<Begin Segment 1>

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.

<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.

<Begin Segment 3>

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.

<Begin Segment 4>

MN: Let me ask you about this article that appeared in a Japanese business magazine, and it was saying that the Japanese corporations like Kajima were getting involved in Little Tokyo because they wanted to showcase it. How, how did the community learn about this and what was the reaction to this article?

Mo N: Well, somebody was, had been monitoring the Japanese newspapers. And this one newspaper in particular that people watched because it talked about overseas news and all that, Nihon Keizai Times. And so when that came out, we caught it, and we put it out in the community, these suckers were coming in, want to take us over. Well, a lot of the older Nisei guys, we're talking about, "Oh, don't worry about that shit, it don't mean nothing." Said, "Why not?" "Well, in fifty, a hundred years, this place will revert back to us anyhow. They won't want us or need us anymore." What the hell kind of thinking is that? But yeah, there was this real split in the community or at least for those of us who are active here, there are those who wanted money. In fact, Kango, as the first redevelopment guy here, took the Kajima guy, or took the CRA guy back to Japan to meet the Kajima big shots, or to sell 'em on the idea of having them come down here and build this hotel instead of the Hiroshima Kenjinkai or the local people. So every time we turned around, they're selling us out to the highest bidder. We also knew what the city wanted, too. The city wanted Chinatown, La Brea Street, the Placita and Little Tokyo to be tourist spots, kind of... what they call that? Places of interest. Where you come down to Los Angeles and you could do business with everything, city, county, state, federal, all in one place. And then you had to go coast, right, Figueroa, had to been built up by that, and then Bunker Hill, so you had all the financial districts, all of that stuff all in one place, and first class hotels, stuff like that. So if people came down here to stay, then within almost walking distance, cruise down to Chinatown, cruise to the Placita, come down to J-town, so that's what they wanted. We were dead set against that. We wanted something that benefited our people, not just businesspeople. So there was always kind of the idea of Little Tokyo having two sections.

[Interruption]

Mo N: Okay. One of the things that some of us pitched from the youth community was the fact that our understanding was Little Tokyo was a working class community from day one, and all the business here were to service those workers that lived down here and for other people that come from other parts of the city, come down to J-town and shop. So it was mainly for the community. Wasn't no tourist bullshit. And so if they wanted a tourist trap, and we realized that, some of us realized we couldn't do nothing about it anyhow. So what we opted for a separate working class area down here in J-town out toward the river, out to where Nishi's at right now, around through there. So when they took over White King, we started licking our chops, it was a beautiful working class section right down there. But yeah, split this sucker. Let the businesspeople have First and San Pedro. If they're willing to sell their soul out for that sucker, then let 'em sell it. We wanted a place where we would have low-cost reasonable housing for working people, especially young people, senior citizens, and we wanted to put up a hospital, medical facility that was both east and western medicine, bring all of that together, and have a budokan down there. Not this thing that Bill is talking about, we don't need no basketball. Some people do, that's okay, but what we want is something for us -- martial arts and sustain our culture. We ain't worried about that, they can go to school and learn all that other stuff. So, yeah, we had, at least some of us had this kind of design and things that we wanted to build out there that serviced our people. We wanted a reasonable, like a motel or something like that down there where people were coming in from out of town, just drive in and get a place to stay right in J-town instead of paying that ridiculous money up there. Even that... what's that one on First Street, that hotel? That sucker's expensive, too.

MN: You talking about Miyako?

Mo N: Yeah. But anyhow, so there are other views on how the development should have, could have went.

MN: But you know, I'm wondering from the very beginning, was there talk about attracting corporate businesses or was it the two tiered, corporate business and affordable housing? I mean, at the very beginning of the redevelopment discussions, what was it focused on? When did it become divided?

Mo N: It was attracting big business. But they knew that it wouldn't fly because the young people were doing all the legwork and we weren't gonna go for that. And so... that's the reason why the housing got done first. And as soon as the housing got done, check what happened. We just got sold right down the drain. We did all the legwork and then they kicked us out. Once they got established, then they went straight after the money.

MN: So when it became obvious that redevelopment was focusing on more corporate money, is that when the Little Tokyo Anti-Eviction Task Force was formed?

Mo N: Uh-huh, at the very beginning, we were the Little Tokyo Redevelopment Task Force. And then we realized that we got snookered, and then we switched our name and started taking positions against what they were trying to do.

MN: And then from there, that became the Little Tokyo People's Rights organization, is that right?

Mo N: Right.

MN: And then did a lot of those people then eventually become NCRR, National Coalition for Redress and Reparations?

