<Begin Segment 18>

TL: I think I started by asking what role you saw for yourself as this movement was building.

CK: Okay, all right. So then I had that small role there of the link between national JACL and the local group here. And that was '78. And then getting involved with Mike Lowry and knowing Ruthann, so I had some kind of connection there. And then the next step, the major step that I see, was being at a national meeting -- I think it was a national board meeting in San Francisco -- and, that was a time the commission bill was on the verge of passing. And at that meeting, the word came that it was going to be signed and two of the people, I think it was John Tateishi and Cliff Uyeda, flew back for that signing. Then, leaving that meeting realizing that the commission bill had passed and coming back on the plane I started to think, hey, we've got to be ready for that. I mean, it's inevitable. Those commission hearings are going to happen. We have to make sure there's one in Seattle and we have to be ready for it.

So on the way back I started thinking about that, and then when I got back, I called Henry and Chuck Kato -- and Gordon was here on a year-long sabbatical, I guess, at the U -- and I think it might have been Massie Tomita and Ken Nakano, just a few of us and again, we met at Quong Tuck, or whatever. And I told them, "You know, the hearings are coming, the commission is coming." Well, of course, Henry was very dead set against it so I think it was around that point that he dropped out. He had some personal family problems, too. But then at that meeting, I said to Gordon, "How about lending your name? We'll do the groundwork and if you would co-chair this with me, we'll make, establish a community committee on redress, call all the representatives of all the major organizations and let's, you know, get ready for this hearing." And Gordon said yes. So, and as it turned out, he did, you know, not just in name only, but he went around and spoke, and, you know, his name lent a lot of credibility to it.

But then the next meeting we had, we sent letters out to all the churches, seven churches. The major organizations, so we had about fourteen representatives. They all didn't show up, but, I mean, there were fourteen organizations represented, and everyone agreed to form a committee of, to prepare for it. And so that was the start of what later became the Washington Coalition on Redress. So then we got to work, then it was determined that Seattle would be one of the cities and we had a date and I was in contact with the commission staff. They wanted to know where could they hold it in Seattle. So I went all around to UPS and different places as to the best place and we ended up at the Broadway Performance Hall, which turned out to be ideal because, you know, the formation, the ability to see everything on that stage. And we worked a lot with the commission staff on setup, and then our job was to get the witnesses. So to prepare for that, I said to our group, "Let's have a mock hearing. Get some interest."

So we set a date -- it was in May -- and we went through some workshops to get people into the habit of, into the ease of testifying. And in that process, we found three very, very tragic stories. One represented a loss of property. This fellow had acreage in the Olympic Peninsula area and he totally lost it because of taxes. And it was just an outright loss and that was really quite tragic because that was all his life's savings and whatever, involved in that. Another one was Theresa Takayoshi who was in our committee and she was a mixture of Irish and Japanese. Her name was Takayoshi, well that was her married name. But she had been married when the evacuation came. She had the choice of going or not going to camp but they had children and no way, she said, would she want to be parted from her children, so she chose to go to camp. While she was in camp, in Puyallup, her little boy got sick and they took him out to the hospital and then she, she had to go and come back to camp each day. But she went to visit and once she overheard a nurse saying to another one, "Let's let that little Jap kid die." And that was just really tragic. And she realized, she had chosen at age fourteen to go with her Japanese background and so she associated with Niseis all along, but her story was really tragic. And then the third person that we chose to have this mock hearing was a fellow who was only about eight or nine, I think he was eight. He was caught in Alaska with his father, and the FBI came immediately and picked him up. Left him all alone, I mean, there was no one else. So some neighbors and all sort of took him in and they were, the Alaskan people were shipped down to Puyallup. And here he was, an orphan, in essence, and he had to bunk with the single -- some of them Issei men. And this little child, he told a real touching story about, he didn't realize what he could do with his socks and they kept getting dirtier and dirtier until somebody told him you know, "You could go to the laundry room and wash 'em." But he didn't know. I mean he was a little kid. And he told these stories about how he had to struggle, and it was so heart-wrenching. So we asked them, would they mind giving their testimonies.

So we held a mock hearing at the Vets Hall and we asked Judge Smith, Charles Smith and Ruth... I forgot her name, she is a city councilwoman, and about two or three others to be mock commissioners. We didn't know you know, what to expect, but we just assumed there would be commissioners and they would be asking questions and that they would be timed. And then we asked Min Yasui to come to present his favoring a block grant and Chuck Kato to speak for individual payments. So we had this mock hearing and we had a very good turnout. The hall was filled, over 200 people. That eventually brought out enough people to witness, to want to give testimony so that by the time in September that the hearing came, we had 165 people that testified, and that represented people from Portland as well. The tremendous work was done by Karen Seriguchi of the district. She was the regional... secretary, I think it was called then. She helped the witnesses getting their testimonies typed and she worked really, really hard. She was just... and so both of us were, by the second day of the hearing, we collapsed and we didn't make it. [Laughs] But we got to the final day.

But that was... and the one problem with what we did. I think we worked too hard in preparing people because we went down to Los Angeles the first hearing and the emotion, the raw emotion that came out was tremendous and people wanted to talk and talk and they had to be cut off because it was a five minute time period. But crying and you know, "You've got to let me talk." "How many years you haven't let me talk..." And this kind of thing going on. And so it was quite emotional and moving and San Francisco was similarly so. Ours was too well-prepared. And some of the emotion was lost because it all had been kind of spent with the mock hearing and the preparation. So in a sense I regretted that we over-prepared. But Bill Marutani, who was one of the commissioners, (said) that when he got to ours, he said, "Yours is the best organized." Things went very smoothly. We got the witnesses there and everybody, there was no time lag and this kind of stuff. But I do regret that it sort of killed a little of the emotion. There were some very heart-rending ones. I think there was a woman from Portland, who... her story was quite tragic.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.