<Begin Segment 12>

LB: So when did you come up to the Bay Area?

EY: You know, I don't remember exactly when I came up. 'Cause I actually started doing some of the work back in Hawaii where I started really getting more actively involved, and then I came up. And I remember at this point in time, being here and actively involved, I was responding to the petition, to the government's motion to dismiss, and also how to submit all the documents into evidence for the hearing that Judge Patel was having. So I recall spending time with Bob Rusky, Bob Rusky's office with Margie Barrows, and time with Leigh-Ann, and working on that aspect of the case, how to get the evidence in, what to do about it. Also working on attorney's fees, but I guess that came later.

LB: So it sounds like there was some personal risk to you coming up to the Bay Area to work on this case. You didn't have a job...

EY: Didn't have a job, didn't have any income. I did work four hours a week at Merilyn Wong's office with Lily Kimura and Merilyn Wong, so I earned enough money to go to Europe. I worked through all of my savings. But I didn't think of it as risk. It was really that, something I wanted to do, it was kind of an adventure, it was something that was meaningful to me. And so... and it was wonderful. How I looked at it was, all the things I had done were like training myself technically and skills-wise, but also my intellect, but also my own sort of spirit to do something really important, and this was it. And I think a lot of people felt that. So everybody donated so much of their time and energy. Life was difficult because of that, but it was also great and wonderful.

LB: What was that importance that would make you leave Hawaii to come up and work on the case?

EY: It was because... I could tell two things. One, that I had learned from being up in the Bay Area with my friends and their families, was that the impact of the internment was still so strong in their lives. It affected people's self image, it affected people's ability to talk about their lives and their history, especially for the Nisei who had been interned, but it also affected the Sansei. Because many of my friends said their parents couldn't talk about it, there was a certain gulf, that something about growing up... wonderful support from the parents, but still, something was not right because of that deep history. So I came to see that through my friends. And what I came to really understand being back in Hawaii was the significance of legal decisions and legal opinions and how they cement people's understandings of what was right and just. Or Japanese Americans as "disloyal." Korematsu case upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court must mean that Japanese Americans were disloyal. It's a cultural image that's inscribed, and it's carried forward so it affects people's understanding of an entire group, about Asian Americans in general. And so I realized that this is something bigger even than the Japanese American community who had been interned. It's really about how law operates. And I realized that it's how law could operate in the future. So that was part of my motivation, that there was something, this was really important in and of itself, it was important for the people who had been interned, it was important for Asian Americans, but it was important for how law operates and how we understand if law can do justice. So I think those things combined... and there's a fourth thing. These are my wonderful friends who had been mentors and who were now going to become colleagues. And when I came up I met you, and you were this young attorney who was doing this amazing job of really being the pivot point of coordinating so many things, including the documents, about how this case was going to actually turn out. And there was Don and Dale, and I got to know Bob Rusky and then Leigh-Ann, Ed Chen. And Ed Chen and I, I think, joined the team just about the same time. And so it was this other thing, this community working on the same thing, and people that I respected and liked. That really was just such a draw for me.

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