<Begin Segment 19>

LT: Gary, how do you think your father's DB Boy experience affected your sense of who you are?

GI: Well, going back to when I almost burned the house down when I was thirteen and I was motivated by duty and honor to unconsciously just do the right thing. And then once having heard about this DB Boy protest, I was all totally into it. It was right along the same lines that I was already thinking. So there was nothing unusual to me about it, it was, like the guys said, it had to be done and somebody had to do it. And then on my part, we Sanseis at the time were saying, hey, we have to not let the Isseis and the Kibeis just die without the story being told on their behalf, or helping them tell the story and helping maybe them getting some reparations. So yeah, it deeply affected me.

LT: There are many who still don't know about the Disciplinary Barrack Boys. What should we know and what should we learn from their experiences?

GI: Well, I just read, I looked up Shirley Castelnuovo's book... what was the name of the book?

LT: Soldiers of Conscience.

GI: Soldiers of Conscience. And there's one review on Goodreads, and it's a one-star review. And it's from somebody that calls herself "Tammy". And her review is, you know, "It's just like all of these immigrants that come to our country that don't want to make any kind of contribution to our country and they don't want to assimilate with us, and they and their descendants should be ashamed of themselves." And I'm thinking, "What is this, a Trump supporter or something?" And then I look at the date of the review, and it's like 2014, it's right out of the white nationalist, bigot playbook. So yeah, there's a lot for us still to do, to let people know that, hey, there are people behind these stories, and these people are motivated by entire cultural backgrounds that have a host of validity far beyond what this one Tammy is even barely aware of. And it's just a matter of educating people. And myself, I'm not condescending on Tammys of the world, okay? For example, when I found myself at twenty years old in Tokyo Station, and I was seeing all of these Asian people, just thousands of them. And I'm thinking, hey, I'm a revolutionary as far as Angela Davis is concerned, and anti-war and civil rights and all this kind of thing. And so the first thing that pops up in my mind was, hey, it's right what they say, all these Asians look the same. And I had enough self-awareness to catch myself, and I go, "Did I just think that?" And so all I had to do was just look at little closer, and then I would start picking out differences. And then I would look at everyone and I'd go, wow, they're all different. And from that day, I even look at insects, and I could tell insects apart from each other if I look a little bit closer. So I think that's all it takes for people to understand that if they get these kind of thoughts, and they're programmed into our minds going back generations, and magnified by electronic media, and you have to have sufficient self-awareness. And it happened to me as recently as I was watching one of these reality game shows, and I remember it was the survivors or something like that, and there were these two black women. And the meme, again, popped up in my mind, "Oh, two dumb-ass black women, they're going to fail, they'll never make it." And this is maybe twenty years after that Tokyo incident, and I had still not gotten it unprogrammed out of my mind. So I know that the majority of people still do not even have the inkling that this sort of programming is embedded in our minds. And the only way it can be corrected is to have sufficient self-awareness and know the difference between right and wrong, and it's kind of subtle. But once you catch yourself, however infrequent it is, just catch yourself once, and just look a little bit closer, and you can see that, oh, that's not true at all. And then, step by step, the whole world will unfold in front of you.

LT: My last question for you, what do you think your father and your mother would tell you to do?

GI: Oh, well, they would say that they're very proud of me and they think that I've gone the right way and they're sorry for the hardships that I've had to endure, and they're just hoping that I'll be able to overcome them and continue doing my thing, which is mostly just having fun.

LT: Anything else we should know?

GI: Well, no, I think the part about the self-awareness is the most important thing, because through all of this, it's all about racism, which is based on ignorance, which is based on, if it's allowed to persist unabated, devolves into hate which devolves into violence. And you don't want to go that far, to the violence end, you want to end it at hate. You want to end it at ignorance, and the only way to do that is with knowledge. And the only way you can apply knowledge is through self-awareness. That you don't know everything, and it just takes a slight bit of effort to get it right.

LT: Thank you very much.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.