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PW: So going back just a little bit, though, from the time that your mom had passed and you were doing this, in the '90s, you started to become more aware of the community, the Japanese American community. So this was when the Sansei Legacy Project began?

KY: Yes. And I date it all to... you remember that Oakland Museum Strength and Diversity exhibit?

PW: 1990.

KY: So my mother and I went to one of the first panels, which had, I think Hisako Hibi, I think Kiku Funabiki was on it, maybe Mei Nakano, I don't quite remember, and then Diana Akiyama. And this was, I don't know, it was this eye-opener for me. More than an eye-opener, because I started crying and I couldn't stop. And it was something about when they talked about going to the bathroom in the latrines and there were no dividers, my mother never said anything about that. And then Diana Akiyama's talking about her father saying it was like a rape. And if you've been raped, you don't want to talk about it. And that was a total shock to me because she's saying that it was racist. And here I am working with all these Black and brown people, and I'm not thinking that I was ever... so I remember crying openly. I had a hard time stopping. And there was a very nice, there was a white woman, public health nurse that I knew from work who was there for some reason. I remember talking to hear, and I'm just... tears. And then Diana Akiyama said something about how the Sansei need to get together and talk about this. And she passed out cards that we could put our...

PW: And this was at the Oakland Museum event?

KY: Yeah, it was at the event when you're milling around afterwards. And I turned in a card with my name address, phone number on it, and I didn't think about it after that, but I think I told friends that I had this really emotional reaction to it. And then, like, in November or so of that year, I got something in the mail from Michael Yoshii, and I guess also Diana. I grew up with... I have a picture of me and my brother with Michael and his older brother. Michael's about five years younger than me. And so I remembered him, and it was no question. It was going to be the first Sansei gathering. And so I went, and it's at the Buena Vista church social hall where I had spent a lot of time as a kid, because we used to go over from the Takedas' house a couple of doors away and we would play in the social hall or go around. So it was an amazing thing for me, because I was going to someplace familiar. It was a place that I had turned my back on when I was a teenager or a little bit later, and here I am back at the Buena Vista social hall. And there's a group of about thirty maybe, everyone has black hair. And for me, it was a little... I had a lot of family gatherings and we were all Japanese. Other people in the group, they were really like, it was something new for them, because they had not ever been in a room that was just all other Sansei. And everyone went around, and it was around the time that our parents got the checks. So I think that might have been one of the topics.

PW: The reparations?

KY: Yeah, the reparation that people talked about. So that was, you know, I remember being quite comfortable in this group, which would be unusual for me because I wasn't used to being with all these Japanese. But there clearly were other people who were more uncomfortable than me, and there were people who had even less contact with other Japanese than me. This did not appeal to the people who were into redress. They were not the political people from the city, these were all largely East Bay people who were, like me, assimilated, scattered or whatever, not belonging to one of the churches, so that's who we were. And then what I remember, I wrote in this thing that I just read where, at the end, you do one of these games where you have a ball and you throw it to somebody and you have to say one word. And this reminded me, my word was "comfortable," because it was a surprise to me. And then there were several more of these gatherings, that I guess Michael and Diana put together. I was torn for the next one because there was a Gulf War demonstration. I chose to go to the Gulf War demonstration instead of the Sansei gathering. And then I think in the summer, Michael brought up doing a support group. And that really appealed to me because it would be a smaller group. He was going to be leading it, and it just was so much more appealing to me to be able to talk in a smaller group. Because even though I was able to speak in this group of thirty, I knew it'd be more comfortable in this smaller group. So I was part of that first SLP support group. We met at, one of the outbuilding at the church. I think for a while it might have been every Monday night or every other. There are still people, Amy Funabiki, Jean Ishibashi, Marion Cowee, Keith Nomura, John Hamamura, a few others. But we stayed together. Michael left because he was starting another group, and we just went on talking without him. We got, Jill Shiraki was our first staffperson, and then Diana Akiyama had kind of moved, I think, to Southern California. And then Jill worked half time, and then we got Audrey. And then by this time, we'd formed a coordinating council, so I was on that. We planned, we started planning the actual gatherings. Came up with inventive ideas.

PW: Tell me more. So what were the kinds of things that you were...

KY: That we worked on?

PW: ...working on? Yeah.

KY: We would invite writers. I think that Ruth Sasaki came, but I missed that one. Do you remember the guy, David Mura, who wrote... did he come or did someone talked for him about his book? For some reason, he came at one point. [Interruption] But various writers came and we'd have a discussion with them. We did some exercises, because right at the same time, I was doing those Unlearning Racism things separate from the Sansei. But I knew a lot of people who were in co-counseling, Reevaluation Counseling from Seattle. I never got that involved, but I had a bunch of friends who were in it. And that somehow led me to these Unlearning Racism retreats and workshops. So one of the ones I really remember was one of these "crossing the line" exercises where everyone's standing up, and then you have a line, and they say, "Cross the line if you've ever experienced such and such." "Cross the line if you ever felt such and such," and that was a good one. We had one later on anger, women and anger, how we dealt with anger. Marion Cowee and I got together, because I have a lot of the papers. I don't think I have everything, but we tried to organize all these gatherings we put on. We did some stuff with a children of Holocaust survivors group here, I forget what it was called. But the woman happened to be the sister-in-law of a good friend of mine. I forget what her... but we did one on children of Holocaust survivors, and also legacies of camp. We put together one of the last things we did, and it may have been what ended us, is we got... we must have had money. We were putting on a big conference, it must have been in 1999, maybe it was 2000. And we planned it for months and months and months, but we were going to have people from all over the country. We got people at least from Chicago to talk, and it was called, I think it was Legacies of Camp, because I made the big poster, Legacies of Camp. And we had Satsuki Ina, of course. It was at the JCCCNC, and we planned it for a really long time.

We also had, every year in November, we had like an anniversary dinner, and my parents loved this. So this was great. At least my mother got to experience this, that in her lifetime she got to go back to Alameda with me. So in the social hall there would be these big, the annual dinner, and she gave nice money, donation to Sansei Legacy Project. She was very happy about that, and she saved all these clippings. Because we would have various things, we'd put on skits, and it would make it into the Hokubei because JK was one of us, kind of. Yeah, I met some... I met slightly younger people. I was probably on the older end of things, maybe within a year or two of me. There were a number of people just a few years younger. And it didn't go, not quite as young as Kimi, maybe, but it appealed to a certain age group. But more people would come to our annual dinners. And then I would take part in, as a thank you, I would help at, when Buena Vista was preparing for its holiday dinner, we would try to do things for Buena Vista. They turned out to be our... they were, our money went through them so that it could be a donation. Somebody from Buena Vista took care of our accounts.

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