference, it was a citywide conference to talk about this issue of diversity in a city, and look at the changing demographics, increasing the numbers of Asians in the community, the historic Black issues that had gone on, and other ethnic groups that were part of the community, and talking about what's the future of Alameda coming forward in terms of how to embrace diversity and not see it as a problem. Embrace it as part of the reality, and then kind of look forward to where is the city going in terms of its own identity? And that was really the message around Alameda seeing itself as a diverse community, and owning that in a way that's not negative, but that's something that's positive. Of course, there were challenges to that because there were still many folks in Alameda who saw Alameda as a white community and perceived that way.

PW: Was it open to the public?

MY: It was open to the public, absolutely, yeah. And it was a way for us to bring more people into the conversations about what was going on, to invite people to be involved in civic engagement and discussion around the future of this community.

PW: Was there anything developed out of that conference that was the beginnings of a plan? Because I can also understand that it could be just an opportunity to look good and have a conference, but then what? What are next steps?

MY: I think that this is my own assessment of it. Of course I've always believed there's always multiple views of any kind of thing that goes on. But I believe we moved the needle in terms of key people saying, yes, we need to move forward in a new way in Alameda and begin to embrace the diversity of the demographics that are making up this community. And I would even go a further step to say to that, there were folks who were also saying that, in doing so, we want to become more diverse. Not just the status quo, but more diverse as well. And that needs to be part of a vision of different parts of the city as well. And I do believe that people in the district embraced that, people in city hall embraced it, and even the police department, to a certain extent, embraced that as well. And all those chiefs, the chief of police, the city manager and the district, the superintendent of the school district, they all resigned within the next year. And I don't know, I mean, I don't know all their personal situations, but I think there was a signal that there was a change of the guard in terms of -- and I wouldn't call all of them bad people per se -- but that there was a shift in the culture of the community at that particular time. As they gave way to new leadership, then that meant that people coming in to those positions needed to consider, this is the nature of this community. It's a changing community, and the kind of leadership we needed, the police department kind of leadership we needed, school district kind of leadership we needed, city hall, is going to be different, because these are the dynamics that are going on. So I believe that it changed the dynamics. But at the same time, it didn't mean it moved forward with ease because there were still stumbling blocks along the way.

PW: What year was this?

MY: I think that was in the mid-90s, or so, I think.

PW: And now that I know that there was a, kind of a large number of people who resigned or retired in leadership at that point, I could see how there's openings now for change, too. So I know that a lot of the church's involvement intersects with the Alameda Unified School District.

MY: Yeah.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 15>

PW: So I understand at this point there was even more involvement with the AUSD for changes in the school. Can you tell me some of the initiatives that started to develop between Buena Vista and...

MY: Yeah. I think it was after that citywide conference that the new superintendent, or as I mentioned, the other superintendent left the district and a new superintendent came in, Dennis Chaconas, and he came in with this mandate for a diversity plan for the district. And he immediately sat down with us at CARE and OAA, knew that we were very involved in what was happening, and said, "I'd like to work with you and see how we can generate community involvement for changes with the school district." And so his idea was for us to create a diversity audit, and we worked as community members to create something called Team Diversity. We actually had focus groups at every single school in the whole school district, from elementary to middle school to high school to talk about different issues in the district. And we invited teachers, parents and students to come to all the focus groups to compile information about issues that were going on at each school site, and then that was compiled into a report that went... I should backtrack. I think he agreed to allocate some monies to hire a consultant to lead this. And so we were, we in the community were invited to be part of that, invited people to put in their RRPs. And we hired a woman named Marlene Shigekawa as a consultant who's now very involved in, I think, in her...

PW: With Poston.

MY: Yeah, she's the head of that.

PW: The chairperson.

MY: Because I just saw her recently. But anyway, so this is way back in the '90s. She was hired to lead the consultation process with us, and so she worked with us in the community to organize all these focus groups in all the different schools, and then compile the report, brought it back to the school district and then recommended that we create a position for diversity in the administrative office. And the school board then voted unanimously to support that, and there was a position that was created. And then they created team diversity within the district, and a woman by the name of Jane Lee was hired to be the diversity officer, and she's still kind of around in the community. And so Jane and I now serve on the API roundtable for the district, and Jane kind of became the key staffperson to implement the diversity plan for the district. And Superintendent Chaconas kind of had his own vision and plan of how to implement it, including having a particular diversity plan for each administrator in the district that was part of their plan and they would be evaluated on that. And I mentioned before, Keith Nomura was the first Japanese American assigned as an Asian American administrator, and he was kind of like the shining star in terms of his diversity plan at the elementary school that he was the administrator for. Problematically, things shifted, kind of the political wind shifted over a period of time, and that didn't sustain itself. And by the time Superintendent Chaconas left, things began to kind of slide in terms of, it started to backslide in terms of the whole diversity initiative, and Jane's position got reassigned into some other, she'd probably be better to tell that story, like what happened with her position. So we saw initial gains, but then we also saw some backsliding on things as well. But in general, I think, there was this general sense of sensitivity to diversity. But I think the tools for implementation and the building blocks didn't sustain itself.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 16>

PW: So tell me roughly how long was Superintendent Chaconas in place?

MY: I believe he left around 2000.

PW: So it was almost a decade of that work being developed and implemented?

MY: Well, I think there was a decade of work that went on, but I think he was there for probably about five years, I think.

PW: And so you were saying that, with the change, things shifted, but there was still positive work being implemented through the Unified School District. Can you tell me more examples?

MY: One of the programs that we did with Superintendent Chaconas was with the CARE program. It was really an interest in supporting youth and understanding that youth needed to be supported, particularly in a racially heightened environment. And so with CARE, we started a program called CARE Multicultural Student Relations Program, it was an afterschool program where we invited students at the three high schools, Alameda High, Encinal High and Island High, continuation high school, to participate in a cohort of leadership development around racial identity and understanding the dynamics of institutional racism. And four of us volunteered to do that program the first year, Leonard Spadoni, Kathy Fong, myself, and Vicky Smith. And then we got some funding, and Vicky, who was part of the founding of CARE and a longtime activist in the Black community, became kind of the CARE staffperson, and she began to organize the program at all the schools through some grant funding that we had. And we found that to be a really productive way to focus down and impact the lives of young people. And Niel's son, Austin Tam, was one of the first people to participate in the program, and I remember he wrote an editorial in the newspaper about what it meant to be Chinese American and what it meant for him to speak up, and within his culture, kind of find voice and so forth, and just cultivating leadership in that way. So that continued even after Chaconas left, for several years, but there just wasn't the infrastructure of the initiative in place any longer. And Vicky ended up continuing to run that program, and then she shifted gears because our funding was running out, and she became the McKinney-Vento representative, that was around the homelessness provisions for communities that were undergoing changes in military bases. And she began to focus on homeless youth that had no residences but were registered in the school district. And so she morphed the program from the racial dynamic to the support for homeless youth and their families, for that matter, until she retired a few years before I retired.

