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MN: Now you said after you finished this fellowship after a year, you came back to Cal State L.A. and you helped form the Oriental Concerns? What was that?

Mo N: Yeah, well, during the strike there was all this hesitation going on. And the JACL had a junior JACL complement, and they had money. So some of the young people... I don't know how I got to know them, but they were talking about, "Let's have a conference," so, "Okay, let's have a conference and call it 'Are You Yellow?'" I think it was '68 or something like that. And so, yeah, we had the conference, and all these Asian Pacific youth, mostly Asian or East Asian youth came forward and wanted to know what the hell was going on. And then we had Penny Nakatsu and some of the people from state come down and talk to them on what they were thinking. So that was real good. So that was the beginning of our organizing, and then we came up with the thing about we need to organize on our campuses, we need to organize around Ethnic Studies, we need to organize around, especially identity issues and our own, who we are and that kind of stuff, that's where the term "banana" and all that shit came out. So, yeah, I participated, not so much on a special campus level, but just generally speaking in terms of talking to groups and stuff like that about the need for us to come together and do that. And, shit, by the time we got done, every campus in Southern California had some kind of Asian component, Oriental Concern or something. SC had a hapa Asian Political Alliance. But yeah... and then from that it broke off, right, where segments of young people went out and started doing projects in the community on their own, left the campus and started working.

MN: But you also helped to go around the different campuses, and didn't you bring the Isseis and the older Niseis to start talking about camp?

Mo N: Yeah, to some of the classes and stuff like that, classes that were established, and we were able to take community people to the different campuses to talk.

MN: What were the reactions that you were getting from students?

Mo N: Good. It was always positive, people felt good. I mean, learning about their own history and shit and from their own elders, so it couldn't have been -- besides, if they had negative feelings about that, they'd have never took the class.

MN: Was it hard to find people who would talk publicly about the camps?

Mo N: Not really, not really. I mean, people that we had that were willing to were pretty strong people in their own right, so that they're, they'd go out and talk and stuff like that. One of the best guys was Ron Wakabayashi, the dad. 'Cause he exposed all of the bullshit. There he was, supposed to be a "good Issei man," bigshot, right? Head of the Kyogikai and all that kind of stuff. And this guy jumped ship and came after the cutoff. So no way he could come in legally, so he jumped ship in Seattle, got caught, got thrown back on the boat again, and come down to Los Angeles, got caught, jumped ship, got caught, put back on it again. Maybe he tried one more place, got caught, thrown back on the boat again, and the boat went down to Peru. And then he jumped ship and was going to try to get away there or he was welcomed, I guess, he was then. 'Cause they wanted Japanese laborers. But he said he saw them suckers, they put chains on like they were setting up [inaudible], he said, "Fuck that," he jumped back on his boat and got back, then he got up into Mexico and he jumped ship in Mexico. And nobody hassled him, he didn't get caught. So he got across, I think he was at the... you know where the Baja Peninsula comes all the way down, it's around, right around La Paz at the end, right across there's a Mexican city there. I forgot what the name of that was. But he jumped ship there and he finds out, right, from, I guess, local Japanese there that there's a trail from La Paz goes all the way up the Baja Peninsula into, around San Luis, the Arizona border up there. So gets away across and he starts up. He comes up all the way up and he makes it, all the way up. And the Mexican people were pretty friendly and they'd help, they'd sell them stuff, vegetables and fruit and stuff so he could survive. But he said that there were, you could see bones along the side of the road of the guys who didn't make it.

Gets all the way up there, and then the routine was set up already. So you're going up to there, then you get a job on the Mexican side of the border through a Japanese farmer. Then you go in there and you learn where you want to go, the streets, all of that stuff, so you get familiar with it and get a working knowledge of English so you could get through customs. Then you jump on the other side and maybe work a little bit, there's Japanese farmers on that side. And same thing, educate yourself, then you get on the bus and you go. And then customs people would come on, immigration people would come on and start questioning you: "Where you from?" "Los Angeles." "Where in Los Angeles?" "Boyle Heights. Oh, I live on First and Mott," right? Give 'em some line of shit, and if they go for it, then you're home free, you come into L.A. That was his story. All this crap about illegals, he was stone illegal, he was big shot in the community when he passed away. Yeah, made that journey up from, can you imagine that? I think that's almost a thousand miles. [Laughs] Shit. On foot? I know some other people that did that, too, man.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright &copy; 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.