Mo N: [Nods]

MN: But by this time, when it became LTPRO, you had left the movement --

Mo N: Not the movement, I left...

MN: You left the redevelopment, I meant the redevelopment.

Mo N: Well, the organized section. I was part of a revolutionary organization, so I was working as a representative of the Revolutionary Organization in the community. And I got fired from the Revolutionary Organization but I was still a community person who lived out here.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright &copy; 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<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.

<Begin Segment 6>

MN: Anything else about redevelopment you want to share about?

Mo N: Yeah. I think that the main thing, the gripe I have about the redevelopment and its process is that my understanding, as I understood it, was that redevelopment was supposed to benefit all the people. And the redevelopment, the forces that were going to participate in the redevelopment was supposed to represent all the forces. When it comes right down to it, then the actual process, the law talks like that. What actually happens in practice is that first when they formed the Community Development Advisory Committee, they talked about bringing in businesspeople internally in the community or in J-town but outside. So it was heavily laden with businesspeople. And then those of us, the young people that were part of the AI office. And so instead of really bearing down at us organizing people, the tenants and the workers and people who lived down there and have them come to the redevelopment meetings, we pretty much took it on ourselves to represent their interest on this thing. Once we get that housing finished, then the door gets opened up to all the corporate interests and the insurance and all these other people started pouring in, 'cause not there's some big money coming down the pipe. That's when we get kicked out, we participate early on in the development of the cultural center, booted out. We participated in the development of the Pioneer Center, booted out. All the institutions that we thought would represent all of the people, we didn't say just workers or oppressed people, poor people that live down here. We wanted, whatchacall, like the Pioneer Center. The Pioneer Center's supposed to help everybody down there, not just old people. Young people are supposed to have a place to come and hang out and talk to the old people. Supposed to be where the generations could mix and do things together. That's what the hanami was about, all that kind of stuff. No, petty bourgeois interests got a hold of all that, they took it and ran. And the only people they benefited was themselves and screw everybody else, young people and the poor people.

MN: They definitely kicked out the young people.

Mo N: Yeah.

MN: You mentioned there was a flag burning on First Street. What was that protesting?

Mo N: Well, after the Keizai Shimbun article came out about "Big Tokyo was gonna take over Little Tokyo for showcase for Big Tokyo," we figured, so we started raising hell in all the meetings and stuff like that, you know. "Fuck these goddamn Japan corporations. We need to put some kind of limits on their participation, gonna let them just buy their way in and stuff like that. And we were doing this in the community as a whole. And especially a lot of our young people, youth organizations. So they formed the Van Troi Anti-Imperialist Youth Brigade. I don't know if you know who Van Troi is. Van Troi is a young man who was part of the anti-Vietnam War effort here in the United States. He was a Vietnamese student, he was sent back to Vietnam, in fact, deported, and he was taken off the airplane and executed right there on the tarmac in Saigon. And he represented the youth of the world, standing up for justice. And so we had a Van Troi Anti-Imperialist Youth Brigade, about two or three hundred young people, beautiful, they were marching in step, the little pop and all of that, it's bad. Yeah, unfurled that Japanese battle flag, it wasn't the hinomaru, it was the battle flag, the one with the rays on it. That's the one that Emperor Meiji gave to Togo Taisho when he defeated the Russian navy. Japanese battle flag, and put that sucker out there, put a torch to it. Everybody shit a brick. [Laughs] Oh, man. This is what we hear later, is that Reverend Toriumi is supposed to be the spiritual head of Little Tokyo, he gets called in to the consul general's office and gets chewed out. "What the hell are you young people doing?" and blah, blah, blah. As if he could control us, hell. Would listen to him, but he ain't gonna control us. He calls me. "This is democracy, man. This is America. Go to hell." And young people are gonna do what they're gonna do.

I was with another organization, and what we did was we went up, climbed the Kajima Building, unfolded some banners and stuff from up there. That was Van Troi, who was the other one? We had another anti-imperialist group taken from the Vietnam War. I think we dropped some M-80 firecrackers up there, make a big noise, disrupt the whole damn thing. But yeah, that's what it was. It was to expose Japanese imperialism, that they weren't our benefactors, and for the community to be aware.

MN: So how many, like, seniors or low-income people do you think were displaced from all this redevelopment that went on and all the hotels that were destroyed?

Mo N: How many?

MN: Yeah, how many do you estimate? A thousand people?