PW: Tell me... and then I know that there was some work towards the affirmative action...

MY: Yeah, I mean, Chaconas was very proactive in bringing in people of color, teachers, administrators. What we had found before he came in was that the affirmative action office had been dormant for many years. It had been under the stewardship of a man named Don Sherait. And, actually, Don, we had to have some really challenging meetings with him and Roy to kind of let him know what the goal was around things. And to me, to Don's credit over the years, he came to understand, he said, "I think I understand what you guys have been talking about as a Caucasian person, longstanding in the community." It was very rewarding for us to become friends, and for him to support the work that needed to be done and become proactive in it as well. But that went in tandem with when Chaconas was coming on as superintendent and being proactive himself because he had many contacts of people that he would be able to recruit into the community. And then I think, I got away from the school district work, coming into the 2000s when Chaconas had left the community. So I don't know all that went on during that period. But one of the things that Chaconas did do was, even though Niel had been sort of blackballed for his role in the controversy around the Asian community, Chaconas did appoint him to a vice principal position at Woodmill school, and then later he went to Miller as the principal and then became principal at, I guess it's the former, gosh, Washington school, which he helped change their name into Maya Lin elementary school.

PW: This is Niel Tam?

MY: Niel Tam. And he became, actually, a well-respected administrator in the district, and then kind of, again, a model like Keith was, of how to work with diverse approaches to things. And when he retired, he actually ran for the school board and he won and then eventually became president of the board at a certain point in time. And he also became a champion for LGBTQ curriculum at a time when it was very controversial, and took a lot of attacks to that as well.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 17>

PW: I know that around 1997, our friend Roy Mita comes back into the picture with AUSD by helping with another group of supporters to start something called the Multicultural Center?

MY: He and two members of our church, Sharon Bayle and George Chin, went to a workshop and cast a vision for us creating a multicultural center where there could be different groups coming together in one space to work together and (in) coalition together, but also creating a stronger voice for a multicultural community. And so he brought that to our community development committee, and I think there was a committee that was formed where we had community members Vicky Smith, Jeanne Nader, Dave McIntyre was from the Court Street Methodist Church, and then from our church, Sharon and George, and then Lynette Lee had become a member of our church by that time, and she became very prominent in that project because she was the executive director of the East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation, which was the nonprofit housing organization, and well-known. And Lynette was well-known nationally as well. And so we were blessed to have her in the congregation in leading this community development effort. And there, EBALDC became the nonprofit fiscal sponsor for that project. And initially the group found an office space and then another space to operate out of. Unfortunately, the budgeting was really a challenge for the group, and they ended up getting space with the school district in partnership, and Niel was the one that kind of helped to negotiate that with the district. And they had a space out at one of the former school sites to operate out of over a period of time. But I think Roy moved on once we got that started, and he felt it was just kind of time to move on to some other things, and he felt other people could be more instrumental in helping to get that done. And so that's where we brought in Juan Saavedra who was the part-time pastor of the Court Street Methodist Church and kind of had experience in this kind of work, and so he took the lead in the development work for that particular project.

PW: So to clarify, the multicultural center was not necessarily with the school district, it was an initiative that was for the entire city of Alameda?

MY: Yeah. It was more of a community project, but with Niel creating kind of a partnership with the district, they ended up creating a space for the project at a school district site. And eventually, though, that went dormant as well, and particularly, I think, to the time when Niel got sick and then eventually passed away, they had to close their doors because their organization kind of just lacked the capacity to sustain itself.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 18>

PW: Let's go to another major area of activist work that Buena Vista became deeply engaged in. There was a gay pride proclamation that the City of Alameda made, I believe, in 1993 maybe. But after the election of a new mayor in 1994, he refused to issue the proclamation here, saying that there was pressure from the religious right and there was, quote/unquote, "too much diversity." Tell me what happened.

MY: Well, there was a national trend going around at that time in terms of groups, particularly religious based groups that were trying to stop LGBTQ identified folks from their rights in local communities, and particularly they were targeting school districts and school boards to keep curriculum out and to keep any discussion about the inclusiveness of LGBTQ children and youth in school districts, and it came to Alameda. I think I can name the church in Alameda that was the forbearer of that, and that was the Central Baptist Church, and their pastor was leading the charge against this. And so the newly elected mayor told us, "I've got to cancel this gay pride proclamation because these folks are in my ear." And I happened to attend a meeting with him, with one of the people, Kathy Teller, who was the writer of the gay pride proclamation. But he apologized, he said, "I really want to support this, but can't do it." And so we came back to the church and talked about what they needed to do. And they decided that they needed to create some kind of organization to do education, because clearly it's an issue of constituency. They're listening to the religious right on this and not other people, and they didn't have an organized voice.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 19>

So they created a voice for the LGBTQ community in Alameda, and they called it Out on the Island. And they met at Buena Vista and had their meetings there, and there was another pastor, Reverend Larry Schultz, who was very supportive. He was probably, he and I were the only two pastors that would speak up on this issue, and we accompanied them to school board meetings and we would speak up on behalf of the faith community to say that that other church doesn't represent all Christians, and that there's another view in mind here. And so it took them a good year to organize, and then they brought the proclamation back. I think they maybe did some changes in wordings, or what have you, but they got the proclamation back into the city with blessings on it.

But that also kind of was a period where there were other things going on as well, as they began to target this teacher, Vicky Forrester, who had not been out. But she was a lesbian, and they were targeting her, I'm trying to remember, I think she was teaching at Amelia Earhart, but she was also a basketball coach. So some of our kids played basketball for her in middle school. And so because they were targeting her, what was very interesting about that, Chaconas was the superintendent at the time. He was very proactive to support her. There was no question that she had the support of the school district, and when issues came to the school board and things were, I think they were trying to penalize her for bringing some teaching around... I know what it was. She was talking about the Ellen DeGeneres program in class one day, and I think one of the kids went home and told their parent, and the parent complained to the school. And the church got wind of it and they started to target her, and they wanted to out her and they wanted to get her fired, I think, but the school district had her back.

