<Begin Segment 22>

TI: But I'm curious, here's maybe a question, and this might not be fair, but how do you think the people, the Japanese Canadians that you dealt with, how would they describe you?

OK: Probably... it depends on who you talk to. I think Roger, people like Roger, Art, would say that I was a strong supporter of a fair settlement. I think Roy would say I was certainly supportive, but I was a bureaucrat. I mean that he, because we had more confrontational sessions than I had with... which isn't to say that we didn't have, I didn't have disagreements with others or they with me, with Roy they were more direct and confrontational. "No, I won't agree to that." "But you got to agree to that." "No, I won't agree to that." It was those kinds of back and forth with him, that I didn't have with most of the other individuals. In terms of other people that I think were important players, Tommy Shoyama, who was a Deputy Minister in Ottawa for many years. He was the first --

RD: He's, I was going to bring him up.

OK: -- Japanese Canadian that ever got that high. No Japanese Canadian has ever been that high in the bureaucracy.

RD: There are no real, no real national politicians of Japanese ancestry, they're very different pattern than here. 'Cause there wasn't that kind of tight community support because they broke up the community.

OK: And Tommy was somebody we talked to to try and get a sense of the community. Now, his involvement with the community was very limited. I mean, he maintained his, certainly his sense of being a Japanese Canadian in, but his organization involvement was very, very limited, partly because of the fact that he occupied the kinds of positions he did. I mean, he rose to the second highest position in the Canadian government, in the bureaucracy, as the Deputy Minister of Finance. There's only one position higher, and that's to be the Clerk of the Privy Council. And so he was such a success as a bureaucrat, but he wasn't involved in the community, but he was very knowledgeable about the community, he knew a lot of people in the community. And he was a figure that was highly, highly regarded in the Japanese Canadian community because of his successes. The other person who was a highly successful Japanese Canadian, who was minimally involved in this whole issue, was David Suzuki.

RD: I was going to ask you about him.

OK: And David really wasn't of the community, but there were some politicians who liked to quote David Suzuki as, "Well, redress isn't that big a deal, redress isn't that critically important. I'm not opposed to redress, but..." and so some people like to latch onto people like David Suzuki. I think in the end, he came around. He came to see the justice of the whole process and of the outcome, but certainly during the '80s, he was not what you would call a strong proponent of this.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.