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PW: In this kind of community work, did this lead to other volunteering opportunities and things that you envisioned?

KY: You know, I think that in Michael's vision, it was supposed to. You sort of heal yourself and you go out and work with other communities. For me, I don't know if it did that with me, because I was already working. My life was working with really underserved people. So I already had this, so I don't think I did much. I was very involved with the A-bomb survivors, so I was part of Friends of Hibakusha with Geri Handa, and every two years, helped organize the medical visits.

PW: Say a little bit more about that, people don't necessarily know.

KY: There was a committee of A-bomb survivors in the mainland, and they had helped get the Japanese Hiroshima Prefecture Medical Association to send over a team of doctors every other year to do medical exams on the American A-bomb survivors. I got recruited because I was in a study group called the East Bay Socialist Doctors group. We were a study group. And I think Floyd Huen came. Do you know Floyd? He's the husband of Jean Quan. You know Jean Quan.

PW: Of course.

KY: Well, Floyd is a doctor, and he's like my age, and he worked in my system but he also worked at Highland, he's kind of a community clinic doctor. He came and told us about the A-bomb survivors, with the Japanese doctors coming to examine the American survivors and that they needed help. They needed help organizing and staffing. So that's how I got involved. In LA and in Honolulu and Maui, there's enough Japanese American doctors that they would have their own office and nursing staff and you could just have the exams done there. But here, that's not the case. So we had to find places that we could have, run a whole clinic after hours and basically on the weekend. And we had to find people to staff it, so I would get my doctor friends to work as health workers doing heights and weights and blood pressures. Because the health workers in your clinic, they're not going to work on weekends for free. So all my doctor and nurse friends would come and they would help. Every two years you do the flow, traffic flow, collect lab samples, sometimes draw blood, and they had different stations. There was the gynecologist, there was the surgeon, there was the internist, we had to move people around.

PW: What years was this happening?

KY: This happened, I think the first one I helped out on was in '83. Might have done '83 and '85, and then I moved to New York, so I wasn't involved for a few years. And then when I came back in the late '80s, I then got involved -- because they had by this time started, they started Friends of Hibakusha earlier. Reverend Hanaoka... do you know him? He was at Buena Vista for a while. He's been at Pine¸ and he himself is a Nagasaki survivor. He and others started Friends of Hibakusha, which is supposed to be like a community support group for the A-bomb survivors. And that was an interesting thing because in Japantown at the time, a lot of these community groups were either, I don't know if they were started or they were... but all these sectarian groups, all these politically progressive JAs had started these groups, or I don't know if they got in or what. But I could see a little battle within FOH between CWP, Communist Workers Party and League for Revolutionary Socialists, they both had people in FOH. And I would have to say that LRS probably won, their person stayed longer. And one of their doctors was the one who, I worked with him for all these decades, really nice guy to run these exams.

The important, the name, John Umekubo, who was a doctor, he's a Japantown doctor. He was the one who was really the head of it because he was the one who belonged to the medical association. The Japanese liked these medical, you know, like the medical association. I would never join the AMA or the California Medical, I'd never join that. So Umekubo was good because he was active in all these things. So he was kind of our spokesperson out front. And then Richard and I, Richard Fleming and I, would be the ones in the back making sure that things worked and everything was in place. Yeah, so every two years, certainly from '87 on, we spent a chunk of time doing this. It usually happened in the summer. Geri Handa does all the work. I mean, she's just amazing. And unfortunately I've been sort of saying we should probably just disband. Because the last time we had a, there was an exam was in '19, 2019, and I think there were just thirty people who came, because they were all pretty old. And a couple of times ago, the Japanese decided that they weren't going to examine the second generation. And the second generation was who was bringing the survivors to the exams from Sacramento, from Fresno, from many places in northern California. I think they're doing an exam in L.A. There was a split in the committee of A-bomb survivors, one of these huge irreparable splits. The LA and Hawaii broke off from CABS, northern California CABS. Some horrible split that... and these weren't even JAs like us, these were more from Japan people. And it extended to Hiroshima, because we didn't, I think there was one time when the doctor came and it was a really cold reception when certain of our people went to greet her at the airport. It was one of these like, it wasn't talked about, but it was really intense. So there were a few times that was difficult. So they split, it used to be that the Japanese team would do Hawaii, LA, San Francisco and Seattle. And that's a long trip for someone to be away from their home practice. They did split it to one group does Hawaii and LA and the other group does San Francisco and Seattle.

PW: But it sounds like timing-wise, this started up before Sansei Legacy Project.

KY: Oh, yeah, it did, yeah.

PW: So this was moving before, and then Sansei Legacy Project, 1991.

KY: 1991.

PW: Something around that. And then how long did that run?

KY: Well, it technically sort of ran for about ten years, but a number of us just continued meeting once a month for what we started calling a "living room." So one Sunday a month we would get together at someone's house and then we'd order takeout. Because if you made it a potluck, people would be late preparing something. So we decided we'll just do, order out and someone would go pick up the food. So that's still going on in a way, but because of the pandemic, we kind of went to Zoom, and some people just didn't want to do Zoom anymore. So it's now a tiny group of four or five, six of us, and it's every two weeks on Zoom. But we used our name for a number of years afterwards for writing a letter, we wrote a letter to the editor after 9/11. And there was a writing project that Brian Dempster was doing. We had a grant and we never finished it. This is very bad, but we never published the book. And so I have all these writings from, we all practiced, he had us doing writing exercises, how to get people to write, blah, blah, blah.

PW: And the same time, we did an oral history with your mother for NJAHS.

KY: No, I used their guide and I interviewed my mother, my father. My mother's... both sisters, but that couldn't have been very easy because her older sister didn't speak English that well, but I must have done it. And then her younger sister, who was not at all open at all, at all. And I did my aunt, my Hilo aunt. Yeah, I did a bunch of them, I was terrible. I started with my mother, but I would talk too much. And I didn't give her enough time. And then, even though I said that my father shouldn't be around, he came in. So I have in my notes, I said, "Dad walked in." [Laughs] Because my mother's going to defer to him a lot, but it was okay. I'm glad I have it.

PW: What year did you do that?

KY: I couldn't... oh, maybe I have a date. Because I went back and listened. I have a feeling it's got to be the mid-'90s.

PW: Well, when did your father and your mother pass away?

KY: She passed away in 2001 and he passed away at the end of 2012. Where did I write these dates down? I would say the mid... oh, here, 1992. Yeah, 1992.

<End Segment 24> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.