Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Donald K. Tamaki Interview
Narrator: Donald K. Tamaki
Interviewers: Tom Ikeda (primary); Lorraine Bannai (secondary)
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: April 17, 2009
Densho ID: denshovh-tdonald-01

[Correct spelling of certain names, words and terms used in this interview have not been verified.]

<Begin Segment 1>

TI: So today is Friday, April 17, 2009, we're in the Densho studio, Seattle, Washington. On camera is Dana Hoshide, and I'm the interviewer, Tom Ikeda. Later on, Lori Bannai is going to join us, in about an hour, so she'll be here. And we're interviewing Don Tamaki. And this is for our digital collection, it's a life history. And so Don, I'm going to just start at the very beginning for you. Can you tell me the name that was given to you at birth?

DT: Donald K. Tamaki.

TI: And the K, does that stand for something?

DT: It doesn't stand for anything, and I've asked my parents about it and they said, well, it could stand for my grandfather, whose name was Kameichi, but that means "number one turtle" in Japanese. [Laughs] So I think they just shortened it up to an initial. And they said, well, it was like Harry S. Truman. "S" didn't stand for anything, so I had a "K" and that was the end of that.

TI: Good. So when and where were you born?

DT: I was born in Oakland, May 26, 1951, at Kaiser Hospital.

TI: And before we get into your childhood, let's talk a little bit about your parents. And let's start with your mother. Can you tell me a little bit about your mom's family and where they grew up and things like that?

DT: My mother's family grew up in Oakland. They, like all Japanese Americans, or most of them, the Issei immigrated at the turn of the century, the late 1800s or early 1900s. And my grandparents, who had, my grandfather never had met, he was dead by the time I came around. But my grandmother's side came from Gifu Prefecture as immigrants, and settled in Oakland.

TI: Do you know why your grandfather came to the United States, why he left Japan?

DT: Well it was for economic opportunity. But beyond that, I don't know the details. Japan at that time was having a difficult time. And my grandfather came here pretty much without skills, and then had schooling to become a tailor. And I think he may have gotten that schooling in New York or somewhere on the East Coast. So these pioneers that probably didn't speak much English...

TI: Well, that's a little unusual to go to the East Coast to get that kind of training.

DT: Yeah, I think that's what he did. And then settled back. So they had a little tailor shop near Oakland Chinatown in Oakland, and they lived over that, they rented, and they lived in that little apartment over the tailor shop, and that's where my mother grew up.

TI: And the names of your grandparents?

DT: Yamashita. So my grandmother was Tomi Yamashita, and, gee, my grandfather, what was his name? It escapes me right now.

TI: Okay, and how many kids did they have?

DT: They had six children. So my mother was one of a number of siblings. Was she number three? She must have been number three, yeah, three in line, or number four.

TI: And so they grew up in Oakland, your grandparents were tailors, but then you mentioned your grandfather... well, he died before you came. Okay, so... and then during the war, what happened to your mom's family?

DT: So they were, let's see, December 7, 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. And like in all other West Coast cities, the Secret Service and the FBI swept through those communities in Oakland and San Francisco. And from the stories that they told me, of course, everybody was scared, and this was a very besieged population. And at that time, there was a drumbeat of war and hostilities with Japan leading up to the war anyway. So I think this was already a minority that was already under intense pressure to begin with. And so after the Secret Service, FBI swept through the community and arrested community leaders, following that were the executive orders leading up to the rounding up and putting them in Tanforan Racetrack, which was a local assembly center in the Bay Area. And so the common experience of either burying or burning anything connected to Japan, my family did engage in that also.

TI: And for your, so for your mother's family, were there any, like, particular stories that she told about this time that stood out in terms of the event, experience?

DT: Well, I think she must have been in her early twenties when this happened, so she definitely was conscious of everything around her. She had gone to Cal Berkeley and gotten her degree there. And, but they were pretty -- all of the Japanese Americans were pretty much cloistered in segregated communities. But they completely felt that they were American citizens. And so I think there was a sense of fear and outrage that this thing was actually happening to them. I don't think they were, they could believe it. And there was, she says that people came around and they wanted to buy their property, household goods, because people couldn't take that with them. There were churches that were willing to store their property. But I think there was a deep sense of loss and upheaval. And my grandfather probably, I think he had died before then, so he didn't have to go through that process. So it was my, my mother and her siblings and my grandmother that ultimately, they went into Tanforan Racetrack.

TI: Now, before they went to Tanforan, there was something, I was reading, I think it was your father's testimony during the hearings. And he mentioned his mother-in-law getting a note slipped underneath the door of their tailor shop. Do you recall that?

DT: You know, I don't offhand, I don't. And I should re-read his testimony.

TI: Yeah, it was interesting, just essentially this note was saying, "Get out, we don't want you."

DT: Oh, yeah, right.

TI: And that was something that... so from Tanforan, then from Tanforan, where did your mom's family go?

DT: Topaz.

TI: And how about your mother? When, where did she go after Topaz?

DT: She... she met my father, and so they fell in love. It was like love at first sight, at least the way they told me. And they got special permission -- this is probably after a year, about a year of being interned -- to get married in Fillmore, which is a little town just outside the camp. And then, by then, if you could demonstrate that you could be employable, you can get out. And by then, my father was drafted.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 2>

TI: Let's go to your father then. So before we go to him being drafted, let's talk about, a little bit about his family, sort of, history in terms of, like your grandparents on your father's side. What can you tell me about them?

DT: Well, my, again, these are interesting stories of Japanese adventurers really. I kind of think, "Would I do the things that they did?" Whether they were just driven by economic need or whatever, just this tremendous courage to basically leave. In this case, my grandfather came from Okinawa. And so I think economic difficulties, and from what I had heard, his family had run a brewery in Okinawa. But his father, my great grandfather, had basically run it into the ground, lots of debt. And so he decided to leave. And he went to Hawaii to cut sugar cane, and decided that was too difficult. I mean, that's backbreaking work. And so he paid a ship's cook on a steamer to stow away. And so he was stowed away in the pantry, and he stayed there by day and then walked the deck at night. And he landed in Eureka, not speaking a word of English, and he made his way down to San Francisco.

TI: How do you end up in Eureka? Isn't that kind of inland? I'm trying to figure out how you would...

DT: I don't know. Again, I've never met the man, and so these were just stories.

TI: That's an interesting story, yeah, how he stowed away and that's how he...

DT: Yeah. And so probably he was an illegal immigrant. [Laughs]

TI: Right. I was going to make that comment. [Laughs]

DT: So, and as a lot of people ended up, ended up in America, he made his way on his own down to San Francisco. And again, my father doesn't even know how he got established, but somehow he was able to scrape enough money together. Well, what he did, evidently, was ran a business of meeting boats of... I don't know whether he was a baishakunin, kind of an intermediary for "picture brides" or whatever, but he used to meet the boats as they came in off Angel Island, and then set up the relationship. So he was able to... and my father, again, how he met my grandmother, I'm not sure. But my father was born in Chinatown in San Francisco, and then ultimately they moved in the area that was known to be Japantown. And he was able to raise enough money to buy a four-room flat on Buchanan Street in San Francisco, which is right in the heart of Japantown called Fuji Hotel. And there's a, when the Smithsonian had an exhibit on the internment, there was a replica taken from a Dorothea Lange photograph of the front of my, of that hotel. And I remember going there as a kid, it was the Fuji Hotel, and Dorothea Lange had taken a picture of these men, they were laborers who stayed there, they came in from the valley. And it was a hotel for immigrants. And that's the business he ran.

Now, the interesting story about that situation is that Japanese Americans, immigrant Japanese, were not able to buy most kinds of real property. So anything having to do with business, agricultural property, business property, the alien land laws, which were common in California and the state of Washington, Arizona, Oregon, prevented immigrant Japanese from owning property. And the way the laws were written is that it said "only persons eligible to be citizens could own property." Well, Japanese Americans and Chinese Americans as well, I believe, could not naturalize. And so the question was, how do you get ahead in America if you can't own property? And the answer is you can't. So basically, the whole concept was, of California legislature at that time, was to get the benefit of immigrant labor, but then make sure that they don't establish roots here, and keep them moving. And so this was a dilemma that they faced, and so what they, the things that they did to get around the law. And in this case, my grandfather had the foresight to connect with a Caucasian lawyer by the name of Guy Caulden. And Caulden ran a practice, a two-person practice in San Francisco, and he represented lots of Japanese Americans and also the consulate general of Japan. And what he did was basically he took title to this property, and then held it in trust for the benefit of the firstborn child, which in this case was my father. So at the age of five or six, my father was the owner of the Fuji Hotel. And the way the trust was written is that when he turned twenty-one, the title would automatically vest in him. And so was that legal? Probably not. I mean, it was a maneuver around that law, but basically that's what people did. The other techniques, I think, were to establish corporations and had the corporation own it rather than the Japanese American immigrant. And whether anybody looked under the rug to see who the ultimate owners were, I imagine they didn't or if they did, there would be some pretty draconian consequences, people losing land. There were civil penalties as well as even criminal sanctions for that.

