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WH: And the next thing I got involved in was the pardon of Iva Toguri, and we got involved in that in Chicago in a fairly big way, and we did it through a church, our local church. And when the redress movement came along, the first thing we thought of was modeling it on what we did for Iva Toguri, through the church. And, so we didn't think of it as a major thing. It got major only when the JACL decided to go for the Commission. And then when they went for the Commission, our little church said, "Well, wait a minute, what's going on here? Why are they going for the Commission?" And one of the things that we had observed was there had been a movement for... it wasn't against the government, it was some sort of black reparations, led by a fellow... anyway, he addressed the church, the Protestant church, and our own conference responded to that. But the thing somehow died. He didn't follow through on it. And we were afraid the same thing was going to happen with the redress movement, that it would just simply die. So we were very worried about that. And so we just sort of followed our instinct. We says, "Well, we really can't support the study. We have to go along with what we originally agreed, which was redress." And it was a real goofy decision, 'cause we didn't have, we said, "Well, we have to form another organization, a national organization. How we gonna form a national organization? Well, we'll try." So that's how the whole thing began. But it was a real, real long shot kind of thing. And not within the church, but forming this national organization was a huge, huge, long shot. And I sent out three memos, a copy to three people that I knew, one in New York, L.A. and Seattle. And Seattle responded. And that turned out to be the group that, Miyatake and Sasaki and so forth. The thing is that I had no idea that they were looking at me as a leader. I thought we were looking for them, you see. And I didn't realize this 'til much later. And then I got a call from Shosuke Sasaki one night and we talked for a long time about this and that and the other thing. And he just wanted to see where I stood on various things. And we pretty much saw eye-to-eye and I was real happy that they had gotten a commitment from Mike Lowry to introduce the bill and stuff like that. Because that was a real big question, if you are going to introduce a bill, how we gonna get it introduced? And they had solved the problem. So yeah, I was willing to take it from there.

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