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TI: Okay, so let's try to get back to San Jose. I realize we're, we're already at ten o'clock, so we have one more, we have one more hour left, so I want to get to the taiko group, but this has, this has been fascinating, because I think it really helps set up, I think, the, the background for San Jose Taiko, so I'm glad we're doing this.

RH: Well, that, the activities, doing stuff in East Bay was something that was really, so when I started back, came back to campus in the fall, and that's when Asian American studies was starting up, so I had, was volunteering there, so I was getting really involved with that, and then we were trying to organize on campus the ethnic studies, Asian American studies, and also we wanted to organize as the students in some other kind of way. And so we decided that it was gonna be difficult for us to do two fronts, if we wanted to do something in community and something on campus with the same people, that we were gonna burn ourselves out. We were already feeling burnt out, even with the little we were doing. So some of us chose to go in different directions basically, so it was a group of people who decided a lot of focus work on developing stuff here in the community and there was some of us decided to really focus on just making sure Asian American Studies as a program got off the ground. And so I stuck with the department and really got involved with that and just helping, as a student, even though I was a student, I became really involved in administrative operation of the, of the department, or the program, to the extent where probably the administrator didn't know -- and we were fortunate, because the actual faculty director was very, very open to the fact that the students were helping to run the program, where he would invite students on, in to help recruit and even interview faculty and do things like that where, that was unheard of before, and so, and also helping to choose curriculum and all this kind of stuff within the program, so I really got involved with all that. And the focus for us was really to try to design curriculum that was not just talking about the history and the experience, but also design curriculum that was gonna take people into the community to make that relationship happen. So we were anxious to bring in people who had that kind of sensitivity and understanding and work to help us do that from different communities. So we brought in, like, George Woo, who was at San Francisco State and also very active in San Francisco Chinatown. Greg Mark later came in from Oakland. He was with, really involved with Oakland Chinatown and also with, on campus and stuff. And so guys like that really had this crossover stuff, and we also hired people from the community, like we brought in Reverend Mike Morizono who was at the Wesley Methodist Church at that time to teach the Japanese American experience class, and so just trying to bring in the connection of people locally versus the campus itself.

And so that was kind of our way to make that crossover, but because of the Issei experience and the East Bay, I was really interested in seeing what we could do in San Jose, so I was encouraging people that maybe we should try to do something with that here. What was happening here in Japantown was the group of folks that wanted to do more stuff in the community, they formed an off campus group called Asians for Community Action, ACA, and they, and that organization was starting to recruit a lot of people, not only campus people, but it was younger, younger people working in the field, also Niseis, that wanted to be involved with what was happening in the community in different ways. So we were picking different projects, Issei or senior services was one of 'em, also legal referral work because of what was happening with people, especially with the anti war movement stuff, was another one, and just, there was another program that we were trying, that were getting involved, smaller segment was Asian Americans in prisons, basically, at that time, so this is, again, in the early '70s, which, a lot of them were because of drug related abuse programs, issues that they were having. And so, but the Issei project, for us, we started a similar thing that we're doing in East Bay, sort of recreational thing, and that kind of took off to become Yu-Ai Kai later on, I feel, because that kind of spurred that interest. And then we started a legal referral service. We got JACL to kind of open up the Issei Memorial Building, to take over the, what's now the downstairs conference room, and we ran sort of a referral service out of there, brought in some folks from Santa Clara University and those guys spun off to begin Asian Law Alliance. We had done sort of a early survey in the community about senior housing and the needs for senior housing and then that information kind of, I think, launched the building of the Fuji Towers that the Buddhist church took on. So I feel there was a lot of stuff that we were able to implement, the ACA was able to implement was, really kind of helped launch a lot of other now existing anchor organizations in our community, basically.

TI: Now, I don't know as much what happened in the East Bay, but it just feels like more happened in San Jose than, say, the Oakland area when you started talking about the East Bay group. Is that a correct perspective, our, or what do you think of that, in terms of more happening in San Jose than, say, in the East Bay?

RH: Well, I think East Bay's problem is it was so spread out geographically and it, it never had a central Japantown, like Nihonmachi San Francisco, there was a lot of stuff that went on there because of the physical Japantown.

TI: Exactly, so there's this advantage of place, I mean, having this sort of area they could focus on.

RH: Because in East Bay, our sense of community there were basically the churches, which were all over the place, from Berkeley to San Leandro, Hayward, so it was a large spread. There was no one physical space or geographic area, and the community was spread in the same way.

TI: So even though it was a sleepy little town you at least had that, that...

RH: Right. We were able to at least capitalize on that prior existence and at least knowing that people would still come back here for different things because the stores were still here, the grocery stores and the different kind of things, they're still here at that time.

TI: Good. Okay.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.