<Begin Segment 1>

TI: So today is January 19, 2016, we're in San Francisco at the Hotel Kabuki. On camera is Dana Hoshide and interviewing is Tom Ikeda, that's me. So, Janice, I'm just going to start at the very beginning, and we're going to do a, just sort of a life history. So can you tell me where and when you were born?

JM: I was born in 1941 in Stockton, California. And about nine months later we were all sent into the camps because Pearl Harbor occurred and the executive order occurred in 1942.

TI: Okay, so like the spring of 1941?

JM: I was born in February.

TI: Okay, February. And what was the name given you to at birth?

JM: Janice Hachiko Mirikitani.

TI: Okay. So I'm going to first start with your parents. Can you tell me your mother's name and some of her history?

JM: My mother's name is Bellan Shigemi Matsuda, that's her maiden name. She married Ted Mirikitani, Tadashi Mirikitani, when she was twenty-six, I believe. And he was from Lodi, we were from Stockton, or the other way around, I'm not sure. [Laughs] Actually, we were from Petaluma because my maternal grandparents had a farm in Petaluma which my mother as a Nisei, American-born, was able to purchase after they had done indentured servitude on a plantation in Hawaii. So they immigrated through Hawaii like a lot of Japanese immigrants did, and worked their way so that they could by some property.

TI: But they used your mother's name to buy the property?

JM: My mother was an American citizen, therefore she was able to purchase property. And what they did is they grew out the land into a chicken farm, and we had various other, we had vegetables, we grew vegetables, we sold eggs, we had sheep, we had one horse.

TI: So how large was the family farm?

JM: The family farm I think was about five acres, because we had large... back then, we had large chicken houses and we had yards, so we had no cages for the chickens. These were really, really fresh eggs and totally non-steroidal and non-hormonal. Those were the days.

TI: So I have this image that it was kind of like an Easter egg hunt every day then, because they weren't caged, the eggs would be all over.

JM: Oh, no, the houses had nests.

TI: Oh, I see.

JM: And the chickens would come outside to eat, and then at night they would shoo them inside, and they would sit in their nests and they would lay their eggs. And so every day it was our task, our task, ever since I was ten or twelve, I think, to gather eggs and also help clean the chicken houses because we didn't have mechanical ways in which to do that, so we had to shovel shit, basically. [Laughs] And it was an interesting childhood because the child... growing up on a farm is very isolated. And, of course, after the camps when we were released in 1944, my mother and I and my biological father Ted and Bellann, moved to Chicago with me.

TI: But before we go there, let me just finish up with a few more questions about your mom's family, then we'll go to your father's family, then we'll just kind of walk through chronologically.

JM: Okay.

TI: So your mom's family, they have the family farm in Petaluma. Now, your grandparents, where did they come from in Japan?

JM: Hiroshima. And the Mirikitanis came from Hiroshima also, so Matsudas and Mirikitanis came from Hiroshima. And the Mirikitanis moved after the war to Kansas City, and we moved back to, my maternal grandparents moved back to Petaluma, and we moved to Chicago after the camps.

TI: Right, but then your biological father, so his family also from Hiroshima, but then when they immigrated, they came to Kansas City.

JM: They went through Hawaii.

TI: Through Hawaii. This is your dad's family, biological.

JM: Yes. In fact, the Mirikitanis owned quite a bit of property I understand, in Waikiki. [Laughs]

TI: Oh, really?

JM: And I'm considered a poor relative.

TI: You'll have to tap into that. Okay. And how did your biological parents meet?

JM: Well, my mother, as I said, was raised in Petaluma, and my father was in Lodi and he was a baseball player. And this was a baishakunin arranged marriage, so they arranged my mother and my biological father to marry.

TI: Even though they were Nisei, it was a baishakunin? You hear a lot more in terms of Isseis, but Niseis not as much.

JM: Well, they were older. [Laughs] More traditional maybe.

TI: So older Nisei.

JM: Yeah.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2016 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 2>

TI: Yeah, so you were, okay, so you were, it sounds like about nine months old when the war started.

JM: Yes.

TI: And maybe about a year old when...

JM: When we were sent to the camps.

TI: Sent to the camps. So let's pick it up there in terms of as much as you know about what happened.

JM: Nothing, I have no memory of it. On one of my books there is a very rare photograph of me as a child in the camps, and it's the cover of my latest book. And how they snuck in the cameras and were able to take photographs like they did, and how they were able to be so creative with paint and being able to do so many artistic things is quite miraculous to me. And I do remember being told, and, of course, received Dorothea Lange's photos of the children in camp pledging allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. And many, many Issei had to be informed that their Nisei sons who had served in the 442nd and other regiments were killed in the camp while they were in the camps. So while their children were serving in the U.S. Army, they were being incarcerated as suspicious citizens.

TI: I think earlier you mentioned that your mother, up until a certain point, never really talked about the camps.

JM: My mother would never talk about the camps, and she was cursed with a daughter with great curiosity, and who's a writer, and I wanted to know all about that, and she would just simply change the subject. And I kept asking her, "What happened? How did you feel?" And the one thing that she did talk about a lot, because Japanese, especially Nisei, believe in ganbatte, you know, don't whine, don't complain. But the one thing that she was not shy about complaining about was her mother-in-law, my grandmother on my father's side, because they had to live in the same barrack as my father's parents.

TI: Yeah, so explain that. So finally you found out a little bit more information. So your parents and you lived with your father's parents, your grandparents?