Mo N: Probably close to a thousand. You had New York Hotel, the Sun Hotel, and the Allen Hotel were the biggest. They must have had close to four or five hundred people in there at least. And all the smaller hotels, yeah. And that's another thing, betrayal. The redevelopment law says that those people who are displaced are supposed to have the first opportunity to come back. When me and a friend went to check up on somebody at the Redevelopment Agency, Little Tokyo Redevelopment Agency office, we asked where this person was, and they didn't know. So we asked them, "Well, how in the hell are you gonna get a hold of them when the new housing goes up?" [Shrugs] Which means basically that they didn't give a shit. They got 'em out, paid 'em off, if they raised enough hell, then that was it. But they did a lot of it, they did go in and pay off a lot of the Buddhaheads. See, that's what they did at the Sun Hotel. When they bought it, what made the intention to buy it, then they went in and gave the people I forgot how much money it was, to leave, and ninety percent of the Japanese people left. Well, instead of closing the goddamn building down, they left it open and let that sucker let in Latinos. Then when they came down to really demolish the building, they didn't want to pay the Latinos to leave. That's where LTPRO did some of its great work, stood up for them and the people got some money out of that. But that's the kind of stuff, prejudice or kind of playing the racist game for the white man. So, yeah, it's the ugly stuff like that that's in the history of the redevelopment process. [Laughs] I lost your question.

MN: No, you answered it.

Mo N: Yeah? Okay.

MN: I mean, we can go on about redevelopment, but is there other points you want to make before I go on to another subject? 'Cause I could talk about another hour on redevelopment, but probably not. [Laughs]

Mo N: Yeah, we can't. Well, I think the parting shot for me would be that we've lost the battle. This place is gone. You come here at night and that's all you see, looks like salt and pepper out there. And the reason is pretty clear. There's housing, but it's all high-end housing, it's all for yuppies. And that what we need to do in order to revitalize our part of J-town is to fight for housing, low-cost housing. And we know how to build it, we know that modular, prefabricated housing, all we need is land, we don't need a lot of land. And they got land all over this place, the city does. They owe us. They didn't give us nothing back, compensate us nothing for the Parker Center area. That's supposed to come back if they don't use it for that. It's like Indian treaties, if they're not using it, they got to go back to the tribe. Bullshit. They ain't giving back nothing to nobody. But that's the promise, they said that. Cold north side of First Street, that whole area back there. So that's a good solid two blocks of perfectly good land that could be used to benefit our people taken away. There's still a score to settle, and we need to get out there. So that's why I'm waiting; as soon as this rising that we see coming now, we see Occupy L.A., so that's the bellwether. Clang, clang, clang, round three. [Laughs] Yeah, when the youth hit the street again, we'll be back.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright &copy; 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 7>

MN: Okay, let me go on to Wounded Knee. 1973, the American Indian Movement occupied Wounded Knee in South Dakota. How did you get involved with that?

Mo N: Well, I was with the Community Workers Collective, and East Wind Revolutionary organization. And we've been doing work and supporting an intertribal recovery program called Redwind, by Grandpa Seimu, led by Grandpa Seimu. And they were being attacked by the white folks, the police department. So we were supporting them trying to find a place to live and stuff, and then one of Grandpa's kids had gone back to Wounded Knee and came back. And then there were demonstrations going on at the federal building, so we were going down to support those demonstrations. But it was our understanding then that when the war in Vietnam had ended, and the war had come home, that's what the struggle at Wounded Knee represented. So there wasn't any word coming out of Wounded Knee. The FBI had just, letting out hardly any kind of information, and the media wasn't carrying it. So we decided to send a relief convoy up to... they were going to try to break the blockade, they were gonna march in, international call put out.

So we were part of that, so we went there, me and another lady comrade, we went up there as advance party, and then the L.A. contingent showed up, there were about twenty, thirty people. And then we rendezvoused over at Crow Dog's Paradise at Pine Ridge. And then we tried to walk into the Knee. That's where my memories are real fuzzy... 'cause we never got in. We never made it in. One of the thoughts that I had is, memories I have is racing down these dirt roads about ninety miles an hour with the FBI chasing us, and me thinking to myself, "Goddamn it, I'm gonna die out here in the middle of nowhere, being chased down by the FBI. But apparently we didn't get caught, we got away. And we decided we were gonna come back, that we had done what we had tried to do, and that we made enough connections so we were gonna be able to put the word out about what was going on up there. But then some really beautiful stories came out of there. Want to hear 'em? [Laughs]

MN: Did it affect you?

Mo N: Huh?

MN: How did these stories affect you?

Mo N: Well, it affected me by letting me know that I was on the right side.