TI: But at least in this case, because the family owned the land, they had something to return to after the war.

DT: They did, yeah. And they... it was an arrangement made... again, his father had died before the internment. So it was in his, he's probably twenty-two or twenty-three at the time. So he had to make arrangements with the bank to hold the property. And then he hired an African American, actually, caretaker, to take care of the property while they were gone. And they did all this not knowing whether they would ever return, and made arrangements for the money to be transferred from the bank to make the monthly mortgage payment, evidently, from their savings. So they were able to return to that property. And then that property stood there until the 1960s when San Francisco had this policy of removing blight in the city under the guise of redevelopment. And those neighborhoods were then plowed under, and what stands in its place is now known as the Japantown Center, which is right in the heart of San Francisco. But those used to be the neighborhoods. And now the irony is that the Japantown Center, which is a modern mall in the middle of Japantown, it's really iconic and it's identified in Japantown. But that is not the real Japantown from the community, that's a creation of the redevelopment process.

TI: Excellent. I'm glad we got this documented. That's a good story. So I now want to kind of shift -- well, before I go there, how many children did your father's family have? I mean, how many siblings did your dad have?

DT: Let me think. One, two... were there four of them? I think so.

TI: Okay.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 3>

TI: So I'm now going to shift more towards your family. So your mom and dad, they met at Topaz.

DT: Right.

TI: And they got married shortly after. So pick up the story from there. Where did they go after they got married?

DT: Well, let's see. There's a lot of things sort of bouncing around in my head, so I'm just gonna throw 'em out there before I forget them. But even before they got married -- so after my father made arrangements to have the hotel taken care of, and the whole family was carted away also to Tanforan, where they ultimately ended up in Topaz, my father was finishing up his pharmacy degree at Cal. And he finished, and he then was sent from Tanforan, then to Topaz, and then he gets his, he got his degree while he was in Topaz. So it's a mailing tube that I still keep, and on the outside of the tube is the Topaz, Utah, and his barracks number, and it's to a concentration camp. And on the inside, the contents, is his wrapped up diploma. And I think it's such a fitting little piece of memorabilia, 'cause it was like it just symbolized their whole life. I mean, on the one hand, inside the tube was his, the promise of America in terms of the doors of opportunity, he's got a degree from Cal. And then it's encircled and constrained by this mailing tube, which is the reality of the internment camp. And I kind of keep that just, just a reminder as to how far we've gotten.

And so he gets his degree in an internment camp. And in the meantime, their whole world has been turned upside down. And, of course, he's young and still full of hope and optimism, and he falls in love and meets my mother. And because it's wartime and people don't know what's gonna happen, I think there was a real sense of urgency, that everything has to happen like right now. And so they got married, as did other people, and ultimately he was drafted. And he spent the war in Cushing Hospital in Massachusetts, because he had had a pharmacy degree in medical, pharmaceutical background. He was put there, and my mother, in the meantime, had been able to get a job as a domestic in Massachusetts, in Framingham, and so she was able to more or less join him there, and I think they stayed there for the duration of the war. And there was some issue as to whether my father was gonna be sent overseas, and there's a story about whether he was on a list to go overseas and to Europe, and there was a doctor at the hospital, at Cushing, who decided, well, he was more valuable to him there, so he did not, he did not go into combat, I guess. But just one of those stories of people, the movement of people during time of war.

TI: And eventually they got back to Oakland?

DT: Yeah. Eventually, my grandmother remained for the duration of the war in Topaz, because she couldn't work, couldn't speak English. Her kids were able to get out after the first or second year. Of course, no one could return to the West Coast, that was an excluded zone. And eventually my mother and father made their way back to San Francisco, as did the rest of the family, and then re-started up the Fuji Hotel. And thereafter, my father, I think he worked at a couple of private pharmacies, drugstore-like settings, and then he ultimately got a job with the government like a lot of minorities and Japanese Americans in particular, working for the Veterans Administration as a pharmacist, civil servant. And he did that until he retired.

TI: And so when did they move from San Francisco to Oakland?

DT: So they moved, I think, right after I was born. So that was in '51, I was born. And they moved into, it was a nice neighborhood, small house. And the story that they told was that -- to me -- was that the real estate broker who sold them their house ultimately was fired because he had sold the house to a Japanese American. And then there were a group of neighbors who came knocking on the door, basically saying, "You're not welcome in this neighborhood." This was because it was a "white neighborhood." And my father, of course, was angry about it, but he said, "Make me an offer," meaning, "You come up with the money. And if you want to get me out of here, buy me out." And they never did. And so I lived there, and fortunate enough to live in one house until I left for college. And I had, I was oblivious to any of that because the, my neighbors and the kids in the neighborhood, I got along with really well.

TI: What neighborhood was this in Oakland?

DT: This is off Lakeshore Avenue, not too far from Lake Merritt. And I had a wonderful childhood. And in those days, you could work in a factory and you could own a house. And that's a reality that doesn't exist anymore with the cost of real estate and everything else. But it was, my father worked two jobs, he worked in the Veterans Administration during the day from eight 'til five-thirty, he'd come home, eat a sandwich, and then he'd go off to his second job which was at Kaiser Hospital pharmacy, and he worked there 'til eight-thirty or nine at night. And so I basically saw him when I was kid at nine o'clock at night, and I wouldn't talk to him until after he had his two martinis. [Laughs] 'Cause he'd be pretty fried by the time I got home. But he was very, both my parents were very loving parents, and to me, that was normal. So, I guess the translation is that my working hours are kind of similar, but I don't think anything of it, 'cause it's kind of like I grew up with that.

TI: Good.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 4>

TI: Let's talk a little bit, just about growing up in Oakland, for you. So you mentioned earlier in terms of a really nice childhood.

DT: Yeah, I think we did. We belonged to a Japanese American Methodist church. And again, the way the organized religions in America dealt with minority communities is kind of interesting. They treated, because their own congregations were pretty much segregated, they pretty much established, they called 'em missions. Kind of like, to me, it kind of reminds me of, you send the missionaries to a foreign country just to sort of convert or proselytize or extend their religion to these kind of outcast communities. And at that time, Japanese Americans were certainly one of them. And so we grew up in an all-Japanese American church and had, as they do now, sports leagues and baseball and basketball, many of our friends were there. So we were connected to the Japanese American community largely through the church. And at that time, then the church plays a function, I guess spirituality is certainly one, but the other one is just networking and social support and other things from people with a common history. And, but I went through public schools in Oakland during that time.

TI: And when you think about your public schools, were there very many other Japanese Americans?

DT: There's a few, and quite a number of African Americans. Oakland at that time was kind of at a rare point in history where it was very multiracial. And "white flight" had not set in in the city yet. Not lots of Latinos, but certainly numbers of African Americans, middle class African Americans as well. And it was an interesting place to be. I think from a minority point of view and from a child's point of view, though, it was, these were the '50s. So what do I mean by that? People pretty much did what they were told, people generally did not question authority, people were very patriotic, I mean, this was just following World War II. Japanese Americans as a group were often cases, in many cases now, returning to the very communities that exiled them in the first place. And some of them, when they came back from the camps, were homeless, they had no jobs, they had no businesses. And so the ideology was to keep your mouth shut, don't make waves, and I'm sure you've heard this many times: "You be 110 percent American." And so there was a pretty -- although we belonged to a Japanese American church, there was lots of disassociation with Japan. And at that time, Japan was a defeated country, and poor. And so the products that kids think are so high-tech coming from Japan didn't exist at that time. Japan was known for cheap products that broke easily. Toys, trinkets, things that are more associated with third-world countries. And so there was the identity thing where Japanese Americans did not want to associate with being Japanese, and Japanese American was very strong. So we were, kind of didn't know who we were.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 5>

TI: Yeah, so I want to follow up on that. So you went to a Japanese American church.

DT: Right.

TI: How about Japanese culture? Things like language...

DT: Well, I did go, my parents sent me to Japanese school on Saturdays, but we mainly went there to chase girls and have fun, frankly. It wasn't very serious. And we rejected that; we rejected it anyway.

TI: But there was an attempt by your parents to try to...

DT: There was, but they didn't talk about the internment. I mean, nobody did.

TI: So that's what I wanted to ask. When did that first come up? When did you first, like, start thinking, "Oh, something happened"?

DT: Well, the camps were the singular most defining event in their lives, and so for them, they were proving things. They were always proving who they were.

TI: Right, so for them. But for you, when did it enter your consciousness?

DT: Well, they talk about the camps, but they talk about the good things about the camps and their friends and what they did.

TI: Which block they lived in, things like that.

