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SH: But when I left Stanford and I went to go work as an engineer -- that was in 1978 -- I hooked up with some of the same people who were in AASA who had gone down to San Jose to work for AACI and also who were forming a new organization called the Nihonmachi Outreach Committee. And that was formed, I believe, in 1979. And their main activity at that point was to organize around the, kind of the preservation and defense of the San Jose Japantown. San Jose Japantown was, and I think maybe is today, the only remaining Japantown that hasn't been redeveloped out of existence or turned into a tourist trap. And so there was a lot of concern among the community residents and some of the workers and some of the social service providers, as well as students and other people about the preservation of Japantown, so I joined NOC.

And in 1979 I went on the Tule Lake Pilgrimage, and that was one of the early kind of mass mobilizations around monetary compensation and redress. And that was the first time that I had heard people discuss the concept of redress for the camps. And see I, from my background, I was... I very much identified with my parents and their situation. I think a lot of times in families there's one person that kind of decides to inherit that. [Laughs] And I think in my family I was the person who decided to inherit that. And so I had harbored this great anger and deep feeling about that whole thing. And when I... I had never heard of redress before, that concept, and I think that when I heard people talking about it, it was like "zing." [Laughs] I felt it physically, that it was really clear to me that's what I wanted to do, that I wanted to work on that until my dying breath. [Laughs] That I felt that it was really clear to me that, that was so important, that that would... I think on some level I felt like it would avenge my parents.

But I also felt that personally, a lot of the racism and oppression that I had experienced, and that I knew other people had experienced, partly was a result of the fact that the camps were an unresolved issue. That Japanese Americans still were looked at as enemy aliens, an enemy race. And anybody who even knew about the camps generally felt that it was justified militarily. You know all those misconceptions, I felt that a lot of the racism aimed at us was a result of that not being resolved. And so I personally, personally wanted to participate. I -- that's when the Nihonmachi Outreach Committee became -- kind of shifted focus and became more of a redress organization. It was actually a multi-issue organization and continued doing stuff around the preservation of Japantown and other things. Like we did some work on the Vincent Chin case, but -- and other things -- but the main focus shifted to become the redress campaign. And we started... I think we were part of the NCRR founding. We went down in 1990 -- 1980, sorry -- and I was there for that conference. And a lot of the people who joined NOC around that time were, a lot of people who also came out of the student movement. And then we started meeting more Niseis through the organizing for the commission hearings.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.