JM: Yes, there were, I think, five or six of them in one barrack, in one room. And my father, I think -- and again, this is vague because I could never get a real stream of the thread of weaving our history -- but my father went out and I think she was planting potatoes, harvesting potatoes as part of the labor that people were forced to do, and we were in Rohwer, Arkansas, camp. And for some reason he was -- and I don't really quite understand this part of the history, but for some reason he was released a little bit earlier and went to Chicago apparently to find us a place to stay, and actually started a Buddhist church.

TI: So was he ordained as a Buddhist minister?

JM: No, no, he was not a minister, but he helped organize the community to create a Buddhist church.

TI: Oh, how interesting.

JM: Yes.

TI: And going back to camp, did your mother, when she started talking about the camps, did she ever talk about how difficult it was raising or caring for an infant in camp?

JM: No.

TI: Because I was just thinking, boy, that must have been difficult without a washing machine.

JM: She never complained about that part of it. I think from what my cousin tells me, that I used to be their doll. So I was kind of like their plaything, I was a year old, I was cute then, and so they'd curl my hair and do all this stuff. And so when you see my photograph on the book cover, you see them a little bit ticked off because I just got my hair curled. [Laughs] And I think the way they survived was to be able to do that, the women were able to do that with each other, they were able to come together and to perm each other's hair or to curl each other's hair, you know, like create their beauty shops, to create their own gossip circles, and they created community. And I think that that's what kept them strong, is that sense of community. And even though we were separated, my maternal grandparents were at Amache, and some of my cousins were raised in Tule Lake, so we were scattered to different camps.

TI: So a real separation of the family.

JM: It's the Japanese American Diaspora. And I think that that is, that's how I analogize or liken -- I mean, there's nothing like slavery, I cannot compare it to slavery, but I do believe that is what happens in communities when you separate families, when you separate communities, that it becomes, it weakens the community and it weakens the family. So the traditions, the rituals, the family ties, the religions, the sources of strength and spirituality that keep a community bound together is broken. And I think that that's what happened to... you know, when my husband, Cecil Williams and I, he is an African American, his grandfather was a slave. He says he's actually an ex-slave. But his family talks about many things in which I find similar strains. When people are segregated they are weakened, when they are segregated and separated they are easier to divide from the community, from the total community. It's easier to exclude them.

I analogize everything to today because I think there's always a connection with history and the present. And like today's ghettos, what we call ghettos or poor communities, are like concentration camps. They bus the children in and bus the children out, they're separated, they had inferior education, they are not given the same opportunities, they don't have the same supplies, their schools are falling apart, the teachers are not well-paid. So I analogize that to what happened to us. And even though we may have had the kind of anger and the kind of culture that forced us into, well, we're not going to complain about it, we're going to just dig our heels in and work harder, I think that that's, it's not a racial issue, I think it's much more complex than that. Because I think with African Americans, slavery was so severe, there was such a separation, there was such a generational discrimination like look at what's happening today with Black Lives Matter, and look what's happening every day in our streets in every city throughout the country, young people are being shot, and they're mostly people of color and African American specifically. So I would say that -- and even today, my analogy is with the Muslim community. When Donald Trump can say, "Let's incarcerate Muslim Americans," like Roosevelt did with Japanese Americans, to me that is obscene. It's an obscenity. And I'm so glad, I think it's Anna Roosevelt, who is President Roosevelt's granddaughter said, "It was wrong then, it's wrong now, and how dare Trump do that?"

TI: Yeah, because I think Trump was saying how, well, if FDR was a pretty good president and he put Japanese American in camps, so maybe it wasn't such a bad deal.

JM: "It's not a bad idea."

TI: And that's when she came out and she said, "No, it was a mistake."

JM: It was a huge mistake. It was unconstitutional, and it was criminal in my eyes. And with all of the border debates about immigration, and now saying, okay, we're not going to let Syrians into the country, and millions of people are dying and starving and just waiting for some respite, and we're closing the borders, we're becoming more and more a box. We're boxing ourselves in.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2016 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 3>

TI: And like you, I've been studying this for the last twenty years. And so like you, when I see things happening in the world today, then United States, I see those patterns also, these similarities in terms of the incarceration of African American males and all that. There are so many things that people say, "Well, they're different." Yeah, they're different, but the forces behind it kind of makes these patterns happen over and over again. And one of the things that I, that sort of I worry about is how quickly we forget about what's happened in the past.

JM: Well, exactly.

TI: We talk about, both of us know what happened to our families, and for you, in terms of you were in camps, but when I go to schools today and talk to kids, especially when you're off the West Coast, they don't know that about this.

JM: They don't know, no.

TI: And so they talk about, actually, well, this is America, and what Trump is saying about American Muslims, that can't happen. We have a Constitution, it will never happen. And so when I tell them what happened to Japanese Americans, they're actually shocked. They don't realize that...

JM: Well, we're not in the history books either.

TI: Yeah, so how do we keep this alive when every year we get further and further away? And my concern is in twenty-five years when we have the 100th anniversary of the camps starting, that most people won't know about this.

JM: I won't even be around then. [Laughs]

TI: And I won't either, probably.

JM: Well, I think that's why it's important what Densho is doing, because I think that what you're doing is archiving a history that is very important. And I think it's really important, like you say, it's January 19th, it's the day after Martin Luther King's birthday, and my husband and I received an award from Martin Luther King's birthday celebration. He was chair of the Northern California at the request of Mrs. King for twenty-five years. And so when we were honored yesterday, what I said was, as a Japanese American, what happened to us, 120,000 of us, mostly American citizens, fifty percent of us were children, we were incarcerated. What we're doing now, look at what we're doing now. If we isolate ourselves from the Muslim community, from the Sikh community, from the Native American communities, African Americans will be complicit with allowing another injustice to occur.