[Interruption]

Mo N: One is at Wounded Knee, on the inside, there was one person killed in there, one major casualty, guy named, brother named Frank Clearwater. And we were on the outside, and someone asked us, we sent some people to go in and bring the body out from Wounded Knee. So a couple of our comrades went in and escorted the body out. So we were at the mortuary when the body came out, and we met the brother's wife, companion, partner, and a sister named Morning Star. She told us their story. She said that they were alcoholics in North Carolina, wasting their lives, when they heard about Wounded Knee. They discussed, talked it over and said, "Shit, let's get the hell out of here and let's go up there, see what's going on." So they hitchhiked from North Carolina all the way up to Rosebud. And this is in the '70s, there's still segregation and still, they're hunting down Indians and blacks and Mexicans and killing them, right? So they're dodging the vigilantes and all of this stuff, hitchhiking all the way across, they make it up into South Dakota and they get in. And then he gets killed. So we're all feeling pretty shitty about that, so we're telling Morning Star, "Oh, man, please accept our condolences," and blah, blah, blah, feeling sorry for her. She looks us in the eye and she says, "If you're feeling sorry for me or Frank," she says, "stop right there." She says, "You know, we struggled and, and almost got wasted coming in here, and we got in, and we were free. We were free. We were on Indian land. And he died as a warrior, defending his nation." Says, "There ain't shit to feel sorry for. Be proud for him. Rejoice in that, that he died a free man." Is that bad?

The other story is almost, just as great. One of our comrades stayed behind, and then she saw this young black woman, thirteen, fourteen years old, and she was already a legend there. They were resupplying the Knee by walking in and out, about twenty, thirty mile walk into the Knee and out again, and they're carrying stuff on their back and walking in. And they're stopping the FBI from going too crazy, ducking the police dogs, the whole works, the radar, everything they used in Vietnam they were trying to use over there, and they were just outwitting them, in and out. This young lady, maybe she weighed a hundred pounds, got a fifty-pound pack, and just trucking in, coming back out. So my comrade asked, "What's the young black woman doing up here?" She says, "My family ancestors are runaway slaves. When Wounded Knee went down, our family had a council, and said, 'We got to do something to support them, and here's the chance for us go give payback.'" But when they went around the room, all the relatives, everybody's working, and here she was, I guess, junior high school, beginning high school, she says, "I'll go. I'm not making any money for the family or doing, toward the welfare of the family." She says, "I'll go." So they talk it over and they said, "Okay." So they get all their nickels and dimes together and they get her a bus ticket and sent her up into Rapid City. From there she joins, she comes to the Com Center and then she starts participating in the walk down the Ho Chi Min Trail. [Laughs] When we got there, all these Asians pull in, and, "Oh, man." Word went out, right? Chairman Mao has sent reinforcements to help us. [Laughs] People flashing the red book and stuff like that, it was cool. [Laughs] But yeah, can you imagine that? Fourteen years old. She was tough. But yeah, those two stories are stories I really like to tell about Wounded Knee.

MN: They're very, very powerful.

Mo N: Yeah, yeah, inspiring.

MN: What were some of the lessons you learned at Wounded Knee?

Mo N: Well, main lesson was the teaching by Henry Crow Dog, Leonard Crow Dog's dad. But he told us that the ceremonies that the Lakota people do, sweat lodge, sun dance, vision quest, all those ceremonies are there to draw the line between the white man's technology and his civilization, what he says is supposed to be so great, and that the ceremonies are to make us strong so that we will know who we are and to know the difference between right and wrong. Like I said, I do the ceremonies, I do three of 'em anyhow. I do the sun dance, I do vision quests, and I do a sweat lodge. And all of those, I remember that when we participate in these ceremonies, that's what we always do. We mind ourselves, and we're caretakers of the Earth Mother, we're not people who come in and just take. And we're there to protect the Earth Mother and protect the people, the children of the Earth Mother. So that our job is just to be, is to make a better world. And capitalism and imperialism definitely are not the way to go.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright &copy; 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 8>

MN: Now on the way back from Wounded Knee, you stopped by Amache?

Mo N: Uh-huh.

MN: How did you feel about returning to camp?

