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MN: Let me go back to Manzanar, and I know you've been very involved. And in 2011, at the Manzanar Pilgrimage, the Manzanar Committee honored the 5500 organization, and this is something you founded. Can you share a little bit about what this organization is and why it got started and what it does?

Mo N: Yeah, sure. Like you mentioned, I participated in the first pilgrimage, and I've been going to the pilgrimages off and on for all these years. That place will always have a part of my life, so I don't ever think I'll not ever go there. But anyhow, what started to happen was that the direction that the Manzanar Committee was going in was starting to make me ill. This whole thing about asking the government for this, the government for that, getting recognition by all these politicians and stuff like that, all these guys trying to use our community to get ahead for themselves. And we had talked about over the years about an alternative to the pilgrimage. Not to down the pilgrimage, but an alternative to that.

So in '91, the sweat leader or medicine man had a vision of doing an elders gathering here on the West Coast, here in Los Angeles. And we wanted to do something, there was a bunch of us, me and Misako who were sweating with him, we wanted to do something to help support him. So we formed a committee to support the Indigenous Elder Support Committee, that's what that means. Okay, what could we do to actually support 'em concretely? So there were two things that we decided we wanted to do. One was a fundraiser, we raised money to give to him and his organization to help fund some of the stuff that they wanted to do. The other thing was for us to do a ceremony, a prayer ceremony that had to do with us as Japanese people. So we thought about, okay, getting together the people who had gone to Wounded Knee in '73, and those people who went up the Big Mountain in '83 or something like that, veterans who had supported the native struggles. And so we formed the group, and that's where we came up with the idea of maybe doing the run from Little Tokyo to Manzanar.

And so in '92 we kicked off the first run. But we did it because, one, wanted to support the elders gathering and the indigenous people, and two, the direction that the Manzanar Committee was going in was getting into these bourgeois political games, and didn't really, to us, touched the essence of who we were, what we were about. And it wasn't promoting any pride, it seemed like it was always promoting us going hand in hand to the white man and asking him for something, recognition, money, status or whatever. None of us feel that that should be the main reason.

MN: Now during this twenty years... well, actually, tell me, for those of us who don't know what the run is like, can you share with us what it's like? I mean, like one person doesn't do the entire run.

Mo N: Right, right. It's a relay, we refined it down to the point where each person runs, walks, crawls, flies, a half mile, or up to a mile. And we do a cycle. It's a relay, we have two objects of worship that we carry with us. One is a scroll given to us by Kazu Ishii, atomic bomb victim, she wrote us a scroll for our first run. We kind of put it in plastic and run with that, and we run with the Hiroshima eternal peace flame. And these things have kind of evolved, or people have given it to us and we just decided, okay, we're gonna go along with it. The beauty of it I think is that we run from Little Tokyo to Manzanar basically following the trail that our people did when they went to Manzanar. And we carried the Hiroshima peace flame and this scroll written by an atomic bomb victim, and American atomic bomb victim. So tells us that the symbol to me is that if you common people, you got no business supporting nothing that they do, because it's us that catches the hell. Get atomic bomb, you get sent to concentration camp, what more could we ask for, right? Symbolically it unites what happened to us in Japan and happened to us here.

It's a way... well, most of us have traveled that distance ninety miles an hour down the freeway, and don't hardly see nothing, right? Just whiz through there. Well, when you're walking or running on that land, it takes on a whole totally different complexion and complexity and beauty. So part of that teaching was to respect the Earth Mother, the traditional teaching that comes down from that, it's borne out in the run itself. Yeah, twenty years, I'll do it 'til the day I die, same thing with the sun dance. It's a part of my life. What I learned at Wounded Knee comes back to that. Henry Crow Dog said that these ceremonies that we do should help us reinforce who we are and also to draw a line between getting caught up in bullshit that the man lays on us about how we're supposed to live, and what is reality. What is it that need? You don't need all that stuff. I mean, we joke about that. On the run, what do you do? You eat, sleep, run and defecate. That's it, until you get to Manzanar. [Laughs] You know what I mean? Then we go to join our Indian brothers and sisters in a sweat lodge and a potluck and close the gap, end the run with that. Pretty simple. Gives you a chance to rest your mind and sort everything out, put everything in place. It's good, if you're a Buddhahead, I encourage you to come and try it. And you don't have to do it all the time, you don't have to run all the way. Whatever you can run, we can make arrangements. Come and join us. We have Chinatown kids that do one day or half a day, join us and they run. Come for three, four hours with us.

MN: How long does it take to run from here to... from Little Tokyo to Manzanar, how many days do you take?

Mo N: Well, we were really, thought we were tough guys at one time, and we used to do it in five days, fifty mile days. And we'd take seven days off, so we used to have two days where we used to mess around. We decided, "Well, why are we trying to kill ourselves?" So we stretched it out so we started running seven days, it was a little bit easier, now we're down to, our numbers are really small right now. So we stretch it out nine, ten days. So instead of leaving on the weekend, we leave Wednesday or Thursday or Friday, add an extra day. One year there was only two of us, me and Misako. She's my chief... maybe I should say Misako and me. But yeah, we took ten days and just basically my family. And people came and supported us on different days and stuff. So we know it ain't about not making it, that ain't the question, it's the kind of spirit you're in to do it.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright &copy; 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.