The contrast in this is that when they first came to shut down the gay pride proclamation, they outnumbered us. Like they had over a hundred people at the school board meeting. Our city council meeting, we had maybe twenty people at most. By the time this thing came with Vicky Forrester, the school district mobilized people out to support Vicky, and they had well over a hundred people, maybe two hundred people supporting her. And by that time, the other opposing forces had dwindled down to, I'd say, less than fifty. So there was a shift, I think, in public sentiment about this issue, and people were becoming aware that the rights for this segment of the population was just as important as anybody else, and I think there became kind of that movement forward. And I think Alameda then began to have, to develop a reputation in the area of being gay friendly, so to speak, and more people started to move there, more anecdotal, and as far as I know, I don't have any data on that, but I just get that sense talking to people. And we had some key folks that were very great partners in working with them, Morton Wellhaven and Christine Allen who were part of Out on the Island, and also kind of kind of there on the ground with the local community to help us understand how best to organize together.

PW: At this point, I can just visualize in my mind, so we're now in the '90s, and your congregation's getting very, a lot of experience with dealing with controversy. How did that feel for you just on a weekly basis coming in or daily basis, I'm assuming, working with everybody. Because I can just feel this evolution happening.

MY: You know, one of the good things about the Community Development Network and the community organizing training that we were part of in the Methodist church is that they had told us that when you're organizing any issues, you don't necessarily want a hundred percent unanimity on things, because that's not real. Change is happening because there's tension and there's conflict that's going on, but we hope we're on the right side of issues, and you want to education people, you want to mobilize and move people toward community change, but there always is going to be tension if you're really doing your work well. And so that was always something I took note of. And they said, "You know, maybe seventy, eighty percent support is what you're shooting for. When you split down the middle, that's the worst thing," because then, you know, which side do you go on on the particular kind of issue and so forth? So I think just being aware of that, that that's some of the dynamics of change, and also that as you're moving through different issues of concern for people, for me it was always important for us as a church that what we're doing is God's work. It's a faith issue. We're discerning, what is God calling us to do? And for me personally, I'm in ministry because I'm a believer in God, and I can attest and witness to God's transformative power in my own life, in the life of people around me, I've seen it, I've witnessed it. And as a pastor now retired, I can attest to it. When we were going through it, I was always a believer that if the spirit is moving us in the right direction, then we cannot fail. I mean, no matter what the result is. It doesn't mean we have to win something, but if we're following God's spirit, the Holy Spirit we speak of, then transformation can take place.

And those are kind of the unseen things that you can't calculate, but that the movement and the transformation of people from the inside out happens, it happens. And I can testify to that now that I'm retired, because I look back on all the things where we entered into something, it was quite unknown where the result was going to be. But, to me, discernment of the Holy Spirit is the most important thing. And so even if you're in the midst of conflict or differences of opinion, those differences can emerge in a new way in terms of kind of a creative collaboration of interests, and people's perspectives. And I experienced that over and over, from one thing to another. So just always being mindful that we need to follow God's will for us, and that includes me, because sometimes I'll be the stumbling block to something.

PW: I can just imagine this particular time in your evolution with this church and the nation, and LGBTQ rights being something that, if there is a religious aspect, there's a core value part of this that I could see being a little more work than mainly saying the racial stuff, right?

MY: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And we did, within the congregation, we had resistance to it for different reasons. I think for some people it was theological, for some it's cultural, and so we had to have some.. and there was actually one point in time where George Chin, my administrative council chair, told me, "You know, people are getting uncomfortable with this LGBTQ issue," and he asked me, "How do you want to deal with them?" And I said, "Let me take a moratorium on preaching on this from the pulpit. But I would like to make sure we support this group Out on the Island for their right to meet." Because I think maybe this is too much going on for people, and as a pastor, you don't know also what's going on for people's lives behind closed doors as well. Because maybe it's uncomfortable because maybe there are folks that are dealing with a gay son or a lesbian daughter, or maybe persons themselves are feeling, like, on the spot with certain things, or who knows what's going on? And so there's always the pastoral side of supporting your members, which you don't know what people may be going through. And then the prophetic side of trying to cast a vision for what is right in terms of social justice, and you have to put that in balance in the congregation. I think that's the unique thing about being in a congregation, because you have the full spectrum of life, which you're dealing with. So I did take a moratorium for a period of time on preaching about things. But I told George, after they went after Victoria Forrester, "I got to break the moratorium, we got to speak out on this." And there were young people who understood it and why, because she was their basketball coach.

And then also we went through the process of us becoming a reconciling congregation. It took us a while, but being reconciling means, within the Methodist church, reconciling means you are fully inclusive of LGBTQ persons and their families. It was an important designation to make because in the national Methodist church, our Book of Discipline does have discriminatory clauses that are still there today, that are causing a lot of conflict in the greater United Methodist church. But reconciling ministries were the ways in which people can become fully affirming. And also important in Christian churches to apologize to people for the harm that has been done in the past through biblical scripture interpretation and theological interpretation as well. Because it needed to be healing for people because in many spaces, churches have been toxic for that particular (concern). And we didn't become reconciling until 2006 under the leadership of Daniel Park, who was our chair of our Church & Society committee at that time, and we went through a whole process. We went through like a six-week, we called it a Lent series, building up to Easter, process of education to talk about the issue, and more deal with it within the congregation. So there's this symbiotic relationship with what we do within the congregation and then what goes on in the community as well, because they're always connected together.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 20>

PW: I still have another question on this topic, though, too, which is it's so great to hear the transformations and the changes in the work that's being done in the church. Was this a hugely controversial thing still outside Alameda? Like was this... I'm just kind of curious about the feeling of the general community.

