Densho Digital Archive - Phil Shigekuni Interview

<Begin Segment 1>

SY: Okay, we're talking today to Phil Shigekuni at his home at North Hills, California. The date is August 29, 2011. I'm Sharon Yamato and the videographer is Tani Ikeda. So, Phil, let us start with talking a little bit about your family history and if you could tell me about your parents and where they were from originally.

PS: My family goes way back, so much so that I don't know that much about their arrival in this country because my mother is Sansei. She died about twenty years ago and she was seventy-six or so when she died and she didn't speak much Japanese. Her Nisei mother was very fluent Japanese and English and she obviously had my mother at a very early age and she was kind of ahead of her time, too, my grandmother, in that she was married three times. And so my mother was the result of her first marriage and after she had my mother, my grandmother got remarried and had three other children. And so my mother because of... I think there's a certain stigma attached to being remarried or to being divorced, never talked very much about it. And also the two of them didn't get along. Part of the reason I think my mother got married at such an early age, she had my sister at sixteen and had me at eighteen, was to get out of the house, and she married this man. So there were some family problems where my mother finally got a divorce and moved down to San Diego, didn't want to connect with her mother who was living in Los Angeles. So it was a very... my sister had a birthday the other day, she turned seventy-nine, and we sang "Happy Birthday" to her and all in the restaurant. And I told some of the people around who were at the celebration that my sister and I got very close because when my mother moved down to San Diego, she took a job I think as a waitress and couldn't afford a babysitter. So she put my sister in charge and my sister couldn't have been more than five or six and I was a year and half younger than she. So I just remember being locked up in this room all day.

SY: But it's so unusual really... the thing that really strikes me is the fact that your mother was so young and that your grandmother was so young when she came to this country.

PS: Well, she was born in this country.

SY: Rather, I'm sorry, yeah.

PS: My grandmother was born in this country.

SY: The fact that she was a Nisei so her parents obviously came to this country at a really, really early time.

PS: They were here at the turn of the century.

SY: At the turn of the century and then she was born, I would imagine her parents were fairly young when she was born as well.

PS: Yeah.

SY: And then your mother must have been born when your grandmother was fairly young.

PS: Yeah, very young parenting.

SY: So now where did your grandparents -- so you don't know who your grandfather is?

PS: Just seen pictures.

SY: And where did they settle?

PS: They were in San Francisco and they were there when the earthquake hit in 1906 or 1907 and I guess they stayed up there because I was born in '34 in San Francisco so they somehow decided... at least my mother decided to stay in San Francisco after the earthquake.

SY: So if she was married and had your mother by 1906 then probably, right? Do you know when your mother was born? Oh yeah, she just passed away.

PS: Well, she was the same age as my dad, my stepfather and my stepfather I know was born in '15, 1915. So my mother was, I think she was 1914, 1915 something like that. So they were living in San Francisco at the time so it wasn't until after that that my mother moved down and my grandmother had already moved down and she had at that time her third marriage married a Dr. Miyamoto who is a physician and he had his practice in the Seinan area. And so after my mother struggled with the situation I just mentioned, she eventually broke down I guess and we came to live with my grandmother and her husband in the Seinan area close to Normandie and Thirty-fifth Street.

SY: And you were about how old at that time when you finally moved back?

PS: I started kindergarten so I must have been five.

SY: Again I go back to the fact that you were then considered Yonsei because your mother...

PS: Yeah, on my mother's side.

<Begin Segment 2>

PS: My father grew up in that same area but he didn't know my mother until we were sent to Santa Anita and so they became acquainted in Santa Anita.

SY: This was after you were born, this is your stepfather?

PS: Yes, right, and then we were sent... after about six months we went October of '42 to Amache, Colorado, and that's where my stepfather's family wound up also.

SY: And he was a Nisei?

PS: Yeah, he was Nisei, right.

SY: He was Nisei.

PS: His family had a wholesale nursery in that area, his dad was a gardener and fortunately my dad's hobby was racing hot rods and he was very good at it. He tested equipment for Vic Edelbrock who was a well-known racing guy, even until very recently he and I think his son were in the field of hopping up cars and racing equipment and all. So I remember when my... so my father was able to get a job as a mechanic in Milwaukee. As you probably know, even during the war we were able to leave the camps provided we didn't of course come back to the West Coast. So since he was able to get a job as a mechanic, that's where he established himself, he sent for us and then we took the train. He met us in Chicago and then we went to Milwaukee.

SY: So now this was your mother's second husband?

PS: Yeah, right, second marriage.

SY: So she eventually married another time after? She was married three times?

PS: No, no.

SY: No, it was your grandmother.

PS: Grandmother was married three times so my mother... this is just my second, my mother's second marriage.

SY: So do you know much about your real father?

PS: Well, my real father... it's kind of interesting because my mother was very angry at him and she never talked about him. Pictures that she had of him had his face blocked out so I never even got a chance to see what he looked like.

SY: He was Japanese American?

PS: Yes, right, he was living... he settled in Pennsylvania, he was working at a factory or something in Pennsylvania so when he retired at age sixty-five he got in his car and drove out to see us. He tried to contact us through our minister but I never heard anything about it, but anyways he shows up one day at this home, right over here in our family room and he doesn't turn out to be a very likeable person. He was a very, well, very talkative kind of fellow and he kind of went on and on and it's just not a very comfortable person. He turned to our daughters who were nine and ten or eight and nine or something about that and said, "I want you to call me Grandpa." And that gives you an idea as to kind of I guess you might call it insensitive kind of behavior. I mean, people just don't do those kinds of things, trying to establish a relationship, an instant relationship with somebody you haven't seen all these years. So he tried to maintain a relationship with me and I was cordial to him but I wasn't interested.

SY: Did he explain why it took him so long to get in touch with you? Or had he established his own family in Pennsylvania?

PS: Yeah, he had gotten remarried and, well, his story was he didn't know what happened to us during the war but he didn't try very hard to find us.

SY: And he had no problem with being sent to camp because he was on the East Coast?

PS: Yeah, right, and he didn't go to camp, of course. So that part of it I could understand and actually it was good that he was able to make the contact because I was able to meet the guy and realize here this is a guy my mother got a divorce from and I have to say I didn't blame her. [Laughs]

SY: And you had a fairly good relationship with your stepfather, the one that was in Milwaukee, the one that your mother met in camp.

PS: Yeah, he was a great guy, wonderful man, and I had a lot of respect for him and we got along well. He took us fishing a lot. He loved to fish.

SY: And they never had any more children so it was just you and your sister?

PS: Yeah, just me and my older sister and I think because my mother had such a bad experience with her mother and having half brothers and sisters, and her mother was not the most nurturing kind of person. She didn't want to have children, any more children, so that was part of the agreement I think once they got married.

SY: And your relationship with your grandmother, did you end up, when you came back from living in San Diego you ended up living with her?

PS: Grudgingly we got back together and my mother wasn't happy with the way... so my mother took a job at a fruit stand or something but she wasn't happy with the way my grandmother was raising us. So she moved us out in the middle of the night but then my grandmother was able to go to the elementary school which was right up the street and find out where we were living and so they patched things up I guess and so we moved. And so when the war broke out we were living with her.

SY: So you all ended up going to camp together?

PS: Yeah, we all wound up in Santa Anita together.

SY: So do you remember the... what are your memories of that particular time when you were being sent to camp? You were quite young so I imagine you don't remember too much.

PS: Well, I wasn't that young. I was eight. I remember pretty much what went on. I think because of not wanting to alarm and upset the children, most parents tried to stay calm. They knew that if they showed that they were frightened or upset then that wouldn't be good for the kids. Although my grandmother that we were living with, she became more active in the Christian church and I remember one thing she did when we were getting packed up to leave. She put on each of our suitcases a little label that she had typed out: "Heaven is my destination." So that was alarming because I knew that you went to heaven after you died so I immediately thought, "Well, are we going to die?" and so that's the one thing I remember. Aside from seeing the massive garage sales that were going on in the neighborhood looking up and down the street and seeing where all the Japanese lived because they had stuff in front of their houses for sale. They had their coffee tables full of all their knickknacks and the refrigerators and the whole thing in front of their house for people to come down.

<Begin Segment 3>

SY: And this was predominantly... maybe we should back up and talk a little bit about the Seinan area, it was predominantly Japanese American?

PS: It was black and Japanese American.

SY: And what part of Los Angeles was that?

PS: That was Normandie and close to Normandie between Jefferson Street and Exposition.

SY: And Seinan is translated as?

PS: Seinan means, I believe, I found this out fairly recently, "Southwest."

SY: So it's just a geographical --

PS: Geographical, I found out there's a Seinan in Japan. It's just the area but there's a certain esprit de corps that developed for people who lived in that area and people stay in touch even today. I remember on Thirty-fifth Place and Normandie there was a Methodist church that continued to be there until even after the war for several years before it moved down to little Tokyo on I think about Third and Alameda. And then my dad had a gas station for about two years right after the war and that was on the corner of Thirty-sixth Place and Normandie. I remember right across the street was John Naka, a well-known bonsai expert and then right up the street was the Senshin Buddhist church and on the other side of that was the elementary school I went to, Thirty-seventh Street School. And then going back west from Normandie was the judo dojo where I took judo for about six months.

SY: So it was really predominantly Japanese American?

PS: And then farther down on Thirty-sixth Place was Twin Cleaners that was run by a well-known brothers, well-known twins, Lyle and Lane Nakano.

SY: Oh, that was why it was called Twin Cleaners, how funny.

PS: They used to, I remember seeing them come around in their van to pick up cleaning. They provided that service at that time.

SY: 'Cause now it's really predominantly African American, black, that whole area.

PS: Yeah, it's Latino, black.

SY: Completely, Latino, black. And maybe a few Japanese families left there.

PS: I don't think many. Most of them moved out towards Crenshaw, the Crenshaw area.

SY: So it's a little bit --

PS: Yeah, farther west.

SY: West.

PS: Yeah, right. Not too many.

<Begin Segment 4>

SY: I'm sorry, we should probably back up. I never got the names of your parents. Your mother's name was?

