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TI: So during this time period, growing up, did you have a sense, or was there... could you see the impact of the war on the community during this time period? I mean, you're a kid running the streets, so it may not have come up or something, but I'm just trying to get a sense of...

RW: Only in this way a lot of people have articulated, that you meet people in J-Town and your parents will say, "This is Mr. and Mrs. So-and-So, they were on the next block from us in camp." And our camp references, like with a lot of people, it's like Mount Hermon, the Christian camp, or there was kind of a human rights camp, Brotherhood Anytown. But the reference to camp didn't take hold for the longest time. Because I remember even when we were in our twenties, the only two books I can identify was the Daniels book and the tenBroek book. There's very little literature that I could find. But then, I did do things like I started scouring old bookstores and finding old magazine articles about the internment.

TI: And so about when was this? When did this concept of what happened to the community...

RW: I think it starts with the Black Civil Rights Movement. And it raises the parallel question of what's in it for us? And then I'm in Eastside, so we eventually get to the place of like the Blowouts in East L.A. and those kind of things. And I guess by the time I'm in college, I'm joining UMAS, United Mexican American Students, but I think it was the Black Civil Rights Movement that raised the first questions. And then, as a Japanese American thing, the thread here is that the Junior JACLers kind of outgrew that. Because that was largely a social kind of thing that was set up. And I think they paralleled, were going to, like what is our place in all this civil rights struggle?

TI: Oh, so it was almost like a study group or discovery for that cohort?

RW: It started with, like there was a thing that developed called Sansei Concern, and it's an immediate successor to Junior JACL. So that's the nucleus, those folks just kind of move over and create... on college campuses, and mostly UCLA, they're UCLA based. And someone pulls together a conference in conjunction with the L.A. County Human Relations Commission, it was a guy named John Saito who has passed, but whose story about how much, how quietly he did community building, because those original Oriental organizations, that's his organizing.

TI: So tell me about that. What were some of the, I mean, we were talking about before the interview started, but tell me about some of those organizations. Oriental Concern I think was one.

RW: Well, in the beginning it was Oriental Concern is the first one, and that stays around for a while, and then parallel, up north, you start, like Yuji Ichioka, like Berkeley are developing things like Asian American Political Alliance, AAPA, and then you start hearing about, like, Alex Hing, Red Guard, and stuff that's far more out there than what we were doing. We were doing kind of like, who are we and what does it mean? So down here there was a conference, late '60s, called, "Are You Yellow?" And it's kind of a typical, I think, college-age conference, you're into groups and discussion. But it triggered something. There was this sense of coming home. Like you didn't know all these other kids, but you were home. And that was the momentum that carried the development of Sansei Concern, Oriental Concern, and then the timing of other kind of things like I described, like when we organized the Council of Oriental Organizations, the War on Poverty is going, out of that we started getting little chunks of money initially. So one of the first chunks was to do a survey of the Issei, and then sort of the discovery of who the Issei are, right? And that there's a whole slew of these guys, single males that are living alone, and no pensions or social security, nothing. And the Issei in my view, they're different than your parents. Issei are like Jiichan, Baachan, for Sansei, anyway, when you skip that generation, what Isseis conjure is Jiichan, Baachan, the people that spoil you, it's different. Your mom and pop discipline you, and so the pioneer projects just take off. Like Pioneer Center develops, I remember even like one outing, we used to get buses from the city. And Tom Bradley becomes mayor, Noguchi becomes coroner, how these changes are happening. But on these outings, one outing we went to the port, because L.A. is weird, right? You have the city of L.A. in this narrow thread that's called Harbor Gateway.

TI: Yeah, explain that to me.

RW: The city of L.A., if you look at a map, there's a big bulb that's the city of L.A., then there's a narrow strip that runs about 15 miles to the harbor.

TI: I didn't know that.

RW: And because the city of L.A. wanted the harbor because of the revenue of the harbor. So they had a lot of harbor related things, so that we get a bus, we take the Isseis on an outing. And with Isseis, you develop a strategy. There's the real fast ones and the real slow ones, so you have some people in the front and some people in the back, and you pinch them in, because you lose them otherwise. So I remember coming back, and we get back on the bus, and there's one guy missing. And we look out there, oh, man, he's way at the end of the pier. So I go running out there and I say, "Ojisan, kaerimasho." And he doesn't say anything, he just is still. So I come up in front of him, and he tells me, "I'm from Wakayama." But I don't know my geography, and says, like, "So?" Says, "I haven't seen the ocean since I come to America." And I went, "You know what? Stay right there." I said, "Hey, can we hold the bus?"

TI: That's a good story.

RW: But because I hung out with my grandfather, right? You find all these other single Issei men, and you hear their stories and they're tragic. The successful ones end up with families to support them, but there's a whole bunch that are not. So Pioneer Project picks up that gap. And then one of the subsidiary projects that we did was a thing called Oshokujikai.

TI: Going back to that Pioneer Project, are there any remnants from that? Did you guys document any of these stories?

RW: I'm sure there is, but I don't know where, what the repository is.

TI: Because that's one of my, things we just missed, and we started the project twenty-three years ago, so we missed that whole generation. As you're telling me these stories, I just realize how much a missing that is for me not to have these stories.

RW: Yeah, I think for a lot of us, I know like other oral history projects, like Fresno Library did a whole bunch on "picture brides," they interviewed them, and I saw a few of those, and they're wrenching. Because at one level you say, oh, okay, they got married by photographs, how cute. It was disastrous. Those poor women. My dad even tells me a story like he went out to meet a boat with his friend, 'cause his wife was coming. And this woman gets off the boat and comes up to my dad and starts bowing. The guy sent my dad's picture.

TI: Oh, no. [Laughs]

RW: That's awful. Can you imagine how she felt? And I've heard things like that in the oral interviews in Fresno, and some of the women are pretty candid, "And I was hoping he'd die," "He was a bastard." And some of those Isseis, I remember, like were, talk about chauvinism, man, unreal.

TI: And so this was a collection at, what, Cal State University?

RW: I recall Fresno Library.

TI: Okay.

RW: But they were videoing it, and it was an oral history. But this is while I was at JACL, I remember it was going on, and it intrigued me.

TI: Yeah, I'm going to have to research that. I'm not familiar with that, maybe Brian Niiya...

RW: But I think there's other oral histories like that, of the Isseis.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.