<Begin Segment 37>

MN: Now, can you share with us... a lot of us won't know what the Sun Building is, the history of it and what happened there, and the picketing. Can you share about that?

JM: Well, the Sun Building was the one building on Weller Street, which is no longer there, which is the... right about the site of the Kyoto Grand right now. And you notice I don't call it New Otani anymore with great satisfaction. But anyway, all of the CRA activities involving property owners had to be, should be local people, 'cause that was the whole idea, was to invigorate the local community. Lo and behold, we see this front develop. I forgot the name of the front, but it's essentially backed by the New Otani and Kajima. And they got a couple of local folks over here to front the thing, but when you looked at who the list of investors were, it read like a bank statement for Kajima International and the New Otani and I believe the Sumitomo Bank. It was strictly a Japanese thing. And it was the biggest single project. And so what that meant was that the Sun Building, which all of the social services and small artists and our Pioneer Center was in, oh, every little community group you think of. The JACS office, JACL office, was gonna be destroyed because it had to be destroyed. And they were gonna build us a quote/unquote "new community center," which was gonna house everybody. And we were like, "Yeah, we believe that. Like where is the new Tokyo Towers?" Because they had a moratorium on it. So we're like, "Where is the Towers? We don't see that. And now you're coming up with this cockamamie idea about, we're gonna build a community center and we're gonna shift everybody over there. And boy, we sure, we sure believe that." And this is where the split between me and Kango became permanent. 'Cause Kango was adamant about, "We can't build a cultural community center without help from Japan, the Japanese money. I'm like, well, yeah, first of all, show me the, show me the Little Tokyo Towers and I'll believe you. In the meantime, you've got these guys that's coming in that have taken over this whole redevelopment project.

So we came to loggerheads one day, and they had the grand opening ceremony, and we decided we're gonna picket it. And we had, at that time, it was called the Little Tokyo Anti-Eviction task force. And so we developed a (plan) all the city muck-a-mucks were gonna come in. The limousines started to pull in and they came into this empty lot, which was right, which would now be the very center of the Kyoto Grand hotel. It was an empty lot at the time. And the Sun Building was still standing and all that, and they eventually evicted everybody and destroyed it. But at that time, they had the opening, you know, a groundbreaking thing. And so we had this ring of pickets going around. "Save Little Tokyo," we all had badges, "Save Little Tokyo!" And when the ceremony started to open this opening day ceremony with all the city muck-a-mucks there, we cranked up (the music) -- we got on the rooftop, and we had these, I guess, tape with amplifiers, and we started playing "Colonel Bogey's March." Have you ever heard that one? [Sings] That was the... did you ever see that Bridge on the River Kwai? Yeah. Tani, you ever see that one? Did you ever see that? Bridge on the River Kwai? Oh, that was a classic. Well, that was the one in which the Japanese were building the bridges across Burma, and they used all the British soldiers and American soldiers as slave labor. So, the theme song throughout it all was "Colonel Bogey's March." So we were alluding to the fact that Kajima was the one that built the railroads, which they did. They were the ones in Bridge on the River Kwai that were using slave labor. So we cranked up [sings]. You know, it was blasting at 'em. Everybody was looking up, and then we rolled down a huge sign that said, "Save Little Tokyo," and we just completely took over that thing that way. It was something. I got to admit that it was one of the few things I was really proud of. Eventually we lost out (on) everything, the CRA, it was hard to beat big money, really hard. Kango was right in there. Oh, is there a picture of that in there? Yeah.

MN: But you know, you folks lost, right? I mean, the Sun Building got destroyed, a lot of the low income housing, the hotels were destroyed, a lot of the Isseis and low-income people were actually thrown out of Little Tokyo because of this massive redevelopment in Little Tokyo. How did that affect you? Were you disappointed? Why didn't you... did this stop your activism?

JM: No, at that time, I was a charter member of the Anti-Eviction task force, and I had used my experience in the CRA to our benefit. Because every time they try to say something and discredit us, I would bring (up my experience) you know, and we would be on TV quite often, and they would have me speaking and saying, "He's a former CRA employee."

MN: How long were you with the CRA?

JM: Six months. That was about as much as I can take. [Laughs]

MN: So, but after all this happened, and a lot of the people from the Anti-Eviction task force and Little Tokyo People's Rights Organization, you shared with me, you formed LACCRR, the Los Angeles Community Coalition for Redress/Reparations. And then, from LACCRR, it became NCRR.

JM: That's correct.

<End Segment 37> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.