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TI: Yeah, because I want to kind of drop you back in. Because we started this because you said JACL was kind of in a turmoil, there was a struggle going on, and I wanted to get a sense, at that moment, 1984, towards the end of 1984, what were people thinking? Were people optimistic about how this was going to play out? What was the feeling?

JT: You know, the attitude had really changed after the commission hearings. I mean, it was like someone had turned on a lightbulb, and for the first time in the community I would hear conversations about camp and about reparations. And you remember that at the beginning, it was the old guard, the older Nisei who really fought this and said, "You dishonor us with this." And it's true, it was anathema to everything we are as a culture in this country. We just don't do this kind of thing. Plus, we didn't have the tools to do it. We didn't have any experience in national politics, we didn't have wealth, we didn't have connections, I mean, every reason why we shouldn't do it, was out there laying right in front of us. But the hardest obstacle was getting the Nisei to agree. After the commission hearings, it was rare that you would hear someone say, "Oh, this is wrong, we shouldn't do this." I never heard it myself. I know people still felt that way, but the difference now was we had the whole community behind this. Before, we were at odds with NCRR, NCJAR and all these different groups, but now everyone realized, this is the only game in town. And if we don't jump on this team, we ain't going to be part of this. And so for the first time --

TI: But is it more than that, because I'll bring up, there was an interview that I looked at, Cliff Uyeda, and he actually says, gives you credit for changing that older Nisei sentiment. That he said, yeah, initially, they were against, and even more than just the commission hearings, you had to do a lot of groundwork to really change that. And that's what Cliff said, so he said you don't get credit for that.

JT: Cliff was, he was my best friend. He was... he and I worked really closely together, he and Edison and I. And yeah, I realized that without the Nisei, we just didn't have a campaign. And I was concerned that they would miss the only chance ever. And I felt like it was an obligation, and I focused a lot of my attention through the initial parts of this campaign on getting the Nisei comfortable with the idea of what this is about.

TI: And he said the key thing that, strategically, that you did was you took it away from making it a money thing, into more of a principle or constitutional issue. And that shift in how you talked about, JACL talked about it, there's a shift there that he says made a big difference with the Nisei.

JT: What I realized was the money really bothered everybody. Even those who supported redress, somehow it was like, okay, let's make this work. We don't really want to do money, it's dirty. And there was this really racist thing going on, too, with the Nisei, about, "Well, you know those other people, they're on welfare, they accept money, we don't do that, we're too proud. Even after the war, we had tanomoshi, but we never took handouts, we did it all ourselves. This is who we are." And so to talk about demanding reparations really didn't sit well with the community, even among people who really supported the need for justice or setting the record straight. And so I felt like I had this obligation to make them understand that what they were doing was no different than what they did by going to camp, or by joining the 442 or by resisting, or whatever they did to try to show the country that they could be proud of us. That everything we did, all the sacrifices, and huge sacrifices, was for the country. And so I said, "This is the last hope we have. For the final time, we want America to know that we do this for the country, this is for democracy." That resonated so far with the Nisei. I mean, I could tell it was changing them. I never, ever talked about money. People would bring it up in meetings, community meetings, and the way I characterized it, because to me it was true, because I saw it happen, the guidelines. That until we put money on this issue, nobody was, they didn't care. "So what if you lost your freedom? We don't give a shit about you, you're just a bunch of Japs." I mean, that really was the rhetoric. And I faced that on radio shows constantly, and when I would say to the Nisei, "The money is there only because that's the only way we could talk about the issues that are really important, which are the constitutional issues." That's what our whole experience was about, is trying to make the country understand that everything we've done was to try to shore up the foundations of the constitution. We're doing this for the country. If anything makes sense to the Nisei, it was that.

TI: Yeah, I'm glad we got that on the record.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.