Because Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Cecil Williams, they brought together all kinds of people. We work with all kinds of people. The Sikh community donates blankets to our people at Glide. For people who are standing in our food lines, we give out blankets. We celebrate Ramadan, we celebrate Hanukkah, we celebrate all the different religious holidays, and we have a very, very diverse congregation of eleven thousand people in our church. But in our programs, we sere maybe sixty-five to seventy thousand people a year, and it's quite phenomenal.

TI: But I'm going to say that what you do at Glide is extraordinary in that when I go to different communities around the country, and when I interview the Japanese Americans primarily, and I ask them about the other communities, oftentimes I feel like we're a little siloed, we don't really do that much in terms of working together.

JM: We are siloed.

TI: And not only siloed, but oftentimes we're played against each other. And so when you talk about Glide, I think that's extraordinary, because that's not the norm.

JM: Well, I'm very privileged. I feel very blessed, I would say, and I'm not a religious person. I wouldn't get a mile within a church before I started working at Glide, and I worked at Glide as an accident. I was a temporary worker going to, I had graduated UCLA, went to UC Berkeley for my teaching credential, and decided to back to State for my master's, and I needed a job. And I met Cecil Williams, and he was the most bodacious, braggadocios, egotistical guy. And he said, "Don't you know who I am?" and I said, "No." [Laughs] And he almost fired me. But I said, "Who's the guy with the big head?" and they said, "Oh, you met Cecil."

TI: And so for you it was initially just a job?

JM: Oh, it was just a job. I was transcribing tapes from the LBGTQ community and seeing how they were brutalized. And then I started working with a group of young hookers who were gay, runaways, who had been abused by their parents, and we immediately identified with each other because I experienced childhood abuse. And I said, I hate the way I look, I'm Asian, I feel unworthy, I feel ugly, I don't see images of myself anywhere. And they said, "Well, guess what, honey? We want to look like you." [Laughs] So we bonded instantaneously. They were seventeen, eighteen, nineteen-year-olds, and they were, like, turning tricks in our bathroom. And I'm banging on the bathroom door and saying, "Hey, time's up, you guys, you can't turn tricks in here, it's a church." It was funny. And I think it was at Glide where I learned from Cecil -- and I have to give him that credit -- about unconditional love, the power of that.

TI: For everyone.

JM: For everyone. The ability to accept everyone for all of their differences, and to be able to respect the differences and say, "Okay, here's my story." My story is I was abused, I was battered, I was addicted to violent men. And they look at me and, you know, I'm this stereotypically Japanese-looking... they would call me China doll or they'd call me geisha or whatever, and I would say no, let's break that stereotype. We're not that, we're not objects to be placed, we should not be objectified. Black people are not all lazy, they're not all gun-toting hoodlums, you know what I mean? We have to break the stereotypes, we have to reach out to one another and find out our stories because we have so much more in common than we realize. And I think Asian Americans, Japanese Americans specifically -- I won't speak for everybody -- but it was hard for me in a room full of African Americans to speak out, I was intimidated, I felt invisible. So I think whatever the deterrents are for us as Japanese Americans, we need to take bolder steps, we need to make more courageous movements across the line. Not drawing the line, but crossing the line, and reaching out to different communities, particularly those who are facing crises.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2016 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 4>

TI: Okay, so we're going to go back to that, but I'm going to reel you back to Chicago.

JM: Okay, we're going back.

TI: So you left the camps -- because I want to go through a little bit more of your life and then come back to Glide. So from Rohwer, you said your biological dad went to establish a Buddhist church.

JM: Well, he went to Chicago, got us a place, and helped establish a Buddhist church. I don't know that much about him because my mother did not talk about him very much after they divorced, and they divorced soon after the camps.

TI: So you and your mother went to Chicago and met up with your biological dad, and then you said shortly after they divorced.

JM: They divorced. He had met another woman and basically left us. And I remember, those years I remember well. I remember my mother having to sit in the dark or a dim room and do piecework. The American Legion flags, you know, the American Legion ribbons, she'd do the flowers, tie the flowers on these crepe paper poppies. And I don't know if she'd get a penny a flower or whatever, just to make ends meet, to put some food on the table. And she worked two jobs, and I was pretty much babysat by the streets or the movies. So she would put me in the movies on Saturdays when I wasn't in school, and I would sit there from nine o'clock in the morning until she finished work, and so I would see the same movies over and over and over again, which is why I'm maybe addicted to movies. But we also were so poor that we had to go to a Japanese American dentist who I will not name, and he molested both of us. And it was...

TI: And how did you know that he molested your mother? Did she talk about it?

JM: Well, because she said, "I wish you would stay in the room. You have to stay in the room so that you can protect me." And I'm going, "What does that mean?" And then when he was drilling me, I could feel his hands between my legs, so I assumed that she was being molested also. And I think also because we were poor, and he allowed us to pay, he didn't charge us as much. In fact, we couldn't even see a white dentist, we were being discriminated against. And it was very difficult times.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2016 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 5>

TI: Earlier when you were talking about your mother doing that piecework, you got emotional about that. What's behind that? What were you thinking or feeling when you had that image of your mom doing that piecework?

JM: Well, she was making crepe paper... I have poem about that. She's making crepe paper flowers for the American Legion, and the American Legion, of course, represented a very patriotic organization. So it was so ironic, we were living in a very poor south side of Chicago in an apartment where we shared a bathroom with three other tenants. And she would make sure that, I mean, I had two dresses to go to school in, and she made sure every day that she would wash a dress so that I'd have a clean dress to wear to school because she was proud. She didn't want her daughter to look dirty.

