<Begin Segment 20>

MN: You mentioned JACL before. Were you involved with the JACL at all?

TN: Involved?

MN: Member? Were you a member?

TN: Well, one time I was involved, a member of this chapter of the JACL that was mostly social stuff. The metro JACL or something like that. I think Ellen Endo formed it. I wasn't in there very long, but they did have a meeting where they met up with a couple of people who were in the American Indian movement, which at that time was pretty active. They had rebelled or something at the Wounded Knee reservation in South Dakota, tried to take it over. And there were other scattered incidents in different places. And one guy was Arching Fire, he was a Sioux, Lakota Sioux or something like that, and the other guy was Black Dog, he was from the Snake... no, I don't know what tribe he was. Crow tribe or something. But they explained their position to us, so we gave them a little bit of donation.

MN: Did you cover any of the early pilgrimages to Manzanar?

TN: Later on, not the earliest. Only after I got a better car. Actually, I took the bus up there a couple times, more than a couple, maybe four times.

MN: So you were incarcerated at Rohwer.

TN: Rohwer.

MN: What was your impression of Manzanar?

TN: It was just another concentration camp for Japanese Americans. Another ugly reminder of what the government can do to us.

MN: What were your thoughts about when the movement started to make it into National Park Service?

TN: Good, that's all. We needed reminders like that, we needed memorials like that. We needed monuments like that to remember all the victims and to remember to tell the government not to do that anymore. Like they tried to do to the Arabs and Muslims and South Asians after September 11, (2001).

MN: But we have this monument in Washington, D.C. What do you think about that monument?

TN: Which monument?

MN: That National Japanese American Monument, I think that's what it's called.

TN: I'm not that familiar with it. Can you kind of remind me?

MN: It has quotes from the President and Mike Masaoka as a civil rights leader on it, and the names of the camps, and a crane with barbed wires.

TN: The barbed wire part's okay, and the names of the camps are okay. What did the President say? "Sorry"?

MN: I'm sure it has Truman's quote on there.

TN: That's okay.

MN: "Fought prejudice..."

TN: But I don't know about having Mike Masaoka's, what's that thing called? JACL credo? That thing is, I don't know, that's like sucking up to the powers that be or something. I don't like that at all. I never liked that credo.

MN: Did you ever get to interview Mike Masaoka?

TN: Never. Never really met him except just say hi, that's all.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.