<Begin Segment 27>

MN: Now, during the 1990s you became active in the veterans organizations. Can you share with us how the Japanese American Korean War Veterans Organization came to be formed in 1996?

RW: Well, for years I was working with Jim Yamashita with the World War II Memorial Alliance, but we didn't have that organization. It was in the days of when we were arguing over the 442nd Living Veterans monument. Before that Jim and I were collecting names, addresses and names of World War II veterans, 442nd, and I was collecting Korean War vet names and addresses, At the time I didn't know why I didn't have anything in mind. Something just told me to collect names and addresses, and so I had a pretty good list of names and addresses. In 1996, the Vietnam War Committee, Vince Okamoto, Ken Hayashi, and Dave Miyoshi and a bunch of 'em built that Vietnam War Memorial at the Japanese American Cultural Center, so once they built that, then that was the impetus for the Korean War vets to do something. Min Tonai -- I didn't know who he was at the time -- called me and said he had heard that I collected a lot of names of Korean War vets, that we should organize and build a memorial too. So I said, well, okay, that sounds like a good idea, but we got to get permission from the Cultural Center. "Oh, don't worry about that. Don't worry about it." He assured me don't worry. Well, we need to do this or do that. "Oh, that's okay. We can do it." So I thought, well jeez, who the heck is this guy, I said I got the names, we can just contact all these people and see if they want to come out to a meeting. After we hung up I called Sam Shimoguchi 'cause we were working together on that 442nd monument issue, and I asked him, who's this Min Tonai? Man, he sounds like he can get anything we want at that Cultural Center. "Don't you know who Min Tonai is?" And I said no, who is he? "He's the President of the Cultural Center." He is? Wow. Okay, so then we got together and on my own I put together the list, sent out letters to everybody inviting 'em to a certain day for a meeting to form a Japanese American Korean War vet group, and surprisingly, at the first meeting we got about forty guys. And I think every meeting since, even today, it's at least twenty, twenty-five guys that show up, so they're very, very active today. I've kind of dropped off because I've been doing the book writing and other things, but the Korean War vets are very, very active today.

MN: Now, were the Korean War vets, their names, were they supposed to be part of that Go For Broke Monument?

RW: Well, that was my contention. That was Sam Shimoguchi's and Jim's argument. Well, they didn't argue that point as much as I did. I refer to theirs as a monument. I refer to ours in the, in the memorial court as a memorial. Theirs is not a memorial because they're living. But when they were given the property by the city, in the proposal, a big, thick booklet proposal, it specifically said it would be to honor and memorialize the World War II veterans and Korean War veterans. That always was a stickler for me because it said "and Korean War vets," but their guys, without naming names, they had guys that were pushing for just living names on the monument. They insisted that the city made a mistake, that they didn't mean to include the Korean War. And that, to me that was totally wrong. So we had meetings after meetings. Harold Harada was one of the guys that was pretty strong, Jim Yamashita, myself, Sam Shimoguchi, we tried to argue, I tried to argue to just give us a little space on the back of the monument with those that were killed in Korea. That's all we'd like. "No, we can't do that. We can't. This is just for the living names." So it was a big argument, and one of the guys at one of our meetings just to really tell you what their thinking was at that time, one of the MIS guys told one of our guys that, "We don't have to honor those who died in the war because they didn't do the fighting. They died and didn't do the fighting because they were dead." And that was absolutely shocking to hear somebody say such a thing, because our motive, what we wanted to do was to honor and memorialize those who died. And then when we tried to even ask them to separate those that died on that monument from the living, they said no, they have to put 'em all in the same listing but they'll put some kind of symbol. I don't have the wish to go look at -- I've never seen that monument and I don't have intentions of seeing it, but I think they put some kind of symbol for those that were killed in action. In the meantime we formed our Korean War vet group and in a matter of a year we had raised two hundred thousand dollars to build our Memorial with all the Japanese names. A few years later Ed Nakata and Min Tonai were instrumental in our suggestion that we put up a memorial in Korea, and so we built one, the same type of memorial at the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea with the Memorial listing all the Japanese Americans that were killed in Korea. We've had a lot of good comments from the Korean people whoever see it. When they find out that Japanese Americans actually fought in Korea for their freedom and then when they see the names of how many were killed they have a lot of respect for the Japanese Americans. That was the intention of that memorial.

MN: Was it difficult to get permission from the South Korean government to build that memorial?

RW: Actually no. Min and Ed Nakata did a very good job of getting the permission, and to this day they're very close to a lot of the government officials of South Korea.

<End Segment 27> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.