MY: The feeling of the general community, I think the trends were moving towards a more, kind of identified space where LGBTQ community were affirmed here. But like with racial issues, there's also the backlash that occurs as well. So I mentioned the curriculum issue. It didn't just move forward without any opposition, there was opposition to that, and Niel was heading that. But you've seen things like I mentioned that Larry Schultz, who was the congregational minister, he and I were the only pastors that were outspoken on this. When he retired, their church intentionally called a LGBTQ pastor, Laura Rose, she's now still in the community. And I believe that because their congregation was going through this as well, and they called specifically to have that leadership, she's brought leadership to the entire community as the pastor of that congregation. We had another rabbi who had been one of the first gay rabbis in the (world) serving Temple Israel. But he had been here kind of all during the time that all of this was going on. I think having leadership in the community makes a difference in terms of the climate of the whole community, and certainly Laura's leadership in the community has made a lot of difference, because it's visible leadership that's there. I like to say, too, like, for our congregation, what I've seen emerge is leadership from LGBTQ couples that I've had the chance to marry, which is against the policies of our Methodist church, but something I had the conviction of doing. But you know, just doing that as a pastoral activity that I would do with any of the families, but these two couples have become great leaders of the congregation. Kara and Nikki, Salde Azzam, and then Brendon and Kevin, Sullivan Chean. And the thing is that, to me, it's not just about inclusiveness, but it's about wow, the gifts they bring to leadership are remarkable. And because they've lived life in a way where they see reality differently than others, and they bring a different vision for what can happen within a congregation. To me, that's also transformative, because what we're doing is we are receiving and blessing the gifts of different people.

PW: I can see that being a really motivating or just blessing to the congregation that might also help move people's minds and hearts. Because even within the Japanese American community, we've come a long way as well with acceptance, or not even just acceptance, just being able to openly talk about gay rights, about gay coupledom, and I can imagine that being something that, again, in this particular time, what a big move this was for this congregation.

MY: You know, before I retired, one of our young people who was off to college came back on one occasion to worship, and I was so touched because she brought her partner with her. And so she stood up and proudly introduced her partner, which was also clearly a sign of coming out to the congregation. And Riki Fujina is her name, I think I can give a shout out to her because when you see kids grow up, and you see this... I mean, years of shaping a different culture of the congregation, and being engaged in the community, can make a difference, I believe, in people's lives. And then seeing her activism and her energy out in the world, it's just a blessing to see that. And I know, because I could see the smiles on people's faces in the congregation, the joy it brings to everybody, to be proud of one who's grown up in your midst, and knowing that we were all part of the family in that way.

PW: These are big things for a community to go through. Like reflecting already just on the stuff around EO 9066 and all the racial incidents and just having to face it instead of just walking away or saying nothing, and moving to this LGBTQ stuff, that this is a lot of growth. And for a community that's unfortunately got a habit of shame and fear and not speaking up about this, yeah, I imagine this must have been a huge feeling for you at this point, right?

MY: Yeah. And as I say, there's shifting sand as you move along on different things. I mean, for me, it's always about, again, following the Holy Spirit and following God's will, and knowing and trusting and having confidence that things will move where they need to move.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 21>

PW: Well, let's move to the next topic, which is, so now we're in the mid-'90s, and you alluded to this earlier with the wonderful Vicky Smith, moving from work within the Alameda Unified School District to paying more attention to what was happening to homeless youth. And it sounded like part of this was connected to the closure of the Alameda Naval Base, which, I didn't really ever think about this as such a big subject, but the more I'm talking to you, the more I'm realizing this really changed this community.

MY: Yeah, absolutely.

PW: Tell me about this. So, in the '90s, the Alameda Naval Base was in the process of being closed or closed entirely. What does that mean?

MY: Well, it was closed in 1996, that means the Navy operations would come to a halt, and that was part of President Clinton's tenure. And actually, he came out to have some ceremony to close the naval base, but that meant also the redevelopment of the base and all the land there. And then what's very important in all that is the land speculation and then housing issues were hitting a crunch. And you invoked Vicky's name. Vicky was a renter living in the west end of Alameda closer to the naval base, and she was noticing that there were a lot of people being evicted at that particular time, kind of in the mid-'90s or so. There was a housing crisis going on, and she was connected to our community organizing committee because she had been a community representative for other projects and also having worked with CARE. And so she brought it to that committee and said, "We really need to deal with the housing crisis going on." And so Lynette, also being, Lynette Lee, also being involved in housing work herself, could substantiate that what you're anecdotally seeing and feeling is true. She knew very well about the housing crisis, so kind of reconstituted the committee at that time, of community members and church members to begin focusing on the housing issue, and specific to Alameda. And we had some really, really good folks that were involved in that particular committee, including Don Tamaki, Diane Yamashiro, Carl Anderson, and then from the community, Vicky, along with Richard Woo and Arnold Perkins were the people.

And then Roy had left us, and so we hired on -- and actually it was through Roy's recommendation that we hired Cynthia Okayama Dopke to be our organizer for this next phase of organizing. And Cynthia had been working in my office, but had been a PSR grad, Pacific School of Religion grad, she had her M.Div. Decided not to go in the ministry, but she was very involved in peacemaking with her husband, with national peacemaking work. And Roy thought she would be a really good person to organize on this next effort, so she became our organizer. We ended up focusing on, there were 590 units of old Navy housing in Alameda, in the Alameda (naval base), that had not been touched for decades. And so there was a plan, though, to demolish them and to build upscale housing, single family homes there. And actually, Vicky and our community member Jeanne Nader went to the city manager and were asking, poking around asking about what's going on with this. The city manager says, "Yes, there's a plan, we have a corporation that we're working with to try to build new housing." And he said, "If you're concerned about it, come to city council meetings and we'll be debating it and discussing it." And so the committee came up with a focal point on that as a housing issue that was right in front of us. And so the idea was to oppose the demolition of those houses but to convert them into affordable housing. And Lynette, through EBALDC, came up with a pro forma to propose how they could be converted into affordable housing, and then Cynthia began organizing interfaith vigils at the site of the housing and organizing folks. The key partner for us in the faith community was the St. Barnabas church, which was located near the housing.

Other congregations weren't so enthusiastic about getting involved with the housing issue, because housing, we learned, kind of had been sort of a sacred cow around certain policies that had been in place. And we learned about Measure A, which was an exclusionary housing policy that had been passed in the 1970s that barred multifamily dwellings being built in Alameda, and was really, there were multiple rationales around it, but one of them was to keep out low income minorities from the community. And we began to understand it as we began to hear the stories being told, particularly from the Black community, because they understood it very well. But nonetheless, we moved forward with this campaign to convert East Housing, and Cynthia did a really great job of organizing folks, Lynette was kind of at the helm of it as well, being the expert on housing. We mobilized people to come out to the planning board meetings, we were unsuccessful in stopping at the planning board level, it went to the city council and we had dozens and dozens of people out testifying as well. People who were renters, people who were concerned about their long-term sustainability in this community, because there were neighbors that were being evicted, and it was just happening too rapidly. And we were unsuccessful at that point as well, at the city council, and they moved forward with the plans.