PS: Lillian, my mother was Lillian and her stepfather's name or my grandmother married a Dr. Miyamoto, and Dr. Miyamoto had his family the San Fernando Valley. He was from Tottori-ken and Tottori was largely established and had roots in the San Fernando Valley so that was the connection.

SY: So did she take your... Dr. Miyamoto's last name? Did your mother?

PS: Yeah, so I went... I kind of assumed that name for a while. In fact, I think when I went to... I had that name for quite a while. When I went to school, starting kindergarten at Thirty-seventh Street School I used Miyamoto and then I think my sister did also. And when we were in camp we were registered as Miyamoto. We were kind of an oddity in that no one was divorced in camp so they didn't quite know what to do with us. So at first they had us all together and --

SY: You mean your grandmother?

PS: Yeah, my grandmother, my mother and then finally we found separate lodging in a different block.

SY: So did you feel a kind of a little strange because of your mother's situation? I mean, was that uncomfortable for you as a child growing up in this sort of more of a maternal atmosphere?

PS: Yeah, I didn't give it much thought but in Santa Anita for some reason I was... there were some older boys who wanted to see me fight this guy about my age and the guy was I think the youngest in his family, Makoto Mizukami was his name and he came from family of boys. So they were after me to fight this guy and this guy, he made threatening gestures to me for no particular... I didn't even know the guy it was really strange. I could understand it if we had words or there was some kind of conflict between us that caused this but there was no particular reason. I think it was a matter of boredom. People are just looking for something to occupy themselves. There was nothing to do. Schools were not established in that time, it was just six months so it was a temporary arrangement. So we got together, I threw a couple of punches that didn't land and he did the same and it was all over. But then my mother realized that she felt as though she wanted to do something but she felt kind of helpless. So she asked this Christian minister, George Takaya I remember his name... and he died fairly recently. His advice was, "You have to let him fight his own battles," so that wasn't very reassuring to her. So I think she felt the need to find a father for me and my sister, Evelyn. So I think that was... and then of course he had an out from camp, he did have the skill, he was able to get the job, and so she took that opportunity.

SY: And what was his name?

PS: Tunney, T-U-N-N-E-Y. He was also athletic; he was a boxer. And he got the name Tunney because one of his friends gave him the name of Gene Tunney.

SY: So it was a nickname?

PS: Yeah, his name was Tsuneo.

SY: And his last name was?

PS: Shigekuni.

SY: Oh, so then you took --

PS: Right, so I adopted that name.

SY: I see.

PS: So just like I picked up Miyamoto I adopted Shigekuni even though it wasn't legally mine and I didn't find that out until I went into the army and I had to get a security clearance. I was stationed in Camp Carson right outside of Colorado Springs. I had to go into town in Colorado Springs and go to court and legally have it changed so I could get the security.

SY: Your legal name was Miyamoto? What was your legal name?

PS: Well, on my birth certificate it was Morisue, M-O-R-I-S-U-E. So that was legally my name.

SY: And that was your father's name?

PS: Yeah, my birth father, my natural father.

SY: Yeah, that must have been interesting having to go through all that.

PS: Yeah, it was quite an experience. Actually, my so-called natural father really as much as I found him obnoxious, he did us a favor because -- I mentioned to you this before -- that he had mentioned the thing that broke up the family was that my mother had run away with this man. And through a series of coincidences my sister was able to connect with a man who knew this man that my mother had run away with. And it was in the state of, I think it was in Nevada or Utah, but anyway he had this picture of this man with my mother along with another woman that we couldn't identify but it was amazing because this man looked very much like me, more than the guy who showed up on our doorstep. So I'm convinced that this man who was purported to be half Filipino was my natural father, so my sister and I have different fathers.

SY: And she never married that man that she ran away with.

PS: No, so that was kind of what precipitated the divorce. So the interesting thing is that this man who shows up, my supposed natural father, brings up this whole thing. I didn't even know about it and because he has a big mouth, fortunately he told us the whole story. But then he says that my mother said that he was not my father. And this man had a big ego so he says, "Oh, no, I know that I was your father." It wasn't even an issue for me but then since he brought it up I thought well, gee. So then I started thinking about it and looking at my birth certificate, of course, it does say Morisue, his name. However, my middle name is Masanori and he told me that this man that my mother ran away with was named Mas. I don't know his full name but his name was Mas. The other clue that my mother left was my name, Philip, "Filipino." It just clicked with me that my mother was trying to tell me but I could never... I found about this while she was still living, however my mother had problems with depression, it was very difficult for my stepfather to really live with her but I give him a lot of credit because he stayed with her and was very understanding of her. But I couldn't put myself in the position of asking her to make her more depressed. Although I think she probably would have told me, but it's one thing that I somewhat regret but I think if I had to do it again I probably wouldn't have asked her. I suppose I knew.

SY: It was clear.

PS: And it was good. I mean, all and all it was a good thing that I met this man because I could get an understanding of my mother's motivations for doing what she did, and I don't hold it against her. And I think because she needed to get out of the house to get away from her mother, and I had contact with her mother, my grandmother and I could see what kind of person she was. I could understand all that was going on and I could see that because of my grandmother's personality that she wasn't a good person to raise a family. So I could understand my mother made some bad choices, obviously some bad choices.

SY: Yeah, probably kind of courageous choices too because at the time it was probably very unheard of to be, again, to get divorced, to remarry, all of that.

PS: Right.

SY: But then that was also a model that was set by her mother.

PS: Yeah.

SY: Which was probably even more unusual.

PS: Yeah, and my sister has gotten a divorce so you know there's been some research I think, and so I think the tradition kind of gets carried on.

SY: And you really don't know anything about your grandmother's divorce?

PS: No, nothing. My mother never, never talked about it but I know that even her third marriage was not a very stable marriage.

<Begin Segment 5>

SY: And when did she pass away? When did your grandmother pass away?

PS: You know I don't know the year but I think it was back in the early '60s someplace. She was seventy-five, seventy-six or so, about the same age as my mother.

SY: So you kind of lost contact when you went to Minneapolis, did you lose contact with your grandmother when your family moved?

PS: At what point did we lose contact with my grandmother?

SY: Yeah, I'm asking that, do you remember? I was thinking when your stepfather after the war moved to Minneapolis.

PS: To Milwaukee.

SY: I'm sorry, Milwaukee.

PS: We lived in Milwaukee.

SY: Okay so in Milwaukee then you lost contact?

PS: No, no we knew where my grandmother was. We stayed in contact, we wrote letters and all.

SY: Okay and then you were there for how long?

PS: For two years during the war.

SY: Two years.

PS: So that's one of the reasons we decided to move back. It's not as though we were moving back not knowing anybody and I'll have to say that my mother's stepfather, Dr. Miyamoto, was good enough to lend them money so that they could start the gas station. So I give him credit for that. He was a good man, Dr. Miyamoto was a good man, very kind man.

SY: Not very many doctors in the area.

PS: No.

SY: One of the first probably, physicians, right, he was a physician?

PS: Yeah, he was a very spunky guy. He went to San Fernando High, graduated from San Fernando High. He was a very short man but had a lot of drive. Actually he was an osteopath at first, he went to school of osteopathy and then things were changed and the osteopaths were able to become MDs so that's what he did. He became an MD after that was possible.

SY: So he was Issei or Nisei?

PS: He was Nisei.

SY: He was Nisei. So getting back to you're half Yonsei and probably half Nisei?

PS: Yeah, on my stepfather's side. My natural father was Nisei I believe.

SY: So half Sansei, half Sansei, half Yonsei.

PS: My mother was probably more influential in shaping me and my attitudes although yeah, she was very liberal in her viewpoints, her outlook, but it didn't carry over for me. I did pick up on it a little bit was when I remember during the Vietnam War she was very much upset at what was going on and how we were involved in Vietnam and how we should be getting out and all. And I was not political at all so she was upset at me that I was un-phased, I was unwilling to take a stand. It wasn't until I got involved with Paul Tsuneishi, you know, I showed you his interview that I did with him that we put down.

SY: This was much, much later, you were --

PS: Much, much later back in the mid-'70s.

SY: Right.

PS: So in the process of redress is when I got socially active and Paul was --

SY: I was going to say just to back up because we'll get into that but so would you consider your mother very liberal activist or just very liberal?

PS: Just very liberal. She just stayed at home, she did a lot of reading. She was very bright woman but her eyes were very bad so she... that kept her from really doing very much, couldn't go to school or anything. So amazingly back in Milwaukee contact lens came out and her eyes could not be corrected by normal means because he had scars on her retina, but contact lens saved her. She was able to get good vision.

SY: That's great.

<Begin Segment 6>

SY: But now your family was at the same time was very religious, right? Your mother and grandmother, would you consider them?

PS: No, not my mother but my grandmother.

SY: Your grandmother was very religious. Now sort of describe...

PS: Well, she was somewhat religious I guess. She taught me things from the Bible, Bible verses. To this day she taught me the 23rd Psalm that I find it comforting, I use it to meditate, to go to sleep. So she had some positive things that she instilled in me.

SY: Because that stayed with you.

PS: Yeah, right.

SY: And I assume that your mother was but was she Christian, did she believe?

PS: Yeah, she attended the Holiness church with us after the war, after I became more active but wouldn't call her religious at all.

SY: I see. So the Holiness church was something that your grandmother first --

PS: Yeah, there was a church on Thirty-fifth Street or Thirty-fifth Place right across the street from the big elementary school there just south of Western. And that church was rather fundamentalist evangelical type church.

SY: And was it interracial?

PS: No, it was a Japanese American church.

SY: Japanese American church.

