<Begin Segment 29>

MN: So you were honorably discharged.

JM: Honorably discharged.

MN: Did you return to Los Angeles after that? You're already in San Pedro.

JM: Uh-huh, right. So I began hanging out back in L.A. And like I say, time marches, you know, time marched on, so to speak, and all the old feuds in the past kind of disappeared, and we were on a whole different level.

MN: So what did you do?

JM: Oh, I kept working in the aerospace industry. For ten years, I was associated with the aerospace industry, assembly and things like that, and I became one of the very few Asian labor... what do they call it? Shop stewards. I was the only one around. And my constituency was women and minorities. But I ran for about ten years, I never lost. I never lost an election. Oh, and I quit the day they, we got into a big argument at a union meeting among all the people in Local 887, I was part of Local 887 United Aerospace Workers. And the argument came up as to who to endorse, LBJ or Eugene McCarthy. And Eugene McCarthy, if you remember, was against the war in Vietnam, and LBJ was, that was his war. And so I was part of a group trying to endorse Eugene McCarthy. And the other half were loyally for LBJ. So one guy gets up and he says, "We ought to," he said, "we ought to bomb the shit out of 'em like we did in Hiroshima. We ought to bomb the Vietnamese, we ought to bomb them bastards just like we did in Hiroshima." So my response was instantaneous. I just jumped up and yelled, "Fuck you." And I said, "If that's the way the rest of you feel, then you can all go kiss my ass," and I took my union badge off and I walked out. And later on, they said, "Are you gonna resign?" I said, "Yeah, I can't be part of a racist group like this." So I lost my union status, which cost me my seniority. And a month later I was laid off, because they were going through layoffs. If I was a union steward like I was, I had super seniority and I would not have gotten laid off. But as it was, I got laid off, and I said, "Oh, the hell with it." I said, "I busted my ass for all these white folks, rednecks and everything else for ten years. If they're gonna come up with stuff like 'bomb these gooks' and all that, I'm gonna go back and help my own community." I'm gonna go back and... you know, the Asian American movement started at that time. I said, "I'm gonna go back and see what they need over there and see if there's anything I can do." Instead of putting my energy, spending my weekends over here trying to see what these folks want, I'm gonna go back and help the folks out there in J-town. So began my long association with, you know, all these things having to do with Little Tokyo and LTPRO, with the Pioneer Center, with the Anti-Eviction Taskforce, APA, with the pilgrimages to Manzanar. I did over fifty speaking engagements about the internment.

<End Segment 29> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.