DT: Yeah. And a lot of social things, but they never talked about... well, "never" is probably not the right word. They did, there was a sense that they were wronged, but their situation was that they had to raise their children, they had to be successful now. The internment had been heard in the United States Supreme Court, the constitutionality of it, the legality of it, and the Court ruled against them. And now they were having his label of basically being "prone to disloyalty," they had to sort of disprove that. So certainly you're not going to get that, you're not going to become that by talking about it and being bitter about it. So they closed that door. And so I had heard about the camps from my childhood, I had read about them in high school by then, and I think there was a psychological overlay that was not articulated in a clear sense, but that has a definite impact. Like, for instance, my father would say to me, "You have to be twice as good as a white man." And I'm thinking as a kid, "Why do I have to be twice as good as a white man? Why can't I just be me?" And then, but the world informs you why. I mean, you turn on the TV set, and you see the images. Like the newscasters were all white men, no women, even. And things that people take for granted as being part of a diverse society didn't exist then. So all the leaders were white, and December 7th was a day I just hated. 'Cause growing up was, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and this was not too many years after World War II ended. We were growing up in the shadow of all of this. And to be identified as being the enemy, or associated with the enemy, or looking like the enemy. That was probably the one day that I would get into fights at school. And so it's a duality. We're trying to blend in, we're trying to be American, but we're not quite, we can't be. And it's like you're growing up as a foreigner in your own country.

So I think, I don't say that to say that I had an unhappy childhood, but it is to say there was a sense of displacement and inequality in the sense that we had to prove ourselves. It would manifest itself in other ways. Now that I look back at it, maybe all these things are psycho-babble. But we would go to, for instance, on car camping trips, where you stay at motels, 'cause we couldn't afford the hotels, or you stay at a cabin. And part of the, when you pay for that, part of the fee is they change the linen, they do all these things, and they clean up after you. And my mother would always save a certain amount of time at the end before we left to clean up the whole place. We'd be scrubbing the sinks and picking up the trash, and I'd say, "Why are we doing this?" Because this is what you pay for. And her, the philosophy was, "You leave the place cleaner than when you found it." And why? Because we don't want people to think badly of us. And I'm thinking -- now, I know where that came from now, and it's this sense of having to flip the stereotype. And so that, all of that sort of baggage, you know, I'm not saying it's bad or anything, it just is what it is. But I think that's where it all comes from. So no, they didn't talk explicitly about the camps in the sense of, "This is what they did to us, this is what happened to us, this is a hardship," all that was never talked about. But all the other things that parents do to protect their children, and to try to make them successful and not be the targets, certainly were passed on.

TI: Okay.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 6>

TI: So I want to now go to, kind of like your awakening in a sense. You mentioned high school you started reading about this, so you started reading, sort of, books. It was also, you were talking, what, mid-'60s, late-'60s? I mean, it's kind of a very turbulent time in terms of civil rights.

DT: Yeah, it was a turbulent time. So I was, looking back, I was so lucky to grow up during that period for a lot of reasons. This is postwar, America's having an economic boom, I didn't have to go through the hardships of my father and certainly my grandfather. But at the same time... and America's going through change because of the civil rights movement. So Martin Luther King, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, other African Americans leaders at that time were leading marches, and we saw it on our black and white TVs. So even as a kid, you saw the, the newscasters were showing the brutality of what was going on there, you know, with Bull Connor and Mississippi and Alabama and Atlanta and other places. And so we were beginning to wonder about our own place in America, too. There was, I think, a certain amount of identification. Like I feel like, I think, as a kid, there was a sense of, "Yeah, I can kind of relate to that in terms of what it's like to be an outsider," although we understood we weren't African American, but it was a sense of, yeah, we do live in a color-conscious society, and we are not as free to go anywhere as you want to. Although Bay Area was not the segregated South, by any means.

TI: But during this time, did you ever make the connection in terms of what happened to your parents, the fact that they were incarcerated because of their color, their ancestry?

DT: Yeah, there's no doubt about that. It's just that we didn't harbor an extreme sense of outrage. It was like, okay, that's the way it is, we can't do anything about it. And so when we saw what was happening with the civil rights movement and things like that, we were thinking, "Maybe there is something you can do about it." And I think it got people kind of politicized and excited. And so, and then all the assassinations that happened, there was Martin Luther King and then Bobby Kennedy, and then a very unpopular war by the time I hit high school, the Vietnam War, in which, very unclear why we're there. And the war, unlike World War II, wasn't measured in cities liberated and territories gained, it was measured by how many, what was the body count. And that kind of announcement of so many people killed, so many soldiers killed every single day as a means of sort of keeping score whether you're winning or losing, was commonplace. That was just an everyday dinner table news thing. And by the time we were in high school, of course, we now had friends who were being drafted out of the war, and some of 'em who were dying. Even, I remember Benji Yamane from our church, kid I played ball with, got into Cal, for whatever reason dropped out, ended up in a ROTC program and then was leading a platoon in Vietnam and he got blown up with a mine. And so as these things were developing, of course, high school students beginning to understand that they had skin in the game. The one thing about the draft is that people realized, "That could be me." And so the war began to be characterized as not only an unjust war, or a war that didn't really have a moral, good moral base to it, but also was seen as kind of a racially, racialized war. And more bombs were dropped on Vietnam than in all of World War II. And so this sense of Asian lives being a little cheap, I think that was also something that also made Japanese Americans and Asian Americans kind of wake up.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 7>

TI: So I'm going to shift gears a little bit. I want to learn a little bit more about Don Tamaki. If, in high school, if I were to ask your friends, "What's Don like? How would you describe Don Tamaki?" What would your friends say?

DT: [Laughs] Well, I probably was way too serious. But I think that's just my personality, but I became politically very active in high school. And again, it was I think in part because of the war that was going on.

TI: And so what does it mean, "politically active"? What would be an example?

DT: Well, for instance, there was... I think a lot of people were turning inward. And again, I would say for a lot of minorities, it was the tremendous impact of the civil rights movement that there were things that were wrong about America, that were not true to its creed, and that we ought to do something about it. And that penetrated from the college campuses right into the high schools. And so for instance, this sense of American history, we would go to public schools, and in the public schools, you'd learn about California history and United States history, but Asian Americans were not ever mentioned. So it's nice that Densho is doing this, that we're actually part of the fabric of American history. But you wouldn't know it. Maybe blacks got mentioned as being slaves. In fact, that's basically the only area aside from George Washington Carver or a few other prominents, but beyond that, nothing. Maybe Asian Americans in particular, Chinese Americans building railroads, that's about it. And so there was this sense of, we ought to know our own history. And so students as young as high school were saying, "What's wrong with our curriculum? We should have, we should know about these things." And that became questioning in other areas.

For instance at Oakland High, I knew that some of my friends were functionally illiterate. I mean, this was high school, and yet they had been promoted from one class to the next and they couldn't read. And they were ending up -- see, the other thing was that you could get a student deferment and not get drafted if you could go to college. And so college students felt tremendously guilty, 'cause they didn't, they could escape this. Whereas their counterparts who didn't even have money to go to college, or didn't have the grades, ended up in a meat grinder, war. So that in itself was politicizing. We began to question the... we need remedial education programs within these schools, and we need something that is more to get students into a situation where they can either get a job at the end of this process or go on to college. And so, and there were other things about more counselors, things that were wrong about the schools. And the interesting thing is teachers joined us, too, because they felt that the students were articulating things that they'd been asking for for a long time. And so there were a couple sit-ins at the school board, and there were, it's a very active coalition of high school students among the six high schools in Oakland, and I was part of that leadership.

TI: And what do you mean when you say "part of that leadership?" What would be an example of the role that you played?

DT: Well, there was a group, loose coalition, called Associated Students Union of Oakland, that we had formed among black student union presidents, the other ethnic activist groups. Oakland High had this group called Asian Bloc, and they were others who basically began to look beyond what was going on from a social standpoint. And we put together a list of changes we thought the school needed, and we organized a march on the school board. And at that time, the teachers unions were also complaining about not being paid enough. So it was kind of an interesting intersection between what the teachers wanted and what these student activists were asking for, organizing for, it sort of converged. And it did result in some changes. They put an honorary student, high school student as part of the school board meetings, they had people begin to look at the curriculums and, sort of, the other things. But that launched me into just this whole thinking that, you know, we could actually change things. And that was part of the luck of being born in that generation. We believed we could actually make a difference. And so a lot of that is naivete, not knowing any better. But once you believe you can make a difference, then kind of the world opens up to you. And we were looking to do more and more. So at that time, when I went to college, again, the war was just raging, and we just felt that it was kind of a moral thing to speak out and help get the country back on track and end this war. And so there was a lot of organizing activity, marches, demonstrations, news, creating the news, actually, to ultimately be part of that national movement which ultimately did end the war.

TI: And were there quite a few other Asian Americans who were part of this?