Mo N: Yeah, that's a good one. I don't know. I know I wanted to stop, I went by there at night, but it was dark, so we had no place to, we didn't want to stop there. And we had people we wanted to stay with in Rocky Ford. So we drove to Rocky Ford, but my wife at that time said, "Why don't we stay over a couple days and then go back?" So then we drove back to Amache, it's not that far. Colorado ain't that big of a state, unlike California. So we went back during the day. And I got up to where my block was, and I had all this rush of memories that came back. Yeah, I don't know what to say. I was just overwhelmed by it, so I just had to take a break and just sit down and let it run through me. But yeah, I had a lot of rushes. Dog, and used to be a couple... somebody's dog, like wild dog, and me and two other guys from our block, we used to run together all the time, so they used to be like our pals. And just the memories. I was talking about the obake that came out of the... the hinotama that came out of the graveyard and chased us? Yeah. Being at the shooting range. See, some of these, I don't know if they're dreams, I don't know if somebody conjured 'em up. 'Cause when I talk to people, they don't remember it. This guy named Mitsuru Konki, he was a real "bring it" guy, he was hit by a car. He was what kind people say is "eccentric," and then Japanese called him kichigai. We used to go fuck with him all the time. We had a reunion with the two guys that I was in camp together with, so I asked him if he remembered. It took him a little while, the guy who says he's got a clear memory, it took him a little while, he said, "Oh, yeah, now I remember. Guy on a bicycle, older guy. So I asked him the question that's always been bothering all my life. I said, "Did we used to throw rocks at him?" He said, "Yeah." "What do you mean, 'Yeah'?" Said, "Shit, we used to throw rocks at everybody including each other." [Laughs] And I'm thinking, oh, man, we got some heavy bachi coming off of that, man. Okay, yeah. So these memories I have of camp was just, yeah, they overwhelmed me that time. Took that back with a real heavy heart. But it was part of my liberating process, to be able to look at that and see it for what it was. I went back again, you know, a couple years ago with my son after a sun dance up there, we stayed on the, camped on the grounds there a couple, three days. I didn't have the rush, so I guess I must have cleared it. So my son was trippin'. There were some coyotes howling at night, scared the shit out of him. [Laughs] Cracked him up. So, yeah.

You know, my association with the Indians goes back to Alcatraz when we took the Pioneer Project people, we went up there and took a whole busload, the Nisei fishermen and all that. Yeah, so there's all this sprinklings of heroic deeds done by our people that you dig into it, it ain't just the 442, the MIS and all that other bootlicking shit, chasing after the white man trying to curry favor. Our guys were brave, but they're stupid, too. I love 'em, but... go ahead. They don't need to be defended.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright &copy; 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 9>

MN: Let me ask you about your drug addiction and how you got into the Red Rose. When you were at the Community Workers Collective, you started to break ties with a lot of the organizations. Why did you start doing that?

Mo N: Well, at the time, I viewed it as a political problem with the leadership of the revolutionary organization that I was a part of would agree to what we had come to a unanimous decision around, and then turn right around and do his own thing contrary to what the agreement was that everybody agreed on. And nobody stood up to him. I thought that was bullshit. At that time, we were talking about this thing, the "cult of personality" we called it, right? When you put somebody up on a pedestal and then they become the boss, absolute boss. That's not a revolutionary way. So I left because of that. And they were drifting away from working in the, really talking about base building. They had become a part of a larger organization, and then the larger organization started dictating to what was going on. That's where the LTPRO business starts, LTPRO to NCRR. In fact, they dropped, they betrayed the people of J-town, become this overall Japanese community leader in the redress movement. "Betray" may be a strong word, but I felt in a sense that it was. And they left a lot of people who were still loyal to the people of J-town, left them in limbo, and eventually they just dropped out.

Then I got divorced at that time, and the collective was falling apart, people wanted to move on to new and better things I guess. So for me, it was leaving the guidance of a political organization, leaving my marriage, which wasn't much of a marriage. We lived in the collective. And so I guess I wasn't a very cool guy either at that time. She was ready to leave me, and I didn't even know she was mad at me. That's how dense I was. So can't say much of a marriage out of that, but I still loved her. Then collective falling apart, so my living situation was in limbo. So I opted to move to J-town, and she wouldn't come with me, so that broke that up. We went to counseling and stuff like that, got together for about a year after.

Yeah, so I came to J-town, I thought I was gonna come home and be the savior, save J-town for us. Shit. People wouldn't even talk to me for a couple of years. This is a village. Villagers don't like outsiders coming in acting big. [Laughs] So man, I got shot down, so I thought, well, I needed company. A couple of guys down here were dope fiends just like me, so we used to get loaded together all the time. I got into drugs more and more to the point where I couldn't even hold a job anymore. I spent about ten years on the run.

MN: What was your relationship with your family at that time?