PS: Yeah, the Holiness denomination is fairly interesting because it's the only indigenous Japanese denomination. That is, it wasn't attached to a Caucasian group like the Baptists or Methodists or the Presbyterians. It was founded by some people in Japan and they came over here. So yeah, I became more active in the church after I left high school so that was a positive thing for me and fortunately when I got a job teaching in the valley we transferred our membership to the San Fernando Holiness Church. But then about the mid-70s the pastor decided he wanted to start to work more towards the western part of the valley which he did. Ren Kimura was his name, Reverend Ren Kimura and so we were struggling along in that vein for years. The people who joined this didn't want to become Holiness people so we were non-denominational for over ten years. We finally again through Paul, Paul Tsuneishi, we got chartered as a Methodist church and it's been a good move for me. I just am very thankful for... another reason I'm thankful to Paul because he was activists and he got us going in the Methodist church. The Methodist church I think is... I feel very comfortable in because it's more open, more accepting of people and it's a big, a much larger tent, it's accepting of people who have a wide range of beliefs and I'm on the left end. I'm in the liberal end of the Methodist church.

SY: So all those years that you were going to the Holiness church it wasn't really considered... you said it was evangelical without having the name?

PS: No, it was a Holiness church.

SY: Oh, okay.

PS: The L.A. Holiness church and then when we moved to the valley it was the San Fernando Valley Holiness church.

SY: Okay.

PS: It's a huge operation. They're doing very well and they have a lot of young people, Sunday school and the whole thing. Whereas in contrast the church I'm attending now in Chatsworth it's one that has always been very small, mainly seniors, in fact I'd say about a hundred percent seniors. And we merged with a struggling white church, the Chatsworth church that was established, probably one of the oldest churches in the valley.

SY: I see.

PS: So it's worked out well. It's helped me personally I think deal with some of my hangups that I've had. Because I've worked with white people all my life but never felt comfortable. So it's forced me to come to grips with that part and so it's been good for me.

SY: Because your church is very mixed ethnically.

PS: Yeah, it's some old...

<Begin Segment 7>

SY: And where did that feeling of not feeling comfortable around white people, can you sort of trace that back to camp?

PS: Camp I think and growing up during the war, all the racism during the war.

SY: So you remember that?

PS: Oh, yeah, it surrounded you. If you're at war with a country, all the propaganda is towards the enemy. I thought about it, to cause people to want to kill some other people, you have to motivate people. You can't look at people and say, "Hey, these people are like us, so go out and kill them," you have to make them hateful. You have to make them subhuman so you can pull the trigger and kill this person and think you're doing the right thing for your country. And so with that going, and I happened to be the same race as the enemy, so much so that they put me in a concentration camp, it was hard to feel good about being who I was and hard to feel comfortable around people who had... who are programming in this way. Ideally, theoretically I knew better, that they're probably, okay and yet that feeling existed and still to this day exists to a certain extent. I think it's... I was a counselor, I was trained as a high school counselor and I did a little... you had to take courses and learn about human behavior, and the term I think is neuroticism. You're neurotic if you are living today as if condition exists today as they existed in the past. That's what it is, I'm not living in... those people who discriminated against me, those people who had the negative feelings towards Japanese, they're gone or... I don't have to deal with them anymore and yet those tapes exist in my mind that still haunt me. So I've had to deal with it and being part of a religious group that at least has it's ideals getting along and loving everyone and yet having exposure to being able to be myself and be who I am as Japanese, it's been tricky. It's been difficult to look at myself as an American, being loyal to this country, being in the army for two years. I signed on the dotted line. If they sent me over there to die for this country I would have done it. That was my duty as an American citizen. And yet on the other hand being conflicted having this country turn its back on me and throw all this racist stuff at me, it was difficult for me to feel good about being who I was as an American and as a Japanese person. And I had to really dig it, looking around and seeing that I'm okay being both. And it's kind of hard to explain to people but part of maturing I think has allowed me to look back and take a good look at where I've come from.

<Begin Segment 8>

SY: So did you actually enlist in the army?

PS: No, it was during the draft time.

SY: And was there a war going on at the time?

PS: No, it was peace time. It was kind of in between the Korean War and the Vietnam War. But I was able to... they had an army reserve deal if you were within a certain age I think, eighteen, above eighteen you could enlist as reserve and then go active from the reserves at a higher rank. So I went in as a corporal, so what you do is you go active from the reserve and the time that you go in of course you get credit for as if you were drafted. So could either sit around and wait until you get the papers to be drafted or you could do what I did and go in as a reserve.

SY: So where did you serve during that time?

PS: Oh, I was in Colorado, Colorado Springs.

SY: The whole two years?

PS: Right outside of Colorado Springs, I was there for the whole time.

SY: At the time was that fairly routine? What are your memories of that period?

PS: Well, not much. I was a personnel specialist, just typing records, interviewing people and pretty routine stuff. And I guess the positive part of it is that we were right outside of Colorado Springs so it was kind of a resort area, Pike's Peak and Garden of the Gods and it was a nice pleasant place to be in the off hours.

SY: And so when did you, while serving in the army did you have thoughts about the whole war experience for -- I mean was that something that being Japanese American, having gone through this camp experience, and was that any kind of motivation for you to actually be a good soldier or was it just a matter of course?

PS: Well, at that time there was no, there was nothing around dealing with what it meant to be Japanese or Japanese American so I just, like you say, it's a matter of course. This is the way, you're an American you do the American thing. But so I knew what it meant to be an American, you have to be loyal you have to do what your obligations are. If all the men of a certain age are eligible for the draft, well, you go in. There's no question about it.

<Begin Segment 9>

SY: So when did that awareness of being Japanese American, having gone through what your family went through, when did that start to become more of an issue for you?

PS: Well, I had a chance to get a good look at myself, I went to a human relations camp, I was on the staff for ten years. It was called Brotherhood Camp, Brotherhood USA.

SY: And was it connected to a church?

PS: No, it was sponsored by the National Conference of Christians and Jews, NCCJ. It was held up in the mountains, it was held at different places but when I got involved with it it was between '73 and '83 and it was held at Pilgrim Pines which is a camp that is owned by the United Church of Christ up above Yucaipa. It's apple country. You go up the hills and there are apple groves that were up there. So it was a program that helped high school kids come to terms with who they were.

SY: And you were how old then?

PS: Well, I was an adult, I was a counselor, upper forties I think, forty-eight, forty-nine. And so there was extensive training before we would work with the kids. And the training involved looking at oneself ethnically, so we had a multiracial group of the staff, the Asians, the blacks, Latinos and whites and few Native Americans. So we sat around and I was able to talk to other Asian Americans, Japanese, and talk about what it meant to be Asian Americans, talk about terminology. You want to be called Asian, you want to be called Oriental, what do you want to be called? And so we kind of parsed the whole issue, Asian you're talking about a place where the Orientals is kind of nebulous and the difference between the two terms and so forth. So it gave me a chance to look at myself and look at what it meant to be Asian and to think about my experience and how my experience in this country had an effect of making me not like my Japanese-ness because of the war experience and come to terms with that. And also come to terms with other Asians. I was always indoctrinated growing up from my, mainly from my grandmother, Japanese are at the top, somewhere down the ladder is the Chinese, then the Koreans, at the bottom of the ladder are the Filipino, so I mean geez. So it was kind of a hierarchy or who and where you were and so I realized that was not the kind of thing that I wanted to cling to. So that was part of the training, so after the different groups talked about who what it meant to be who they were Latinos, the black people, then we kind of got together and we talked about, kind of shared information. So it was a very growth producing experience for me. I got more out of it than the kids because I think I'd been through more insofar as having to face being who I was. So it was just a week each summer for ten years, but I profited a great deal and actually some of the people who were there with me, they didn't work as long as I did but some well-known people like Ron Wakabayashi was on the staff there.

SY: Active in the JACL.

PS: Karl Nobuyuki, the former national director. Alan Kumomoto was on staff, Mark Ridley Thomas was there with the person he eventually married.

SY: So there was a Japanese American contingency that was there at this --

PS: No, they weren't all there at the same time but they went through the same experience I did. It dawned on me that Yellow Brotherhood was a very well-known experience, and I'm just wondering -- and Ron Wakabayashi once came to our JACL chapter to tell us about his experience in organizing Yellow Brotherhood, I was just wondering if his experience at Brotherhood Camp was -- I'm sure it had some carryover as to what caused him to organize Yellow Brotherhood.

SY: So really having grown up around other Japanese Americans, but did you feel close to that community or were you also a little not -- where did you feel like you fit in terms of the people that you grew up with and the people that you associated with after as you became an adult?

PS: Japanese, really by default. I mean for one thing when you have segregated housing you don't have much choice, you're there with the Japanese, I mean, you can't get away. All the events are all connected there and then you go to a Japanese church and it's all Japanese.

SY: So you're the most comfortable in that setting?

PS: Oh, yeah, right.

SY: And this human relations event every year helped you open up to others?

PS: Yeah, it helped me to separate myself and have a more sense of identity, a better sense of who I was as a Japanese American and to understand myself better. In very blunt terms, it's to grow up in times of war when you are the enemy, it's easy to get self-hatred, it's easy to internalize rejection of who you are. And that's where I was coming from and it was hard for me to admit that to myself and yet I can understand myself and I can say hey, that makes sense. If I didn't, there would be something wrong with me, I mean but it's something like a form a therapy you have to realize you're okay. So some of your attitudes and some of your ways of looking at things is understandable that you turned out that way but you don't have to continue that way.

<Begin Segment 10>

SY: I wanted to back up just a little and talk about when you came back to Los Angeles after the war. We didn't mention what you ended up going to high school in the Seinan area?

PS: Yes.

SY: So that was all... your high school education was all postwar?

PS: Yes, right. I went to... I came back in junior high school I was about seventh or eighth grade. At Foshay junior, Foshay Junior High School is just north of Exposition, close to Western, right at Western and Exposition and Exposition was more or less the color line. North of Exposition was black and Asian, and south was white by law. So my folks tried to buy a home on Thirty-seventh Place which was a couple of blocks north of Exposition which was still in the prohibited zone, that is the zone that had restrictive covenants in the deeds to the house, which prohibited the owner from selling to somebody other than another white person. So in 1947, I believe, we moved in and I remember this white man who was going door to door soliciting the white people in the neighborhood to sign a petition to force us to move out. So it was a very... it made an impression on me to think that somebody would have that kind of power once we were moved in to force us to move out because the widow, the white widow that sold us this house had violated law because she couldn't sell it to anybody other than a white person. So fortunately the Supreme Court made a decision largely due to Thurgood Marshall that made the restrictive covenants in the deeds to the homes unconstitutional. And after that point the complexion of the neighborhood... the color line vanished and it just revolutionized things.

