<Begin Segment 11>

TI: So how do you sustain this in the future? Succession planning, have you guys talked about what happens?

JM: We're not leaving. [Laughs] Of course we're all leaving, but anyway, we're transitioning into co-founder roles, which means that we're going to continue to train people on the legacy. But I transitioned almost eight years ago out of being executive director and to founding president and co-founder. And Cecil and I do a lot of the fundraising, so we'll be probably moving into new roles next year, but we're not leaving. We don't want to scare people, we certainly want to hold our donors, we certainly want to let the donors know as well as the people that we're not abandoning and we want to continue this legacy of unconditional love and acceptance.

TI: Earlier you talked about, and we talked about Asians Americans, Japanese Americans, and you were saying how Japanese Americans and Asian Americans needed to cross the line when it comes to being more active, in today's climate, what would that look like? How could Asian Americans, and in particular Japanese Americans, especially with our history and what happened to us during World War II and our fight with redress, what would you like to see from the Japanese American community?

JM: Well, I think there are many vehicles by which we could do this. When we... after 9/11, we began a coalition, including the Muslim community. And what we did was we had an open, a town house meeting, and we invited some of the Muslims who were in our community to come in and talk, and we just talked to each other. And it was a matter of saying, okay, we understand slavery, we understand internment, we understand discrimination, racism, ethnicism, xenophobia of all kinds, sexism, classicism, etcetera. So where's our common ground? And Munadel, one of the Muslim leaders, said, "I buy my son that robot toy, and he eats cornflakes for breakfast, how is he different from any other child? And why do I have to be afraid to walk him to school because I'm afraid he's going to be beat up because of who he is." And it's an issue of, I think, hearing that, and then of course we, in our programs, we taught our children, because they were picking on Indian children after 9/11, and we said, "No, you can't do that. Here is who we are, here is who they are, here is who they are." And it's very hard work; it's an educational process, and I think there are many ways to do it. We have town hall meetings, we have community coalition meetings, we have all kinds of ways in which to outreach and reach out to people. Well, I think that the Asian American community needs to find vehicles to do that. And I will say that Brenda Wong Aoki and Mark Izu do it so well with the African American community, they do it through art, they do it through history, they do it through art history. The film art was shared in the Western edition with the Japanese American community. They moved in when we were incarcerated, and when we came back, we had nothing. But I think that the connection has to be purposeful. You have to be purposeful. How can we restore the stories, how can we restore the community, and how do we define community? And if you define community as diverse and inclusive, then you have to put the toe in the cold water and just walk through it and say, "Hey, how about getting involved in a project with us?" Or, "We'd like to do an oral history project with you," or it's what you're doing. It's what you're doing, connecting Issei, Nisei, Sansei, Yonsei, Gosei, all the way down, all the way into the future.

TI: But to do it this way now in terms of other communities, connecting.

JM: Well, you're doing it if you're going... I taught a class of mostly African American kids. And I said, "So, how come you guys don't want movies with Japanese stars?" "Boring." I said, "Okay, so in other words, you have to have what's his face, the tall white guy, to play the samurai in order for you to watch this movie?" It was not John Wayne, it was somebody else.

TI: Was it like Tom Cruise, The Last Samurai, that one?

JM: No. Well, that one, too. [Laughs] And I'm saying, "Gee, some of those enjoyable movies to me were like Toshiro Mifune."

TI: Yeah, Kurosawa.

JM: Kurosawa movies, oh my god, and Hitchcock learned from Kurosawa. I learned lessons from Kurosawa. But they say, "Oh, yeah, that's different," because they have a lot of action. And I'm going, okay, so if Marlon Brando wasn't going to marry this Japanese woman, would you be interested in watching that movie? If it was like a Japanese actor? No, nobody would watch that movie. They watch the movie because it's Marlon Brando who's going to fight for this poor Japanese girl to be able to marry her. [Laugh] And I think it's... what I say is a lot of it is about the media, a lot of it is how we're sold by the media, how we're shown, how we're not included, how we're excluded by the media. Oscars is a perfect example of all-white nominees. Movies that are -- Oprah has to produce them in order for them to even get a best song nomination. I mean, it'd endemic and embedded in our society, this kind of stereotypical racism that people feel about each other. And it isn't until you get to experience who I am and experience who you are, and experience my mother, who couldn't afford to buy shoes after the war, so she would go to into a shoe store and pretend she wanted to buy a pair of shoes. And she would love it because the guys, she was such a good-looking woman, she had great legs, and she would preen in her shoes and they'd whistle at her. That was her one moment of vain pleasure, but she couldn't afford to buy the shoes. It's poignant to me that she lost her teeth because in camp she had to breastfeed me. And many childbearing women of her age lost their teeth because there was no nutrition in the camps. And so she lost her teeth and we had to go to that horrible dentist. So I wrote a poem about "high heels and false teeth." Because, think about it, it's a human thing to want to be admired, to be seen. It's a human thing to want to be able to control your own appearance, and to be able to afford to have healthcare, to have a decent set of teeth. And that's the human part of the story I want to achieve in poetry. The child who was raped in Okinawa by two of the military, and I'm saying, "I am your daughter. I'm the daughter that you love, I'm the daughter that you protect, I am the woman who takes you to the movies, I am your mother, I am your aunt." I just want people to see us as universally as possible, because we are all human beings and we all have the same kinds of feelings about who we want to be and how we want to be perceived for who we really are.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright (c) 2016 Densho. All Rights Reserved.