And I remember one Christmas, we were so poor, and gosh, this really dates me, and I don't know if anyone know who Sonja Henie is. But back in the day, in the '40s, she was a movie star ice skater, and they made a doll of Sonja Henie. And she was a blond, and she was beautiful, and I said, "Oh, I want a Sonja Henie doll, Mommy." And I would beg her and beg her, so I found this Sonja Henie doll under this little tree that we had, and she was so beautiful and I just loved her so much. And I thought, wow, if I cut her hair and pasted it onto my hair, maybe my hair will grow blond. So I cut her hair and pasted it onto my hair, my mother was really angry with me. But that was so symbolic of how I already, at the age of five or six, that I internalized the self-hatred.

And I think that that is what happens -- and I've been part of many coalitions, women of color, writers of color, etcetera, as well as people at Glide of many, many different races, ethnicities and cultures. And I would say that something that was very common for the women of color when we were organizing anthologies and so forth in the '70s and '80s, that that was a very common thread that we all share, that sense of unworthiness and self-hatred. And I will say to this day that the women and the children who are trafficked in our streets who are women of color are put out there by their parents and they are addicted to that life because they feel worthy of nothing better. So I'm saying in order for -- and I am extremely protective of my daughter, and I am extremely protective of all the women and the children and the families that come to Glide and to use our programs, we have a building for children, we have early childhood education, family parenting classes and so forth, nutrition classes. We have three buildings for affordable housing: one for homeless, one for working class, one for a mixed population of recovering people, people and families.

So I'm very protective of all of that population and really, really trying to understand how do we break that, how do we break that deeply internalized sense of unworthy. How do we say to somebody, "I believe in you. I believe in you, you can do this. You can get through school." And they're so afraid, you know, if they drop out of school they're so afraid, and when they get their GEDs, oh my god, everybody applauds. We get them up in the congregation and you know, people stand up and applaud and they say, "I've got two years of recovery from alcohol," yay. Or, "I earned my GED and I'm going to go to City College," and I go, "Yay." But we also know that in order for us to be able to get to that core place, that core place of shame or self-deprecation, or even self-destructiveness, that you have to have a lot of support. So we understand that you need case management, wraparound care, mental health services, primary healthcare services.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2016 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 6>

TI: So I want to get to some of the support that you got as a child, which I think takes us to Petaluma. So let's go to Petaluma from... so Chicago, why did you go to Petaluma? I think we talked about earlier, because of your mother's family.

JM: We were in Chicago for a couple of years. My mother met her husband, second husband, who decided, he was working in a carbon factory, and he wanted to change his occupation, his work, and he thought us moving into the country and building our own house and living with our grandparents' acreage would be a positive move for us. So we left Chicago and moved to Petaluma and lived with my maternal grandparents for, I'd say, a couple months, and then we lived in a chicken house. And my mother said, "Don't ever talk about living in a chicken house, that is so disgraceful." So we had no refrigerator, we had running water but no plumbing, so the running water that we had went straight into the creek that was underneath the house. And we had an outhouse that we'd have to go to the bathroom in. So it was really truly antiquated living. And while we were working in the chicken house, my brother was born, and I was eight years old. And fortunately we had, this chicken house had a small room attached to it, that was cold enough where we could keep the milk cold. So we had no refrigeration, we had electricity, but we had no refrigerator. And while we were living there, my stepfather and my mother, with the help of a carpenter friend, built our own house. And that took, I'd say, a year and a half, two years.

TI: And how was it for you going from a city, Chicago, to rural life. What was that like for you?

JM: Oh, it was much better, I thought. The city was not friendly. I remember in Chicago we used to get strung up by black kids, white kids, and I remember one time they hung me up on a clothesline, it was in the middle of winter, and they were pulling me back and forth, "Kamikaze, kamikaze." [Laughs]

TI: So how would they string, I mean, they would actually just tie you up onto the...

JM: Yeah, they'd tie me up by my coat and just pull me on the clothesline, you know, those old fashioned clotheslines. And we lived with other Japanese American families, and this Issei gentleman who lived on our floor, who I shared the bathroom, we shared the bathroom with, came out and he used to chase them away. But yeah, so it wasn't great living in the city.

TI: So it was a pretty tough neighborhood, it sounds like.

JM: Yeah, it was real tough. They dragged one of my friends down the stairs, three flights of stairs, they dragged him down because he was Japanese and Japanese American.

TI: Do you recall the neighborhood in Chicago where you were?

JM: I recall it being a poor building. We share, again, we shared a bathroom, each floor shared a single bathroom, so you can imagine three or four families sharing a single bathroom, so we had to schedule a bathroom time. And my best memories was when I was able to take a bath with my mother, because then I felt really safe. And my father in Chicago was supposed to see me once, twice a week, and I remember always being disappointed because he never came. And when my mother and her second husband married, that's when the beatings began. He started spanking me. And when we moved to the farm, I had my maternal grandmother. She basically saved my life because he began to molest me. I was molested by, I would say, three or four adult males in my family, so it wasn't just him, three or four different males, adult males.

TI: These were, like, relatives?

JM: Relatives, cousins.

TI: That were living on the farm?

JM: Or that we had community with. And also my stepfather's friend, who would come and stay with us for two or three months, he was a chick sexer, do you know what a chick sexer is? Interesting job. Anyway -- he had his hands insured. [Laughs] But he chick sexed me, so what can I say? So there was a lot of abuse.