Mo N: About nonexistent, yeah. Towards the end of my run, my mother had kidney failure so she was, had to go to dialysis. My dad was getting old, so then I started to help him, he was gardening around and stuff like that. So I made some amends, but I never recovered my dad's trust, and I wasn't clean when my mother passed away. So when she left, she knew she had a fucking dope addict son that would leave her hanging at the dialysis center when he's supposed to come by and pick her up and take her places. And the last straw was when I forgot about her. I was out there running around, then I remembered her, so I went back to the hospital and it was four hours after she was supposed to be done, she was still there. I picked her up, took her, they told me to take her to the hospital because her blood pressure or something was not well. I took her home to my house, told my dad, "Better take her to the hospital, they said she has to go." I let them take her. But about then my dad put the word out that he didn't need to see me come down there and worry my mom, make her sick, stopped me from visiting my mom, and he would disown me. That's when I figured, "Well, maybe I'm a little sick. I better go see somebody about trying to figure out what the hell's going on." That started my road to recovery, and it took about three years after that.

MN: Which group did you first try to get help from?

Mo N: Well, ADAP was what was available, so that's what I did. I went there and did some outpatient counseling there with some young dude out of college, and it helped some. It helped just to release the pressure but not getting deeper understanding. Then I stopped for a while, then I went back, "Shit, I got to do something." So I went back and then I got Mike Watanabe, he's the director, and he agreed to be my counselor. So he was good, 'cause he's an ex-junkie, too. He comes out of the recovery program, so that was good, so I would be able to develop insight. The young guy was good but he didn't have no insight. He didn't have no experience at nothing. So I was able to kick the angel dust with their help, but I was still smoking a lot of weed, probably doing some psychedelics and stuff like that, smoking tobacco.

MN: Were you going in and out of jail at this time, too?

Mo N: Yeah, yeah.

MN: How did you protect yourself in jail?

Mo N: What?

MN: How did you protect yourself in jail?

Mo N: Oh, I was working out. I've been into judo and martial arts and stuff all my life, so just take that into the jailhouse so I wouldn't get messed with too much. If you have to fight, you have to fight, fuck it, yeah.

MN: Did you have any incidents like that where you did have to...

Mo N: Sure. Most people in jail, they'll mean mouth you, but that's about it. You stand up and fight back, then they'll back off, most of 'em. Unless it's something bigger rather than just they're trying to bully your ass, then something else might happen. I was never in that kind of situation.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright &copy; 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 10>

MN: Now during your drug addiction years, you were introduced to Buddhism, through Soka Gakkai?

Mo N: Yeah.

MN: How did you come about being introduced to this?

Mo N: Well, that was about the time when a lot of the artists were starting to move into the district just east of J-town, the artists district. And I met this lady who was open to me, a white lady, and so I started making it with her, and she would do this chanting morning and evening. I thought, "Wow, what is he doing?" I was tripping out on her. She wouldn't pressure me or nothing, she'd just leave shit around for me to look at and read, so then I started reading some of that stuff and it started making sense. So I became a member. And if you ever have a jones, one of the hardest thing in the world is to get that son of a bitch that's sitting on your shoulder to be quiet. It's always talking at you, telling you what's good, what's bad, all that kind of stuff. You know those two little devils that they make fun of? Those are real. [Laughs] I used to have a radio on all the time in my room so I'd have company. But the only time I could shut that sucker down was when I chanted, so I can get a little peace of mind even for a little while like that. So it made a believer out of me.

What was good about, I think, Nichiren Buddhism is that Nichiren, when he formed the Daimoku, he laid out all the stuff for me and brought clarity to what I thought was the law. Namu is to come into unity with, become enlightened, too, mystic law, myoho and rengei, the lotus flower and the sutra, lotus teaching. So the teachings of the mystic law and the lotus sutra, the lotus is the symbol of Buddhism, it's the law of cause and effect. We don't believe in no god, we believe in this law of cause and effect. It just made a whole lot of sense to me, so It felt like the place. Much later, I began to realize the more I thought about it that it also, dialectical materialism, the law that Marx become enlightened to in his study of capitalism, it's exactly like that dialectics, the law of cause and effect. So for me, the merging of Buddhism and mystic law and dialectical materialism, fundamental teachings of Marx and how he lays out the approach to socialism and communism is the natural order of things. It was really good for me. I mean, there's other branches of Buddhism, but the fundamental teaching is still the same, it's the law. We wasn't talking about no God, we're talking about the law. And the law is cause and effect. I was thinking the teachings of the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni Buddha, and that's in there. Yes, so it was a great boon to be able to be introduced to that and give me the peace of mind that I needed to begin to really develop my recovery.

