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JG: I'm trying to get a sense of what a prototypical... like I'm trying to think of Billy Graham or something, like, as a prototypical minister of the post-war period, but one of the things that's interesting to me is at the same time that you could be... and understandably you would admire the experiences of these Nisei and older Sansei, you were also coming of age at a time when Asian Americans, this was a period of not just awakening for African Americans, but we're talking about the Third World Strikes is a little, that predates your time up at seminary, but this is the time of the Asian American kind of consciousness, "yellow power," and also of kind of the nascent movement for redress for Japanese Americans and reclaiming this amnesia that occurred after World War II, this kind of desire to put the past behind. And I'm just wondering, in that context, coming of age and continuing with your own political development, your own, the development of your own political consciousness, were you also critical of the clergy? Did you kind of come to a sense of, at any point, that some of what had occurred in the Japanese American religious community was maybe short-sighted or not fully developed, and did you have an idea of what your generation could do as it moved forward towards ordination and beyond?

MN: Right. You know, Jim, as I was growing up during that era, civil rights, Vietnam and all that, I guess because our family, or at least I was so wrapped up in the church... and yes, I know that the anti-war protest movements were going on, some of them were inspired through religious channels, but our community was just trying to survive, and so those larger issues, even though I felt the war was wrong and I had my own personal political views on it, in terms of the church being a vehicle for that, for any kind of social change, it just didn't dawn on me that, well, Centenary, or Japanese American churches in general, could play that role. However, one recurring remembrance I have of those times with respect to the Church is that I do know, I do remember that the Church was one place, if not the only place, where Japanese Americans could congregate and have discussions about everything going on at the time and feel free to voice their opinions. Again, when you think about it, there were not a lot of social or political outlets for Japanese Americans, number one, to gather, number two, to express their views, number three, to let, to think that anybody cared about what you had to say in the first place. So in that sense the church served a very, very important role, and that may be a passive way. It enabled folks like me to listen to other discourse and dialogue, to hear other people's perspectives. I vividly remember one Sunday morning at church when I was, gosh, I couldn't have been more than thirteen or fourteen, hearing two younger Niseis arguing about the war. One guy was, said yeah, we need to be in Vietnam. We need to get rid of those Communists. The other guy was arguing no, this is just American imperialism and, and the war is bad, and besides... for me, to hear this kind of discussion, it just on the one hand didn't register with me. Why are these guys talkin' about this kind of stuff? But it's still the kind of stuff that I remember going on, and the old saying, hindsight's always twenty-twenty, but looking back on it, those are the discussions that I do remember hearing at church, and those are the remembrances that have stayed with me throughout the years. And in some way the Church did play a very vital role, whether it could've played a more forceful role or not, who knows? I think, again, even as a Sansei growing up, there were always other Sanseis who were saying the Niseis should've done this during the war, the Niseis should've done that to avoid, to protest evacuation, but the times were different and there were certain limits on what we could do, realistically could do, back during those days. So in that sense, my remembrances of the, what was going on at the church at that time are much more precious and more important than some of these hypothetical questions. Could the church have done more? Should we have done more? I think yeah, the answer's always yes, but when you realize what else was happening in the larger arena at that time, I tend to hedge against those easy answers.

JG: That's interesting. Interesting.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.