<Begin Segment 22>

TI: So good, keep going, so all these things have, are springing up now.

RH: Right. So that's, the stuff on campus was startin' to kind of take off. I got involved working with the Buddhist Church 'cause one of my interests too was working trying to organize the youth, and growing up in the Buddhist Church, just what they were doing or not doing was kind of a concern of mine, and so in the early '70s the Buddhist Church on a national level decided they were looking at, trying to figure out a way to get more of the youth involved, too. And some of the people that were behind it, prior to that the JACL had started a program called the FOX Program, it was kind of a weird name for what they called Field Operator Expediters. It was kind of their outreach people going into the community and doing stuff. It was mainly the younger youth folks. And so some of the people that were involved with that within the Buddhist Church wanted to do something sort of similar but not as political, perhaps, but just trying to organize, so they created what they called, this program called Relevant American Buddhists, RAD program, so basically they wanted to hire in, supposedly, youth coordinators to work within each district and to help inspire younger people to get more involved with the church by trying to create more programs in different ways. So when the program started, was starting up, I heard about it, so I applied for it and I got the job for the, what's considered the coast district.

TI: And this was the, I'm sorry, the Buddhist Church or JACL?

RH: This is the Buddhist Church doing this, and, but it was kind of modeled off of what the JACL had done prior to that.

TI: Okay

RH: So we, my district, or the coast district goes from Mountain View, San Jose, Morgan Hill, Gilroy, Salinas, and Monterey, so it's a pretty big spread of territory and, but I was responsible to try to go to all these different churches and meet all the different youth leaders and try to work with them to help them try to organize in different ways. And so I was trying to introduce to them my short experience of what Asian American Studies was about and doing that kind of stuff, and naturally the Japanese American awareness stuff was part of, and identity issues were all part of what I was trying to bring people, the younger folks, to be aware of. But the minister here at the San Jose Buddhist Church, he, Hiroshi Abiko said, "You know, it'd be kind of cool if we started something else up that would help draw the kids in," and he knew Reverend Mas Kodani in L.A. who was doing the taiko there, the Kinnara Taiko, so he said, "Maybe we could do something like that." And so this was early 1973 that he was looking at trying to do that. So two of us, Dean Miyakuzu, myself, along with Reverend Hiroshi Abiko, just launched it to try to organize, doing taiko around and using it as a tool to engage the youth into the church, basically. So we're using it as an organizing tool and as a cultural thing, and for me it was interesting because of my music interests and that it was musical and it was cultural, it was something from Japan, so it had all these units of interest for me that really kind of clicked at the same time. Even though I really didn't even know, even then, that that was really, had something really there to grab onto, and so it just seemed really interesting, just seeing what was going on at that time.

TI: Interesting but not really that "aha" moment yet, like how this all is gonna...

RH: Not yet, 'cause I was just kind of connecting on different levels with it. It wasn't really how the taiko itself could really be that implementing tool in that strong way.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.