SY: So you ended up staying there?

PS: Yeah, we didn't have to move. But you know, I think it's these kinds of things that are part of the impression that is made on people who are impressionable and I was thirteen or fourteen coming out of a camp that you were put into because of who you are. Coming back to a situation where somebody's trying to force you to move, who you are, it affects you, it makes you have second thoughts about your identity and so that was another part of it.

SY: And even though then most of your friends were Asian right or other JAs?

PS: Yes.

SY: And Foshay was... since it was in this --

PS: Yeah, I look at their annual and it was, gee, about half and half. I mean I would say majority white. They all came from south of Exposition.

SY: So then when you graduated from high school where...

PS: I went to Manual Arts. My sister, it was very common practice for people to use someone else's address who lives in the area where the school you wanted to go to so my sister... I was living in Manual's area so I went to Manual Arts High School where there were very few nonwhite people. My sister went to Poly, most of the Asian kids went to Poly. That was before Poly moved out to the valley. They were on Flower and downtown someplace.

SY: So your sister and you went to separate high schools?

PS: Yeah. I kind of regret not going to Poly. I don't know why I did but I did. I guess the people I knew had gone to Manual or were going to Manual and they seemed to like it but I was a very poor student. I was not motivated. I got B's, never cracked a book, I was very conscientious I carried my books home every night but never looked at 'em. [Laughs] So I was not a very good student. I don't know just to what extent it was a function of my identity or just what it was but I... and then my parents were not getting along that well. I think that probably added to it. So, but anyways, I graduated from Manual, went to LACC for a year or two.

SY: Community college.

PS: Yeah, the community college, Los Angeles City College up on Vermont and went to work. My dad was working at North American Aviation which eventually moved out to the valley, became Atomics International and then became North American Rockwell, but anyways he was working there and so he did that for a few years. Well, actually it was fairly interesting what happened is this... when he had a gas station, he met this white man who he got to know very well, Jerry Fowler, I still remember his name. He had a job at North American as a machinist so he offered to get my dad a job and so my dad, he was giving up the gas station so he said yes. And my dad had no experience on the machine but he was clever, he could pick anything up. So he put in a good word, my dad got a job there, the only nonwhite person in the whole place. And eventually he got his brother-in-law in, my mother's half-brother, and he got my sister's husband in, my brother-in-law. And so we got our foot in the door but I could see the need for affirmative action because there may not be necessarily an intent to discriminate against people but people get jobs because they know other people. And the people you know if they're all white those are the people who are going to get jobs. And the reason my uncle and my brother-in-law were able to get in is because they knew my dad. And so of course it helps if you're capable of course, if you can do the job, so I've always been a firm believer in affirmative action because you got to break the barriers down somehow and that's the only way to do it, to firmly change things.

SY: So he managed to have a fairly good living, your father then?

PS: Yeah, we did okay, he was on a swing shift and I remember he would be sleeping in the morning when I went to school, and then of course they were having problems getting along and so that made it difficult.

<Begin Segment 11>

SY: So when you were going to LACC you still lived at home and then did you eventually... when you went into the army is that when you left home?

PS: Yeah, that's when I left home. I worked for North American Aviation where my dad was working for one summer and one semester, but that was a good experience for me because it motivated me. I realized that it was not the thing I wanted to do the rest of my life. I wasn't very good with working with my hands anyways and so I knew that I was a misfit. And so when I went back to school I went, for a semester or two I did much better. I was still not an outstanding student but I got by. I did okay. And then went into the army for a couple years as I mentioned in Colorado and then came back and much better motivated. By then Los Angeles State College it was called at that time was using the facilities at LACC so I took a couple of courses there and then they moved out to where they're located now and then during the Reagan years it got changed to Cal State Los Angeles. So I graduated from there in 1958, became a biology teacher, got a job in the valley. And then went into counseling after a couple of years but that was a good move for me because I enjoyed working directly with people.

SY: So when you were in college you knew you wanted to be a teacher?

PS: Yeah, I decided I wanted to be a science teacher.

SY: And you wanted to be in science.

PS: Yeah, so I taught biology, biology and physiology. Yeah, I enjoyed teaching physiology, teaching science is a lot of work, if you don't have help there's a lot of setting up to do. And then you have to deal with the papers and it was just... so I was glad to have gone to go into counseling and I enjoyed working with the kids.

SY: And that was something that you were able to do without any kind of additional courses?

PS: Then you had to take classes to get a degree, to get a credential.

SY: So most of your working career was as a counselor then?

PS: Yes, I was at Cleveland High School for thirty-two years, one school, never changed schools.

SY: Wow.

PS: And then I had kind of a run-in with the head counselor and so I went into Special Ed and so I was itinerant Special Ed counselor until I retired for about two or three years. And that was good; it allowed me to travel around. I was able to, one of my schools was Fairfax High School and I got acquainted with Kay Ochi who very active in the NCRR and so that's been a good relationship. I was able to meet with her and have some contact.

SY: And in your role as a counselor what kind of work did that involve?

PS: It was general guidance counseling.

SY: So kids would come to you --

PS: Career counseling and part of it I taught a class in guidance. It was a ten-week course in guidance that came opposite of driver's education, driver's education used to be mandatory by the state. So they had this and it wasn't a whole semester deal so they had to do something with the other ten weeks so it was a class called guidance. And so we were able to basically get the kids in the class who I was counselor to, and I was counselor to people who were within a certain alphabetical area, towards the end of the alphabet. So it worked out pretty well, I was able to see the kids in class who were going to be my counselees and then I was their counselor until they graduated so I enjoyed it. It was good work.

SY: And you ended up retiring after thirty-two years.

PS: Yeah, thirty-five years total.

SY: Thirty-five years, wow.

PS: Yeah, that itinerant counseling was interesting. What I did was I worked with the Special Ed kids and I was what they called a least restrictive environment counselor so I'd go in to make sure that kind of liaison between the student and the parents and the teacher to make sure that the kid was in the right place. Because the kid could either be in a Special Ed class where there were only maybe six or eight students to the class or they could be in a pull out program where they're sitting in a regular class, pulled out as special needs to get special attention.

SY: So these were academic issues?

PS: Yeah, academic issues mainly so I was able to do that. I was able to travel around and go to different schools so that was a good ending to my career which I liked.

<Begin Segment 12>

SY: And during all those years you were extracurricular, you were active in the church?

PS: Oh, yeah.

SY: Was that --

PS: Right, I stayed active I was teaching Sunday school at the Holiness church for many years and in fact one of my students was Bill Watanabe of --

SY: Little Tokyo Center, how nice. Can you sort of describe what the Holiness church, the methodology, the theory?

PS: It's an evangelical church. It places a great deal of emphasis on the literal interpretation of the Bible and it focuses on the portions of the scripture that have to do with certain things that you need to do to be a Christian. You need to accept Christ, you need to confess your sins and in order to be a Christian you had to do these things and if you did these things then you were a Christian, you were saved. And then once you're in the loop with other Christians, then it was your obligation to go out and convert other people because if you didn't the consequences were dire, of course. So I was in that mold for many years.

SY: And when you say it was all... your church then was all Japanese American, right?

PS: Yes, that was first the L.A. church and then the Holiness church in the valley.

SY: And when did the Holiness church start here?

PS: Oh, gosh it got started many, many years, well before the war.

SY: So way before the war.

PS: Yeah, in the '20s sometime, some real pioneering people.

SY: So it had no relationship to Japanese Americans trying to stay together as a group or it was purely Christian origin?

PS: Yeah, right, started in Japan.

SY: And still very, very big here.

PS: Oh, yeah, and still very big and still very conservative.

SY: How many Holiness churches are there in the area do you know?

PS: Gee, there's one in San Jose, mainly in southern California. I would guess maybe six or eight, something like that. There's one in San Diego, in West Covina, so I feel very good that Paul, largely through Paul, we became Methodists. And as I mentioned it's a much more open church.

SY: And that was something that Paul Tsuneishi was looking for that?

PS: He initiated it right. He got together with the pastor at the Centenary Methodist Church who was at that time was George Nishikawa and George told us what to do and we eventually did it.

SY: And it was with the express purpose of becoming less restrictive.

PS: To become Methodist, United Methodist.

SY: To become Methodist knowing that the Methodist church is more liberal or less --

PS: Well, I don't think that was necessarily our intent but one of the things that happened when Reverend Kimura, who died a few years ago, he wanted to start another church because he felt that he wanted a church in the western part of the valley. But the people who came could have gone to the Holiness church but they chose not to so they weren't about to become Holiness so these people were Presbyterians or Methodists, they were other denominations, so they felt more comfortable fitting into to the Methodist framework and so that's because the Methodists had a more liberal outlook. One of the examples of the persons that joined with us was somebody who was kind of on the fringes at the Holiness church that I knew and I asked him why he wasn't more active at the Holiness church before he became active at our church, the Methodist church. And to this day he's one of the pillars of our church. And he told me very out, he said, "I couldn't come to grips with the fact that my mother who was Buddhist was doomed. If I didn't reach her and convert her it was too bad," and he couldn't accept that. So that's the good news of the more liberal churches, not only the Methodist churches but some of the more liberal wings of the Presbyterians and so forth.

SY: Did the Holiness church though stay very racially... all Japanese American?

PS: Mainly.

SY: And then when you turned Methodist did that open it up to other...

PS: No, the Methodist churches are largely ethnic, the ones that I know of. Centenary is, you know, it's right in J-town, it's starting to get a few non-Japanese but it's basically still a Japanese church.

SY: Japanese church.

PS: And West L.A. is basically Japanese church. It's probably the largest ones in the area but I feel a lot more comfortable with the Methodist people. They don't have a lot of the trappings of traditional Christianity, but I'm comfortable, I think.