TI: While this was going on --

JM: And I would tell my mother, and she would not believe me. And it's not because she was a bad person, it was just because she didn't want to be lonely again. And I understood that many years later. But my grandmother understood, and I don't speak Nihongo, but she knew, and she would tell me in Japanese, just, "Ganbatte," you just have to endure and just get away from here. "Get away from here, you can do it with education." So, of course, being the Japanese super achiever, overachiever, that was my form of escape.

TI: To...

JM: To achieve in school and get the best grades I could, got straight A's, scholarships to two universities, UCLA, and I got accepted into the UC system, to both universities as well as Santa Barbara, but I chose UCLA because they chose then, in 1958, to move to Los Angeles.

TI: I'm sorry, who moved to Los Angeles?

JM: My mother and her husband decided to move to Los Angeles with my brother. And they said, "Well, since you got a scholarship to UCLA, you can go there," because they couldn't afford to send me. They saved all their money to send my brother to college.

[Interruption]

JM: So I think it was my grandmother's compassion when I ran to her and I said, "I've just been beaten up," or I went to her crying in her lap, she would comfort me and she would understand. I mean, I was... he would lock me in the cellar. We had those old fashioned storm cellars where my grandmother would pickle her tsukemono and stuff, and it was a dirt floor, and he would slam the door on me and lock me in the cellar. And it was pitch dark, and I was terrified.

TI: And how old were you at this point?

JM: I was eight, nine, ten. I was molested for almost fourteen years of my life. So I understand... and then, of course, when I was going to college, I was addicted to relationships that were brutal. So guys who beat me up, guys who'd treat me cruelly. I used to get beat up by this one boyfriend I had for just giving somebody else an address, giving another man an address. He would come up and slap me in front of the guy. And so I understand when a woman is being beaten up by her husband who has pimped her, she hasn't brought home enough money and he beats her up for not bring home enough money. I understand why she still is with him. And so that's why I feel so passionately about having programs of support for women. And when I tell them my story they're always shocked.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2016 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 7>

TI: And so when you started coming out with your story and your writings and talking, what reaction did you get from the family?

JM: Oh, they basically ignored it. So my mother never read anything I wrote. And her husband probably did, but I would say that whatever he went through, and I know that he had a hard life also, and he served in the army, and I think he was terribly mistreated by white soldiers. And he was the oldest and his other two brothers achieved greatly. One became a judge, one became a lawyer, doctor, and he was a farmer. So I think there was bitterness in his life. And I'm not making excuses or being co-dependent about that, but as a woman of color -- and I think people need to hear this -- as women of color, and Asian people particularly, the worst thing you can do is disgrace your family. And the worst thing you can do is to harm your mother or to cause your mother hat kind of pain. And so I was threatened, and I was told, "If you tell your mother, you will kill her." So the silence became like a wall. It was like a wall. And I analogize that to the silence that the Japanese Americans felt that they had to keep during the war, after the war, because of the shame. And I really feel shame is a killer. It kills people of all colors.

TI: And so how did you break through? How did you break through that wall of silence?

JM: Well, I worked with Cecil for a very long time, from 1965. And in 1980 he began recovery programs for people with AIDS and people particularly in the African American community about crack cocaine, which had been just glutted into their communities, and it was ripping apart the black family. So they came to us and they said, "Please, please, we need a culturally sensitive, racially sensitive program for African Americans." And I became involved with women, particularly, and they were telling me their stories in recovery, and I realized oh gosh, ninety-eight percent of them had been molested during childhood, or somehow abused, or beaten or raped during childhood.

And so in 1982 when Cecil and I got married, he said, "Do you mind if I talk about being married to a woman who had experienced incest?" And I said, "It'd be easier for you, I think, if I told my own story." I was terrified. I thought, "Oh god, nobody will ever talk to me again." And I told it to the congregation, and at that time, they were strangers to me, two thousand people. And I talked about it, I read a poem about it, feeling like an impaled insect. In fact, the poem was about that. And after I finished telling my story, people were weeping. Cecil said, "Well, is there anyone else who has been through that experience?" And to our amazement, sixty people stood up, and they started to get in line to tell their story. We said, "Oh, we don't have time, let's start a group." So we started a group right then and there for survivors of incest and abuse. And that's how we did a lot of organizing grassroots-wise. So people would come to us out of need, and we don't have money to start a program, we started with the people, we started with volunteers. When we started our feeding program in 1968 or whatever, we started with volunteers.

TI: But going back to you, when you broke through and told that story to the congregation, how did that change you?

JM: It freed me; it freed me. It was like this, you know, when they talk about addiction, they talk about crack cocaine, it's like the gorilla on your back? Well, it was like that. It was like I'd been carrying around a cement wall, and it just helped me crack through that wall because I realized I wasn't alone. And that telling, there's a certain part, there's a certain thing about telling, talking, telling someone else. There's a certain thing about poetry, about writing, that there's a liberating aspect to it. It frees you to then become more of yourself, who you really are. Because half the time -- I can only speak for me -- but half the time I was hiding. I was hiding behind this exotic mask. I thought nobody would look at me, they would look at me but they wouldn't see me, so I didn't feel visible. I felt only accepted for my exoticism or from my physical being.

TI: But then with Cecil you had someone who knew the story.

JM: When I first met Cecil, I told him, and he said, "I believe you and I love you unconditionally." And so when we started the recovery groups, it was very much part... you know, shame, you talk about shame, shame is something that everybody shares. I don't care what color you are, I don't care what culture you're from, I don't care if you speak English or not, the point is, that shame is always there, whether you're poor... poor people feel ashamed of being poor. People think they're just freeloaders, they're crazy. Many, many people are really, really poor because they're mentally ill or they have physical problems or they have mental problems. The issue is shame causes you to become invisible or to hide. And when you break through that, there's a liberating aspect of it which says, "I can be myself."