DT: Yeah. They were very much keen to that. And I think it was a real awakening experience. And the fallout from that, or "fallout" is a strong word, the good thing from that, is that then people directed that energy back into their own ethnic communities. So a lot of these organizations all were born at the same time. Like in the Bay Area, I helped to form Asian Health Services, which started out as a little health education project, and is now, provides primary care. It's considered a safety net institution, doctors, nurses, paramedicals. And they have, I think, about a hundred thousand patient visits a year. Another group that was formed was Asian Community Mental Health Services, which, again, people thought, "Asian Americans do not have any mental health problems. What are you doing?" Well, they do. And that was, started out that process. The Asian Law Caucus, which is the oldest public interest law firm representing Asian Americans in the country, was started during that period. And not just in the Bay Area, in Seattle, in L.A., New York, all of the organizations started about the same time. So all this energy went back into those communities.

TI: And at what point during all this did you decide that law was a profession or a career that you wanted to pursue?

DT: Well, I broke the stereotype. I couldn't do math, not like you. [Laughs] Not like you, Tom, in terms of science, that was not my forte. But I could talk and I could write. And law, again, our role models, there weren't very many Asian American lawyers. There were just a few of those. Our role models were the folks who were influenced to want to make change, to make a difference, were African American lawyers. And I used to look at these guys in Oakland and the Bay Area, and I was amazed that they were out there advocating for their community, providing leadership, they understood the law and they could try cases. And you kind of look around and you thought, "You know, I want to do that." And so that led me to want to go to law school.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 8>

TI: Okay, so for the second hour, Don, we just got into some of the reasons why you chose law. So let's go into law school, and why don't you describe what law school was like.

DT: I think I spent my first year there -- as Lori Bannai, Professor Bannai is present, I don't know if I should admit this -- but I spent my first year wondering why I was there. 'Cause if this was what it was about, I'm thinking, "I'm out of here." And I sort of wrestled with it for a full year, and I'm glad I didn't decide to leave. But it wasn't what I was expecting. I was studying contract law and property law, and I was really interested in the other stuff, community organizing and some of the issues that were going on. And I'm learning these nuts and bolts things, trying to learn how to reason, whatever. But I stuck it out, and then after the first year, I started volunteering at the Asian Law Caucus and doing some other things. So that became, it became more relevant, then, at that point. And I'm glad, of course, I continued.

TI: Now, do you remember studying Korematsu when you were in law school?

DT: Yeah, that was the third year, every law student has to read these cases. And, of course, you're reading about the experiences of our own families. But they did -- what Korematsu is taught for is the power of the President, that in time of war, to issue executive orders governing civilian populations, basically. It's taught as the authority of the President to make such sweeping decisions, which, in ordinary times, in peace times, the President would not have authority. But it certainly doesn't, didn't go into the experience of our families at all, and what had happened. And so, you know, I felt that the Korematsu case came out wrong, but there's nothing we can do about it, right? And let's move on. And I didn't think we'd ever have the opportunity -- you know, it was the furthest thing from my mind that we would actually get to meet Fred Korematsu, Gordon Hirabayashi, and Min Yasui, let alone do anything about these ancient historical cases.

TI: Good. So let's move to after law school. So what did you do after you graduated from law school?

DT: So I got a fellowship through the Legal Services Corporation called the Reginald Heber Smith Fellowship. And these were fellowships given out to encourage people to do poverty and civil rights law. And it was done at a time when there weren't... the origins of that particular fellowship was to encourage people to go into that area. But by the time I came in, the Legal Services Corporation had opened offices in every major city. I was just placed, placed in San Jose, and took advantage of the opportunity to begin to work with the San Jose, Santa Clara County area community.

TI: And it seemed like something that followed from that was the Asian Law Alliance?

DT: Yeah. I had had experience doing community work in Oakland, and I knew how to write, for instance, grants, because that's one of the things I did. I had experience in organizing programs and in budgets and this sort of thing, and then I was volunteering at the Asian Law Caucus while I was in law school. And I thought, well, this is something that could be duplicated in the San Jose area. And I started working with Santa Clara law students. And I had added incentive, because I met my bride-to-be, Suzanne Ah-Tye, she was a law student at University of Santa Clara. And there was a group of other students that were the Asian American Law Students Association at Santa Clara. And they were really committed, and to do something similar to forming the Asian Law Caucus, similar to the Asian Law Caucus, but in Santa Clara County. And so we formed the Asian Law Alliance, which is staffed by, I think, five lawyers now, does lots of work representing immigrants on civil rights issues, housing issues, immigration issues in Santa Clara County and that Silicon Valley area. And it's a stereotype that everybody there is wealthy and rich and successful, but for Asian Americans, there's a huge population of recent immigrants, it has all the problems of any immigration population. And the Asian Law Alliance has provided a much needed service. So I helped to organize that.

TI: Well, so here's an observation. As we've been talking, it's like you are the serial nonprofit entrepreneur in terms of starting these things up. The Asian Health Services, I think you mentioned a couple other ones, too, the Asian... oh, there was another one, I wrote it down. And then here's another one, the Asian Law Alliance. I mean, what is it about starting these new organizations that makes it exciting for you, or makes you want to do this?

DT: Well, you know, I was just a part of this. In other words, none of this could have happened without a group of committed people. But the lesson that I got from this is that you don't need tons of people. You need a few committed people who are competent, but people who are dedicated to do some, that focused activity that could create change, and it can be done. I had experience basically doing a few things, and doing them in a way that had some good results. So I was just able to pass that on, but you need a bunch of people. Not a lot, but a bunch of people to be able to pull that together. I was pretty driven by then, but then, so was a lot of people at that time. And again, I think it just reflected the activism of that period. And by the way, this was, I think other interviewees have probably said this, this was happening in every ethnic community. And the Asian Americans certainly were influenced by the civil rights movement, but Latinos, there were a lot of activism going on, the African American community, the environmental movement began, women's rights movements, I think it all... gay rights, I think it all had its beginnings in watching the America being transformed through the civil rights movement. This whole idea that, yeah, we can make a change. We can change this society. And I just feel so lucky to have grown up during that time.

TI: Okay.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 9>

TI: In 1980, you became the executive director of the Asian Law Caucus.

DT: Right.

TI: Explain how that happened.

DT: Well, I spent my three years as a Reginald Heber Smith Fellow, or Reggie, as they called them. And I was thinking, "Okay, what do I do now?" So I did a little bit of criminal defense work, private. I did some civil work, and then I thought, well, I know the Asian Law Caucus, I have a feel that I could contribute. I felt that I could make a difference. And so they needed an executive director, at that time it was Sam Yee, and he was moving on to another job. So I applied and the board named me as executive director. What I didn't know is financially how, what bad a shape the Asian Law Caucus was in. I thought I would be, you know, litigating these great cases and making big speeches and doing all these great things, but basically I became a fundraiser. And that is a job of an executive director, you raise money. But we were literally a few months short of just running out of cash completely. And so I spent a lot of time doing grant writing and fundraising and setting up the infrastructure for sort of a diversified fundraising effort, from individual donors to grants to government funding. And that was, and I did that for the next three years.

TI: So was this really the first time you really had to focus so much on fundraising?

DT: Yeah. I didn't expect it, but you know, that was what I did.

TI: And how did you like that, fundraising?

DT: Well, it was one of these things that I did. It didn't wow me, but it's one of those things that had to be done, so I did it. But what was fortunate during that time is the Korematsu case also came along, which really was the case of a lifetime.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 10>

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.

<Begin Segment 11>

LB: So this is Lori Bannai. I'm taking over the interviewing now. One thing I wanted to establish before, though, was you already established your relationship with Dale, how you knew Dale through the Caucus?

TI: No, we haven't.

DT: Not too much, now.

LB: Okay, just wanted to clarify that. Okay, so we were talking about how you were executive director of the Caucus, and then heard about the Korematsu case. Can you recall when you first heard about the possibility of reopening Fred Korematsu's case, and what you thought at the time?

DT: Well, the context of it was that when you read these, the cases in law school, you basically think all these guys are long gone, they're not around, and they're just, they're just historical names. And so when Dale calls and he says, "How would you like to represent Fred Korematsu?" My reaction was, "He's still alive? Is he around?" And Dale said, "Oh, yeah. And Peter Irons, professor, has found these Justice Department secret documents, which may give us some reason to be able reopen it." And I said, "Sure, I'd be interested," but I didn't, I was highly skeptical that anything like that could be done, but I was definitely interested.

LB: How did you know Dale? How did Dale end up calling you?

DT: I had heard about Dale when I was doing community work as a college student at Cal, and then when I went to law school, I started volunteering at the Asian Law Caucus. They had an office across the street from my old high school, Oakland High, the storefront. And the desks, I'll never forget this, were made out of doors bought at, like, the Home Depot kind of thing, Ace Hardware, whatever, on sawhorses. And that was the firm, that was the public interest law firm. And I met Dale in that capacity.

LB: And you became friends?