<Begin Segment 13>

SY: And you said that's where met your wife at the --

PS: No, I met her in the Holiness church.

SY: So you met her in the Holiness church.

PS: Back in the mid-'50s, so we became... so she was baptized in the Holiness church so when I got my job in '58 in the valley we came out, we continued on with the Holiness church, both of us. And so when we pulled apart and became Methodists, Marion was with me the whole way. But she has a Buddhist background.

SY: So she was the only one in her family that was in the Holiness church?

PS: Yeah, largely because of my influence. Yeah, I was really wrapped up in the church and she probably felt that she either became part of the church or maybe we wouldn't have had a relationship. I don't know. I haven't thought about that very much but everything turned out.

SY: And when you were part of the Holiness church that's when you started your family?

PS: Yeah, our daughters were born in '61, '62, and so we didn't break away from the Holiness church until the mid-70s.

SY: So they grew up in the church too then.

PS: Yes, and our younger daughter had some bad experiences with the theology, so to this day she doesn't feel too kindly towards what happened to her in the Holiness church. Whereas the older daughter, the attorney in San Francisco, she's with an evangelical Chinese church and so there's certain things we don't talk about very much, one of them is homosexuality. She's pretty liberal... she's very liberal in all other ways but when it comes to that field.

SY: And that's influenced by the church, by her church do you think?

PS: Yeah.

SY: So is that part of the evangelical --

PS: Basically, yeah, they feel that homosexuality is not a choice if people chose their lifestyle to be that way, so it's just completely -- but anyways we don't talk about that too much. But ironically that's the one issue that I feel most strongly about and that's the direction that I'm headed now with my faith, that I think is important to help people come to grips with who they are and feel okay, feel good about who they are and not feel that they have to hide it the rest of their lives. And I run into people like I found out recently about this man Mel Fujikawa, age fifty-six he finally came out of the closet last year. When he was a minister at the Baptist church, the Evergreen Baptist Church in south San Gabriel he was choir director at that church and I guess there were rumors about him being gay so he finally got in front of the church and said, "No, I'm not gay." And then last year he had in the meantime moved up to northern California and on "coming out day" which happens in early October every year he came out and he's just a changed man. He doesn't have a job but he seems a lot happier. And I think I see that as kind of the tip of iceberg. And I met last week with Iku Kiriyama's daughter, Tracy. And we met at Mitsuru Restaurant in J-town and we talked about this thing that you mentioned, the intergenerational meeting that's going to be sponsored by the historical society. I think it's a great idea because this one area is the one area that we need to get the generations together because... I think largely because of the internet. Young people are pretty comfortable going in the direction of openness and they meet together and all but their parents and grandparents, they're out of the loop. And unfortunately at the meeting that we had at Mitsuru last week, I asked them what's happening with them. He said, well, typically what happens is that the kid who's gay or transsexual will get on the internet and they'll make connections. So they meet at restaurants and different occasions and so amongst themselves they're fine and that's good. The breakdown comes when there's no connection with the family because the same kind of "don't ask don't tell" thing. With the Japanese families there's a lot of feelings well, I don't want to embarrass them, you don't want it to get out to their friends, they're going to lose friends, friends are going to discriminate against them, just not rather. And on the other end, the parents are thinking, well, this kid is different, he doesn't date girls, he's only hanging around so I have my suspicions but I better not say anything, I don't want to upset him. And so this whole code of silence just continues and it goes on and on and on and so you wind up with this fifty-six year guy who's just coming out now.

SY: Right.

PS: That's tragic.

SY: And do you think it's particularly bad among Japanese Americans?

PS: Well, I went to a meeting at the legal center, the Asian Pacific Legal Center on Wilshire Boulevard, and they have a group of Asian gays and LGBT there and they put and Q in there too now. I asked them about that but -- for "queer."

SY: For "queer," yes.

PS: But it's mainly Chinese so I said, "What's going on here? Where are the Japanese, where are the Koreans, where are the Filipinos." So I asked one of the people at this meeting, Tracy's meeting and I said, "Well, is it because they don't get along with one another?" He said, "No, it's just a difference in approaches. They just rather get on the internet and socially meet with other Japanese who are gay." So these are the kinds of things that I think it would be helpful at this conference to talk about. How do we get people to come to grips with this so that we don't have these dual lives? Like they said, what happens is that typically is that these young people will move away from the area so they're out when they are moved away with their friends. Soon as they come home they're back in the closet again.

SY: It's probably largely having to do with their parents then.

PS: Yeah.

SY: Definitely generational an issue.

PS: Sure.

SY: So as a person in the parent's generation or the older generation, what prompted you to come up with this sort of desire to broach the subject which is probably a little, it's highly controversial, I would think.

PS: Oh, yeah. Well, it's something the Japanese don't want to talk about.

SY: But why you? Why did you come to this point where you feel a real need to talk about it?

PS: Well, I think it's largely a faith issue. How can I profess to love people and not deal with an issue where so many people are hurting? And the Methodist church, I've been active with the Methodists for Social Action, it's kind of a splinter group with the Methodists where we push for unpopular causes and that's one of our unpopular causes. Equal marriage and that sort of thing. In fact, I was very impressed with this group -- I wasn't there but two years ago at their annual conference that's held in Redlands every year, they got that group to vote to support no on eight.

SY: Proposition 8.

PS: And they did it because they worked on it for years. I mean, not specifically that issue, but working on helping people to understand the issue and putting a face to the issue. Like last year I had Harold, Harold Kameya, I don't know if you know Harold but he has a lesbian daughter, and there was a man by the name of Ed Hanson who is a retired minister who is gay, and he organized this Telling Our Stories project that went on at the annual conference where he had these gays and their partners who were in the church tell their stories. Very powerful. And I had Harold come out with Ellen... Ellen participated, too, telling her story about dealing with her lesbian daughter, because they were the only nonwhite people who were there but I thought it was important to let the conference know that there are Asians involved here too.

SY: So is that something that your church, the Methodist church is open to as well?

PS: Well, the church as a whole, the annual conference. But my church specifically it's not necessarily open. I had, during Lenten time last year before Easter, I had Harold and his wife come out and we had a small group discussion about their experience. So we had them come out, we had people from AA who meet at our church, they came out and told their story about recovery from alcoholism, and so these are the issues that I feel strongly about.

SY: I'm curious what kind of discussion you get from people when you broach these topics. Is there a general openness to it?

PS: Oh, yeah. The people who show up are the ones we are supporting. If somebody's anti they're not going to come through the door.

SY: So you haven't had much --

PS: No, it's one of those things.

<Begin Segment 14>

SY: Well, I want to back up a little because I always think of you in terms of being very active with unpopular causes. Would you say that it goes back to your involvement in the JACL?

PS: Yeah, it's involved with redress.

SY: You talk about a little bit about when you started with the JACL and what prompted you to get involved with the JACL?

PS: Well, it was largely a social thing at first. They have a Christmas party and back in the early '70s our kids were young, they were eleven or twelve and so we took them to the Christmas party. And then I got on the board and then redress came up and Paul got on the board, he became district governor of JACL. Talk about somebody who supported unpopular causes, I mean, he was on board for atom bomb survivors. He realized that people who were involved in the atom bombing, came over here, they didn't get support from our government. Our government wouldn't pay for any of their treatment. They had to go back to Japan to get treatment. And so he was one of the pioneers in that area. The issue of an apology to the draft resisters came up and he sponsored a couple of meetings there and he gets no credit for it but he was behind that. Talk about an unpopular cause in the community. But he finally got JACL to apologize for the treatment they gave to draft resisters. And then it turns out that his daughter we thought was a lesbian, it turns out she was bisexual, she came out to him, so being the kind of guy he took it in stride, no problem, she's doing fine. She was with this woman in a lesbian relationship, she dropped that, an Asian Japanese, another woman, she marries this black guy, she gets a divorce from the black guy, the guy was a principal of a school so he got her involved, she's now principal of the school, she's doing fine.

SY: So Paul, would you say that he was sort of a mentor to you?

PS: Yeah, very definitely. I'm not the initiator type, I'm a good follower, but it's somebody who inspires me like that I'll follow.

SY: So when you were in the JACL it was Paul who sort of pulled you along?

PS: Yeah, he's the one who got this EO9066 started.

SY: And that is maybe you can talk a little bit about EO9066 was.

PS: Paul was right on. He knew that we needed to start an organization for redress but there were a lot of anti-JACL people out there who would never come near us if we said... if we connected it all with JACL. So this was an independent organization that we got started, we had meetings, we became incorporated, he went through all of that. I remember going to Century City and meeting with the pro bono attorneys to get that going. Then we had meetings where we honored people who were active. Once of the main people that we had come down and we honored them at Keiro Center in Boyle Heights, Gordon Hirabayashi.

SY: And this was back in...

PS: The mid-'70s.

SY: Mid-'70s.

PS: Yeah, one of my claims to fame is that he stayed at this house just before he spoke.

SY: So you got to know him.

PS: Oh, yeah, great guy, he told us this story about this whole thing firsthand about how he was a student and his friends were able to roam freely after, but he had a curfew so he wanted to test the law. So he goes out on the streets after ten o'clock in Seattle, nobody even notices him, so he finally has to go to a policeman and say, "Hey, look, I'm Japanese, I shouldn't be out here." So the guy reluctantly took him in and then he brings him to the police station, the guys says, "There's no local law here, you don't belong here." So he calls around he finds out he belongs in Texas, this was in I read something recently about this, but so he has no way of getting to Texas so he first takes a bus to Salt Lake City. He hitchhikes down to Texas to go to the penitentiary, he goes into the office and the guy, the warden says, "Well, I don't have anything on you," he says, "come back." So he goes to movie and comes back the next day and they guys says, "Oh, yeah, I got your papers," so he starts to lock him up. So he's walking down the hallway being led to a cell and sees this guy coming toward him is kind of older guy who looks like he's Asian. Turns out it's his father who was arrested at the same time.

SY: Really?