TI: One of the things that you said that helps break through that was unconditional love.

JM: Yes. And I knew he meant it, and he did not exploit me. Most men would exploit me. Every job I worked at, I swear to god, every part-time job I had because I was working my way through college, the bosses, the co-workers, would exploit me. They'd want to date me, they'd want to sleep with me, whatever. In fact, I got raped by one of my bosses and I never told anybody, and he was a white guy. And that story about being sexually aroused on your job, I have talked to my staff, and I said, "How many of you as women have been sexually harassed?" I was shocked. Fifty percent of our staff, maybe more, of our women's staff, and we had a small staff at that time. But when we started the recovery programs, they participated. Because, again, there's something very liberating in being able to trust a community, being able to say, "This is who I am," and being applauded for your story, being applauded for telling the truth. That is very rewarding. So I just want to say that to the younger generation, I just want to say that to people of all colors, all backgrounds, that if you can tell who you really are, the truth of it, that's the beginning of pride, that's the beginning of self-worth, that's the beginning of saying, "This is who I am," and everybody needs to say, "This is who I really am." When the AIDS epidemic broke out and so many people of color, so many men, particularly, of color, who were afflicted with AIDS and HIV, were shunned by their parents and by their churches, and so they came to Glide and asked for help. And we started right then and there, by a volunteer who himself was suffering from HIV, we'd go to the hospitals, we'd invite them to join the choir, we would invite them to the church, we would pray with them, we would let them know they were accepted, that this was not God's punishment for being gay.

And I think that that truly... I mean, so many of these things are connected, you know what I'm saying? Whether you're afflicted with a disease that is, quote, "shameful," or whether you're afflicted with an addiction that's "shameful" or whether you were beaten up, which is "shameful," that connects us. That connects us. And there are so many people in our community who are respectable-looking, etcetera, who says, "Oh, I have been in recovery from alcohol for ten years." And when they get up there and they do that, it's not just liberating for them, it's liberating for everybody.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2016 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 8>

TI: But when I'm hearing your story, it felt like something very special happened to you about the time that you were going to graduate school or finishing graduate school at San Francisco State. Because not only with your work at Glide, but it's sort of like that's when you started joining the Third World Liberation Front, that's when you started working on the Japanese American Anthology and things. So a lot was happening...

JM: It was a revolution.

TI: It was like a wake-up --

JM: No, no, it was a revolution. It was a revolution. 1968, Ethnic Studies strike, and I was going to college, and I dropped out of college.

TI: And that's when S.I. Hayakawa was there?

JM: Yeah, we all ate kimchee and tried to breathe on him. No, I'm kidding. [Laughs]

TI: [Laughs] That's great, I've got to remember that one next protest I go to.

JM: No, I'm kidding. Somebody suggested that, though. But he met with some of the Asian students and he fell asleep. [Laughs] While they were talking to him he fell asleep and started snoring.

TI: But revolution, what was happening? All this was going on...

JM: Well, I think, like I said at the Martin Luther King celebration -- excuse me if I'm doing too much stuff to myself -- that King and the Civil Rights Movement awakened a lot of fires, ignited a lot of fires. We were all smoldering. The Asian American movement, Native American movement, women's movement, LBGTQ movement, all of those movements, student movement, we were all smoldering. We were all very angry about something, some form of injustice. The Japanese community was pissed off about the camps and it was the Sanseis that took up the cause to get the reparation commission. I mean, we were just, we were boiling. And so it was like King's march across Selma to Montgomery for voting rights, can you imagine, in '65, was, I think, and we saw the people had been beaten, and the dogs being... and all of that happening. And we're going, "This is crazy, this is America, what's going on?" And, of course, in 1965, I would not have been able to marry Cecil, because interracial marriages were illegal. And we struggled for same-sex marriage for all those decades. But I think it quickened, what I say is it quickened the fire, it awakened us. It awakened something that was smoldering within us, and ignited our anger and our sense of demanding justice, activism, it activated us. So all the coalitions that we built around political prisoners, as you recall, that was when the Black Panthers were being persecuted and shot just wholesale, George Jackson, Angela Davis, Cecil was actually Angela Davis's spiritual advisor because that's the only way he could visit her in jail. And that's kind of a contradiction since she was a self-proclaimed communist. [Laughs]

But it was great, I mean, those were the days of an enormous urgency, it was enormously urgent for us to change society. It was enormously urgent for us to seek justice, it was life and death. And you know, when we marched on the campuses and they had the SWAT teams chasing us up and down the grassy knoll, and I watched as they, the cops would grab a woman by her hair and drag her on the ground by her hair. And it was, it was a matter of life or death. And it was also a time when the Chinese community were having their own gangs and those situations. I joined the Red Guard for a minute. By that time I had a two-year-old daughter so I was taking her to Red Guard meetings. [Laughs] But to this day I would say that that activism, even though it may change our tactics, and even though we may have grown in terms of our strategic thinking about how we best went about it, again, when you talk about protest, to have Cecil inviting the demonstrators who are outside and have them be a part of the celebration and to have their voices heard.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2016 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 9>

TI: So describe what happened yesterday. Yesterday was Martin Luther King Day.

JM: Yesterday was Martin Luther King's birthday, 2016. Cecil and I received an award, and there were protesters outside, lots of cops.

TI: Who were these protesters?

