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MN: January 9, 2012, we are at the Centenary United Methodist Church, we're gonna be doing part two of Mo Nishida's interview, and Tani Ikeda is on the video camera, and I will be interviewing, my name is Martha Nakagawa. Mo, last time, the first session, we were talking about Alcatraz, that was 1969. Now I want to get into the same year, stay in 1969, and ask you about the Manzanar Pilgrimage that you went to. How did you get involved in that?

Mo N: Well, it was an organic process. By 1969, the civil rights and the Panther, Black Panther Party programs had really caught on with people. So the Serve the People program, so we had Serve the People programs in Sawtelle, Gardena, Hollywood, Seinan, downtown. So we had all these programs going, and there was a need, they felt a need of some kind of naturalization process. So we used to get together at Centenary, this church, back when it was out on Normandie. And argued like hell about where we were going with our movement. So it was really great, a lot of democracy, it's kind of like the Occupy L.A. thing, you hear about the general subway. Everybody had an idea and they were going to put it out there and fight for it. That was really great. But, of course, we never went anywhere with it. So we spent about three or four months just arguing like hell with each other couple, three, four hours a weekend. But then what we said was that we needed a project that would help unify us, do something together, all of us. But it couldn't be one thing, right, 'cause everybody was doing something, they ain't gonna drop that and do something else, so we had to pool all of that together. So at that time, Vic and Warren worked for the JACL, they worked for the young people, the youth department.

MN: Victor Shibata and Warren Furutani?

Mo N: Yeah, yeah. And they were hired by... what did we say, his name? The Hawaii guy.

MN: Oh, Jeff Matsui.

Mo N: Yeah, Jeffrey Matsui was the regional director at that time, and he was very progressive. Of course, he was the one that started the Ethnic Concerns committee, initiated that, the youth department, all of that kind of stuff. So our group was called the Umbrella Group, and that was kind of a visual thing. All the different programs were the spokes of the umbrella, and the stem was the meeting that we had. That's where things took place. So we commissioned, they talked about Manzanar. I knew about it because we used to go fishing up there one time, we stopped by a couple times there at the graveyard. So, said, okay, let them go up there and investigate, and that's when they met Reverend Mayeda, so we knew somebody was going up there and paying homage to our ancestors up there. And he was tickled pink to see, meet them and meet the rest of us. But anyhow, okay, so to make things, we organized it through this Umbrella Group. So that's how the first pilgrimage, we had over three hundred people show up. And what we did was all of us from our different programs pulled people from the program and asked them if they wanted to go. If they wanted to go, whatchacallit. So from L.A. we took a whole bunch of Isseis up there. Yeah, so that's how we got started and that was the first pilgrimage. Jim Matsuoka was one of our keynote speakers, the General. And he said something there at that first pilgrimage that I always felt hit the nail right on the head when he talked about that the camp had "taken our souls away from us." That we had lost the will and dignity to stand up for who we were. And you know, that's the reason why we picked Manzanar, too, the camp, 'cause nobody talked about it. There was the "no-no" and we were ashamed of our past and all of that bullshit. So we just said, fuck that, we're going to go out there. Well, that's what the Panthers did, right, or the black movement. We're talking about Black Power. We're talking about, yeah, we ain't going for that. They can't, we're not gonna let the white man define our history.

So yellow became a color of pride, and our particular history and all that, and we didn't have nothing to be ashamed of. It was done to us, why in the hell do we have to be ashamed? Our people running around like they're ashamed they did something wrong. So, yeah, there was a lot of flack, too, the in community, "What the hell are they doing?" that kind of stuff. We just told 'em, "Fuck you. If you ain't proud of who you are, then shame, shame on you." Of course, we had the whole world behind us, there was a whole revolutionary situation in the world going on. People are fighting back all over the place, man. Vietnam was kicking this country's butt, and they've already been run out of Korea. So, yeah, so we were standing up.

MN: Going back to Manzanar, that first organized pilgrimage, what was the program like? You talked about Jim Matsuoka, the General, being the keynote speaker. What else did you do on that? Was it just one day, was it a few days?

Mo N: Yeah, one day. We cleaned up the graveyard and we fixed up the ireitou.

MN: Did you repaint the ireitou?

Mo N: Yeah, I think we did. I think there was an advanced party went up there, looked to see if, what we had to do to fix it up, I think. I don't remember a whole lot, we were partying. [Laughs] That was part of the saying, right? Then we all went out to the... we camped out at Grays Meadows, that's where we used to go, above Independence, and took buses in there, we had all these old people sleeping on the bus and all that stuff, young people out there by the fire partying it up.

MN: Yeah, I heard you started a fire.

Mo N: Huh?

MN: You started a fire out there.

Mo N: No, that was a camp story.

MN: No, at Manzanar, weren't you the one that started the fire?

Mo N: No. Started what fire?

MN: Started a fire that you weren't supposed to. [Laughs] Or so I heard the story.

Mo N: That was Victor.

MN: Okay.

Mo N: Victor clashed with Susie, Sue about that. We were talking about we should have a sacred fire, right, so that... during the thing. And he was arguing with Sue and Sue just, "I'll do what you want to do." So got the truckload of firewood out there and started a big old bonfire out there. [Laughs] Victor's a hardhead, too.

MN: So you know, going out there, you mentioned you had been going to Manzanar on the way to fishing, but this organized pilgrimage, what did it mean to you?

Mo N: Well, what it meant to me, I guess it was like it verified who I was. Up until that time, we'd been told that we had to hide our history if we wanted to be accepted as Americans, we had to quit being Japanese. We weren't supposed to speak Japanese, we weren't supposed to hang out with Japanese people and all that kind of stuff. So our generation right after the war, it was pretty much the way we were beat up by that stuff. And yet, this was time of segregation, so we were still living in these segregated communities. So to have that trip laid on us is pretty bad. That's why identity politics was a real big thing in the early part of the movement. It used to be a standard joke, and I understand it still exists. But it used to be you go on campus or anywhere, you walk down the street and you see another Asian or somebody that looks like a Buddhahead, you look 'em in the eye, and goddammit, boy, the sky starts looking good, the ground start needing inspection, the people wouldn't look at each other in the eye and give a greeting. Especially like a lot of us, we grew up in the black community, that's the way you show your brotherhood and sisterhood, you give a greeting, big smile. So, yeah, it was acknowledging who we were. That's what we said, we were gonna acknowledge who we were and our experience, and we weren't gonna hide that shit from nobody.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright &copy; 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.