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MN: Well, you know, you worked on the Housing Committee.

Mo N: Yeah.

MN: How did you get involved with that?

Mo N: Because I worked, my specialty area in the Asian Involvement Office was working with the seniors, 'cause we came out of building up the Pioneer Center and that kind of stuff. I worked with Reverend Sayama. And that's one of the things we wanted to see, one of the first projects was to have some kind of decent housing for our people here in J-town to experience something nice. So I joined... Reverend Toriumi was the boss, and so I joined forces with him and did all the legwork. But again, things were real... I didn't realize it at the time, but I was used by... my job was to go out to all the different churches and places, places were our people congregated at, and talked to the people there and get them to sign up to move into J-town. And then what they told me was that we have to have a backlog; we have to have an oversubscription in order for us to justify building the Little Tokyo Towers. So I didn't know any better, so I bought that.

Yeah, so that was the first and only project where the whole community came together as far as I was concerned. We had the radicals, and then we had the Chamber of Commerce people, and all the liberals, Democrats in between, and Republicans, too, supporting that. So yeah, we used to laugh about that, right, we had the Chamber of Commerce people approaching... who the hell was the chief at that time? Anyhow, the Secretary for Housing or something like that, cabinet thing. But they'd be approaching those guys up there in Washington, and we'd be holding demonstrations here in town for the thing. And when we got it and built it, we were real proud of that, real happy.

MN: Wasn't that Mitt Romney's dad who was Secretary of Housing?

Mo N: Yeah, right. That's what I was thinking. I thought it was Romney, but I wasn't sure. But yeah, yeah.

MN: I don't remember his first name, but I remember it was Mitt Romney's dad.

Mo N: Yeah, I was trying to remember, too. So we got the place, and we were touted at that time that we were gonna, with the housing we were gonna put in there, we were going to be revolutionary housing. It was gonna be real low cost and low maintenance, the whole nine yards. And the housing was prefabricated, modular housing. And so all you had to do was put the floors up, and then you'd take these modules and put 'em in there, bang. And just, whole thing, and the walls did all the support stuff. So you had nice solid walls in between the apartments, soundproof, everything. And they put up, after they did the foundational work, they put the fifteen stories up in sixteen days. You can imagine how much money you'd save that now? Goddamn, all they have is delays installing and cost overruns and stuff like that. Yeah, they did it on budget on time. And then County Federation of Labor stabbed us in the back, 'cause they allowed three of these things to be built, and then they came down and put a stop to it. But nobody said who said what or anything, they just, they weren't building these things anymore. And we got guys on the job, put 'em to work out there working for the company that was building all of this stuff. So we felt that we were getting a pretty good shake out of this stuff, 'cause not only was benefitting the Isseis, but it would also benefit the young people and get work. And what the union people didn't like was the fact that since it was just rolling cement and putting pipe in and stuff like that, you could do it by just mapping plans and stuff like that, you put piping in there and you run wire and do whatever you have to do. So all you needed was labor, only laborers, right. Then when you put all the things together, then you had to have the electrician, the plumber, and all these guys, air conditioning, these guys used to come in, slap it together, and then sign off on it. Well, instead of having six, nine months of work, shit, they had about two days of work right after you put all that stuff together, and they didn't like that, so they shit-canned it. Yeah, laborer, the unions just kind of crapped on the community.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright &copy; 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.