<Begin Segment 16>

MA: How do you start something like that? I mean, it seems almost overwhelming.

LN: It was, because first of all, we said, well, education, we're just going to do education. Education in our own community. For instance, Niseis, we had to set up tables in J-town. Where did we do it now? Right on First Street. [Laughs] Oh, I tell you, it was hard. Because we had these tables, and these Nisei ladies would say, "What's going on? What is this?" And we would say, okay, we have all this literature. Alan was, Alan was... what was he now, what school? He was at Long Beach, Cal State Long Beach, and he was an educator. And anyway, he was very articulate. So he helped us with all the literature, what to put out on the literature.

MA: And what was an example of something you were educating the community about? What you were fighting for?

LN: Yeah, about why we need to fight. We're going back to the, we just went all the way back to the history of the Japanese. When they came here from Japan, they couldn't own land, they couldn't buy property. They were, you know, they were oppressed in a racist community for years and years and years. Then we were sent to camp. And so what this is -- so what is this telling us? We have to go out there now and assert ourselves. And the government did this to us. We have to ask the government the we need, we have to be reimbursed for all the losses that we suffered, and all this. We had to write up a whole history like that. And I tell you, it was very hard, because the Niseis would look at the papers. They'd say, "Oh, no. Don't start this. We don't want to get hassled again by the government. We had enough of that, they put us in camp and everything. And now you guys are talking about redress? Oh, god, give me a break." And they would be just totally hostile. But we just kept at it, every weekend we would have the tables out there and we'd be talking to more Niseis. "Come one, come on out and sit here with us. Talk to other Niseis." We just wanted Niseis to talk it out, talk about it, talk about it. And you know what? The more they did, the more angry they got. And pretty soon, they're saying, "Really, how true. What are we? There's nothing to be ashamed of. We don't have to be embarrassed, we don't have to be intimidated. And we worried about our kids." So what? If the kids don't like it, they have to know where they're coming from, where they came from. If they don't like what we're doing, they'll come around to it. We used to say that.

And it's so true because we used to go to college campus and everything. In those days, it was just organized in our own community. So we would go to college, I mean, we would go to all the campuses, the nearby ones, and talk to the students. And they would say, "Wow, how come our parents never told us anything about it then? They should have said something." We said, "Well, you can imagine what the parents, your parents are going through. Because they were trying to protect you, and they didn't want you go to through all this, they didn't want to... they wanted to protect you from all this and just kind of like pretend that things are just perfectly normal. There's nothing wrong with where you're coming from, and nothing to worry about, and you shouldn't have to deal with this and that." So they said, oh. Well, a lot of the students, we talked and talked and talked more to students, and they would say, "Yeah, I didn't realize that this is what our parents went through. Oh, man, you know. I mean, that's terrible." And the more they became open to it, the more the parents became open to going out and doing it more aggressively. So I tell you, it took time, you know. We had to go to all the different communities, community meetings, and talk about it. It was okay, it was okay after a while, but in the beginning, it was like, "Don't even talk about it. I want nothing to do with it." [Laughs]

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