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TI: But so now talk about the need for this program. What was going on in the community that sort of precipitated the need for AADAP? What was happening? You mentioned the overdoses and stuff, talk about what was going on.

RW: Anecdotally, like in your cohorts, you know there's a lot of ODs and there's a lot of drug abuse. I don't know if you watch... there's a guy who's putting a lot of stuff about what Sanseis were doing in the '60s and '70s, dances, like on Facebook, Mitch.

TI: Mitch... oh, I think I know. Homma?

RW: No, I'd know it right off, but his last name was Matsu...

TI: Okay, I think I am friended or whatever on that feed.

RW: Yeah, so he's become, I haven't talked to him, but he's kind developed this recapturing the Sansei thing, with the bands that we listened to and all that, and there were different dances, like Roger Young, there were places where we went socially. But at those things, you know people were getting loaded, if you weren't doing it yourself. And in that timeframe, like Yellow Brotherhood, we have Asian American Hardcore, which is guys that did joint time. But we know within our neighborhoods, you start seeing these self-help groups develop. But the other thing that exists in that time period is this guy Isamu Noguchi becomes the coroner for L.A. County. And he's a controversial figure, he's a gourmet cook, he's coroner, and he's Shin-Issei, he's from Japan. And he's really inappropriate in a lot of ways, like community dinners, they'd invite him because he's the county department head. But he would show autopsy photos at a dinner.

TI: Oh, my.

RW: And you're going, "That's disgusting." But one of the things was it gave us access to death certificates. So there was a woman that I had a great deal of trust in, she was just kind of rigorous, smart, she comes back and she says, "I talked to the doctor, we can find thirty-one ODs. They don't say 'OD' on the (death) certificate, they say other things, but that's what community doctors did to protect the families. But Noguchi's saying these are ODs. So I'm the JACL Youth Director, I go out with the news release, and the community goes nuts.

TI: Oh, because you exposed this secret.

RW: Yeah, they go nuts. So I'm supposed to get fired for that, and then Mas Fukai, city councilman in Gardena, Mas is a good guy. But because Gardena is heavily implicated in all this stuff, he says, "That can't be true." He's just beating me up. Turns out that our numbers were a little wrong, but the basic thrust of it was right, that there was a huge number of OD deaths. And he wanted me to retract. And I was being stubborn and said, "I'm not retracting, this is getting too much agitation," just as an organizer, I'll retract, maybe, but I'm going to do it slow, because I still knew it was going on. And that really crystallized a lot of stuff taking place, for the community to understand what was taking place. Because you have the young people themselves saying, "There's a drug problem, and I'm it." And then you start getting deeper into it, saying, like, "Hey, check out the drug of choice is barbiturates. It's not uppers, it's not heroin." And as we get more educated, it's like barbiturates depress your inhibition center first. So our experience with it, like these guys would pop a red to be able to talk to a girl. There was this diminished sense of self-esteem, to kind of go and deal. And then you get deeper and deeper into it, because barbiturates are chemically very much like alcohol. But like other communities, white communities are taking acid and speed, they're taking uppers. We're taking downers. And then as we get into it, you can see these difference in patterns and different communities of color, saying, "Ah, there's more to it." And that's what I'm saying, like for us, eventually at AADAP, you start seeing these patterns and saying, this has to do with, I think, Niseis absorbing the lesson, like it's not so good to be Japanese, at least not overtly. And like the translation of that to their kids, it's misguided. It's one thing to kind of like, okay, you need to manage your identity. Like when you walk into certain places, we do that. If I'm going to a meeting in whatever community it is, I'm thinking about, okay, what this place is going to play like when I walk in. That makes sense. But if it inhibits me or makes me feel diminished, and I think that's... so if you look at the pattern of overdose deaths, we didn't do this in a research way, but just anecdotally, they were guys that were physically smaller. If you just sit there and talk about it, and people go, "Yeah, huh?"

TI: And so I'm curious, with this kind of insight, so you're in some ways treating the symptoms of all that, did you guys start thinking about how you can address the source of this? The self esteem issues?

RW: It came up in a lot of different ways. And so one of the ways it manifests is like in development, like in the push for Asian American Studies. We don't know boo about what we went through, and it's sort of a presumption that the more we understood, you can give it context. Even like, sort of, the view of the Niseis, like were they cowardly, or is that sort of a cultural manifestation in this context, and the situation that their parents are put in? I mean, how do you exercise that judgment? And it is more complex. But I think being more complex, the advantage of complexity is that it's forgiving.

TI: Say that one more time? The advantage of...

RW: Of complexity is that it's more forgiving.

TI: So explain that.

RW: Like if you go black and white, saying like they were cowards or not, it's not forgiving. They messed up, they were cowards. Or if it's all the other side, it's all oppression, and it's all the fault of oppression. But it's neither of those; it's a mixture of those, and it manifests differently. And to place the burden of either one of those on individuals, I think is unfair, because the individual pathways are so different. But at least give the tools of what are some of the elements in the complexity, for people to sort it out, and that's more work, but you know what? It is more work.

TI: No, this is fabulous. I really appreciate you giving us these insights, because it gives me another appreciation for the whole Asian American movement. Probably, listening to you, part of it came from a crisis happening in the community.

RW: It did.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.