PS: So they need... well, I don't know why he was in the penitentiary rather than being... but anyways, so it comes time to have his father get a hearing, he didn't speak English, so who do they bring in to interpret, they bring Gordon in.

SY: To interpret for his father.

PS: Just quite a story.

SY: That is quite a story.

PS: But he was a very great guy, very humble kind of guy.

SY: And what was, so during this period where you... when he came to speak what was his position?

PS: Well, no, we just honored him because of what, the stand he took.

SY: Oh, I see.

PS: And then we had Herbert Nicholson who was the Quaker who was very good to visiting people in Manzanar. He was dying of cancer but he came. We honored Wayne Collins, Jr., Wayne Collins' son.

SY: His father.

PS: Who was also an attorney. His father was gone but we honored him. We honored a guy by the name of George Knox Roth who was very helpful to us. So this was all done at Little Tokyo Towers, these others. The first one we did Gordon Hirabayashi was at --

<Begin Segment 15>

SY: And what kind of people did you attract to EO9066? What was the membership like?

PS: It was a small membership. We didn't have many people. Min Tonai was one of our first members.

SY: And they were people who were not necessarily aligned with the JACL?

PS: That's right.

SY: Completely, not aligned.

PS: Some were some weren't.

SY: Some were.

PS: But what touched this whole thing off was on April of 1995 we had a meeting at the community center open to everybody in southern California. Min Tonai was there, Clarence Nishizu came up from Orange County, of course we had the Pacific Citizen out. One of the people was Gail... I forget her name but she was on staff at the JACL. We had, the main person was Edison Uno who came out and in that book you'll see the article in the Rafu about the meeting. We had... he came down from up north. We had Bob Ronka who was city councilman, and we had (Edwin) Hiroto who was administrator at a hospital. So it was a great meeting, we had about maybe not two hundred people but they came from all over the southern California, it was historic. And I would say the people who showed up of course were -- basically you would think that they were in favor but there was a small contingent of people who were opposed and they spoke up.

SY: And Edison Uno was in fact, he was with the JACL then, right?

PS: Yeah, I first well, he went to the meeting, the national meeting advocating redress, he was the first one, okay, he wanted a community fund which didn't fly because when we got organized one of the things we did was we circulated questionnaires in the community to find out what people wanted. And people wanted individual payments, you know, understandably. Said, "Since individuals were affected we need to be compensated individually." So we did that. I remember going to an Amache reunion, it was held at the Miyako Hotel in San Francisco back in about '76 or '77, and I asked the organizer of the reunion, it was very well attended, we had seven hundred people there. I asked him if I could circulate the petition or circulate the questionnaire to find out. I felt very bad because they guy said he met with his committee and they decided against it. But I felt bad because I felt strongly that it needed to done so I went up there and I circulated it anyway unofficially. The reason I felt bad is the guy had a heart attack a few weeks after that, I think coincidental but...but anyway so that was good.

SY: You were the only person who was sort of involved in this committee that took this on at the reunion?

PS: Yeah, right and he didn't want to get involved in anything like that. So it was an indication, it's just one hint that it was not something that would be largely supported by the community. But once we got going, people got on board and it was good to see. So we came up with these surveys that went into the Rafu and we got a reading and the vast majority of people wanted to go forward with it. But one of the things that I think I told you about this letter that Maggie Ishino, Maggie whatever her name is, writes for the Rafu.

SY: Just recently.

PS: She says, "Young people, what do they know about the terms concentration? They weren't even there." But I have to point out to her that it was the young people gave all of their... who provided the impetus, the energy for going ahead with the redress. If we left up to the old people it never would have happened.

SY: Although at the time, you and Paul were not necessarily the young, among the youngest people involved were you?

PS: Yeah, we were pretty old. Paul was in his late forties and I was in my late thirties.

<Begin Segment 16>

SY: So you really joined forces with the young people pretty much?

PS: Yeah and NCRR don't get as much credit as they deserve. They really... they had community meetings. They would have people have fundraisers, charge ten dollars a head or something as a fundraiser. To give you an idea as to the kind of people we were appealing to, West L.A. JACL had wine tasting parties. We're talking about two classes of people.

SY: Right, so there were different approaches to this thing.

PS: Yeah, different approaches, you're appealing to different people, and so I give a lot of credit to NCRR people, really dedicated people, really idealistic people and largely educators. So I felt very good about that too.

SY: But for some reason you didn't join forces with NCRR. You decided at the time --

PS: Yeah, we went our separate ways. NCRR did a lot more work in preparing their people for the hearings. They had workshops and they told them how to answer the questions and so forth. I was involved with Harry Kawahara with the district.

SY: JACL.

PS: We got people together. One of the main people was Mary Oda, Dr. Mary Oda, she gave a very moving testimony, so we did the best we could getting people together but we didn't give the crash course in how to testify that NCRR did.

SY: But as far as the redress legislation, the formation of the things you were asking for, there were differing groups on that issue, right? I mean you said that most people wanted individual payments but other than that there was the idea of going to commission or --

PS: Yeah, well, Paul and I were at first involved with going to San Francisco and meeting with the redress group. The main group was from Seattle and they had done a lot of work ahead of time. The main person was -- can't think of his name now -- but he was an engineer, there were about two or three engineers and they were typically engineers. They were number crunchers so they had this very detailed plan, you got x amount of money for every day you spent in camp and they had different categories. If you were born in camp you got so much, it was too involved. We wanted something simpler and so that was one thing. But they were not very happy with us. In fact, early on when they heard our EO9066 was organized they contacted Paul, they said, "We'd like to talk with you." So Paul said yeah so they had this van, this camper, they drove down clear from Seattle in there. We met over here at a restaurant in J-town, it's no longer there now right on the corner of Central, rather San Pedro and first street, Horikawa. But anyways, we met there and we had a good meeting so they told us what they had in mind and we listened but didn't say, "Oh, yeah, that's a great idea we'll support you." But they went home and they somehow got the impression that we were going to support them with what they proposed. So when Paul and I met with them up there, up in San Francisco to talk about redress, they were really angry at us because they thought we had changed our minds, they thought we had turned our backs on them. So that didn't go too well but then John Tateishi who was director, redress director, very capable guy, I was really amazed. But anyways, he got the committee going, Paul wasn't on the committee. I was on the committee with different people from, basically from Seattle. And there was one guy from Moses Lake, Oregon, they had a slightly different plan going.

SY: And this was a JACL, strictly JACL?

PS: Yeah, this was a JACL.

SY: And that was --

PS: Clifford Uyeda called us together back in the late '70s.

SY: And Paul decided not to get involved on this committee.

PS: Well, I don't know if it was his decision or John Tateishi's decision not to include him, but in any case I was on the committee.

SY: And it was to take an official stand on --

PS: Yeah, because Dan Inouye was the one who got together with Matsunaga and Mineta and they said, "No we need to have a commission, that's the only way to do it." So that would be the only way they would support us. So we had a conference call and went down the line one by one, yes or no. And it was a five to four vote I think to go ahead with the commission. And of course the Seattle people didn't want to touch it, didn't want to go that way. In a way you couldn't blame them they put a lot of time and effort into it and they did a lot of work and so they had investment. For us we didn't have... well, we did have some investment because we were involved in EO9066 but that's the way it went.

SY: So you were in fact or all of you were pivotal people, did you realize that when you voted?

PS: No, and I didn't realize until later that it was a one vote margin.

SY: So you didn't vote over the phone, you took votes after.

PS: It had to be done over the phone it was very critical.

SY: And you stated your position and you were clear at the time.

PS: Oh, yeah, no, John says, "How do you vote, yea or nay?" And went over the phone and I don't know if he followed it up with anything written but I remember the initial thing was over the phone.

<Begin Segment 17>

SY: And what was your position?

PS: To go for the commission.

SY: And why?

PS: Well, I said that number one, the issue had not been aired publicly and I think coming from someone who had been in education for many years, education is crucial to these kinds of things. You just can't lay something out to people and expect them to buy it the first thing out without educating people. And the second thing is we needed to get people to tell their stories. And boy, it just was the main decider, and when the community was able to come to grips with it by hearing stories from their own people, it was very telling.

SY: And what kind of opposition did this have, the commission hearings?

PS: The Seattle people said, "No, no, it's a waste of time. These people are dying off, let's get this thing on the road, just submit an appropriations bill to Congress and get a yes or no vote." But then Inouye knew that there was no way that it was going to fly. It was tough enough to get the commission thing going.

SY: And by this time had EO9066 sort of dissolved?

PS: We dissolved after JACL came up with their position back in '78 at their national convention. Then we figured, oh, this is great we'll let it go at that.

SY: So you were finally in agreement with what the JACL decided?

PS: Yeah, unfortunately Paul for whatever reason was not very active after EO9066. He got a lot of flack.

SY: Flack for what?

PS: One of the things is that we were pushing Edison Uno through this and having the community fund rather than individual payments. But that was not an issue because of the commission hearings. That overruled everything as long as we decided to go with the commission hearings. And Bill Hohri with his other group --

SY: NCJAR.

PS: What was it called?

SY: National, it was NCJAR.

PS: NCJAR, Japanese American Redress. Of course, he was completely opposed to the hearings because he felt that it had to go through the courts. But interestingly enough he pursued it and I give him so much credit because he put a lot of time. I mean, he was going to his regular job, coming home and staying up to all hours of the night working on the thing. I mean geez... but anyways, but he brought it up and it looked as though it might be heard by the Supreme Court at about the same time as redress hearings were coming on so that kind of... my impression was -- and I heard that it created some leverage for us to get the bill through Congress. Because Congress didn't want to deal with -- they were willing to deal with billion or a billion point five or whatever it was but they weren't willing to -- Hohri was talking about thousands of dollars per evacuee and that was -- so that was one reason the vote went in our favor.

SY: I'm wondering if you got a sense of the time of this terrific divisiveness with all of these different organizations, did you get a sense of that were you feeling that it was a very hot issue that was provoking a lot of dissention among different organizations?

