<Begin Segment 6>

TI: I mean, when you now kind of look back at the community, and recognizing that the previous decades, they had gone through the removal and incarceration experience. From your perspective, what insights do you have in terms of what they were dealing with? You kind of lived through it, but it was the eyes of a kid. But now, as an adult looking back, any insights about what, almost...

RW: At a macro level, my sense is like if you listen to the voices of Sansei, because remember, redress starts out in the margins with kind of radical folks that raise the issue --

TI: And Edison Uno was one?

RW: Well, you had Michi Weglyn earlier, Edison certainly, Ray Okumura, up your way, like even Shosuke Sasaki.

TI: Shosuke and Henry Miyatake.

RW: Yeah. There were some oldtimers on that. But like for Sansei, it was like a marginal issue and it was almost flippant to be talking about it. Because it's kind of a parallel to 40 acres and a mule. I mean, there was no research, no concrete thought about what does it mean, how do you do it?

TI: So explain that again. So from a Sansei perspective, they thought that it wasn't a real issue? What do you mean by flippant?

RW: I think it's kind of like a romantic idea. Like Don Quixote, we need to right a wrong, but I don't think we had much substance about, okay, what does that mean, what does that involve? But the energy out of the Sansei certainly put it on a plane, because within JACL, it was a nonstarter, it wasn't going to get raised there. In fact, when we talk about this being the 50th anniversary of the Manzanar pilgrimage, like I was the JACL Youth Director, and Warren Furutani was on staff, and Victor Shibata. And so the idea is Warren's like, "How about we go check out the camps?" So we checked them out and said, "Yeah, there's still stuff there, man. There's a guardhouse, how about a pilgrimage?" And we found Reverend Mayeda, who had been going every year to do services, said, "Yeah, let's do a pilgrimage," and we're stupid. We go in December, it's colder than hell, we get a car that flipped, I mean, if you've seen the old Gidra photograph with the Manzanar, the Nakamura photo in the center, and then all these pictures, I'm one of the pictures right on top. But when we went, it was stupid, we shouldn't have gone in December. But it's serendipity that we did from the standpoint of, like, this was pretty grim.

TI: I've been in Manzanar in winter, and yeah, you really get a sense of how horrible it was.

RW: Yeah, it's grim.

TI: I mean, the snow was going sideways.

RW: Yeah. But we didn't know, it's like ours was romantic, oh, we're going to go there, we're going to clean up the ohaka, right? It's romantic. And the thing is, you know what? Real life is a lot crueler, and the people that were there had to go through it. But when we did the pilgrimage...

TI: So describe the very first pilgrimage, because you were at the very first pilgrimage? Describe that.

RW: Yeah, we just got in the Rafu, like basic organizer, we're going. And there's a base, there's a market for it, because you have all this Sansei Concern and all this other stuff that's going. And what I described about, like, the JACS office, there's really a lot of Sansei base to draw from, to go. So we went, but the reaction from the Nisei, because remember, I'm JACL Youth Director, so I'm in the JACL office. And the Nisei wanted to fire us, literally. We had to go to meetings in Fresno, and Bob Takasugi was not a federal judge yet, but he was a friend of mine from East L.A. We brought him up, and he had to defend us.

TI: So what was the rationale for them opposing this?

RW: "Don't bring it up, what's wrong with you? You're bringing down hell on the community, let it lie." And it kind of captured, even the interview with Reverend Senzaki about burying things Japanese. I mean, I think it ties into AADAP and all these other things, but we didn't understand that there would be that kind of reaction. And you're going, "What's up with this?" "What's underneath all that?"

TI: Right, exactly. Because it's just, whenever you see a reaction that's kind of out of proportion to what is happening, you're thinking, "What's going on?"

RW: That kind of thing shows up for me just when I become the JACL director itself. Because when the commission is starting, I get the bright idea that, hey, let's get some chapter presidents together and have them hone down a vignette about camp, five minutes, and I'll get Quentin Kamp, who's kind of a curmudgeon, board of supervisors and some judges to play commission, and let's walk through it, let's test it out. And the first guy that goes up -- and these are chapter presidents, they're used to talking and all that, he breaks down and can't finish. Then the second guy breaks down, and the third and the fourth, we didn't get one finished. And then we're going, "Oh, shit, what is that about?" So like one of the people that testified in L.A. was a woman like Amy Mass, she's a psychiatric social worker, and so one of my other ties was, I was president of Asian American Social Workers at one point, even though I'm not MSW. But I met Amy and a lot of mental health professionals, and I called her up and said, "Amy, I've never seen anything like this." I have an AADAP background, and some things that you might call generally clinical. But the language of post-traumatic stress was not talked about. That's the first time I heard that language when she says, "It might be that." And so we organized it, like, these commission hearings are going on, let's get our mental health professionals ready, because I don't know what that taps into.

TI: That's interesting.

RW: But just the Manzanar pilgrimage, all the reaction to that was we didn't know what we tapped into.

TI: So that's really, I mean, that must have been an exciting time. I mean, sure, you got resistance and pushback, but it's almost like you hit a nerve, and it's almost like, oh, this is really, there's a lot of juice here.