At the same time I was introduced to the Red Road. I was introduced to the Red Road at Wounded Knee, but I didn't know at that time, I let it go. Later, when I'm hassling with this... smoking dope, I've been smoking weed since about fourteen, thirteen, fourteen years old, I liked the stuff. But I know that I was abusing it. If you've got control over it, you don't wake up in the morning first thing and roll a joint, right? And get loaded before breakfast, even before a cup of coffee. So I went to see this medicine man about, "I want to get rid of smoking this dope." I'd already quit alcohol, I had quit the heavy drugs, had quit tobacco, or alcohol and tobacco, right? Cut out everything else. Only thing I was still doing was smoking weed. "Let me go talk to this dude." So he says, "You try the Sweat Lodge Way?"

[Interruption]

Mo N: He says he can't personally guarantee me anything, but he says if I stay on the Sweat Lodge Way, he said, "You'll be all right." So I took his word for it, so I start sweating. And it took a couple years, but one morning I got up, didn't need no grass, just threw that shit away. And I've been pretty much clean since. I don't have any of those old hang-ups anymore. But yeah, doesn't mean I ain't got no problems with... I'm healthier, and I knew I'd have to quit smoking. My dad had emphysema, and I knew about his emphysema attack, and I didn't want to go through that. You're ventilating like hell and nothing's going on. [Laughs] Ain't no energy coming in, don't need that shit. I quit smoking, so that's been pretty good. I still got weak lungs.

MN: Now as someone who's struggled with drug addiction, and you've stayed clean, what message do you have to other people who might be going through the same thing?

Mo N: Well, I think the main thing is to come out of oneself, right? Usually when we're into drugs and shit like that, we're feeling so sorry for ourselves that we can't see people outside of ourselves. So we're stuck in our own little things, so we take dope so that we can construct a better world. [Laughs] So we can construct a better world at least mentally and live in that better world, at least for the time being. The only hangup is when we come back down again, all that shit is still there. In fact, might have even got worse 'cause we lollygag and procrastinated and not dealt with it. The important thing is to reach out beyond yourself. And one of the important things I think that comes from both the Black Panther Party experience, Asian Hardcore experience, Narcotics Anonymous Fellowship, is that got to help others. You can't get stuck on yourself, help others and be of service to the community, to humanity. And one of the things that we know from the Panther Party experience is that when you have low self-image like most of us do growing up in this country, is that if you go to work and help other people, most people are going to be appreciative and look kindly toward you, so that builds up your own self-image and makes you feel better about yourself and the need for drugs and those other kinds of things is diminished.

But that's kind of what Narcotics Anonymous or Alcoholics Anonymous program is, too, a service to others. To help others is the best way. I don't know where you get to that tipping point, because this thing about what you want and what you need to do sometimes don't cross, like two parallel lines. Yeah. But the main thing, of course, is to be able to reach out and talk to somebody, look for somebody to talk to. And if you're in a situation where the sisters and brothers that you're with are into the stuff, then you might have to cut 'em loose, at least a little while 'til you get strong enough to go back and deal with 'em. But yeah... what we used to tell people in Hardcore was that when you were born, you wasn't born with a needle in your arm, joint hanging out of your mouth. When you were born, you were born clean. You can get a natural high off of that, and that's what we have to try to do is go back to that state where you have a natural high. Don't need no alcohol, don't need none of that bullshit. Unless we do it ceremony. We do it for the purpose, you had to put you in communion with whatever higher power you have, probably not too bad. But if you're doing it just for recreation then you're in trouble.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright &copy; 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 11>

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.

<Begin Segment 12>

MN: But, I mean, it wasn't all smooth going on the run. You've had some accidents.

Mo N: Yeah, thirteenth year, truck got rear ended and flipped over in the air like that. Came down on the cab. I thought for sure somebody would be dead. Worst part of it was one of the ladies had both her forearms busted. But we were lucky, yeah. Thirteenth year. But outside of that, yeah, we've been real fortunate. The weather's been pretty good. It's rained on us a little while in the beginning, the wind blows, but those are the ones you remember, the ones that are real tough. But when it's ceremony all the time, this is ceremony. That's why we ask people not to listen to the radio, not to get involved with the electrical stuff, leave their telephones off, all that kind of stuff. We open and close the day with a prayer, then we have a meeting and we talk, all of our meals are shared, take turns... make a spirit plate of all the things we eat, offer it to the spirits of the land, all kind of stuff. When I say something like "spirits of the land," people think... but what we found is that over the years, things would happen, then there'd be a suggestion, "Why don't you make an offering, a spirit plate?" So we started doing that. And the flame would go out for no reason. Oh, shit, we'd have to drive all the way back to Koyasan and get it, stuff like that. So we started doing that, we started making offerings to the four corners where we camp, every fresh camp we offer tobacco to the spirits of the land, ask them for forgiveness, ask them for permission to stay and all that. It got to the point where we don't have those kind of problems no more.

