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TI: -- second hour, and we'd gotten into college, but before we go there, you mentioned your, some of these leadership roles that you were thrust in, primarily through the church, going to conferences and things. So let's, let me ask about that. So first tell me what these things were. Who was there, what was the purpose? What kind of things did you do?

NA: So the background, I think, it's church background as I know it, in the Bay Area there were two groups, and one was the JEMS, the Japanese Evangelical Missionary Society, and they still exist today and their headquarters is just down the street from us, and then the other group was called the Young People's Christian Conference, YPCC. And if you want to just kind of term it one way or the other, one was more kind of evangelical and fundamental and more conservative, if you want, might want to call it, and the other one was a much more liberal, and under the YPCC would be people like Reverend Lloyd Wake who then is with, active with Glide Memorial and all, but he was Pine Methodist. So that was the two kind of church organizations that happened. Very early, because I was, I went with the JEMS group -- that's Howard Toriumi's church -- and didn't, I was still younger so it wasn't so much that I took leadership there, other than the Sunday school type of thing or youth, the fellowship youth kind of leadership with others in our group, but then into the high school years, because, again, basketball and all of that, I also had friends with YPCC and went there.

TI: Now when you say one's more conservative and one's more liberal, are you talking in terms of political beliefs, or in terms of just --

NA: No, it's religious, the stance.

TI: More religious, okay.

NA: Right. The stance.

TI: So the JEMS, they would be more, like, traditional.

NA: Well, it's the evangelical type of Christianity, and it'd be the Free Methodists, the Baptist churches down here would be part of that group.

TI: And what would be an example, when you look at the two groups, that would be indicative of one being perhaps more liberal, more open to change, I guess? What would be, like a practice that one group would do that the other group wouldn't do, just for me to try to understand this?

NA: Wow.

TI: Like maybe the use of music, is that something that was different?

NA: I have to think about that because the music is pretty much the music, the same and all, but I think, I guess when you get into a place like, well, even in San Francisco you had the Pine Methodist Church and the Church of Christ. Pine Methodist is Lloyd Wake, and on this side would be Howard Toriumi. It isn't that they weren't friendly or anything like that, but I know that Pine Methodist under Lloyd would become, would have a different kind of tone than Howard's, which would feel a little bit more conservative. And I'm not saying this in any disparaging way; it's just how it was, and it wasn't that one was better than the other. It just depended on where you went, right?

TI: And so when these two groups had sort of leadership groups doing things, was there a sense of rivalry between the two groups?

NA: Actually I didn't sense it. Maybe there was, but I know that there were people who dated across churches, the young adults did. I mean, I was still junior high, junior high, high school kind of person, but...

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