PW: You mean they were going to demolish the old naval housing and build new...

MY: And then they were going to build up a new development, which is, I think, called the Bayport now.

PW: That's over by College of Alameda?

MY: It's over by College of Alameda, yeah. But you know, here's what happened. In the process of this, it was determined that there needed to be a new organization to address these issues. And this is where we came up with the name Renewed Hope Housing Advocates, to be the organization that represented the housing interests of the community. And Renewed Hope was named after a group called HOPE, Housing Opportunities Provided Equally, that existed in the '60s, that was a fair housing organization that went defunct in the early '90s. And so we learned about this through people that got involved in the efforts with us. One of them was a significant person, (Peggy) Dougherty, who was from the St. Barnabas church, had been involved in the previous HOPE, and she and other people suggested we take on their name to honor the history of housing activism in the community, but put a prefix on it to indicate a new chapter. So that's why it became Renewed Hope Housing Advocates.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 22>

MY: And there was another group called Arc Ecology, which was involved in military base closures and redevelopment issues, and a woman named Eve Bach who was part of that organization, they participated as an organizational partner in the efforts that we had going on. And it was through their efforts that they entered, we entered, both Renewed Hope and Arc Ecology entered litigation with the city challenging the environmental impacts of the development, which halted it, and we ended up going to court with it. The judge knew what was up with it, and we had city representatives, the representatives of Atellus Corporation which was the developer that was going to do the project in the room, and said, "Okay, let's come up with some compromises out of here, and we won't have to have a hearing on this," because I could see what was going on here. And so we had a meeting there in a courtroom building, and Atellus really wanted to push this thing forward, and they pushed the city to agree to increase their affordable housing units mandate, the state mandate was fifteen percent at the time. We were pushing to increasing it to twenty-five percent on all new developments at the naval base, and Atellus really pushed for it and the city ended up agreeing to that. And Atellus also did a set aside of 3 acres for affordable housing at the Bayport so that there would be some kind of (compromise) on this, so to speak. And so they went ahead with that and they went ahead with the Bay Ports. The city adopted this twenty-five percent affordability. And it took them, I think, some twenty years from that time when they actually had their first development at the naval base. And Renewed Hope still exists, Lynette's still involved in it.

There's an interesting story I love to share about, there was a city staff in community development, Tom Matthews, who came to one of our vigils and rallies. And he had been working internally on developing affordable housing policies, but he was so frustrated because there was just no political will in the city to do it. He came to one of our rallies, and then somehow he contacted me because he heard we were organizing, and he said, "I want to join you guys." And not too long after that, he retired from the city and he joined Renewed Hope, he became the president of Renewed Hope. And we had the value of him having this experience and knowing what goes on internally within the city in terms of the politics and the policy and so forth. So he became the driving force to push the agenda for Renewed Hope, and along with Eve Bach as well from Arc Ecology, and then the plethora of people who became involved because of their own interests. But the problem was, things were moving so slowly that a lot of the folks who were involved ended up moving out of town, and then we started seeing demographic shifts and things taking place. It was a very, very challenging times, very heart wrenching time to see people leaving the community. But Tom stayed with it, and Tom stayed with it to the very end, even 'til the time he got sick and passed away. Another kind of interesting development when we're working from a faith-based perspective, that we just never know who's going to show up and become part of the effort, and actually become the leader of the effort that goes on.

And so we have always paid homage to Tom and to Eve, Eve passed away as well during our time, and a woman named Laura Thomas chairs the group now to this day, and they continue to be at the table. And civic leaders will tell you Renewed Hope is the group that is continuing to push the edge on the affordable housing policies. And I think in the last effort of the housing element, there's been a real shift forward in terms of the planning throughout the community around affordable housing developments in the community. So it's been a long effort, one that I wasn't involved in during all that time personally because I helped in the very beginnings, and Cynthia as our staff was there. But we've seen the continued vigilance and dedication, particularly on the part of Lynette Lee, who's still a big leader at the church. And still, even in her retirement, still volunteers to do a lot of things around these issues, and she's still involved there.

PW: Did she actually make update reports to the church? Because it is such an issue here in Alameda now, and now the public is allowed onto parts of the Alameda Naval Base, the former base, we can see it. We can see those condos growing up and understand, like there's no way that's low income housing. I mean, now I'm speaking just on a personal...

MY: Yeah, as a citizen.

PW: ...citizen, and understanding that impact, and then where Buena Vista got involved with that, but now we can really see how much change is happening to Alameda?

MY: Yeah.

PW: Is this something that she would regularly get?

MY: You know, I've been retired for almost three years now, so I don't know what she's doing in terms of reports by the congregation, but I assume she is checking in with things. But I do still get Renewed Hope emails and updates and things. They are still very vigilant, very active.

PW: I can just imagine, though, that families at Buena Vista might have been here for three, going four generations now, but they can't buy a house in Alameda.

MY: Yeah.

PW: And what does that mean?

MY: Yeah, absolutely. And when you think about it, there's been a lot of commemorations of Japanese American history, the one that Densho's been involved with with Alameda Japantown. And think about Japanese Americans here, when the first Isseis were here, there were housing codes where they couldn't live in certain places, and it was a big deal for people to live in the Gold Coast, or a big deal for people to live in the, what was called the Fernside area. And even Bay Farm out here that just got developed for the old-timers, perceived as, like, wow, that's an untouchable place to go. So housing has always been an issue for Japanese Americans as well, even housing after the war, and resettlement, all that. So, to me, I've noticed that there is that thread of history kind of looping back around were advocacy for people to have safe places to live, it's part of the narrative of our stories as well. So it makes sense how the congregation can support that.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 23>

PW: During this same general period, I know you've talked to me about the Social Justice Committee, and I think this was also a committee within Buena Vista?

MY: Yeah.

PW: Tell me about that.

MY: So we have a national agency called the General Board of Church Society, and local churches are encouraged to have a local church committee. We called ourselves the Social Justice Committee where it would discuss just issues that the congregation maybe wanted to take on. And this is parallel to our Community Development Committee as well. So there was a particular point in time where we had a strong committee that was operating, and they were very critical at a certain juncture because we were forming coalitions in the community, and I think at that particular time, as the housing issue was beginning to get more visibility, there was something called the Alameda Diversity Alliance that got started. And there were key people, I think, in our congregation, Wendy Horikoshi was one of them, and Kathy Lee, Joanne Kagiwara, Keith Nomura, who were all part of committee, Jill Shiraki, who were part of committee, and that committee work was making relationships with this new Diversity Alliance.