JM: They were the ones who were angry about (Mario) Woods' murder, who was shot, what, fifteen, twenty times, which truly was overkill. And so they were demanding the mayor to fire the police chief, and they were demonstrating at the Marriott where the breakfast for King was being held. And we were being honored, and a lot of them were young, most of them were very young. And so the labor leader came out and said, "This is Martin Luther King's birthday. Why are you protesting here? And we're honoring Jan and Cecil at Glide, they serve homeless people, come on." So they go, oh. [Laughs]

TI: Oh, so they didn't know?

JM: They didn't know; they didn't seem to know. So the police were not allowing the protesters into the hotel by the request of the hotel, not the committee. So when this young man, I guess, broke rank and ran into the room and started yelling at the people, "You should be ashamed, look in the mirror, you should feel shame for not joining us," and he was criticizing the mayor and criticizing politicians in general, and he ran out of the room, Cecil said to the emcee, "Get that young man back in here and tell all those protesters to come into the ballroom." And so when we went up to get the award, Cecil invited them to join us.

TI: Up on stage?

JM: On the stage when we were getting our award. And he was talking about King, this is what King was really about, it's about protesting for what you really believe in. And we all believe in justice for all of us, and we all have different ways of expressing it, but we have to work together. And what King really was about was about love. Of course, I started crying, everybody else started crying, but the protesters just were like, "You're actually letting us do this?" And I talked about love and how important it was for me, and how important it was for me to have the Civil Rights Movement and Dr. King awaken the kind of smoldering that was happening within us as Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II, and how we started the reparation movement very closely aligned with the Civil Rights Movement.

TI: But going back to yesterday, though, again, what you and Cecil did was extraordinary, what Cecil did, because I think about a lot of the politicians today, and they were part of the movement back in the '60s and '70s. And I think it's a valid criticism that many of them maybe not have turned their backs to it, but they aren't really doing much.

JM: Well, politicians are politicians. Once you become -- I mean, somebody wanted Cecil to run for mayor, I said, "If you run for mayor, I'll divorce you."

TI: You think because it will change him?

JM: Yes. Because when you become a politician, you have to compromise. You have to compromise, and compromise to me means that you're in danger of selling your soul. Now, I'm not saying all politicians sell their souls, I am not saying that. But I think that if you're a politician that you have to be concerned about the total community, and you have to be concerned about people who have money, who don't have money. I mean, every mayor had gotten criticized about the homeless, but every mayor has not been able to do that our current mayor is doing which is to bring in developers because they're getting a tax break. Now that is creating a really big crisis around economic injustice. And so he's going to get fire from a lot of different sides, and that, I think, is the job of the politician, of a leader, of a political leader, they have to make decisions, and they have to make decisions on behalf of a city. Now, you may not agree with it, and I'm not being a liberal here, I'm just saying I understand it. I mean, I'm not going to sit here and trash the mayor, trash the chief, because if we were to fire a police chief every time there was a shooting in any city, we'd run out of candidates for police chiefs within a week. You know what I mean?

TI: But you've been on the side of these protesters. So what's their goal? What do they, where do they go?

JM: I think that they want a voice, I think they need to be heard, and I think that's what was so transformational of yesterday's event at the Martin Luther King breakfast. Because they were heard, because they were respected, and because it was also the environment. The environment was it was a Martin Luther King celebration. It's different from a mayor being inaugurated at City Hall where you're being yelled and shouted down. And when the mayor appeared for the Martin Luther King celebration, he said that they were shouting him down. And I'm saying I think that that is the difference, which is why I don't want Cecil to run for mayor. I wanted him to be the spiritual leader, I wanted to be a moral leader, and I think there is a huge difference. And it's not to say one is better than the other, it's just to say that that's his genius. It's his genius to be able to spiritually and morally lead people in a way that they could see something that's bigger and better than themselves.

So yes, on the side of the protesters, we were adamant the Vietnam War was wrong. It was wrong; history will prove that it was wrong, we lost that war, and we lost so many, many young people in that war, our people, not just the Vietnamese. And yes, killing black people wholesale is wrong. So when the police were surrounding the Black Panthers in the '60s and early '70s, we went there to surround the building so they'd have to break through our lines in order to break into their offices. And we would bring together coalitions of... when Patty Hearst was kidnapped and I'm not sure what year that was, I can't remember anymore.

TI: Yeah, I can't remember either. It was about that time, though, the Symbionese Liberation Army.

JM: It was around about that time, the SLA, the Symbionese Liberation front. And they kidnapped Patty Hearst, Randolph Hearst called Cecil and said, "I need your help. I need to understand what their demands are." So he asked Cecil to pull together coalitions of radical movement leaders from the Native Americans, the Latin community, from the African American community, from the Asian American community, LBGTQ community, all these different leaders. And he said something to Randolph Hearst which I think was so poignant, which only he could... it's so simple, and yet so basic. Randy said -- I can call him Randy -- Patricia Hearst's father said, "These newspaper people keep asking me things. Do you have any advice for me?" And Cecil said, "Randy, did you ever tell Patty that you love her? She's your daughter and you love your daughter." And Randy went like that, it was so interesting. Which is what I mean by kind of the spiritual force that helped me.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2016 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 10>

TI: Yeah, so during the '60s and '70s you had these spiritual forces, Martin Luther King, Cecil, sort of there at the movement.

JM: But they were also very radical.

TI: Yeah, radical. Do you see the same thing happening today when you see Black Lives Matter, is there a spiritual component that you're...

