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BN: And then at some point, right around here, you start to get involved with JACS?

AK: Okay. So what happens is, in my senior year of high school, there's a group called HICO, H-I-C-O, which is High School-College. And so the concept is college students putting on a weekend conference for high school kids, and why? To encourage them to go to college. So you're trying to reach junior high -- not junior high -- juniors in high school, because when do you start applying for college? So we were finding a lot of high school kids were not going on to college, even though we're the "model minority." So anyway, Marumoto, Bill Marumoto from Orange County, who was student body president of Whittier and became alumni director down there, he and some of his colleagues, the same guys, they organized this. So I had been going on for a couple of years, two or three years, so I participated in it one year, and then what you do is you pass it on. So it was a simple formula, you arrive Friday night, sort of a mixer, Saturday morning you have some of these sessions, and then in the afternoon you have some sessions, you have a dance or something in the evening, and then Sunday morning you have another session, and you leave. Well, these are these Christian conference grounds and places like that, they could accommodate a hundred people. So the first ones are usually around school and things, careers, what are some of the careers. So you bring up Nisei who are doctors and different professionals, and what does it take to get into those careers? So the morning is careers, the afternoon is social issues, dating, relationship with your parents, any of these kinds of hot topics. And then Sunday morning is you usually have religious services or spiritual services or broader issues, social issues, social justice issues.

So it's a long way of saying that one of the following years, I became the chair. So what you do is a previous chair appoints you, says, "Why don't you do this for next year?" And then you select your own committee from usually the committee that's there, you can get those people and recruit others. And so that's how that cycle goes. So that was my introduction back into an all-Asian or Japanese, essentially Japanese activity with kids from all over, not just one location. So the Eastside, the Westside, Gardena, all of these, San Fernando, all of these people are coming together. So I did that, and that's how I met my wife. And some of these things like that, then my uncle Joe was, he was chair of the board of the Shonien. And the Shonien was a children's orphanage that started before World War II, and these kids, a lot of them weren't what you would think of as really orphans. They were kids of parents who were working in the fields during the weekday, so they didn't have any means to take care of them when they got sick or certain age and so forth. So there was this children's home, and there's a whole history of that, and then this is before World War II. During World War II, in Manzanar, there was a Children's Village, which was a village within the camps, which was isolated, and there's all kinds of stories about that that we can get into. And anyway, they had kids from four or five different, quote, orphanages. Anyway, Shonien, after World War II, starts to get smaller and smaller.

And JACS is Japanese American Community Services, forms to continue the legacy of the Shonien. And in this case, it's postwar, World War II, the Little Tokyo area has war brides, Japanese women who married GIs, black, white, whatever, and are abandoned or leave them or feel abused or whatever the situation. So this JACS is formed, Harry Kitano at UCLA, his friend in Northern Cal, Mike Suzuki becomes the director, he has a master's in social work out of Berkeley. And he and Harry and another person, Jerry Enomoto from JACL were all classmates. So here comes Mike Suzuki who heads this group up. The board is consisting of community leaders, so I'm a junior leader. So they make me a member of the board, but not a full board member. So that's my history with that, and I'm still on there, I've been chair of the board and so forth. And eventually what happens is they provide social services to the gang kids, to the war brides, and other, whatever, social service needs are, and there have been trained social workers at one point or another who have helped to, if you will, minister to those folks. Eventually that property up on the hill, on Redcliffe in Silver Lake, close to where I grew up, we put it up for sale and it sold to Boys Republic, that's the one where... what's the guy's name who was in Bullitt? Steve McQueen. Well, he grew up in Boys Republic, some people may know of Boys Republic. Well, the neighborhood and the Japanese surrounding, get in an uproar, so JACS goes underground, and JACS exists even to this day. Right now it's more of a gifting organization in the sense that it regrants money to the community organizations that are doing services, so it's not a direct service like it used to be, but it's giving small grants. And Cecilia Nakamura, who used to be a dancer of sorts, she left her estate and put some money in there, so there's an arts component. And then Joanne, or whatever her new name is...

BN: Nobuko.

AK: ...receives a certain amount of that automatically, because she helped to care for Cecilia, who was a family friend. And then we just got another grant from a hardware store owner, who gave it to several organizations, so there's still sort of a social welfare need in the community that's somewhat hidden. I guess the question is, what is Japanese or who is Japanese? And it's not just who is Japanese, but does a Japanese American exist? Because our grandchildren, my grandchildren, are all mixed race. So after my generation side, there's no such thing as a "pure Japanese." So I asked my grandkid, six of us went to Japan, and I said, "What do you call yourselves?" because he runs track and everything, and he hangs out with these mixed race people. He says, "Well, we're Asians." And I said, "Well, what's common?" "Rice." Okay, so there's some food that's common and so forth. Language isn't, culture is different, all this kind of thing. So I guess we've now come of age where we can use a broader terminology to say this is the inclusive term that we're using. But this whole Japanese thing is, I think, switching and changing. But JACS as an organization caters to at least providing some service out there to someone who's partially, if you will, Japanese.

BN: So have you been involved continuously for like sixty years?

AK: Yeah. I mean, sometimes it goes up, and ebbs and flows and so forth.

BN: One thing I forgot to ask you, also about this time, about the time you graduated, there was the kind of notorious shooting in Little Tokyo, I was wondering if you remember that.

AK: I don't remember that. What was it, when?

BN: I thought it was '58, '59. It was a Sansei honor student who was caught in gang crossfire and killed in Little Tokyo, and that spurred a development of JA and some other organizations at the time.

AK: There's all kinds of things that aren't spoken about that happened. You talk about the pool hall, the Taul building pool hall downstairs, the prostitution that was occurring at the Miyako, which was the California Bank and Trust building now, the Kajima building. That's where JACS was doing social work, so there was a lot of different things like that. There was a lot of gambling and things. The north side of First Street, they have basements all along there, so they were gambling and things, all kinds of interesting things going on.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.