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JG: That must've been a pretty amazing time, just in terms of your development. I'm wondering, what were some of the unique challenges and what were some of the unique kind of joys of that position?

MN: You know, there, let's start with the joys 'cause there was just many more joys than challenges. It was just a very exciting time to be in the city of Sacramento. Number one, the church I was at was a fairly large church, and the people in it, particularly the Niseis who were in it, were very active in the city of Sacramento and politically in the city and the state. In addition, it was a very exciting time politically in California. Willy Brown was running the state legislature, the assembly, and although I really was not much of a, really had no political knowledge at all, just being in Sacramento, you couldn't help but learn about politics and how politics were... the church I was at also had a U.S. congressman as its member, the late Robert Matsui, who had a very, very profound influence on my life personally. So it was just a very exciting time to be in the city. The other thing, the redress movement was building up steam and during my time there the redress movement really culminated, and in fact we ended up having one of the ceremonies for the redress recipients at our church, and in fact that was the ceremony held in Sacramento. Bob Bratt, the head of ORA, Office of Redress Administration, came out and obviously participated in the service. So just a total intersection of a lot of events that were particular to the Japanese American community, particular to people involved in politics and that I was personally interested all just converged at that time, intersected with one another there. So it was a very exciting time, personally, religiously, politically, all the way around. One thing that really surprised me was when the redress bill was signed in 1988 and all the redress, the statistics came out, I saw that Los Angeles far and away had the largest number of eligible redress recipients, over four thousand, but the number two city on the list was Sacramento with something like 2800 or 2900 eligible redress recipients, and I was surprised when I saw that. All of the other cities that I thought would've ranked higher in terms of Japanese American population, you know, i.e. San Jose, Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco, were way far down the list. [Coughs] Excuse me. Now, part of that, I think, had to do with the fact that those other areas also had suburbs and other bedroom communities that were separate cities in and of themselves. For example, down on the San Jose, well, the peninsula there in Northern California, yeah, you've got San Jose, but you've got also Santa Clara, San Mateo, Sunnyvale, Fremont, which are cities in and of themselves, and so the Japanese American populations there were defined by those respective cities rather than being merged all into the stats for San Jose. Same thing, I think, with San Francisco and the East Bay. You had smaller communities with Japanese Americans living there, so their numbers were split out among those different communities. But for Sacramento, most of the Japanese Americans at that time lived within the city limits of Sacramento, and so the second largest, second highest number of Japanese Americans on the whole list of eligible redress recipients was right there in Sacramento, and that's what really impressed me was the demographics there. And that became more evident the more and more community functions I began to attend, the more and more weddings and funerals I started to officiate, the more and more I began to meet folks up there. I soon realized that, yeah, there are a lot of Japanese Americans there in Sacramento and, and they were, again, a lot of 'em were involved in state government, in city government. Lot of 'em were socially active, socially conscious and it was something that I was just not exposed to or used to. A lot, there were some Japanese Americans who I've met who were very high up on the political scheme of things. And it just really impressed me to no end, and that really opened my eyes to the larger world and especially the larger Japanese American world that I had never really seen before.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.