The Diversity Alliance was doing things like holding city council, school board, what do you call them, candidates nights. And I still remember a candidates night, must have been back in, I would image it's '98, where the candidates night was asking the question about housing issues and the changing shift in the landscape of the city in terms of development and redevelopment. And no candidates would answer the question about affordable housing. "Where do you stand on affordable housing?" "No comment." And the existing members, council members, "Next question, please." So in other words, nobody wanted to touch it, and so that's where we began to understand this sacred cow in this community around housing policy issues and all the work that needed to be done in terms of shifting that sentiment. And I think that's where Renewed Hope and other coalition partners, over time that got developed, really shifted the whole direction of things. And so today, all city council members, every one of them will say they are supporters of affordable housing. And some of them will want to say that they're champions of it as well. So that shift is a real one that I've seen happen in my lifetime. There's still more to be done, of course, but it's something to see, that shift take place, and then the efforts of people who were involved kind of on the ground level to help bring things forward.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 24>

PW: So in 1998, Buena Vista church celebrated your hundredth anniversary.

MY: Uh-huh.

PW: What did the congregation do in reflection of that history or that milestone? Was there much?

MY: If I remember well, we had a big celebration, I think, at a hotel somewhere, and we did a lot of history. I think there had been a decade since the passage of the Civil Liberties Act, but there was efforts to recapture some of that history and kind of retell the history to new generations and celebrate. And I think it was also a very critical time because we were having a changing of guard and leadership, we were having new people come in to church, and I think there were people who maybe were not part of families that grew up in Alameda or at this particular church, or not part of the family of the church, but the people who became part of the family, so to speak. And I think that was a really important pivot point for the congregation. And you had key families like the Takedas and Judy Furuichi, Jo Takata, her sister Carol, and Susan, the Koike family, Wayne and his brothers, the Hanamura family, and Wendy Hanamura is offspring of Howe and Mary Hanamura, and her grandparents were key members. I think there's something about core family members being able to embrace new folks to the congregation and then help them feel part of the family and then feel part of the whole fabric of the community, that there was a good shift going on around the hundredth anniversary. And Jo in particular was coming back with us, because she hadn't been so involved, but Judy had been involved for a long time. Jo came back and started to give leadership to senior citizens, and started a program for the seniors, and actually, she started that back in 1990 or so. But anyway, I think, fast forward to 1998 and I think the shift in our leadership kind of was a key thing that was taking place.

PW: And with those changes from some of, well, there were key families that you're describing, and there's new families. I'm just imagining that a lot of people who were Japanese American are moving out of Alameda, you just described all the housing issues, and you have a new demographic.

MY: Yeah.

PW: What was that like? What did it start to look like?

MY: Well, it started becoming more multicultural. I mean, people walking through the door, there's no sign that says "Japanese only," right? That's antithetical to what you are as a church. Although I think there were some hopes that this church would continue to be sort of the anchor place for the Japanese community. I think it still has been and still continues to be, but it's also become more inclusive of others of other ethnicities. Other Asians becoming... I think in our mission statement we began to talk about naming that we were much more of an Asian American congregation at that particular time. But I think it was not until toward my retirement that they also began to embrace the naming of being more multicultural as well because of who was making up the congregation at that particular time, maybe another decade later or so.

<End Segment 24> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 25>

PW: So I'm going to shift again. So in the '90s, there was a major national/international incident that I'm sure must have affected the congregation, and that was September 11, [2001], when there was the tragic attack, terrorist attack on the World Trade towers in New York.

MY: 9/11, yeah.

PW: Yes. What was the congregation's response and what was your response?

MY: The very first... we were going through a renovation at that time, and so we weren't using our sanctuary, but we were using our social hall for our worship services. And that was also a historical building because it was built in 1927 after the 1924 Anti-Exclusion Act. So there was a certain ambiance whenever we worshipped in there that I'd feel, because it was almost like you have the ancestors with you in the space, because they've built the place. But it was interesting to me, because the very first worship service we had, a couple of folks spoke up. I remember particularly Ki Nomura and Tats Tajima, who said it reminded them of Pearl Harbor, when they were the face of the enemy, and they were worried about the Arabs and the South Asians and the Muslims who would be targeted, because there was a stereotype of who was causing the World Trade attacks. And so there was a quick pivot for us on looking at how do we reach out to these communities. And at the time, there was a strong Afghan community. So the very next week, I invited an Afghan friend, a doctor who was active in the community from Afghanistan, and he came and talked about how they were feeling as Afghans in the community. And we actually did kind of a holiday gift giving. They were Muslim, so they don't celebrate Christmas, but it was getting toward Christmas, but we called it a holiday gift giving. Because he was taking a plane, he was chartering a plane to go back to Afghanistan to help family members and community members there that he knew.

And then the following Sunday I invited a Muslim friend from some networks that we had been involved with to come and speak about what Muslims were experiencing, feeling as well. And it became very clear that there was a lot going on in terms of these communities where there were monitoring of communities, there were deportations taking place immediately, there was a lot of surveillance going on, and a lot of fear in the communities themselves about kind of being looked at in a fishbowl. And so we started working with a woman named Samina Sundas, who started a group called (American Muslim Voice) or something like that. But she was organizing vigils at the INS, and also when there were families that were being subjected to deportations of family members unjustly, that was getting on her radar screen, and we were going out to some of the INS vigils and rallies, things of that nature.

PW: INS being Immigration...

MY: Immigration and Naturalization Service in San Francisco. And then she was developing conferences to bring people together, and she was particularly aware that Japanese Americans were being supportive of their communities, so she reached out in that respect. And so that kind of shifted some of the landscape of what we were doing to the more global understanding of this situation. And also it was a pivot back to civil liberties theology. Because when we think about the things that were going on, and what the commission said about race prejudice, lack of political leadership, and war hysteria being the reasons for this, we were seeing that in front of us in terms of the hysteria going on around the attacks. There were justifiable fears that were going on for people in terms of the attacks, but then there's another level of it being, kind of going sideways, and certain communities being impacted. And we could see definitely the anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiment being fueled in that as well. And then paying attention to what political leaders were saying and doing for that matter as well.

<End Segment 25> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 26>

PW: And this is an obvious road towards extending the work that Buena Vista is doing into an international realm. Can you tell me about other initiatives that were born out of this kind of heightened consciousness and awareness of what's happening?

