<Begin Segment 10>

TI: Well, during this time, you were also, you mentioned earlier, getting your master's in public administration. So was that happening in parallel with law school, were you working, or how did that all work?

RI: I finished my coursework at UCLA and you still had to do a thesis, which, I don't know what a thesis is, some big word about some kind of report. But I said, "Okay, I'll work on the thesis, but I'm going to law school because I don't want to lose time." So basically, getting out of high school until I got out of law school, I was in school for ten years, and I was just ready to go out and see the real world, and that's when this whole opportunity with the JACL came about, and I said, "I got to try it."

TI: So tell me, how did this opportunity come up? So now you graduated from law school, you have your master's degree, and what happened?

RI: Well, one day, my friend Harvey and my other friend Leanne, we had a law office in Gardena. And I read the Pacific Citizen, Pacific Citizen said, "We're looking for a person with a law degree or political science background to be the Washington representative for the JACL." And I looked at it, and boastfully, I told my friends, "I'm going to get this job." I don't know what it paid, $19,000 a year, I forgot. Whatever it was, the money wasn't the big driving force. And so what happened is I sent in my resume, I get a call from this person named Carl Nobuyuki, who was executive director of the JACL in San Francisco. So Carl says, "Okay, I'm going to come down, and I need some references, and then we'll get together." Well, one of the references that I put down was a person named Roy Kato. Roy Kato was a city planner for the City of Gardena. When I was at UCLA in 1970, I was a planning intern at the City of Gardena, because I kind of liked urban planning. And so I remember Roy had sent me a letter and said, "Okay, you're appointed to be an intern, and we're going to pay you a dollar thirty-five an hour," I don't know, it was like ten hours a week or whatever it was. So anyway, eight years later, Carl calls up Roy Kato and says, "Roy, what do you know about Ron?" And I don't know what Roy said, but Roy basically said, "Give him a chance, I think you won't regret it." And so then Carl sat me down and said, "Okay, you're gonna have this job," and then right at that time, Mike Masaoka's mother had passed away, and there was a funeral just down the street from here, I think at Union Church. And at Mike Masaoka's mother's funeral is when I first met Mike. And Mike said, "Okay, you come out to Washington, D.C., I'll meet you, and then I'll see you again at the national convention in Salt Lake City."

TI: Because your position was going to be in D.C., so you'd be reporting directly to Mike because he was there?

RI: No. Mike was out of, he was not the Washington representative, but Mike has been in Washington since the war, and well respected and knowledgeable about things in Washington, D.C., especially for the Japanese American community, and so the JACL has a group of advisors that included Mike Masaoka, Kaz Oshiki, who worked for Congressman Kastenmeier, Pat Okura and Lily Okura, and Cherry Tsutsumida. So I was assigned five people to be my advisors as the JACL...

TI: Okay, but that was sort of unofficial, though, because they weren't necessarily staff of the JACL then?

RI: Oh, no, they were advisory.

TI: Okay, so in terms of D.C., they were setting up an office for you, and it was like a one-person office?

RI: Yes. It was a one-person office. Before me was Wayne Horiuchi, and I think Wayne is now in Utah, involved in government relations work. And the difficulty is, whenever there's a transition -- and Mike had this position of Washington representative for... he created the position.

TI: Right.

RI: And so as he transitioned out, it was always difficult to pass the baton. And so whenever you try to take over a position with someone that had, in such way, like Mike Masaoka, there will always be differences of opinion and difference in approach. And obviously if you didn't grow up in Washington, D.C., and understand that process, this was a learning curve. So there was probably two or three Washington representatives before me, after Mike, then there was two or three, and then I was there. And I just learned a lot through that process.

TI: Well, so what did the national director tell you in terms of what your job was going to be?

RI: Well, he indicated there's this civil rights, maintaining the presence of Japanese Americans involved in civil rights issues, and then, as an aside, he said, "Oh yeah, by the way, at their national convention in July in Salt Lake City, there's going to be an issue that's going to be coming up and it's going to be called redress." So I looked at him and I said, "Redress? Wrong, when you redress something there's a wrong," and said, "What wrong are you talking about?" And he says, "The internment." And that was really probably the first time I thought about, this is going to be the most challenging and interesting task for the JACL. Because even then, even at the convention, there was different approaches. And whether it's the Seattle approach, or I don't know if L.A. had an approach, but different people had views on what should be done, and you had people in Chicago and New York and others. And I think the further away you lived from Washington, D.C., the feeling, belief comes about that we know it's wrong, so they should just do this. And that is where the challenge became.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.