PS: No, I don't see it, it was just certain amount of apathy. I think it was more apathy more than dissention. I think typically Japanese are consensus people. They like to see which way the wind's blowing and go in that direction. So when it came time to go to camp, everybody says we got to go, so you get one guy, Korematsu, who is out there having plastic surgery and changing his name and doing all of that. They finally catch up with him, he's not going to be hailed as a hero. They said, "Hey, you think you're better than us?" So I think --

SY: That was the goal then in terms of all these different organizations because you did have JACL and you had NCRR and the other and then you had the Seattle group.

PS: The Seattle group eventually came on board I think. There were hearings in Seattle, so reluctantly they came on board. I remember we had this big redress meeting in UCLA.

SY: This was way after?

PS: Oh, yeah, this was in the '90s, early '90s as I recall. And this main guy, I can't think of his name, I can picture the guy, but he got into it with Norm Mineta about this guy was saying Norm Mineta was not supporting him when he came here after the war, and boy, Mineta really unloaded on him. I was really surprised and then at that meeting I remember I saw Bill Hohri and Hohri admitted, he says, "After those hearings I became a believer." So that was good to see he was big enough to admit that we did the right thing and it turned out well.

SY: It must feel good to sort of be a part of that decision to go forward with that because it really did change the course of the redress movement in a lot of ways, the commission hearings.

PS: It would have been dead without it and also when Tom Doi, who is, got to be eighty-eight, eighty-nine now was our chapter president. He had Grant Ujifusa who was the chief lobbyist for the bill, he came out and he told us some interesting stories about how made it through how we had all of this support from different groups, we had support from the gay groups, we had support, fascinating stories. You know it was good too is that he was a Republican, so he was able to get support from the Republican side because it took everybody on board to get something to Congress.

SY: Yeah, absolutely.

<Begin Segment 18>

SY: I was just saying that for someone who wasn't there during that period of fighting for redress, it's hard to imagine but I know that the climate was probably really different than it is now. Everybody now thinks it was the best thing that ever happened to us but back then there were a lot of differing opinions. I mean, really to get involved in the redress movement was quite brave, would you say that it was kind of? But fighting for something like that when you got a lot of opposition in fact.

PS: No, I really didn't hear much opposition, really.

SY: But most --

PS: Not after a certain point.

SY: I was going to say but initially it was sort of a feeling of we can't do that or how is that possible. That will never happen.

PS: Frankly I had that feeling myself. It was something that I felt I needed to do because it had to be done. It's like getting into a fight that you know you're going to lose. But it's one you have to get in there and slog it out. It was just -- when Harry Kajihara is a friend of mine, he became interested in redress and he was chapter president for the Oxnard chapter and he became the national director during the time that the legislation was going through. And Harry's one of these kind of guys that he always comes across as being up, he's always optimistic. So I'd ask him how are things going, he says, "Great we're going to make it this time." I say, "Oh yeah, sure Harry."

SY: So you had your doubts.

PS: Yeah, so when it came about I just couldn't believe it, just amazing.

SY: Yeah, I was going to say what did you do to celebrate? I mean, that whole signing of the bill, do you remember that period what that was like? And was your mother still alive?

PS: Yeah.

SY: So she must have... was she at all?

PS: No, interesting I don't remember her being that vocal one way or the other on that really. I think part of it is that the Japanese are funny about money it seems. They don't feel comfortable accepting money for something like that. There are people even today I hear of people got the money, they turned it down. You know they just felt, the word in Japanese is kitanai, it was dirty to accept money. That's not something you do. I remember hearing Senator Hayakawa during a redress hearing saying, "Oh, this is so... it just makes my flesh crawl to have to accept, go to the government and ask." I think a lot of the younger people who have been involved in redress, they really were angry at him for saying that, but I think he really represented the gut feeling of a lot of Japanese. You know, they just didn't like the idea of asking somebody for money. But you know American society is... that's the way things go. We've gotten a lot of apologies in Congress before redress, apologies are cheap. But as soon as you attach money to it then people pay attention. I remember John Tateishi was saying that when we were involved in the '70s in redress he says, "I'd tell them about what we have in mind and they'd yawn. But as soon as we said we're asking for 25,000 dollars, they were on the phone, they wanted to know what's going on." In the same way I think you can tell American values by what it is that we honor in this society. We don't honor the people who quietly went to camp and were good citizens and proved our loyalty by going to camp. Who do we honor? We honor Korematsu, right, who deliberately defied the authorities and stayed out of camp. He gets honored by President Clinton by this Medal of Honor. What are the camps that we honor? We honor Tule Lake, Tule Lake is something, honor in the Pacific, the exemplary model. And think about those people renounced their citizenship, right? So we honor those kinds of people, people who don't go along, the people who fight, those are the people we honor. So right now even the draft, as much as we honor the 442nd and what they did which was important, I think we've come to honor the draft resisters too, for taking a stand of conscience.

SY: But there are still those who say that they're being shunned too. I mean, there's still that group, and largely, well, the JACL in some ways has maintained a rather conservative position on some of these things and Paul had a big part in the draft resisters and that did not come easily. Were you there during those discussions with the JACL?

PS: Yeah, I was on the board and coincidentally our chapter president who went to -- I think it was in Monterey - was Karl Nobuyuki who was national director during redress and he was not in favor of that apology.

SY: So there's still that group in the JACL that's conservative? But at the same time you feel important to be a part of it, right?

PS: Oh, yeah, sure, but there's a lot that we need to talk about.

<Begin Segment 19>

PS: I'm writing a column for the Rafu and one of the columns I did recently had to do with the Stockholm Syndrome, we talked about that earlier.

SY: That was fascinating, you were talking a little bit about that how you relate to...

PS: It's somewhat related to that incident on the metro line with the Japanese guy wound up stabbing this guy that was attacked -- did you read that article?

SY: No.

PS: The first incident they had in many years that they're running the metro line. Somehow this -- I think it was a white guy was waving something at this Japanese guy and the guy took out a knife and stabbed him. And so what happened was that they were trapped on the subway and so some of the people, they didn't know how to react, but a couple of the women told this guy, "Hey, take off that bloody shirt so you won't be recognized," and were helping him plot an escape. And they were helping him with his story, this guy says, you saw it all it was self-defense, this guy was attacking me. But that was interesting. It was kind of like the Stockholm Syndrome, these people may have realized that this guy killed somebody, this guy was lying in a pool of blood, so they should have done something about the guy who was doing it but this guy had a knife. If they said, "Hey, just a minute, what do you mean lashing out at a guy..." he could have turned on them. So it's interesting, so as soon as that thing stopped the guy jumped off and ran. But it's related in that here we were cooped up and as that article said on Google, what happens is that when the captors don't mistreat you, they don't harm you, you interpret that as kindness. In other words, I think what it is is self-defense, you are thinking well, it could have been worse. They could have starved us they could have beat us they could have... they didn't so that's being kind to us therefore we should cooperate, we shouldn't be too hard on them. And that carries over to redress. Therefore, hey look, they're our country, we look on the brighter side of things. We should always support our country, we should never say anything negative about the United States, so they drop an A-bomb, they kill off a hundred and forty thousand people in Hiroshima, we have friends who may have come from Hiroshima but we got to be loyal to this country. I think we need to face up to these kinds of things that we... and if we left it up to the older people, it would never happen. It's the younger generation that we need to look to and say, hey look, help us with this.

SY: Yeah, but it's amazing that you came up with that similarity between the Stockholm Syndrome...

PS: I'm amazed that no one has come up with it, no academic person because it's so obvious.

SY: Yeah, right.

PS: You know, Patty Hearst getting captured by these guys, taking their side, going, robbing a bank with them, I mean, and this woman who was kidnapped at age eleven, bearing children from this guy, having ample opportunity to run away, choosing to stay put with this guy. I mean, I think we need to look at it all.

SY: It's interesting because we generally think of it as a cultural... being put in camps, we think of it was maybe cultural that people didn't fight more but it could have something to do with feeling, with aligning ourselves with the government in that situation. I mean, the whole camp experience was the people who just cooperated, we all cooperated, right. So it might be a little bit more than just our cultural values.

PS: Sure, it's cultural mixed in with the other.

SY: Yeah, that's really fascinating.

<Begin Segment 20>

SY: I think you have a very psychological approach to things. You think deeply about things and does that just come naturally you think or something you're interested in?

PS: I guess partly because of my counseling background. You have to take a certain number of courses where you start reading the books that have to do with these kinds of things and so yeah, that's part of it. And I think it's my religious background too, I'm reading books that are rather radical. They have to do with more of a radical interpretation of Christianity that, a more liberal view that I feel comfortable with.

SY: Radical in what sense? Is it because, I mean, they all have Christ.

PS: Interpretation of the Bible, you don't take things literally. Some of the things that you go to church, virgin birth, that was a myth, even the crucifixion of Jesus was very brutal kind of thing and to say that God condoned that, God is a brute that would kill somebody like that for the sake of satisfying his need for people, would be able to lay their sins on what Jesus did. I mean, it just doesn't make sense. And it's critical, it's an essential point of Christianity. But then if you... I've had time to look at some of the things with historical Jesus people say, that if you look at the record, if you look at the conditions under which the Bible was written, it was written by Jews. These Jews met every week, what did they have to go by? They went by the Old Testament, what did the Old Testament tell them? It had stories about things like scapegoat. You know you heard the tape, you know that term came from a Jewish custom, every year they took a goat, an innocent goat, they let the goat go and escape into the wilderness and that goat was your scapegoat. That you laid all your sins on that goat, okay, and in the same sense of Abraham killing his son Isaac. Why would he kill his son Isaac? It's a sacrifice, but that kind of violent God doesn't make sense to me. God is a loving god. How can you tie those two together? But you see, that's the way the Jews wrote the scriptures. They were clever people, brilliant people to come up this these tie-ins, to tie things together which really made sense until you look back on it and realize. The whole idea of the communion, that you take wine or grape juice that's supposed to represent the blood of Jesus, it doesn't make sense because Jews have a real taboo about blood. Blood is not kosher. It's not likely that they would latch onto something like that that would involve blood so directly. So, I mean, to admit that I have these doubts I think in a way is kind of... I have mixed feeling about that because I wouldn't want to have other people's faith disturbed by what I say but I have to be honest. And I have to be true to myself and true to what I believe, what I've come to believe.

