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OK: In December of '84, we held our first meeting with the NAJC in Winnipeg. It did not go well. That we sat down with the negotiating committee for the NAJC, started the discussions, I started the discussions by saying, "These are discussions." And Roy Miki, not Art, but Roy very forcefully let me know that that wasn't on, and these had to be negotiations. The meeting lasted, as I remember, several hours, and ended with a significant measure of discord. We left, they proceeded to hold a press conference denouncing the federal government in terms of its lack of sincerity, lack of commitment, lack of openness, you name it, and they stated it, all of which was true. Nobody... and I went from Winnipeg, flew back to Ottawa with Doug Bowie and Anne Scotton and Elise Rainville, my EA, and we saw the news reports and, of course, the minister, Jack Murta was very upset that the NAJC was being so recalcitrant and so uncooperative and so unappreciative, all those things. I mean, they should have, in the minds of particularly his executive assistant, been down on bended knee and thankful that we had agreed to talk to them. And the discussion we had when I got back to Ottawa was not what you would term a very happy one. Essentially we were blamed, Bowie and I were blamed for not having been able to persuade the NACJ to see the wisdom of Ottawa's position. And I thought, at that point, "It's over." I was prepared to get on an airplane, fly back to Vancouver, and resume my duties, and that would be the end of it.

Well, I don't know really what happened in Ottawa after I left, but obviously somebody got to the Prime Minister. I don't know whether it was Roy and Art Miki through various intermediaries, but Murta called me back and said, "Okay, you've got to start holding negotiations, but here are the conditions: no apology, no individual payments, no real money. You can talk about money, but there's not going to be a lot of money on the table." Now, this is really a great mandate that I've got. I'm going to back and say essentially what we were told was not on when we had the first meeting in Winnipeg. I went back and set up a meeting with the NACJ again and we met in Winnipeg, and that's where Art Miki lived and that's, and it was the center, kind of, of the country, so it was easy for the Toronto people and the West Coast people to meet there rather than meet in Ottawa or Toronto or Vancouver, which would have been my preference, then I wouldn't have had to spend time on an airplane. And we held the next set of discussions. They went a little bit better than the first set, but not overwhelmingly better. That the government wanted a quick resolution to this. I mean, I gave Roger a copy of the statement we drafted for the Prime Minister to make a statement in the House of Commons. Basically we had the first meeting with the NAJC on the fourteenth of December, and they wanted to be able to make a statement --

RD: Year?

OK: 1984, and they wanted to be able to make a statement on the 16th of January 1985, wrapping the whole thing up. To say that the NACJ found that unacceptable was a mild understatement. I mean, you're not going to have a negotiation around this kind of issue in a month's time, particularly with Christmas there where you're gonna suspend all discussions of any kind for several weeks at the very minimum. I went back to Vancouver after that second meeting and I had some interesting phone calls. My name had now become public, and the media is the one that was the lead negotiator on behalf of the government of Canada, and I got some calls. How people got my phone number, I guess it was not hidden or anything, at home, from people who were associated with the Canadian Legion. Not officially, but members of the legion, denouncing me. Saying, "How could you possibly be doing this kind of thing after what the Japanese did to Canadians in Hong Kong?" And I tried to explain that, "You are comparing apples and oranges. What happened to Canadian military personnel in Hong Kong had nothing to do with what happened to Japanese Canadians in Canada." Well, again, it was a futile discussion. These people that were calling me and denouncing me weren't prepared to hear that. If a person was Japanese, they were Japanese, and that's all that mattered. And that kind of shook me up a little bit, but it also, I think, made me want to see these discussions proceed to meaningful negotiations, that if, in fact, the government was going to talk to people in the Japanese Canadian community, then it had to talk in a serious way. It wasn't going to be no apology, no acknowledgement, no recognition, no money. If they were going to talk, they had to be willing to enter into meaningful negotiations, and I said that at Ottawa. And I was kind of politely rebuffed. "Go back to Vancouver and we'll talk." Well, I went back to Vancouver and didn't hear very much more.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.