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TI: Okay, so you're now stepping in as national director, the guy who was leading the redress just leaves, it's at a time when the commission hearings are just going to start, everything is happening right now, and you're stepping right into it. Tell me a little bit of what was going on. What was that like?

RW: Well, I actually, I think the main thing that concerned me was that I was walking into -- like the JACL budget was maybe about a half million dollars.

TI: You mean for the whole organization?

RW: Yeah.

TI: That astounds me, it was that low.

RW: And we were facing a hundred thousand dollar deficit. So the thing that was on my head is like if we're facing a twenty percent deficit and we couldn't sustain the organization, because it could crumble under that, my first priority was to put it back on financial footing, which is not my basic orientation. I think if we really talked about, probably I'm fiscally conservative, because I don't like waste. But the only way I can get the JACL to be a balanced budget when we have a solid organization platform to go forward, is not to hire anybody. So I was the youth director, the program director, and the JACL director. So I guess I view that as one of my major sacrifices, and one of my major learnings is to do that kind of thing. It's really hard, but you get no credit for it, and you have to just take that, that there's no credit for pulling it into a solvent position. But that part was critical, but the other part that was critical is to maintain the identity of the organization in civil rights, and that's why stuff outside of redress, that we had to maintain a sort of platform and presence, I think I did a very good job at staying with that. So I'm involved, like Henry Der, who ran Chinese for Affirmative Action, Henry and I became like conjoined at the hip. Like on so many issues, we were joined, whatever it was, that involved the Asian community. And other things I learned about JACL, like the Vincent Chin thing takes place then. So Shimura calls us and he starts talking about it, and OCA was not, they existed east of the Mississippi, they didn't have a West Coast presence, really. And they were being kicked out because they would show up and say, "Okay, we're the national organization, we'll be in charge," and the folks kicked them out. There are some lessons in that, like even now, like in my work, it's recognizing local folks and their work. And with JACL, I asked Jim, "What do you need, man?" He says, "We need money, we need to kind of keep this on the screen." And so I went out to the chapters and made the pitch. And one of the things JACL is good for like that is raising money. Within a few weeks, we got fifty grand into Detroit, and we still stayed quiet, it's invisible. Like Jim probably maybe remembers it, Helen Zia may remember it, but it's not something we broadcast.

TI: And that was very generous, because at a time when you could have used the money yourself, organizationally you helped raise money for something that...

RW: Yeah, but anti-Asian violence was a cross-current issue with U.S.-Japan.

TI: Sure, the Japan-bashing happening.

RW: Right. And we had conflicting currents in all of that.

TI: Well, because, during that time, I know there was more focus and attention to make a Japan connection from the JACL, right?

RW: There was a mix. There was a camp that said, don't touch that, we don't want to be associated with it, we want to be non-Japanese, no contacts.

TI: But there was a faction that wanted to make that connection, right?

RW: Right.

TI: And so you had to navigate that.

RW: Well, sort of. But we had, the plusses is that we had some really remarkable people, like Sen Nishiyama. Sen was this remarkable Nisei that got trapped in Japan when the war broke out, and he had a double-E degree, he really wasn't Japanese proficient. But being trapped there, his literacy just... he became a scholar and recognized. And he became the international executive for Sony, but he did the on-air translation on NHK on the American moon landing. He's just this remarkable man. So I regard him as senpai, you know, as a teacher. But there were just some remarkable people around to help give us guidance. And Fukushima was around, too, like he was emerging as a U.S. trade rep in kind of a position with Japan. So we had some folks to help us navigate it, and I think there was a good base within people who were balancing that approach, and we had national presidents that had that view as well. So Frank Sato and Floyd are among them.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.