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BN: What I wanted to do then is, actually, a couple more things about redress. And one thing I've always wondered is where did that come from? When did that, to your recollection, did that idea first occur to you, or when did you first hear about that?

AN: Well, I first heard about it during the Title I campaign. And Edison Uno was really critical. And then folks up in Seattle began to push this.

BN: Were you in contact with the Seattle people?

AN: Yeah, but never really closely.

BN: But you knew what they were doing.

AN: Oh, yeah. Shosuke Sasaki and Henry Miyatake. At the time we thought it was pretty outrageous, but a just political statement to demand monetary reparations, etcetera. So when Edison was right on, but I was very pessimistic that JACL would ever embrace that position. And when they did, then that's when we felt we needed -- it was an important position to take, but again, what we said was we needed to involve the JACL and support the Edison Unos and that segment of the JACL in their efforts. But at the same time, I felt, and many of us felt that if we let the JACL be the organization to drive that, that it was doomed for failure on a number of things. One is they would sell out, but two, just a core of their hidden leadership that have their own self interests, that would not want to rock the boat, that would want to just settle for an apology or do things that they think are politically acceptable and would not be willing to push the envelope. But I'm always saying JACL was critical to the redress campaign and its success. Because it had the framework and the network to do that, etcetera, and to their credit, I think were able to broaden their own... and partly it was a generational change that allowed that to happen. But yeah, initially it was really getting the inspiration from others. And us, coming from the LTPRO perspective of, we saw it as an issue to organize around that was really unique. And for me personally, it was almost in a manipulative sense, that yeah, this is another issue that we're never gonna win it, but we can organize, we can get people up in arms, etcetera.

And I tell the story of, I made a presentation on redress at the Little Tokyo Towers. And after the presentation, this Issei woman comes up with this crumpled, I think it was a five dollar or ten dollar bill had just kind of said, "Here, do what you can do." And then one of LTS's social workers kind of told me, "This woman is on a fixed income, she doesn't have much money. This represents a significant part of what she lives on. And then I said, this is for real, that we have people that really... this is important for their lives. And then I realized for my life, then it became personal. I said, this is beyond a political issue, it's something, it's a statement for our community. And then it took on that significance. When we got closer to, quote, winning, that we realized this takes on a much broader kind of thing. And at the time, we never, I mean, I didn't ever envision that. In retrospect, it just kind of took on a life of its own. Redress is such an interesting story, when you think of all the twists and turns, how we were so fortunate in the timing of so many things, Barney Frank being the chair of that subcommittee, his position, Jim Wright being speaker of the house, just so many things falling in place at the right time to be able to have this happen. So that was kind of, to me, an important highlight, and reinforcing the issues of what I was continuing to believe in as the importance of grassroots, community organizing, and just kind of reinforced to me. And so that's why I continue to feel that sense of optimism, despite all the other crap that goes on. We see the small victories that create change.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2018 Densho. All Rights Reserved.