RW: "What's there?" Because there was really very little material. You know, like I said, it was tenBroek and Daniels. Because the Niseis weren't talking, and remember, the book that was kind of prominent around that time is Nisei: The Quiet American. And we're taking umbrage at that, like, "What's up with you calling it 'Quiet American'? Just stop it." And I think it's a legitimate book, but it's a perspective we didn't understand.

TI: Well, so as this is starting to happen, because, in a similar way, when we started Densho twenty-three years ago and we were going to document these stories, I got some pushback in terms of, "You don't want to do this." And it wasn't so much... what I realized, it wasn't so much in terms of the Japanese American community being seen as sort of this force that was bringing things up, it was the internal fights that would come up. That was the stuff that people didn't want to come up. It wasn't about standing up for your rights or the fear of that, it was all of a sudden this internal kind of...

RW: You know, it's kind of like the experience I had with the 442 guys. Because I'm an idiot now, I come out of the antiwar movement, so even when I become a JACL director, Eric Saul, who did the exhibit at the Presidio, the first one, he says, "You know much about these guys?" I said, "The only thing I know is they wear funny hats, they run the dime pitch at Nisei Week." He said, "You're the JACL director, you need to understand this story," and he took me through that and says, "Sit down, you need to understand this story." And I thank him for that, because I didn't understand the story. And then this other woman gave me her v-mail that she got from her boyfriend, and some of it is, like, romantic tripe, but there's, interspersed in that, "We know we've got to prove that we're loyal. This is our main role." And then he dies, he gets killed, and his friends write back, "He really loved you, Haru." It's just wrenching. And then his dad writes this really philosophical letter, and all of that's just like, "This is deep shit that went on there, and people can't talk about it." Like some of the documentaries on the Nisei soldier, we premiered them or previewed them in my office at JACL. And I brought in the 442 guys that I had gotten to know, friends, and I couldn't stand it. These guys don't cry, but they do. Or even during the hearings, I remember sitting in the L.A. hearings with one of the community leaders, and (Mitsu Sonoda), while her husband's testifying, and he's a dentist and he talks about being sent over to the health facility with nothing there, and this baby is dehydrated, and he talks about it dying in his arms. And I'm sitting next to her and she's going, "Kiyoshi doesn't cry, Kiyoshi doesn't cry. He didn't cry at his mother's funeral, Kiyoshi doesn't cry." And you're sitting there in the middle of this, and you say, no, there's stuff that's just really wrenching for people that's within it. And not for everybody, because some people said, "No, I had a ball there. We were all kids, we ran around, it was fun." And I'm sure there's different segments of stories, but for some people, it was heavily lost, but within it overall... for me, the macro story was when I talked about Hosokawa and that book. If you listen to the beginning testimony, pre-commission, and even in the early commission hearings, the Sanseis take after the Niseis, that they didn't stand up, right?

TI: Right.

RW: But by the end of the hearings, the Sansei voice is like, "We appreciate the dilemma you were in and the contributions you made." And I remember my last round with JACL, they kind of let me do a victory lap with chapters. And this immigration attorney's association gave us an award. And I said, like for me, the twenty thousand dollars is good, and I talked to a lot of people what they're going to do, and I had great stories of what different people did with the twenty thousand. But I think the greatest gift we got is, my son was six then, and if my son told me, "Dad, I'm really disappointed, you weren't there when I needed you." And I actually heard those words and those stories out of our national president at one time, that his son told him, "You weren't there." It wasn't about redress, but told him, "You weren't there when I needed you, and I felt like you weren't strong, you were a disappointment." And as a father, I felt like, I never want to hear that from my son.

TI: So explain that... so I'm not quite sure. So...

RW: It's a disappointment.

TI: A father talking to his son, or the son talking to the father?

RW: Well, I'm using that as a metaphor. That for the Niseis, what they lost was the respect and affection of their children's generation.

TI: Got it, got it, okay.

RW: And in my mind, that's a huge loss. I mean, it's epic loss. Like if I list all the things you don't want, the love and respect of your children? So I think what the Nisei in particular -- well, not just the Nisei -- what the Nisei got back is, you know what you got back, is you got back their respect and their affection. And Sanseis, you know what we got back? We always needed, "My dad could beat up your dad." That you needed your parents to be powerful, and you recognized in what way they were powerful. Like that 442 story, that's crazy. Like Battle of the Bulge, people falling to their death and not screaming, or Lost Battalion, who does that kind of stuff? Because we know ourselves, we know our community, and I mean, one, like I think we knew that this is not a threat, these people are not a threat. If anything, they're quiet, it's crazy. But the recovery of what they lost to what they got, Niseis and Sanseis, I think that's the great gift. But it's not something that's as tangible.

TI: No, but it's really powerful, as I'm listening, because I think about my dad's generation, what he went through, and he was in the military service during World War II. But what you said really hit home because, one, they were placed in these camps, so there was some form of emasculation in that, they go off and fight, and they didn't really talk about this, but then, yeah, I grew up during the anti-war protests of Vietnam. And so I remember when I found out, I read the novel No-No Boy and stuff like that, and getting in this argument with my dad, said, "Why didn't you guys, how could you guys not stand up?" and had just that same conversation. But it wasn't until after Densho when I learned, as you said, as I learned the story, that I came back and we really were able to connect on this.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.