<Begin Segment 2>

MN: I want to change the subject now a little bit and ask you about redevelopment. And you were very involved, but I want to go back to your high school days when you and your cousin used to go up to San Francisco, and you saw what was going up in San Francisco's J-town. Can you share with us what you saw and what went through your mind?

Mo N: Well, you know, when we used to go up there, me and my blood, that was in high school. So we didn't really quite understand what was going on, but all we knew was that when we got up to J-town, they had the Geary Street widening where they chopped J-town right in half. And we were up there when they were bulldozing it, too, and all of that stuff. So I thought, "What the hell is all this shit about?" But the part, Post and Buchanan, Post and Sutter, all of that, was where we hung out at. So Geary Street was over some more, over another block or two. So, but I saw that and I remember the comments of people, that a lot of people got rousted, had to leave because of the widening and stuff like that. So I always remembered that, that J-town was, had this big construction thing right down almost the middle of it. It came down Post or Sutter or something like that, would have been right in the middle of it, and a little bit over on Geary Street.

But yeah, so when the redevelopment started here, we already knew what had happened at Bunker Hill. When I was growing up, my age group, when we used to come down to J-town, half the time we'd go out there and hang out up there up on Bunker Hill, or go down to Main Street. A lot of Japanese people have hotels and stuff like that, so a lot of our friends lived down here. So we used to go up there and run the streets. And at that time, Bunker Hill had all these old mansions. That used to be where all the old rich people, white people used to live. But they let it run down, and by the time the war ended and we came back, that was where all the hookers lived, all the deaf-mutes lived, Indians used to live up there, you name it. The flotsam of downtown Los Angeles lived there 'cause real cheap rooms and stuff like that. So yeah, we saw that. But they tore all that down just for all that crap that's up there now.

And yeah, so when the redevelopment started down here, and we were afraid of that, that there was a, it was a big problem. So some of the older Nisei guys said that, "We're gonna fix that. We're not gonna let that happen to us." That's why we asked for a real small redevelopment project. It wasn't as big as it should have been, it should have went from Temple down to Fourth Street, from the river down to Los Angeles Street. But they set the boundaries, and they said that this is the way we were gonna beat it, so okay, so a lot of us were for it at the beginning. So we knew what we thought that we had some control over. But we got sold out by our own people.

MN: So did you attend some of the early Little Tokyo Redevelopment Agency meetings? That's the one that Bruce Kaji was chairing.

Mo N: I don't remember Bruce. I mean, we had our own thing. We had, the JACS people, the Asian Involvement Office, we had our own ideas and then also that, yeah... I personally had interaction with... I don't know what the hell they called it. It was before the redevelopment itself, so this might be this agency thing you're talking about. But I don't remember Bruce at all. I remember I dealt with Kango, I dealt with...

MN: Kango Kunitsugu.

Mo N: Yeah, Kango Kunitsugu, I dealt with Tosh Terazawa, Frank...

MN: Hirata?

Mo N: No, the sushi man. No, Hirata was just a, he was...

MN: Part of the --

Mo N: Lackey of the... not lackey, I guess, but secretary. Secretary of the Japanese Chamber of Commerce.

MN: Who was with, Mukaida was the chair of the Japanese Chamber of Commerce.

Mo N: Could be, yeah. Mukaida was King Kong in L.A.

MN: Are you talking about Matsunozushi?

Mo N: Yeah.

MN: Kawasaki.

Mo N: Yeah, what was his name?

MN: Akira.

Mo N: Akira, yeah. Not Frank, Akira. Those guys. So that's who we dealt with then, yeah. Yeah, then the JACS board was pretty much left, liberal guys, too. Yeah, there was Tosh and Kango, all those guys that made up the left, left of center, Democratic, Japanese Democrat, Nisei Democratic Club of the West Side. Kango was 10th District whatchacall way back in the '40s and early '50s. But they represented the left. That was probably Communist inspired, too, and so they caught a lot of hell during McCarthy times. And present the old 10th District, the Jefferson area, the Jefferson Valley area, the Seinan area, that was a hotbed of Communists at one time.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright &copy; 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.