SY: So the church for you or for the community as a whole, what direction do you think it's going in? I mean, is it becoming more liberal or will there always be these different points of view in the church?

PS: Well, I've come to see... I've been working with a minister who has made gains in changing his views on LGBT issues, and I want him to take more of a stand. Harold and I went to speak with him about having a program where we would have people on the panel presenting... telling their stories. He didn't want any part of it. He says people in his church, some people are very anti-gay. There's one guy who went through a program to convert him from being gay into being straight, it's called the Exodus program. So this guy's coming to him for help, so how is he supposed to deal with people like that? So I can understand and unfortunately it makes the church an organization that doesn't make stands of conscience. Rather it just goes along with the whims of society or the forces of society. He says, "Well, the people who are opposed to Proposition 8 are young people so it's just a matter of time before it'll change." Well, I said, "Yeah, that's fine, but what does the church... how doesn't the church take a stand of conscience in all this?" He says, "We can't, there are too many people out there that we have to please." So it doesn't say much for our church if the church just goes along with what society does. He says, well when society changes then we'll make the change.

SY: It is like you were saying that the church didn't take stand on redress either.

PS: No, that's true for Buddhists and Christians.

SY: So that's... the role of the church may be different.

PS: The church was complicit in going along with the government. The government, well, the JACL leadership says we should cooperate to prove our loyalty and all, and the church went along with that. So they didn't... and so even after the war was over and it came time to press for redress, liberal or conservative didn't make any difference, the church stayed out of it. And I think it's largely true because they knew they were going to get opposition from certain factions no matter which side they took.

SY: So how do you sort of fit in there? Because you're active in organizations that clearly aren't willing to take stands. You just feel that as an individual it's important for you to take a stand and you're fine with operating within this organization?

PS: Yeah, I understand, I understand. So the little movement that we can make on the part of clergy we want to reinforce. There's an Asian gay and lesbian organization that's honoring this minister I was telling you about because he's come a long ways in being more supportive and so that's good. We can relish the little gains that we make.

SY: So do you see the church changing at all? I mean, do you see it the movement as people get younger, I mean, is that something that you see in the future for the church?

PS: Yeah, I think the church changes with the times. It doesn't necessarily promote change but it goes along with whatever changes there are I think. I think the exception might be the black church during the Civil Rights Movement. I can't imagine the pulpit being silent in the black churches when it came to supporting Martin Luther King and what was going on in the south.

<Begin Segment 21>

SY: Well, just within our Japanese American community we still have fairly strong, the Methodist church is fairly strong and the All Saints church is fairly strong and of course the Buddhist church exists. Are those the main denominations I guess within the religious community, the Japanese American religious community you think? And how large is their impact on people do you think? Is it still really an important part of the Japanese American community?

PS: Yeah, I think so.

SY: Church membership is still holding strong?

PS: Yeah, particularly in the conservative evangelical churches are really surprising. They in uncertain times, my feeling is that people are looking for definite answers and that's what evangelical churches provide. They don't hedge, they tell you what the truth is.

SY: Even if it's something that you don't necessarily agree with.

PS: Yeah, if you can't buy it you don't belong. We don't want to hear anything opposing what our official view is. If that's what makes people comfortable, I guess, and it does because that's where people are going.

SY: People are still attending. It's an important part of the community I guess the point I'm trying to get at, that it's still a very important part.

PS: It serves a function and if people gain from it, why not. I think there's a certain talk about atheism but atheism doesn't give you anything, if you believe not to believe something that's fine, but it doesn't lead anywhere. I mean, no atheist says, "Well, because I don't believe in God I'm going to do this or I'm going to do that. I'm going to take a stand because I don't believe in God," no, it's a dead end. I respect people who take that position because there's plenty of reasons, logical reasons for a person not to believe in God. You know, you look at these tragedies, I mean, you figure how can God... but it takes a little digging to come up with ways to still have a faith.

SY: Do you feel that it's offered a place for you 'cause you've had a rather traumatic, would you consider your life to have had its share of problems growing up? And certainly being put in a camp would be one. So does the church offer that to you? I mean, is that one of the reasons you feel that the church is important in your life?

PS: Yeah, well, I did a DVD. I got some money from CCLPEP and I did it on religion in camp because I thought the story needed to be told. So I got two conservatives and two liberal clergy, Paul Nagano who was formerly conservative who is now liberal. I got Roy Sano who is a Methodist bishop more on the liberal wing, and Sam Tonomura who is retired recently from head of JEMS, Japanese Evangelical Missionary Society. And I got John Miyabe who is a senior retired from the Free Methodist church. So I thought the story needed to be told because I think that -- and the title of my DVD was Comforting the Afflicted because they served a real function in comforting people in camp and I think it was important that they be there. And I believe in Ecclesiastics that says, "For everything there is a purpose under heaven, a time to live, a time to die, a time to rejoice, a time to mourn." There's a time for people to cooperate with the government and go along and do because you don't have much choice. But then when that time is passed, then it's time to get accounting from the government for what happened, then you have to seize that opportunity also. I think that's my way of handling this whole issue.

SY: Did you learn anything from getting these guys together and were you surprised by anything and what they said?

PS: No, I wasn't. I really wasn't surprised, but I think the story needed to be told. One of the things they mention is that they were favored, Christianity is the religion of this country so we were... nobody was put in a separate camp because he was a Christian minister. Whereas the Buddhist ministers were picked up and put in separate camps. So the Buddhists had no spiritual leadership, but to their credit many of the Buddhist priests counseled their former members to go to Christian churches. And so many of the Buddhist's became Christians in camp.

SY: That's interesting. And I wonder if they turned back to Buddhism after camp.

PS: I don't know. I don't know what the readings were. But it was interesting hearing the stories of people like Paul Nagano and Roy and you could see... it's my bias, but I could see more change, more growth on the part of Paul and Roy. Maybe the growth on the part of Sam and Reverend Miyabe was more inner growth, more spiritual growth, that wasn't as obvious. But I think the growth socially I think is, I think because that's where my interest lies now. That religious expression should have a social meaning, that's where my emphasis is now.

<Begin Segment 22>

SY: So just getting back a minute to the JACL and their stand on gay rights. Have they taken a stand on gay rights?

PS: Oh, yeah, back in '94 they were the first ethnic organization to come out in favor or in favor of gay marriage, and it was my understanding that at the national convention, Norm Mineta was very influential in causing us to support that, equal marriage.

SY: So is there anything that you feel needs to addressing by the JACL today? Are there any outstanding issues that you feel --

PS: Well, that's one. I think we need to get on board with Proposition 8, but I think more crucial is to do what the Japanese American Historical Society led by Iku Kiriyama is about getting people to talk with one another, getting generations to interact and that one crucial issue of course is the LGBTQ issue, crucial, I mean, it could be most helpful and most difficult too. But I think times have changed now. You look at the media and it's all over the media so it's pretty hard to avoid and I think the tide is positive for making social change and it's encouraging. So my original theme was this year because of Don't Ask Don't Tell being overturned, President Obama signed the bill, that we should take the cue from that and look at how we can overturn Don't Ask Don't Tell in our communities. It's going to take some work, we need some input. I think the most important input as always comes from the young, it doesn't come from the parents or the grandparents, it comes from the young. It's up to them to tell us how we should handle this. Do we want to be asked? Would we rather tell? How do we create the climate where asking and telling can take place? I think that's the crucial thing that we need to tackle.

SY: So your role in all of this is to just raise the issue. Is that what you feel? I mean, doesn't it warrant getting organization? Would you like to see something formed that you could work with? Or are you just doing this on your own kind of because you think it's important?

PS: Well, yeah I'd like to see something happen. I don't quite know which direction this will take but I'd like to see some progress. And that meeting in November, I think, November 5th, should be a good one. I talked with at that meeting with interesting fellow, Riku Matsuda, transsexual. He has an hour program on KPFK every Monday night at eight o'clock. I intend to listen to him. Interesting guy. I was so impressed because he's come through it so well. To face the kind of flack that he's faced and yet to be so... to lack bitterness but to be so, I'd like to say Christian in his attitude, so these people have said some very terrible things to him but he's willing to forgive.

SY: Is he a Japanese American?

PS: Oh, yeah, he's hapa.

SY: Oh, he's hapa, interesting. There are several Japanese Americans I know of who are transsexual.

PS: You know him too?

SY: Well, I don't know him but I do know someone else.

PS: Oh, really?

SY: Yeah, Michael Yamamoto.

PS: Yeah, he mentioned Michael Yamamoto. Yeah, I know his story. He used to be a roommate of my, Marion's brother-in-law at UCLA so that's how we found out about what happened.

SY: That's a very difficult --

PS: Talk about courageous people, but you know, yes, it's courageous and yet they gain a great deal from it, too. I mean, they do it for themselves basically so that they can live with themselves and hold their heads high, but they're doing it for other people too because this Riku that I just mentioned, looks up to Michael Yamamoto or Mia Yamamoto. And so we need more people like that to come out, people like George Takei. I mean, people who have some stature in the community plus everyday people, you don't have to be George Takei just people to take a stand.

SY: Clearly... it's funny because I think of you as one of those kinds of people that is willing to take a stand, it's not always easy and you don't have a lot of doubt about a stand once you've taken it.

PS: Yeah, right.

SY: You feel it's important enough that that's... so you can look back on your life with satisfaction.

PS: Yeah, and the older I get the more I'm willing to let it all hang out. I mean, I got nothing to lose.

SY: And your family goes along with it?

PS: Oh, yeah.

SY: They're very supportive.

PS: Yeah, except for my older daughter who goes to a conservative church but you can't win 'em all.

SY: That's true. And I think that's been another highlight, I mean, another key part of your life. You've been around people and you can't win 'em all.

PS: Yeah, so you just go.

SY: Well, I sort of think that's a nice place to end. Thank you very much for this.