MY: Yeah. Well, I think immediately following the work with these particular communities, we became aware, probably through our national networks of our Methodist church of the push to begin moving into Iraq, and how unjustifiable that was going to be because of the way that it was being manipulated politically and in terms of with information. And now we know what Colin Powell has said about the stuff that he was bringing to the Congress and so forth. And we were very involved in trying to stop that, in terms of our social justice committee that I mentioned, and we had, at that time, an intern, Allison Mark who was with us, and she was doing a lot of work with our organizing and we were very active in anti-war movement protests against going into Iraq. Once we did go into Iraq, then we were involved in getting out of Iraq, so we were involved in a lot of activities. Jose Arcellana was another key member of our committee, I think, who was championing our visible activities around that endeavor. And that went on for a while.

And I think that was kind of a prelude into Barack Obama's election in 2008, because he ran on getting out of Iraq, right. And there was a lot of peace groups that were organizing to get him elected, and that was kind of a threshold moment when he did get elected. But I think what most people will see, that the peace movement kind of disintegrated after he got elected. There was no sustained movement forward into things, and it is kind of what it is now.

PW: I know that this campaign to get out of Iraq was not the only initiative that was happening at the same time, or that started to evolve Buena Vista. Can you share some stories about work in the Philippines?

MY: Yeah. 2006, I was involved in helping to lead a delegation to the Philippines with our Bishop Shamana and several of our leaders in our conference, in the Cal-Nevada Conference of the Methodist Church, and we came back and started a task force on human rights in the Philippines called the Philippine Human Rights Task Force, or Philippine Solidarity Task Force, excuse me. And we had congregation members that also went on to trips there successive years, including Kira Azzam and Nikki Salde Azzam, they became kind of leaders in that task force. Jeanelle Ablola, who was one of my interns at the time, also went on trips, and she actually is now the co-chair of that taskforce and became very involved as well. So we were doing a lot of work around that, which was really connected to the whole War on Terror because when the War on Terror kind of got launched after 9/11, the Philippines became approached as a partner for the U.S. in the War on Terror. But what happened was they were using that guise to target human rights activists in the Philippines, including lawyers, people working with fisher folks, labor, student organizations as well as clergy activists. And there was actually a United Methodist clergy who was killed in part of the attacks on the activists in the guise of the War on Terrorism.

And so we called these extrajudicial killings, which were spiking up after 9/11. And what we were doing was doing trips there to the region every year to get exposure and have meetings with people who were being impacted by what was going on, bringing that back for education here in our country, and then also advocating for the issue to be (addressed) much more in this country as well. And what evolved around that again was that task force we had for our conference, and leadership that also emerged from our conference. And I think Kira, Nikki, and Jeanelle are key leaders now, and that Jeanelle moved on to become the pastor of the Pine United Methodist Church after her stint with us as an intern, and also partly as a staff for some time. And they are now kind of like leaders in that movement.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 27>

We pivoted also to work with Palestinians around a similar time, as I also was on a trip to Palestine in 2006. We were asked to create task forces in our conference and we created a Palestine Task Force for Cal-Nevada Conference. Our leader of our Justice Committee, Jose Arcellana, had taken a trip, and also came back with a vision to want to start a ministry with Palestinians. And he was clear about it that he was not about studying the issue as it was about being in a relationship with Palestinians. Much like when we worked with other issues in the community, it's about being in a relationship with people, developing relationships, working together and developing mutuality around our organizing. And so it took us about a year to vet it with all our committees in the church, and then by the end of 2008, we were ready to move forward with that.

We brought out our liaison to the West Bank, Janet Lahr Lewis, who was then representing the Methodist church in the West Bank. And she flew out to meet with us in the congregation, and she suggested that we partner with this little village called Wadi Fukin, which is in the West Bank, Bethlehem district of the West Bank, right on the Green Line. A very small village of about 1,300 people or so, and she said this would be a great way to start a people-to-people relationship and a partnership and begin to be on the ground with stuff that's happening. And I had actually visited there in 2006 on my own, so I knew some people there from my homestay that I did, so I was familiar with the village. But she kind of had the vision of how this could work, because she knew them very well, it was like family for her. And she said, "We're a small congregation, so this could be a good fit." So we started, we launched that in 2009, in the summer of 2009, with the Beehive Project, just to support -- it was a very modest thing -- to support the cultivation of honey for families there in the village. And the key issue that they're dealing with is the imposing presence of illegal settlement of Beitar Illit, which is one of the biggest settlements in the West Bank, which is illegal according to international law, and eating up their land and creating havoc for life under the military occupation that they're dealing with. And that settlement at that time, I think, had been about forty thousand people. They've grown now to about sixty thousand, and they have plans to go to a hundred thousand. You can imagine that with a village of about fifteen hundred people, what that looks like. And they're eating up land, always taking more land and ordering demolitions of properties, olive trees, annexing more land through land confiscation orders. And I'm still with that group, as the group has more from, participation from Buena Vista and Berkeley Methodist and Trinity Methodist to several other churches.

We have a steering commission of about twelve people now, and I co-chair that in my retirement. So I'm still very much engaged in that. But Buena Vista was the key anchor for that in the very beginnings. And as a result of that work, too, I think Buena Vista began to have, develop relationships with local Palestinians, people who are here in our community in the Bay Area, that may not be, other people may not be familiar with. And one of the odd things, it turns out, that, for example, the chair of the Arab American Cultural Center in San Francisco, Fuad Atiyeh, who became a very good friend, owned a gas station around the corner from Buena Vista. And it's because of our work with Palestinians that I got to meet him one day when folks from the Arab Community Center were at Buena Vista, and the board chair said I'm going to go visit, I mean the executive director said, "I'm going to go visit my board chair," I go, "Who's your board chair?" And she mentioned who he was around the corner, and I said, "That's where I get my gas." I said, "I didn't know a Palestinian owns that place." And so after that, I went over and paid a visit to him, and he shared this story with me about how he bought the restaurant, I mean, bought the gas station a few years prior. And because of the Anti-Arab sentiment, he doesn't show himself out in their community, out in the gas station, because he doesn't want to stir up anything, and he just stays up in his office upstairs, he says, "But I watch everything that's going on." So we became very good friends, and he began to support our partnership in Palestine with the folks from Wadi Fukin. When they came from Wadi Fukin on a speaking visit, he hosted at his family with a big dinner for them and welcomed them to the Bay Area, and he has since sold the gas station. But the funny thing about it is that you just never know who your neighbors are. And never know kind of the relationships that get developed when you're doing different types of things and different kinds of ministries.

