<Begin Segment 5>

MN: Now, so you were living here, and what were some of the still, debates that were still going on while all this redevelopment was going on in Little Tokyo?

Mo N: Well, when I first came down here, the first little while, the Sun Hotel struggle was going on. That was the last plot of land, after they got that, then the hotel construction goes straight ahead. So that was going on, and that was a tragedy. The potential that could have developed behind that was never done for a lot of fucked up reasons. But we were still organizing, they were trying to organize the ladies in the bars, we still had a whole lot of bars down here, and still trying to organize tenants. In fact, we had a tenants association, I personally participated in two tenants associations. So there was those kind of stuff that we were trying to get organized and get going. So, yeah, what we found, though, is that there were other forces that wanted, that were using the tenants movement, tenants association to promote their own stuff. That was the tragedy of it, right? When we were fighting -- I lived in the Allen Hotel and that was a good fight there. But we didn't get any kind of support from anybody at that time, just us tenants there fought to get what little money we could.

And there we were stabbed in the back by the community people, too, by the advisory committee and all those people. I mean, here we are, right in the middle of the redevelopment project, and this Japanese company comes in and told us to get out, and they're not gonna give us any compensation. And so we said, "Why not?" They said, "Because the redevelopment ain't buying, didn't buy the property and then didn't sell it to us. We're going straight through the owner of the property, so we don't have to pay you." Well, that's not true. The redevelopment law says anything within the boundary lines is considered part of the project and they have to go according to law. Well, that's when we got stabbed in the back. When we went to, we fought 'em all the way up to the CRA board, and when we confronted the board chairman, he told us, "Oh, that's simple. You guys just go back there and tell the Redevelopment Task Force down there, if they accept it, all they got to do is say, yeah, pay 'em off." We went back down there, they turned their back on us. 'Cause there wasn't that many Buddhaheads left in the hotel at that time, mostly Chicanos and what they considered riff raff lived down there. And they sold us out, man, turned their back on us. We had that kind of racially tinged bullshit down here in J-town many times in the past, where principle got sold out behind some stuff about some petty bourgeois nationalist bullshit. So, yeah. Anyway, tripping again. [Laughs]

MN: So, now, these association meetings, were these the ones that were held at the Higashi Hongwanji?

Mo N: What?

MN: The association meetings, were they the same meetings that were held at the Higashi Hongwanji?

Mo N: Some of 'em. Wait a minute, association meetings, what do you mean? Is that the one you're talking about with Bruce and them?

MN: No, the one that you were talking about for the people living in the J-town area.

Mo N: Yeah, yeah.

MN: Weren't there meetings at the Higashi Hongwanji?

Mo N: Well, we had 'em at Higashi, yeah. Nori and his dad were always open to us. Yeah, we had a big meeting there around the issue of the Sun Building, couple hundred people there, a pretty far out meeting. But that's when we had decided we're gonna use the International Hotel in San Francisco as an example, we're gonna turn the Sun Building into a community center and run programs and stuff like that and just get in there and occupy that sucker, live in there. And everybody there pretty much unanimously went for that. We had another political organization that was promoting this line about, "Oh, we should go in there," and just token resistance, give it up without a fight. And our line won. We were gonna go in there and turn that sucker into a righteous struggle. Well, it turns out there's all this fanfare about, "We're gonna defend this building," and blah, blah, blah. And so what happens? It comes time for them to come down and evict us, we have two people in there who had never run no programs, we didn't open the fucking building up to the community or nothing. They come in about four o'clock in the morning, they arrest the two people that were down there and take 'em off, and they lock the building up. And just a little bit after that I get a knock on my door, and one of the old-timers down here tells me, "Man, you guys were full of shit." I said, "Why? What you mean?" Said, "Man, they came and took 'em away. That building's gone." Oh, man. And the thing was was that I guess maybe our forces didn't realize that we did have this kind of community support, and there were people watching. But there were. Yeah, we let 'em down. The movement, the old-timers who lived down here in J-town at that time didn't have much confidence in us or our word or anything, the fact that most of the people coming from outside lived down there, down here. So, yeah, it was a lot of bad mistakes. Lot of elitism.

MN: So when did those photos that I've seen about the Sun Building and the placards, was that taken after the LAPD shut down? No, before.

Mo N: That's what I was telling you, that's all that fanfare. "We're gonna do this," you know. So everybody's gung ho. Then we never opened the building up, we don't invite people to come in, just take that sucker over.

MN: So there was only two people there at the Sun Building in the evening, and the LAPD just came in and just arrested them?

Mo N: Four o'clock in the morning. Yeah, sad stuff.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright &copy; 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.