<Begin Segment 19>
MN: So when you were there, you went to your first demonstration at the Federal Building in downtown L.A. What were your protesting, and were there other Japanese Americans there?
Mo N: Okay, yeah. It was the Bull Connor incident. We had watched that on television. I was rooming with a white boy, Englishman... he was an Englishman so he was different from the American boys. But he saw that and he nutted out. Said, "Man, what the fuck are they doing? You don't treat another human being like that." And that was my sentiment, so he said, "Come on, let's go down there." Never been to a demonstration or anything, right, "Okay, yeah, let's go." So we charged down there. Oh, we had a personal connection, too. Some black guy that we knew during school, he... there was a whole series of demonstrations down there, so he had gone down there and got busted. That's when they deputized any white man in the street to come in and help them deal with these demonstrators and stuff around the Federal Building. So he got hauled in with the bunch that got busted by those vigilante types. And so we saw that and then we heard about our friend, right, being busted, so we went down there to protest him being busted, too. Yeah, so when we got there, I was feeling self conscious as hell, not knowing what to think, and I looked, and there were two other Buddhahead guys, two older guys. And later on I find out who they are, one was Chet Yamauchi of Classic Catering, and the other one was a social worker, Hawaii guy. But, yeah, so I felt better after I saw them, "Shit, I can go out there if they're out here, it must be okay." So that was my first demonstration and I went to a couple more after that. But, yeah, I'll never forget that thing about them turning, Bull Connor turning the dogs loose on another human being. They fucked them, yeah.
MN: And then while you were going to Cal State, you helped form the Alibi group? What was that?
Mo N: Yeah, yeah. It was a bunch of us that were getting ready to graduate or had graduated already, we're trying to figure out how we fitted in to this black/white confrontation that was taking place in the country, and what was our role, and what were we going to do. So all of us knew each other, and we used to drink together at holidays, and then we knew the guy who joined the Alibi, Ben Yano, he was a bartender over at Holiday. And he had this place where if you wanted a kind of nice quiet place to go, the Holiday was, if you liked to fight, that's where you went. [Laughs] Drink and fight and raise hell, right? So you went to Dry Gulch. So that's where we started meeting once a week over at Alibi, and that's what we talked about: how did we fit in? What was our role? We sure as hell weren't white, and our history said that we were part of an oppressed people. And we had people like the Brown Berets come in, different groups come in and talk to us, farmworkers, so it was a pretty exciting time developing new ideas, getting a better sense of who we were and things.
MN: So it's obvious Asian Americans aren't white, and then when you folks went and tried to go and help the African American community, what was their reaction?
Mo N: Yeah. I think their reaction generally speaking was that, "Thank you for coming, we appreciate the effort, but you need to take a look at your own community and see what's going on there." So that's what... that's what I did. One, there was, at that time, okay, this was during the period of the Rumford Fair Housing Initiative. This is when they knocked down all bullshit about white-only neighborhoods and stuff like that and contracts and things like that, made that illegal. And out of that grouping, the Asians that were participating in that initiative, they formed an organization called the Council of Oriental Organizations, and it was started by, initiated by the County, County Human Relations, John Saito. And so they received some money to do a survey in Chinatown and J-town. And in Chinatown, the survey was to include children and senior citizens, and then the survey in Little Tokyo was around senior citizens. So I got the job as a... I think I was the co-director or something like that. So we did this survey, and then with the results of that survey, I went back to our group and said, "Look here, man. You got all this shit going on with the Isseis and there's things that we could do." So a bunch of us moved from the Alibi and then we moved over to Crenshaw Square, a bar there, used to meet there, and we figure, if we're going to talk about J-town then we need to go into J-town. So then we try and switch it over to J-town and we used to meet at the Kaikan when it was upstairs on First Street, and that's how we started.
Then we went through this whole series of discussions and explorations. At first we thought what we want to do is develop a free clinic, so we had some nurses with us, too, in our group. So they went and explored around, what would it take to form a free clinic? Well, we had to get a 501©(3), then we had to go and get some doctors. Then we found that there were some that were willing to come down and help us if we set the thing up. But setting the thing up became so involved with red tape and shit like that, oh, man, we ain't got the time or resources to deal with this. Then we decided, well, let's look at the hot meals program, people needing good nutrition, we were finding out people were fuckin' eating dog food, cat food and stuff like that. So, yeah, let's do that, so we tried to look around for that. And to build one of those, well, it's just... again, you got to have that number, 501©(3), and you got to be able to have a kitchen and blah, blah, blah, and getting served by a cook, a nutritionist... all the bullshit that goes with that. And we didn't have enough sense, if we wanted to start something we just did it, to hell with all that rules and regulations. But we were young and dumb, and we wanted to do stuff. And then finally it ended up all the really important shit of survival we couldn't do.
<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.