DT: Yeah. Friends, he's hilarious and funny, and a tremendous leader, people gravitate toward him, tremendous amount of charisma, great vision. I thought this was a really unusual person. Dale has a way of pulling people in, getting them to believe they can do things that they would never have thought they were capable of doing. And he had this tremendous audacity, fearless, really. And so, yeah, I wanted to work with them.

LB: So Dale called you because of your friendship, because of your position with the Caucus?

DT: Yeah, he knew me, and I was director of the Asian Law Caucus, and we could focus a certain amount of the resources of the organization in support of these cases.

LB: So Dale told you about how Peter contacted him about these documents. Did you then end up meeting Peter?

DT: I met Peter, I think shortly, it could have been the day before we went over to the Korematsu family residence.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 12>

LB: Can you tell me about the first time you met Peter?

DT: I'm trying to think. Was I sober when I met him? [Laughs] 'Cause we'd get together over beers and whatever. But he, he hadn't... I don't know that he met any Japanese Americans before us, really, and he didn't, he's tremendously smart and a good researcher, but he wasn't fully aware, I think, of Japanese American history. And we didn't know him either. So I think there was a getting-to-know process that was going on, that needed to go on, and we didn't know whether we could trust him. I mean, what were his motives for doing this? Why would he come to Japanese Americans with this? Why wouldn't he go to some major law firm? Why wouldn't he go to people he knew rather than reach out to total strangers? So I think there was a lot of questioning: who was this guy? What does he have? Is this really as good, was this as advertised, did he really have information that we might be able to reopen these cases? There was a lot of skepticism. But after we met Peter, I mean, he's very persuasive, and he is totally anti-authoritarian. He questions authority, he's a total independent, free thinker. And after his presentation and Dale's endorsement of him, we realized that we might be on to something. And the next day, I believe, we met, we went over to meet Fred Korematsu, and that was interesting. There was about a dozen of us there.

LB: Tell me about that.

DT: So the family was very protective of Fred. By family, I mean Kathryn, his wife, Korematsu, Karen, and Ken, son and daughter. And understandably so, because Fred had been the topic of many articles and news studies and scholarly kind of work about this case, because it was basically known as the civil liberties disaster, one of the worst cases that ever came out of the United States Supreme Court. There was also, Japanese Americans lost. And after your case is heard in the High Court, the American public thinks, "Well, Japanese Americans must have been spies. There must have been disloyalty, or why would the Supreme Court rule that way?" On top of that, Fred himself, he went through some minor plastic surgery, he evaded the internment, who is this person? And the family would naturally want to protect him from that, that kind of scrutiny. And Fred had suffered a lot. He had put himself out there, he had a criminal record because he defied the internment, he was now fairly successful as a draftsman in the community, he was a respected member of the Lion's Club. So he had a lot at stake in terms of coming out now.

And so when we came in, I'm sure we all looked liked kids. I mean, we looked like babies fresh out of law school. And I think there was a lot of cross-examination, as I recall, about, "What are your motives? Why are you doing this? How much are you going to charge?" And all of the right questions. And so I think it was a little tense in the beginning. And we didn't know whether the family and Fred would trust us. And so I think the meeting was, it was a good meeting, but it was a tense one. 'Cause they weren't, nor should they have been willing to immediately say, "We're with you, let's go forward." I think they were very careful, and rightfully so.

LB: So did that turn around at some point?

DT: Yeah, I think the turning point was each of us talked about what we thought about this case. In other words, the centerpiece, of course, was the shocking discovery of the evidence. And the strength of the case was because it was nothing that we were saying, it was that these were, evidence had come out of the Justice Department's own files. There was a file full of "smoking guns." It had admissions by government authorities and high officials that there, that the internment, that there was no reason for it. There was no good reason for the internment. All of the claims that the army was making, that Japanese Americans were committing acts of treason, were all discredited. And in fact, the government was saying it never happened. And these Justice Department lawyers are now fighting with each other about their ethical duties to tell the truth. Something a six-year-old would know, you don't lie. And you have memos going back and forth where they're debating what they should do. And when Fred and the family heard that, they were as stunned as my parents, I think. They understood that, "This happened in America?" I think that was their reaction. I know Peter, when he talked to Fred -- I wasn't there at this point -- but Peter said Fred took a long time reading these documents, and he looks up and he says to him, "They done me a great wrong." And a man of very few words, but that was pretty darn accurate: "They done me a great wrong." And you could multiply that sentiment over 110,000, 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry, as well as the hole, big hole that's driven right through the Constitution.

So that was part of the process, "Okay, look what we've got," and then the second piece of it was we explained what we would do. And the first part of it was the legal strategy. That there was a basis to reopen the case, not to get any money out of it, basically to restore Fred's reputation and correct this wrong. Secondly, we would do it without fees; we wouldn't charge anything. And I think, I think Ken and Karen said, "No lawyer does," they were thinking, "Lawyers don't do this for free. Why would you do this?" And we had explained that our own families were interned. I mean, we had, we were fighting our own fight, basically, in representing Fred. And I think that was part of the, the sales pitch, for lack of another word, that we were... which was true. I guess it wasn't a sales pitch in that sense, it was just the truth. That this was a mission to vindicate our own families, okay, and Fred was part of that. So in doing that, we would also be helping ourselves. And I think that would, at least gave some insight as to our sincerity. And in doing that legal strategy, we also said that we would pursue a strategy to inform the American public what happened. And so it wouldn't be something that would just be between lawyers and filing in court, but we would go for the maximum amount of publicity. Because we felt that this evidence was explosive. Any time you have a government cover up at the highest levels of the Justice Department, and the lawyer that is charged with enforcing the Constitution in America, the Attorney General, and the lawyers responsible for making the arguments before the Supreme Court, that's front page news. And we had said that what Fred went through was wrong, and it's late to try to correct it, but better late than never. And I think, I think after that, they were, they needed to think about it, but I think we did a good job in making our presentation. It lasted probably a couple of hours.

LB: What was it like for you to meet Fred after being aware of his case personally?

DT: Well, I was struck by, he had a sense of quiet dignity. Later, we were able to meet Min Yasui, and in contrast, it's kind of like night and day. I mean, Min was... I hated to follow him in public speaking events because that guy would bring the house down. He'd look really kind of frail, he'd walk to the podium, and then he had a booming voice, and he literally, he'd be so charismatic. Gordon Hirabayashi, who we met later, was very professorial and complex. Whereas Fred might say, "They done me a great wrong," Gordon would give you a lecture on the Constitution and history. But Fred was just simple, straightforward, straight shooter, a quiet man, quiet dignity, and kind of like our parents. I mean, he was, he reflected that kind of average Nisei, if there is such a thing, average American. And so we liked him immediately, we identified with him. So we were hoping that he would trust us and go along with us. I look at pictures of ourselves, and I wouldn't have trusted us, really. [Laughs] 'Cause we were extremely young and green.

LB: So Fred obviously gave the go-ahead to the team to go ahead with the case.

DT: Right.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 13>

LB: Can you tell me about the early days of the case? What was the kind of work that the team started doing?

DT: So Peter was basically assembling the evidence. He was writing a book at the same time which ultimately became Justice at War. And it roughly followed chapter by chapter the chronology of events. And like a book does, it was, it gave a background on the war and what was going on in the Justice Department at the time. And he had found all of this information by researching government archives. But it was written like a book, it wasn't written like a legal brief. And some of the stuff was definitely usable in the legal case, a lot of it was not. So the first step of it was to, okay, analyze what Peter had assembled in these drafts of this book, cross correlate and compare that with the documentation, the evidence, compare that with, okay, what causes of action do we have, and what's the vehicle to reopen these cases, and sort of begin to figure it out. And it was a puzzle, it was a puzzle. And in my mind, a jigsaw puzzle jumbled up on the table, and all of us trying to, first to sort the pieces, and mesh 'em together and figure out what we had. And it didn't crystallize for a long time. We were thinking, "Well, it doesn't make sense. I mean, if we take this theory, where is the evidence for that?" And then Peter had said, "Well, it's over here," and he'd pull out a document. And that took, process took weeks and months to basically organize everything around. So we basically took his book and flipped it around, you know, jumbled things, pulled out stuff that we needed, and it began to merge into a tight petition. And the distilling of that took quite a bit of time, and sort of prioritizing, okay, what's our best case, what's our strongest case, and what are other issues that we should make in the brief but probably make at the end of the brief, for instance. And wrestling, basically, with different parts of it. So a lot of it was that.

There was another separate debate on what is coram nobis and what do we do with it? And the petition itself is, as you know, it's like a writ of habeas corpus that a criminal defendant can make, who can make the claim that they've been wronged, that they've been denied, in a fundamental way, justice, there's been miscarriage of justice. And it allows a person while they're incarcerated, to have the new evidence heard. Well, coram nobis is after they've served their time, and to clear their name. And so we were wondering, okay, what do you do with this, where do you file it, who's done one of these things? They're rare. And so Peter was the resident expert on that, but there was a whole, I'm sure you talked about this with Dale, there's a whole, weeks of discussion on, do we file in the U.S. Supreme Court? Do we file in the local district courts? Do we file the petitions of Fred and Gordon and Min all together? Do we separate them in the separate jurisdictions? All with a lot of pros and cons, and all with significant consequences, you know. That if we picked the wrong path, the case could have been over very easily.

