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TI: Let's move forward now to the National Memorial. Because you were the one who really advocated putting Mike, Mike's name and the JACL creed inscribed on the memorial. Can you talk about why that was important?

GU: Yeah, I'm afraid, as I told you on the phone, that to put it mildly, I am not an uncontroversial person. I was called by a couple of vets, one of whom lives around here, (who) said, "Look, they got Mike off the wall." And I said, "What? This whole idea of a memorial was Mike's idea." 'Cause this is the way he was. He'd think of things, like he would think of Densho. Right? So he said, "We ought to have a memorial." And people said no, no, they don't do memorials for ethnic groups because everybody, the Lithuanians would want one, and Washington would be covered (with them). But we got the authorization to do this memorial. It's Mike's idea. How can they keep him off the wall? Beyond that, Mike, as I said to you earlier, as far as I'm concerned, is the single most gifted leader that our community has yet to produce. I will say beyond anybody who now sits in Congress. Or indeed, beyond his brother-in-law who now sits in Bush's Cabinet.

So, I went down there. And the board, which consisted of about thirty people -- and we had a little conversation. The vets and I had a conversation. And I said, oh yeah, I'll carry this banner. So went to the executive board meeting (with maybe) ten members, to be followed later that afternoon by (a meeting of) the full board. And the issue was, in some sense, classically American and another sense very Japanese. There were a group of people who were well-meaning, who felt that Mike had done a great disservice to our community in 1941, '42, '43. And it's not clear how much strength they had, but they were absolutely immovable. So in the Japanese tradition, we go into the kitchen and we try to work this out. Well, if you're on the other side, and you understand how the Japanese mores work, you say well, we got this thing won. Because we're not gonna move. All right? And the Niseis, who're still kind of Meiji, even Tokugawa, say, "Oh my God, we've gotta form some sort of consensus because, it's just, can't be done any other way." So this is perhaps a little too dramatic, but, I think can be confirmed by some other people who were there.

I went before the executive board, about ten, and there were some noteworthy Nisei there, including George Oritani, Peter Okada and others. And here they were wrestling with this problem. And I said, "Well we've gotta get off the dime." The Japanese banking crisis was then about four years old. And I said, "They're never gonna get rid of (that) problem." There's too much face, there's too much -- all these classic Japanese issues. But then I leaned forward and I said, "You know, I've got a way for you to solve this problem." And they said, "You do?" And I said, "Yeah." And they said, "Well, let's hear it." And I said, "Let's take a vote." And they said, "Oh my God. Anything -- oh we can't do that. Everybody's gonna have to publicly declare, and we're gonna be criticized for not being able to work this out." And, so they said, "We'll do it." In the afternoon they took a vote. They said, "Okay, do you have a motion, Grant?" And I said yeah, I'd like to move -- at that point they had, among Japanese Americans -- they had only Danny and Norm. That's sort of odd in the first instance. So I said, "Well, I move that the following people be added: Mike Masaoka, Min Yasui, Sparky Matsunaga, and Bob Matsui." And then, then I got a little emotional, I said, well, in 1942, the Sanseis say, and some white radicals say, "You all went like sheep. What was wrong with you?" I said, "Yeah, but Min didn't." And so on and so forth. And I said, "You can't have Norm up there without Bob. And you can't have Danny up there without Sparky. You can't do that. And you've gotta have Mike. This is Mike's idea. Mike was the one who produced Issei citizenship among many other things." So they went around the room and we won, twenty-five to six. And people were still very upset. So over a course of five or six of these meetings, each time we brought this issue up in a slightly different way, and each time we won by similar margins. And so, there was still a great hue and cry of, "Mike Matsuoka betrayed us," da-da, da-da, da. But what can you do in a democratic society absent force the dually constituted body has voted, twenty-five to six, on any number of occasions to include the name. And so he was included. And I think, at any given point in history people fight for, as Marx himself said, you fight for control and interpretation of the past because that controls how one moves forward into the future. So, if you define history carved literally in stone with Mike's name, that produces a certain conception of our history.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.