Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Grant Ujifusa Interview II
Narrator: Grant Ujifusa
Interviewer: Tom Ikeda
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: March 2, 2002
Densho ID: denshovh-ugrant-02-0002

<Begin Segment 2>

TI: Can you explain a little bit about your personal sort of relationship with Mike --

GU: Uh-huh.

TI: -- and how you worked with him? Because I think you're one, at least with Sanseis, one of the few that have worked with Mike. So that would be really interesting.

GU: Yeah, I was the Legislative Strategy Chair for the JACL part of redress. And again, like a lot of life, certainly Japanese life, perhaps Japanese American life, it begins personally. So, it's an act of filial piety, actually -- Mike and Min say, "Well, we're gonna do redress" --

TI: This is Min Yasui.

GU: Min Yasui, I'm sorry. "We're doing redress, but for a separate set of reasons, the Sanseis are saying you can't do this with us because it's now our turn." And they said in so many words, "We think we should play a part." And I said, well, maybe it is their turn. So I chatted with some of the Sansei who were then running redress out of JACL. And they struck me as not very... they were not unintelligent, it's not as if they were... they had great commitment, but they had no idea how this town, Washington, worked. And Min was a great figure. No one does this to Min. I knew Min during my childhood. So I said, "They can't do this to Min, and we need Mike." 'Cause he had the great expertise in our community. So I said, okay, here I go. I'm the filial pious son, you can't do this to either of these guys. So we're gonna get you back players in redress. And so they said, "Thank you." And I continued to work with Mike, who had an extraordinarily close, and indeed almost a brother's relationship with Spark Matsunaga. As you know, Sparky was very important. He delivered almost all of the senators, seventy of them, single-handedly. Okay? If we were to develop in the first instance, trust with Sparky, Mike (already) had that trust. If I walked in, (Sparky) would say, "Well, I'm sorry. Why don't you sign the book and we'll send you some stuff." If I walked in with Mike, then, here we are. Let's go.

TI: So, do you think it was just a lack of understanding by some of the other people in redress in terms of the importance of Mike and his contacts? That they just didn't understand, and that you appreciated, and that's where it came from? Or was it just loyalty?

GU: Well, it's both. I knew how much Mike knew. Mike was as good as any hakujin lobbyist in Washington. He was good. Like there are good basketball players. There are good quarterbacks. Mike was very good. We needed him. So that's part of it. The other part of it is that I got to know him almost like a surrogate father. He was very charming. He had an extraordinarily ingratiating warmth and smile. So I got to love the guy. And whenever I was in trouble I would say, "Here's the problem." And he would almost invariably would say something very American and very Japanese. "Give me the night to think about it. We'll talk about it in the morning." And he always had some way around the problem that we had. He was a guy who could solve problems. So how do you get to person X? Well, you're gonna have to see person Y, person A, and even fifth person is gonna have to call his AA. All right.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.