LB: So you were involved in, with everybody, drafting the petition, legal research, all of the legal portions of it. But I know that your most significant contribution to the case, cases, involved the public education aspect, community outreach. So can you tell me about your work on the public education aspect and why it was important to do?

DT: Yeah. There was two things I had experience in because of working at the Asian Law Caucus. One was raising money, and we needed to raise money to get people to fly, fly people to Washington, D.C. to go through archives, to look for documents. We didn't want any of this to be public 'cause we thought there were so many people still alive with their reputations at stake, that someone would block us, maybe the documents would disappear. So we had to do this right away, and we needed tens of thousands of dollars to cover copying, long distance telephone calls, investigator fees, researcher fees, travel, other expenses. So that was one part. And so we began by assembling lists of friends, family. And we constructed a letter, we called ourselves the Committee to Reverse the Japanese American Wartime Cases, long name. And on this letterhead, we said, basically, "Trust us, we're on to something. We can't tell you what we have, but just give us money, just because it'll go for a good cause." And we raised about $50,000 just based upon that. And I spent time just sort of working the phones, sending out letters.

LB: What kind of individuals? Nisei moms and dads?

DT: Well, yeah, moms, JACL, small checks, community organizations, my parents. And, but it had to be all done on the quiet. We couldn't reveal any of the documents that we had. And then the other piece of it was, that I did, and I had experience with, is holding press conferences and getting coverage.

LB: Let's back up to the fundraising a little bit more. Can you recall any of the people who supported the team early on just on blind faith?

DT: Yeah, they were friends of ours. They were lawyers who were working at law firms and government jobs who wrote a hundred dollar checks, five hundred dollar checks. They were Nisei who were probably in their fifties, sixties, seventies, who wrote checks for us.

LB: Was that surprising that they would do this not knowing what it was about?

DT: Well, I thought we could do this. I thought we had enough contacts out there of people we knew, that we could get startup money. And so we'd call 'em on the phone. We had to tell 'em something, that we found documents, either... we'd say something like, "It'll blow your mind, you'll be shocked and surprised. We're gonna launch this thing, but it'll be about a year from now, but we need money now." And that would be the pitch. And then, once we went public with it, of course, money was a lot easier to raise, 'cause we had national publicity behind us and people wanted to get behind it.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 14>

LB: So tell me about the publicity portion of your work.

DT: I think the most astounding thing to me was how ignorant the American press was about the internment. And I would talk to journalists, and they had no background on this. And when we first, when I first spoke to them, I had multiple responses from different reporters saying, "This happened in America? When did this happen?" And then other reporters thought these were involving Japanese prisoners of war. And I said, "No, these are American citizens." And they said, "That happened in America?" And so...

LB: So let's back up a little bit. The case just started, did you devise a press strategy?

DT: Well, we didn't have to until we were, the petition was pretty much on its way. So we began the process in 1982, probably January/February, and we didn't file until January of 1983. So we had a year of ramp-up time. But beginning in November/December of '82, I began to lay the groundwork and I called key reporters.

LB: And this was around, you wanted press coverage around the filing of the petition.

DT: Right. So I called up key people and got, basically, agreements to embargo the story. And in exchange for their agreement to embargo the story, we would give them copies of the documents.

LB: When you say "key people," who do you mean?

DT: Well, it was Fred Barbash of the Washington Post, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Sun-Tribune, every... Seattle Intelligencer, which regrettably is no longer around. The major newspapers all over the country. And the wire services, AP, Reuters, UPI, United Press International. And we just began to get priming them. And a lot of that was educating them that this had happened in the first place, getting the right people that would kind of be interested in the story. And it was intriguing to them on a number of different levels. I mean, for us it was our families, but that's not a national news story. The national news story was the government cover-up. And this is post Watergate, where a President had been impeached, and an attorney general had resigned rather than fire the independent investigator on a criminal action. And so the press were teed up, I would say, and they were interested in any type of massive government misconduct like this. And so that was very, very helpful, and that was really the story for them.

As far as the television media, that was also kind of difficult. 'Cause they're based purely... they don't do these long pieces. I mean, they do three-minute little deals on the national news. And for them, the issue is competition. They're all, it's all competition in terms of what they don't want to, nobody wants to get outscooped on a story, but the television news even has a shorter attention span. That's a not-so-nice way of saying it, but I think it's accurate. And so I recall the day before the press conference, I'd be calling up CBS News and say something like, "We're going to have the press conference tomorrow, we're going to have all three litigants there. And I've contacted ABC and NBC, and as a courtesy, I just wanted to let you know." And I said, "Will you be there?" And they said, "Well, I don't know. We don't know, we've got other kind of news stories we're working on." And I said, "Well, okay, who can I contact in the event that anything, news breaks?" and they gave me a name and so on, and so I sort of worked the way up the channel. Then I'd call ABC, and I'd say, "Well, just as a courtesy, I just want to let you know I've called ABC, NBC and CBS, so I'm letting you know." And I said, "Well, will you be there?" And says, "Oh, yeah, we've got this on our schedule." So I said, "Are you going to be there for sure?" And he says, "Well, we don't know, but we think we're going to be there." So I called back CBS and I said, "Well, I just talked to ABC, and they're going to be there." And they said, "Well, if they're going to be there, then we'll be there." So then I called ABC back and I said, "Well, just to let you know, CBS is going to be there. Just wanted to let you know." And they said, "Well, we'll be there." [Laughs] And so there's a little bit of this thing that goes around in getting the news coverage. But the consequence of that day -- and it was a slow news day, that was part of it -- is that we hit a home run. So after we filed the petition, we walk into a packed press room.

LB: This is the San Francisco Press Club?

DT: That's right. And so we had set up, and I had orchestrated, basically, who's gonna sit where and who's gonna speak. And we had the litigants in front and the lawyers in back. And Fred, who had never talked before a camera before, suddenly had five or six cameras. And he's seated, along with Min, Gordon... and Gordon, and the cameras are literally four or five feet away from all of them. I mean, they were, like sitting in front of a firing squad. And Fred was a little freaked out, I mean, he wasn't used to this publicity and the flashes going off and so on. And we began to tell the story of the documents and other things. Another kind of oops happened that day where the Washington Post did not respect the embargo, so they broke the story on that day. And the other press were furious at me, and they said, "You promised that nothing would get printed, and here it is this morning, it's all over the paper, the wire services picked it up, you've outscooped us." And I said, "I'm sorry, I can't control it." And I talked to Barbash, and he said, "You weren't clear. You said that we'd embargo the story until this day, it is now the day, and so I'm running the story." And so he wasn't even at the press conference, 'cause he already had his story. And he knew that we meant the next day, but he ran it that day. But the consequence of that is that we had a story that ran for two full days, on front page news. So it had a... it was unintentional, but it had a very favorable effect. And then it was on every network channel, including CNN, around the world. I mean, Min was amazed that his friends in Germany saw this thing. And so we couldn't have gotten better press coverage. I think the other redress groups suddenly were like, "Whoa, where did this group come from?" 'Cause we were quietly working away. They knew that there was a group working on a petition to reopen these cases, but they had no idea what we had.

LB: When you first met Fred, I think he said that he could go, would go ahead with the case, but he didn't want to talk to the press.

DT: Right, he didn't. And so the history behind that is that when he was arrested, the headline was "Jap Spy Arrested in San Leandro." And he was vilified, and he was literally brought into court in shackles. And he, I mean, how humiliating is that for an American citizen, if he'd done no wrong, to be treated that way? And so he was very distrustful of the press. So we said, "Fred, don't worry about it. We will speak for you." And assured them that they wouldn't be that, a target. And then literally, right after the story ran, the next day, he's got a television camera on his front lawn. And suddenly he's having to deal with all this. Eventually, he became very good at it, and probably liked the attention. But in the beginning, it wasn't easy, it wasn't easy for him. Later on, this is a couple years later, I remember Kathryn saying to Dale, she said, "I thought you wouldn't, that Fred wouldn't have to speak to the press." And Dale laughed and he said, "I lied." [Laughs] But Fred turned out to be his own best advocate. He was good. He got practice and got good.

LB: You had done community outreach prior to this, but you hadn't done anything at this scale. Was this overwhelming?

DT: Yeah. I mean, we were, when you walk in to a press conference, and then you've got every national news outlet there, including the Japanese press, too. And it was, for all of us on the legal team, not just me, it was suddenly we're center stage. And we were making very serious allegations against the United States government. A guy like John J. McCloy is still alive, former president of the World Bank and adviser to eight or nine presidents, and the single driver, not single, but one of the main drivers of the internment, and suddenly we're explaining to the world that he's lied to the American public, he's lied to the Court, that the solicitor-general lied to the Court. And I think it was explosive, so we had a tiger by the tail.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 15>

LB: You mentioned earlier about how suddenly people knew about the coram nobis effort, redress was going on, and now people knew about what the coram nobis cases were doing. Did the coram nobis effort work with or independently of other groups working towards redress?