JM: Yes, I see a lot of clergy involved with the movements. But what I feel in terms of a lot of these movements is that it lacks a cohesive leadership. So I think you've got splinters of the protesters who were outside like the Marriott for Martin Luther King, and then you had protesters on the freeway that stopped the bridge traffic, then you had protesters at Yerba Buena. I'm not sure that they're the same people. I think that there are many splinter groups, and they all believe in justice for the Woods family, but I'm not sure that there's a cohesive leadership. It's like the Occupy movement when they occupied Embarcadero, I mean, the Justin Herman Plaza, and the mayor never -- that was Mayor Lee also -- never got the police to kick 'em out or anything like that. We brought food to them if they needed food. But it wasn't, they didn't have a cohesive kind of leadership that would say, okay, what is it that we are demanding, what is it that is needed here? And I think with Martin, he went to... what's his name? President Kennedy, President...

TI: Johnson?

JM: Johnson, oh, my god. Okay, I remember Nixon because of Vietnam. [Laughs] Johnson, and he sat at the table. I think there is not enough of the willingness to sit at the table together and say, "Here is what my people need." Here is what the injustices are, here is what is needed, here the sanitation are striking, here the bus boycott's happening. These are the reasons why we can no longer in the back of the bus, we can no longer get minimum wage or miniscule wage. We need to have more economic justice, we need voting rights. There needs to be cohesiveness about what it just. It's like with the reparations movement, it had a real focus. The testimonies were about the injustices and the effect on people's lives, and it was very focused. I think that there is not enough focus.

TI: So are these current movements, are they reaching out to you and Cecil for, not advice, but just maybe connections? Because the two of you are so well-connected.

JM: Well, they come on Sundays, they celebrate with us. They're not yelling and screaming, they're not interrupting us, but I'm just saying that I think they consider us the people, part of the people, and they know our history, some of them do. Some of them don't even know who we are, but some of them do. And the ones that do know what we do, they cannot protest. There's nothing more revolutionary than feeding people, than working with the poor. There's nothing more revolutionary than working with the poor. And revolution is about love, it's about what Che Guevara said: revolution is inspired by deep love for your people, for the people, for the suffering of the people. So I think that that's the kind of spiritual, moral leadership I'm talking about, but it's very radically-based. It's radically conclusively based, and it gives voice to everybody.

TI: You mentioned spiritual, because talking about your life, you didn't grow up a religious person.

JM: I was religious for a couple years because I thought maybe if I believed in God he would stop the incest, and he never stopped the incest, so I figured that he didn't give a shit and he wasn't listening to me. [Laughs] And I really, really am very disillusioned with -- and I'm being nice -- about institutional religion because I think it is very exclusive. Sunday mornings were some of the most segregated times of the week where you have all white people in one place and all black people in another place. And I think Glide is quite well-known for its diversity, because every Sunday we have people not only from different communities locally, but people from France and Japan and China, England, all over the world. So I believe it is that inclusivity, and part of the vehicle of inclusivity is being able to tell your story and feel heard and feel respected. And so poor people who come through our doors, we always say, "Welcome, we love, you." "Welcome, we love you." And it's a different kind of environment, it's not, "Okay, get in line, get your ticket." It really is, "Welcome, we love you." And if somebody comes late, we say, "Give 'em a bag to go."

TI: When you say diversity, how do you get the people with means, the wealthy people to show up? It seems like if you're encouraging and catering the poor, the homeless to be there, how do you get the other --

JM: Oh, honey, we're connected. [Laughs] We have friends. I mean, people in the tech world, they come to Glide to volunteer. People who, like, run Google...

TI: Why do they come? Do they feel guilty, or why are they coming?

JM: I think they come for the experience because they don't want to be perceived as dehumanizing or hating the poor or wanting to get rid of the homeless.

TI: But are they there for unconditional love?

JM: You can't change somebody else, you can only change yourself. You can only lead by example, you can only show what is possible by being yourself.

TI: But getting them there and just experiencing...

JM: Yes. If you get them into the room with a person who is scruffy and dirty, and they smile at him and that person says, "Thank you," that person suddenly becomes a human being, it's not just a person off the street. So I'm just saying that... and people who believe in what we do and experience what we do, it spreads. So Warren Buffett is an example of someone who is of means, I would say. [Laughs] His first wife, the late Susie Buffett, used to come to Glide, and she came for a couple of years before she told us who she was, and she asked us not to reveal her true identity.

TI: Because she lived in the Midwest, didn't she?

JM: She had a home in San Francisco.

TI: Omaha.

JM: Omaha, yeah. And she had a home in San Francisco and she was one of the most compassionate people I know. She took in people with AIDS, she took people who were ill, she took people on trips. If they were dying, she would take them to where they always wanted to go, she was really a beautiful human being. Anyway, she finally told us who she was, and then she brought Warren Buffett to the celebration, and Warren instantaneously checking out Cecil, checking out what we were doing, fell in love with him. And he said, "These folks at Glide are doing what nobody else is doing better than anybody, just because they care about the most marginalized." So it's, I think, not only because he experienced us, but he was also influenced by his first wife's unconditional love, and he adored her and believed in her, and believed in what she felt for spirituality. So when we went to visit Warren last year, it was great because he's such a down-to-earth, beautiful human being, and he won't give us money outright, he auctions off a lunch, and goes to lunch with the highest bidder. And last year the highest bidder won lunch with him at 2.3 million dollars. [Laughs] So it's expensive steak. But I think that's an example of somebody who is touched by what we do, who experiences that we really do what we say we're doing, and they can see some of the transformation that does occur. And we have to raise a lot of money these days.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2016 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<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 © 2016 Densho. All Rights Reserved.