And we find that if we violate some of the things that we evolved into over the years, then shit happens. Like last year, we had this thing about no listening to the radio and stuff like that. One of the cats talking about, "They told me I couldn't listen to my radio," said, "I wouldn't have come." Said, "I'm gonna listen to it," so he did. And other time, guy's talking on the phone to his girlfriend, goddamn flame went out. It was our last day, or next to last day. "What are we gonna do?" We decided, well, okay, we'll get the flame going again, we'll light a match and get it going, and we'll carry it back and then we'll pray like hell we won't make any more mistakes on this kind of stuff. But we find that there are these things that if you're western, technologized, rationalized human being, that you won't believe that they happen. When you get out there and you live in the world, things happen, and you've got to appease them, the energies out there that you don't control. Yeah, we have a pretty nice run now. We got it in pretty good shape, we know how to respect the Earth Mother and all the spirits of this land.

That's the thing, I guess, what I want to say about what the run teaches us, right? Is that the native teachings involve respect for the land and its people, and the animals and all their environment. That's a for-real project, that's an ongoing learning project. You don't have to get all uptight about it, they should be serious about learning and being aware and in tune with what the environment is trying to tell you. You can't go around like what they're doing right now, right? Burning the forest down so they can put cattle on it, shit like that, or drill and mess with the water and all that crazy stuff that they do, right? All over the world for what? Lousy-ass greenback. Anyhow... soapboxing again, huh? [Laughs]

MN: Yeah, anything else you want to add onto any of this?

Mo N: No, I think that's all right. The run is a ceremony that represents our people and our experience on this land. So it's like the sun dance. The sun dance for me is homage to the native peoples and their ability to stay strong, focused on this land. They've been living here in harmony for how many thousands of years? White man says twenty thousand, right, native people say forever, that they originated here. It doesn't matter, long time, and lived in harmony here. Look what these suckers have done with it already. Lousy two hundred years, fucked it all up. Natives got this beautiful saying: "Whatever decision you make at this moment, pause to think about what the consequences will be seven generations down the road, a hundred years." I think that's a good thought. So that's what we try to emphasize: think about what the hell you're doing so you don't mess it up for kids down the road.

MN: Thank you very much, Mo.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright &copy; 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 13>

Mo N: Let me just add where I'm at right at the exact moment, okay? At this exact moment, I am a revolutionary out of water. But with the things that are beginning to happen all over the world and in our community, I see that I might be around with this next rising that's gonna take place. With that statement about the next rising, I just want to say that I have been able to find some kind of balance in my life by integrating Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, Third Worldism. Understanding of 21st century revolutionary nationalism. All of us have a good... who come from a people, an ethnic people, have a right to live as ethnic people. We don't have to, but we have a right to, as long as we don't put other people down. And we have a right to live and enjoy the fruits of our labors and the labors of humanity so that there's enough to go around in the planet for everybody on this planet. So that socialism is a viable alternative. It's a hell of a lot more viable than capitalism and imperialism. I would wish that people would take a hard look at that.

And that Buddhism has helped me understand that this law that Marx shared with us is not something that white man invented, it's something that he discovered that was part of the law, and that law is the mystic law. So mystic law is dialectical materialism. And in that Buddhism, too, Buddhism teaches that all of us have these ten worlds that we live in: hell, hunger, animality, anger, tranquility, ecstasy, knowledge, self realization, bosatsu, and Buddhahood. And the bosatsu lifestyle is to serve the people, to help others to achieve enlightenment. And you bring this into focus around the revolutionary teachings, then you realize that every human being on this planet is capable of becoming a revolutionary, becoming a bosatsu, to help other people live to achieve enlightenment, live a good life. And one of the concrete ways you do that is you do ceremonies, like this Red Road, learn how to live in harmony with the planet, with the environment, and like in Narcotics Anonymous or in the Fellowship, you have a way where you concretely help people that need help, that could use your help, that are seeking help. You can't help nobody that don't want to help themselves. But if the person is seeking, trying to get well, then you sure as hell put your hand out, right? So the Native Red Road is the same thing, it teaches that we're supposed to help each other. So everything, all these teachings come back to a basic point that the white man want to argue about. "Oh, yeah, we're basically evil," or, "We're basically good," and all that kind of stuff. But Buddhism puts it into a clear spectrum. You've got all these kind of characteristics, the positive and negative of it, and that, yeah. So what do you do? You pick the positive part that you want, and you work on it, and that's serve the people. Adios. [Laughs]

<End Segment 13> - Copyright &copy; 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.