DT: We were pretty independent.

LB: Was that a choice?

DT: Well, yeah, in a lot of ways. The thing about the legal process is that it is, because you've got a client and you have a duty only to that client. I mean, legally, ethically, you're not supposed to be worried about public opinion, you're not supposed to be representing anybody else. Fred was our client, the only thing that mattered was what Fred wanted and the family. And, you know, there was a lot of ownership disputes over redress among the Japanese American activists. And people were genuinely worried, and probably rightfully so, that if we lost Korematsu v. United States a second time, it would really set back the redress effort. 'Cause they were lobbying congressmen, they were explaining to the country how this was a great wrong. And can you imagine if we went into court and the court says, "The internment was justified, the government was right when it did the internment, there's no way to reopen these cases, goodbye." And they were concerned about that, I think that was part of it. And then we had such a huge amount of publicity compared to anybody else. And again, why was that? Well, any time you have a government cover-up, misconduct at such a high level. I mean, this is the only case I know of where there's direct evidence of misconduct before the United States Supreme Court. Lying to the United States Supreme Court, probably unprecedented in the history of the United States, at least with evidence. And so I think the fact that we got so much publicity probably was an irritation at some level. And then there were different strategies. There was another legal group, NCJAR, who was saying, well, "Reparations aren't the answer, the lawsuit with no damages is not the answer. We need to get real monetary damages for this," and they had launched their own lawsuit. And we had sort of preempted the whole process in some ways, from a publicity standpoint. So, yeah, I would like to have said all the groups worked together well, but they were taking potshots at each other except we didn't take any potshots at anybody because we had our own problems to worry about. And we just wanted to be kind of left alone, in that sense, to be able to do what we felt was right. There was that one instance that you're aware of that word did leak out that we were doing these cases.

LB: You're talking about Justice Goldberg?

DT: That's right. So Justice Goldberg, former Justice of the Supreme Court, writes an op-ed piece about how this is doomed to fail. And we read that and our hearts sank, and we were worried. I remember Dale, we had a discussion about that, "What are we going to do about this? Seems to be the cat's out of the bag here. We've got a former U.S. Supreme Court saying we have no chance, Supreme Court Justice saying we have no chance." And Dale just said, "Look, he's not privy to the evidence, we know what we're doing, he doesn't." And just this audacity to say, "We need to go forward here." And so we ignored it.

LB: How do you think the coram nobis cases were received by the general public and by the Japanese American community specifically?

DT: You know, it's kind of interesting. I think for Japanese Americans, they wanted to put this history behind them, in that people didn't talk about it. And people claimed that it didn't bother them anymore, that they were Americans now, and it didn't matter. But when we started dredging this up, about that this wasn't some accident, this wasn't just wartime hysteria... it may have started that way, but it culminated at the highest levels of government as really an intentional plan to manipulate the outcome of these cases in order to validate them. And that there was no basis for it and the government knew it at the time. I mean, they, it opened up a whole different view of things. And I think at that point, people said, "You know, there were some things that happened to me that I need to talk about." And I'm not saying that the coram nobis cases were the sole trigger to that, but I think we were part of that trigger. And the other one was when my father and other people were asked to testify in these various commissions that were, the commission hearings that were done regionally. They started thinking about things they had not, they had just packed away and had not touched in forty years. And when they starting unpacking that, and with the context now of knowing that the whole thing was a manipulation, that it was a charade, that it was nothing close to justice, and that it wasn't an accident, I think it really accelerated things. That was from the Japanese American point of view. I think from an American press point of view, it not only got front-page publicity, but 60 Minutes and other coverage, just because of the massive, huge failure of American democracy. You have these institutions, the judiciary, the legislature and the courts, and each branch failed in such a spectacular way. And then there's writing about it contemporaneously among Justice Department lawyers knowing that at the time. I think that was a big story.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 16>

LB: Tell me about working with the legal team. What were the meetings and the work sessions like? What was the chemistry on the team?

DT: The chemistry was good. You know, the guy I have to credit for the... I mean, it was a marvelous team for a lot of reasons. I think everybody had strengths to offer, but the person who coordinated all of that, I think, was Dale. I mean, he did it in a way that was respectful of people's position and contributions, and he always was trying to work a way of getting and taking advantage of everybody's contributions, and also giving everybody credit, and making them feel a part of the team. It takes a real leader to do that. And we were just lucky to have him, right person, right time. He was perfect for that. And then he also got the fact right from the start that this was a political case, and everybody else on the team got that from the start, that this was no ordinary lawsuit, this had to be handled in a different way. And fortunately, we had people who had the skills to basically do that. And then Peter Irons himself was just a remarkable scholar. I mean, he could have taken that case and given it to anybody, and they might have handled it, they would have handled it a lot differently than a team of Japanese American lawyers would. And so the fact that he decided it was important to have Japanese American lawyers reopening their own case, I mean, that's something that most people wouldn't share. I mean, you know, if a scholar found this information, they'd want to bask in that discovery for their own, promote their own position, and Peter wasn't like that. So the team really was, you know, you said a "love fest." Everybody worked well together and respected... we had heated discussions and arguments, but at the end of the day, it was always consensus. It was never any split. We debated, we disagreed, but ultimately, we agreed. And it was a career highlight, I would say.

LB: Can you recall any rough spots? Conflicts on the team or with the clients? How the team might have worked through them?

DT: I recall Dale's blowup with Min Yasui. I'm sure you interviewed him about that, but I was there. Oh, maybe this is related to Goldberg or something. Anyway, Min... this is a guy that defied the government. And while everybody was saying, "Okay, we've got a bayonet at our back, the government has issued orders for curfew, we're gonna cooperate. The government has issued orders to be interned, guess we're going to prison." I mean, Min felt as an American citizen, he had a duty to violate the law. He tried to get other people to do it and they told him he was crazy, and he got himself arrested. He spent almost a year in solitary confinement before being interned. He lost his citizenship somehow in the process, the court took it away, he had to launch a separate legal action to get it back. Just a huge, charismatic speaker. I always felt that if he was born and raised in another time, like now, he'd be a senator. He might be a presidential candidate, who knows? I mean, the guy was formidable. And Dale is trying to tell him what to do? I mean, that doesn't work. A guy like that is not going to obey anybody unless he respects you. And so he was, we were trying to keep the story quiet, of what we found, and Min was just talking about it. And Dale said, "Look, you gotta stop talking to groups about this. We don't want you to talk to the press, we want you to clear everything through us." And you start issuing rules to Min Yasui? Impossible. And so I'm standing here and they're yelling at each other on the phone. I didn't, Min was in Denver and Dale was in Oakland. And it's back and forth, Dale's yelling at him on the phone, and then he goes, bang. [Pantomimes slamming phone down] And I'm looking at him from about twenty feet away in another room, and I look up, and I thought, "Do we still have a client?" And Dale says, he looks up, and he looks me in the eye and he says, "Do you think I should call him back?" And I said, "I think you should call him back." [Laughs] And so Dale calls him up literally within the next sixty seconds and says, "Min, I want to clear the air." And there's this back and forth, and Min said -- and I wasn't on the line -- something to the words of, "It takes a real man to say that and to call me back. And yes, let's clear the air." So he felt bad, too, he felt really bad. 'Cause he was getting, he was very skeptical about this case. He thought, "Oh, they found a bunch of documents. I don't think this case is going to go anywhere, but I'll go along with these kids." But by the time things started rolling, he became invested in the process, he got his own lawyer to go to, attend the team meetings just to see what we're up to. And I think his lawyer reported back that, "These folks are on to something."

LB: And this was Frank Chuman.

DT: Frank Chuman. At least that was my interpretation of why he was there. And after that blowup and reconciliation, Min was so, he was our biggest supporter. He was very cooperative, got the strategy and really bonded to it. That was, that was one the more rough events.

LB: Did other groups outside of the Japanese American community support the efforts of the team? I know that there was some support from the Jewish organizations, certainly the ACLU. Was the support... I guess I'm interested in what type of coalition building was done around the case.

DT: Coalition building. There was a lot of groups that just, even the ACLU didn't look good on the list because when Fred was arrested, the national board had sent out a directive to all the chapters saying, ordering them not to represent Japanese Americans, and it was the Northern California chapter that broke away. So even... this whole thing kind of resurrected the chapter in which they did some really great things, local chapter getting Wayne Collins involved and reopening it, versus the national that wanted to support the war effort and had ordered the local chapter not to represent Fred, and threatened the Northern California chapter with ouster. You know, the coalition building, I don't think that materialized much until way later. I think most of the money, for instance, which is a true indication of support to me, came from Japanese Americans who were fully invested in this process 'cause they were, it was their history. And it was only after, afterwards, I think, that people began to link it with other issues, whether it's discrimination against Arab Americans or other groups. Now, I may be wrong on that, maybe I'm not recalling something, but that was my recollection.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 17>

LB: Tell me about working with Fred on this case. At the beginning we talked before about the fact that he didn't want to talk to the media, was rather overwhelming. Did you see him change over the course of the case?

