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TI: But before we go there, I just wanted to actually just touch a little bit on the redress. Because during this time, redress started heating up. In fact, your father testified at the commission hearings. Do you remember when your dad did that?

DT: I do, yeah.

TI: And what did that mean to you to see your father testify?

DT: Well, my father was an... he had a tremendous influence on me because... and I think he was real unusual. As far as Japanese Americans were concerned, and Niseis, he read, he was very well-read. And he was a pharmacist working two jobs. I don't think he particularly liked his jobs, I don't think he hated his jobs. But he was always engaged in, kind of, at least thinking about bigger issues. Just to give you an example, when Alex Haley wrote The Autobiography of Malcolm X, my father read that book when it came out. I don't think that was a typical reading for a Japanese American Nisei, second generation. And he was reading the same stuff that I was reading. And so he'd want to engage in it in dinner table conversation. And he had said, "If I could have..." I think he said to his father that, "You know, maybe I could go to be a lawyer," something like that. And his father laughed at him. Because he said, "Lawyer? You'll never make any money. Who's going to hire you?" And I was telling this story earlier, when my grandfather was trying to get around the alien land law, he went to a white lawyer, because basically, that's how he got things done. And so I think my father was kind of, he did what he had to do to raise a family. And he did the practical thing, and he got a good job and he raised the family. But I think if times, if we were in another society, he would have been a different, he probably would have been in policy. Maybe he would have been a lawyer.

TI: Did your father ever talk to you after you, say, graduated, or when you were graduating? Did he ever comment on how lucky you were to become a lawyer?

DT: I think, well, he was really proud of me, there's no question about that. But he was worried about my going into poverty law, worried. It was kind of like, "Okay, we helped you get, we put you through law school, and now you've got to, you're a legal aide at $11,000 a year." [Laughs] But as long as I had a job, a J-O-B, I was okay. But I think when he really became proud of me and probably the other members of the legal team like Lori Bannai and Dale Minami and others, their parents really became proud of them, was in doing the Korematsu case. I remember coming home with a stack of copies of government documents in which we had memos from Justice Department lawyers, and they're saying, "You know, we have a duty not to lie to the U.S. Supreme Court. And the army has made claims that Japanese Americans are engaging in espionage and sabotage, and we know that none of that is true. And if we don't disclose this material to the Supreme Court, it occurs to me that we're engaging in the suppression of evidence." And I was reading this stuff to my parents -- I said, "You can't tell anybody about it, but this is what I'm working on." And they were... [pauses]... I just need a minute to gather my thoughts. They were amazed. You know, they knew that the internment was wrong, they knew that they were treated unjustly, but they had no idea of the degree. And so when they heard that evidence, it was like complete silence for the next hour, went through every document. And I scored a lot of points that night. After that, it was, "My son the lawyer." I think before, they were certainly concerned about my career as a legal aide lawyer, but I think they really got behind me. And I think every member of that legal team probably had that kind of experience. It was an epiphany.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.