<End Segment 27> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 28>

MY: I think the city of Alameda became a sanctuary city in, I believe it was 2017, I think. But it coincided with Buena Vista pivoting also to doing ministry with immigrant migrant families. And through the partnership with Interfaith Movement For Human Integrity, which is the partner organization, the congregation also began to host families living at the church. And the church became a sanctuary congregation, and it coincided with the city also declaring itself a sanctuary city, which I think, you go back to 1994 with Prop 187, there's some history of us working with the city on different things. So we were very much there to support the city taking that position. I was very proud to see Alameda become a sanctuary city in that regard, and Gala King was a key lay member on our committee that was moving the immigration industry forward. And she now works for the Interfaith Movement For Human Integrity as their regional organizer and coordinator for that matter. But those were ministries that followed the Palestinian ministry and then there was also a Disability Ministry that Austin Tam developed as one who came to own his own disability, which he says is invisible because he's got a cognitive disability and ADHD, which people can't tell initially. But his feeling that Asian communities need to be more educated around it because culturally sometimes we want to put people away in closets when they have disabilities. And so he wanted to do education within the congregation, but also he's been an advocate in the community as well. To me it's so ironic because he is the son of Niel, who we started all of our work with, and after his passing, I think Niel passed the torch to Austin about his voice in the community, and he actually became elected to the Alameda County Democratic Central Committee, and is a very strong force and voice in Democratic politics in the area.

PW: This is Austin now?

MY: Yeah, it's Austin.

PW: Well, stop for a minute and tell us about Austin, who he is and how did your lives intersect?

MY: Well, Austin, as I mentioned, Niel started coming to church with his son Austin, Austin was in junior high at the time when he brought him to church, and Austin became involved with some of our youth activities or youth work, and just kind of was nurtured in the congregation. And at one point became our office manager and then really his life began to expand where he has these gifts that he has around organizing, and he became one of our staff to be an organizer on the staff. And he's been very much there on housing issues, he's convened the Renters' Rights Coalition at the church, and has been very much active with that voice. But also a voice for disability awareness and disability advocacy, both within the congregation and also in the community as well. And that's how he got elected to the Central Committee as a disability advocate, them needing to be inclusive of that kind of voice as well. And he's been very vocal on the Palestinian issue, immigrant rights, everything that the church has espoused, he's been very much there. But it's ironic because I think he inherits that legacy from his father Niel, and his place at the church and giving voice and organizing other people at this time and place.

And the last thing I want to close with is with the naming of the school district office, district office in the Marina Village area, the Niel Tam Educational Center, Austin and I and others in the community were involved in working with the district to get that center named after Niel because of all that he went through in terms of the challenges when he was the center of controversy, and then him becoming a beloved person not only in our church but in the whole community. As a leader in the school district and becoming on the school board after serving as principal for several years, to give him honor and to pay respects to the work that he forged for the Asian community, but for all communities in the community as well. And so we were able to celebrate that a couple years ago, looking at my notes, about 2019, I think it was, that the district office was named after him. So there's a plaque there with his picture on it, and some background about who he was. And we just felt so good when we saw that take place and the district honor him, and give homage to his legacy.

PW: This is the whole district main office, right?

MY: The main office, yeah. And it actually followed on, you know, the monument name change movement that's been going on, initiated by Black Lives folks, but in Alameda there was a move to rename Haight Elementary School, which was the elementary school closest to the church, because Haight had been known for his anti-Asian views in the state of California, his anti-Black views, and actually got elected as a governor of California in 1867, I believe it was, and so he resided in Alameda. And so Haight school became subject to question and scrutiny by an activist in town, Rasheed Shabazz, who grew up in Alameda and went to Encinal High School, he's a local historian who's been doing a lot of research, and he proposed changing the name of Haight based on who Haight was. And the school board supported that by acclimation, and there was a process to rename the school. And that's when we first brought up the idea of renaming it Niel Tam school. That didn't fly because it was better for them to rename it Love School, because it worked better with, instead of "Haight," it's "Love."

PW: And that's H-A-I-G-H-T.

MY: Yeah, H-A-I-G-H-T, but it was a better sound. But it did raise the awareness around the need to recognize Niel, and so that kind of shifted into the campaign to name the district office in his memory.

PW: I have one last question to you.

MY: Yes.

<End Segment 28> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 29>

PW: What does it mean to you -- this is my closing question -- what does it mean to you to pastor? Not just to be a pastor, but to pastor or maybe both?

MY: What does it mean to pastor?

PW: Yeah. Well, maybe it should be, what does it mean to be a pastor? What does it mean to you?

MY: It's a privilege and an honor to be in people's lives, I mean, I really mean that. It's a privilege and an honor because you're invited into people's lives for, the breadth of people's lives, from births to deaths, and there are so many things that go in the lifespan of individuals and as families. And to accompany people through different things spiritually, to provide spiritual guidance and spiritual support is just... it's going to bring me to tears now. Because you can't really explain it, it's just, being with people and trying to be, as best you can, a presence of God's love and hope and transformation, particularly in times where there are struggles that go on in people's lives. And I've done the best I can to be a good pastor, and I don't know what I can say, I can only say that it's a privilege and an honor to be in people's lives. And there's no, I don't know, there's no words I can really, adequate words I can give to it.

And it's an interesting thing, because we're talking about justice work in the community, I should say that I want to thank my mentors, Lloyd Wake, who has passed away, and Mike Murazone who has passed away, and Mike was a really extraordinary pastor, Lloyd was an extraordinary justice maker, he served at GLIDE church for many years, and was involved with many different issues. But both of them really gave me good guidance about what it means to be a good pastor, and that you may do justice work, but it's in the context of being a pastor. And so it goes hand in hand, and you need to have an appreciation of what goes on in the fullness of a life of a congregation. Because the congregational life is so multilayered, and so many blessings you have of the fullness of congregational life. And so that's the other part, too, it's not just about justice making, it's not just about being with the family, but being with a community for a breadth of time. And I was very privileged, and I should say in my final word, a special thank you to all the members of Buena Vista from the time I was there for the support I receive in my personhood and in my spiritual journey, and for us to be able to work together to bring to fruition things that we were able to do as a congregation. So there's people I haven't mentioned here because there's not enough time, but every person is so important in the life of the community and congregation. So everybody counts, everybody matters.

PW: Thank you so much for your time.

<End Segment 29> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.