DT: Yeah, I think... and I've talked to Karen about this. I think he was, as anybody would be, he was damaged and traumatized by what had happened. I'm talking about the original, the internment, his decision to evade internment and be alienated from his family, not go with them. The fact that he chose to have his case heard in court all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. I think the JACL and other groups... JACL, I don't know about other groups, but had taken a stand of not wanting to challenge any of these cases, because that was their way of showing that they were loyal to this country and they would do anything for this country. So Fred was probably seen as a troublemaker, persona non grata, in the internment camp. And then after, and then he loses, and the argument is, "You made it worse." And I'm speculating, because I wasn't there, but it was like, "See? I told you. This was not going to lead to anything good." And then to be unable to get jobs because of his criminal record, to really not tell this to his children, and to have his own daughter, Karen, learn about his case in a high school civics class and not from him, I think there was a lot of pain involved. A tremendous amount of pain. And then he built a very happy life in San Leandro. He was very active in the Lion's Club, he was respected in the community.

And you know, the day before the press conference, or a couple days, I got a sense that the coverage on this was going to be big. Because I talked to, we were cultivating our contacts, we were feeding 'em information, we were helping them build the story, we were giving them facts about the internment, we were educating them, and they were getting excited about this. And so I said to Fred, "It's going to be all over the front page, Fred, and maybe you ought to talk to your employer and let them know that this is happening." And so he did. And his boss said, "Why are you bringing this up now? Why do this now?" Meaning, "It's over, this is past history, you're successful," again, "You're causing trouble." So for Fred to put himself at risk again, put himself in jeopardy, I think, took tremendous courage.

And, you know, that was one public sentiment that he was fighting. So the impact on Fred was transformational. I mean, he had all this baggage, and then suddenly the outcast becomes the hero, and he just assumed his place. I think people began to -- and you were there at the court thing. I mean, all these people who probably didn't think much of him for the previous four years, they all went over to him in court to shake his hand. I mean, he was mobbed. And it was a good story, it was a really good story. And so he opened up, but the best part about the story is that it sort of opened up and liberated, psychologically, I think, a lot of Japanese Americans. Because this whole thing about, you know, they were guilty, all this guilt about a wrong that they... I mean, they were the victims, and they felt guilty about the internment. Go figure. And I think they realized that they had no reason to feel that way. And they had a lesson to teach America. Not a bitter one, not an angry one, but basically said, "We persevered. And oh, by the way, the Constitution needs to be honored and protected." And they had a major role in that. And so I think it was a very liberating experience, an Americanizing experience, for lack of a better word.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 18>

LB: You mentioned the November 10th hearing before Judge Patel. Your parents were there. What did they, did you have a conversation with them after the hearing, and what did they say?

DT: I think everybody was just stunned. You know, well, normally judges don't rule from the bench like that. They'll take it under submission and you'll hear it, get a decision in writing some months later. And the cameras are just mobbed, and Patel, Judge Patel just felt moved to... she's got a, she knows what she was going to write, and she wanted to make a statement about the Constitution right then and there. And the whole room was filled with internees, former internees. And so when she ruled, I mean, everybody was like, "Whoa, did that really happen?" And my parents were like, it was kind of like the trials that they never had. That's what Fred's case was. I mean, everybody... if you're wronged, you want your day in court, and that was the equivalent of their day in court. And to be told, yeah, they didn't do anything wrong. After all of these years, it was the government that was wrong, and you were right, and you should not have been victimized like that. I think that was a good, that was... and so they were thrilled, everybody was thrilled. Fred was a hero. It was just the most exhilarating and remarkable, amazing thing I'd ever seen. I haven't seen anything since like that. And so it's breathtaking.

LB: How did you feel as a Sansei in response to Judge Patel's decision?

DT: Well, we felt energized. We felt... and we were taking a risk, too. We had our young career on the line, too, and in front of national publicity, if you lose a case like that, what does that do for you? Nothing good. So I think, you know, we decided to take this action, and the moon and the stars aligned. The evidence was there, we got the right judge, we hit the media at a time when it was open to hearing this kind of thing. And the result could not have been better, in many ways. So I often say to Dale, I wish we could have bottled that up, experience up, and then when you're really depressed and you're down, you can just crack open the bottle and have it. It was one of those kind of events, rare. I just felt lucky. I felt so lucky to be a part of that. People thanked us, why? I'd have paid to be on this legal team. It was incredible. Like I said, to be, to read these cases... another one of these wrongly decided cases, but then to have the opportunity to vindicate your own family is, wow, it's amazing.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 19>

LB: So Fred had an enormous impact on people wherever he went to go speak. Can you tell me about the reactions -- I know you went and you would go speaking with Fred to different places. What kind of reaction did you see, response that people had to Fred, and why do you think there was that reaction?

DT: Well, certainly law students wanted to hear him, scholars, law professors, judges, lawyers, political leaders, anybody who knew anything about that case. And in law school it's mandatory reading, so everybody knew about Fred's case. Curiosity. They want to know, okay, who is this guy and what's it take to, what kind of a person would put himself out there like that and have the courage to do that? I think that was one thing. And then when we talked about what the evidence revealed, it was just, again, people I think generally were flabbergasted that this happened in America. That the process could be so thoroughly subverted by powerful people. And so Fred came to represent the ordinary guy that wanted to set the record straight, and there's a certain fascination about that. You know, the lone guy who stands up and says, in the face of all this pressure, "I'm not going to give in." And I think that... you know, he wasn't charismatic like Min, but just in his own quiet way, and speaking in a very ordinary way, it was very compelling. And you could see the look, the rapt attention people had when he would tell his stories. We'd always, if there was wine and drinks going around before the event, I know Kathryn was running around trying to limit his intake. [Laughs] 'Cause he'd have a tendency sometimes to drink a little too much, and then his story would a little bit meander, you know. But that was part of his charm and humanity, and people loved that. So he had a big impact, not so much because of what he said, but what he stood for, and how genuine he was about it.

LB: Can you tell me a little bit about Fred's work after 9/11?

DT: So, you know, after the decision came out, or after the filing and then after he won, he became very active in redress and reparations. Before 9/11 or any of those events, I mean, he was lobbying congressmen. And congressmen, senators, were thrilled to meet him, because he was the hero. He stood up, he won, he's a constitutional law legend, and for them to meet him, Fred, it was something for them. And so Fred had developed a persona of integrity, I think. And so after 9/11, Fred made it a point to -- and even before that during the first Gulf War -- that when we do have these conflicts, you can't punish people just because they look like the enemy. And that was his, his statement. So he took personal responsibility to continue this educational process, and he spoke at many colleges and universities, public events throughout the country. And after 9/11, I think Dorothy Erlich of the ACLU said that she was convinced that the reason why there was no mass racial roundup was because of the reopening of the internment camp cases and the reparations effort. She said the education was so thoroughly done that... and laws were passed, for instance, in California that they have to teach Korematsu v United States in high school. And that's hard-wired now into the curriculum about the internment. So whereas these educated reporters had no idea that this even happened, most college students now, I'm hoping, at least are aware that this had happened. So Fred was really very much involved in informing the public of his case and what he went through, and the experience of Japanese Americans, and in the correcting process America did to right the ship.

LB: What would you say is -- my last question -- what would you say is Fred's legacy?

DT: Well, God, with a legacy... you have so many different levels on him. I mean, one, stand up for what you believe in. Have the courage to stand up. Another legacy is really not so much Fred but government. The excesses of power and the need for ethical people to make the right decisions in the face of extreme pressure. And you contrast Fred's position and his stand, and Gordon and Min also, with Harvard, Yale, Stanford educated lawyers in the Justice Department. That when it came down to, push comes to shove, whether to tell the truth or lie, they chose the convenient path, to lie. And that is another lesson in this case. I think another lesson is just gaman, you know, the Japanese philosophy to endure and persevere and suck it up and get on with your life, but don't forget it. Don't forget what happened, and to make, take a step to educate the country. I mean, when you think about it, it was a textbook lesson on the meaning of the Constitution. And that's a pretty good gift to the American public. I think Fred's case stands for that. So legacy for Japanese Americans, they're a tiny population, really tiny in terms of American history, but they've left a big mark here. I mean, one was a mark of shame, not for anything that Japanese Americans ever did, but for what was done to them. But then, yeah, how they kind of rose above things, kept their dignity, and have gone out beyond that as Fred has done to make sure it doesn't happen to any other group. I think that's pretty noble. So there's a lot of different ways to look at it.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.