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GK: From your recollection of this period organizing for the hearings, how closely did NOC and JACL work together on this, and were there differing views in how to organize the hearings in San Francisco?

SH: Yeah, in, well, I'll answer part -- in San Jose we worked with Judy Niizawa of the San Jose JACL, she was, at some point she was the president of the San Jose chapter and she was the only person in the JACL who was willing to organize for monetary compensation. I mean, there were a lot of people in the San Jose JACL chapter who were very suspicious of us. We were a new organization and whatever. I think our organizing work actually helped her, and she was very open to it. I don't think we always agreed on everything, but actually the NCRR started out being a coalition of NOC, and Asian Law Alliance, and the churches and... I'm not sure if it was San Jose JACL, I would have to check. I can't really actually remember if they were a member of it. But Judy, through the Peninsula Redress Committee was part of that also. So, yeah, so and there was a lot of struggle over time to unite.

I think... I remember, I remember people getting red baited and I remember people having fingers shaken in their face -- "Young lady, I'm old enough to be your father." There were a lot of problems that had to be worked out, and I think that we, we stuck it out. It was... like some people were saying at this conference today, that there's a certain tension, and differing views, and differing approaches and stuff. It's actually in some ways beneficial to the movement to actually have that debate. It's very difficult and uncomfortable to endure it, but I think that overall we felt that in the interest of the ultimate success of the redress movement, we had to work with these other people. And we had to struggle to unite with them and get them to unite with us. So ultimately in San Jose we were successful, that we did yearly Day of Remembrance programs, and we got consistent response, co-sponsorship and endorsement from the both JACL chapters, West Valley and San Jose, and from the churches and from different organizations. So you know, I think ultimately we were able to unite to a fairly high level.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.