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VY: How did you meet William Hohri?

DC: So William was... well, I should back up. So when we were trying to acclimatize ourselves to life in Chicago, one of the things was that we would attend the Elm LaSalle Bible Church, and that was on corner of LaSalle and Oak, I believe. And so this was a very fundamentalist church, and ran very contrary, their teachings ran very contrary to what I knew in my own family. So I don't think it had a very deep, lasting effect on me. Although I must credit them for having encouraged me to develop my memory skills. So I would memorize large sections of the Bible because you'd get badges and stars and recognition for that. And I got my first public speaking gig with them, I can't remember under what occasion I did that. But I stood at the pulpit of that church, and I rattled off something, some speech I had written, and it was well-received by the community. Somebody there said, "Do you do public speaking? You should do that on a regular basis, you're good at it." And I thought, "Hmm," so I must give them credit for that. And then Dorothy decided -- because Dorothy, my elder sister, was a very ambitious woman. She decided we needed to go to a church where there were more people who looked like us. So we went on the north side of Chicago, and we went down the stairs to the basement to our Sunday school class. There sat this interesting looking fellow with a crew cut and a bow tie, he had these horned rimmed glasses, yeah, he was a very interesting man. Very well-educated, and interested in the intellectual concepts of Christianity. He became a good friend of mine because I think he was someone who liked to talk, and I think he was garrulous in that way, and I think he was someone who was extremely kind. And he probably saw this person who was kind of, maybe a lonely adolescent, maybe he perceived that, I'm not sure, but I would often confide in him. And so there were moments when we would slip into his car because maybe he wanted to show me... so I think he wanted to show me a document that was in his car, and then it started raining, so then we started talking in the car and I would confide in him.

And he was the first person who told me about the resisters in Tule Lake, because, of course, he also answered "no-no" on the questionnaire. And he had been incarcerated at Manzanar, but as a young person before then, his father had moved them around quite a bit because he was a minister. [Interruption] And they were so poor that eventually the parents developed tuberculosis and had to place William and some of his other brothers and sisters in an orphanage. So when William was two years old, he knew what it was to be abandoned. Surrounded by people that he knew didn't care about him, and he says, "That's a feeling you never get over." So he had a very unique background, and he also told me that he was in high school with Marilyn Monroe. So years later, when I attended his memorial service in L.A., we all entered the mortuary, and there was this huge blow up photograph of his class, and it was a very, very large class. And there was an arrow pointing to William and an arrow pointing to Marilyn Monroe. And he told me, "She was the prettiest girl in my class, and she had her hair done every week." And she was absolutely gorgeous back then as well, the camera loved her back then, too. But he was so interesting, the stories he would tell, and he had a very interesting, quirky sense of humor. Yeah, he was someone so uniquely different from my family that it was almost a relief to be in his company and to hear the stories that he told. And he had a unique approach to Christianity, he read the Bible like a book and he would think about these things, he'd look at it from a much broader perspective.

And he wrote plays, and he often invited me to participate in those plays, and he was very kind to me. And one of those plays was performed at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago because Chicago, the theme at Christmas was Christmas Around the World, so they invited all these different ethnic groups to participate. And so we performed his play, and from then I was invited to participate, to perform in "Rashomon" at the Lincoln Park Theater. But oddly enough, my career as an actress was curtailed by my dad because he didn't want me to perform in that play because he thought that was, well, you know, it's about a rape, and I would have been playing the woman who had been raped, and he thought that would not be such a great thing for me to participate in and so I didn't participate. But it was an honor to be asked, and I never thought I was a particularly good actress anyway, I was very much inhibited and very self-conscious and lacking in a great deal of self-confidence. But William, he let me act in his two plays and he was just that kind of person, just very generous in his thinking. And he loved music, so we used to sing, my nieces and I, in the choir. And he would always encourage us because he would say, "That music is one of the wonderful (consolations) of life," he really enjoyed music. Yeah, a very, very intelligent person, a very kind person.

And then, of course, he was the one who left that church soon after we became exiles in Canada over the Vietnam War. He wanted the Christian Fellowship Church to pass some resolution or to make a stand against the Vietnam War, and the majority of the congregation was not sympathetic to him. And so he left that church (this) person of principle, and then he joined another church that invited Latins and, I think, gay people at that time. And then he eventually became unchurched, and that's how he identified himself. And then he took up the cause of suing the American government, and so he formed this NCJAR organization, and he was the lead plaintiff in that case and it got all the way up to the Supreme Court, but then the Supreme Court refused to hear it, and evidently the Supreme Court can do that kind of thing. But there is a picture of him standing on the steps leading up to the Supreme Court at JANM, the Japanese American National Museum, with his bow tie, standing next to Aiko Herzig, who was instrumental in helping him do research. But even though it was refused, he was somebody with the temerity to sue America, he was just that kind of person. He was just an individual of immense integrity, and he thought it should be done. And whatever we received in redress was a pittance compared to what he was asking for. But his actions forced the JACL and its representatives in Congress to push for a legislative remedy. Had William not done that, it would never have become evident that there were that many people who thought that the American government should apologize to us, and they needed to acknowledge the violation of civil liberties. So I credit William with having moved America in the right direction and certainly the Japanese American community, galvanized them in a way that no one else had done before on principle. So I stayed in contact with him even though we lived in Canada and I often visited him. But things are lost as you move away from one another, but my immense respect for this individual has never wavered. I owe him and his family a great deal.

VY: Sounds like he was a very important influence in your life and a bit of a kindred spirit.

DC: Yes, and he would always say to me, "The most important thing, Diana, is to value yourself, to think well of yourself." I think he understood how inferior I felt. And I mean, to be blunt, and yeah, and no one else had ever said that to me. And now, as I've aged and have written a book, and have gone out on speaking tours and have received awards and recognition, I think now I have a better understanding of myself and I do like myself more. That I do see that I have some usefulness, some value, some purpose. That there has been some purpose to my life even though it was formed out of chaos and degradation. That from that experience you can weave stories that can transcend time even. Because many of these stories have resonance now to what's happening all over the world, the treatment of the "other" and how we can either turn away from that experience or embrace it. So yeah, it was a pleasure to know him.

VY: Before we finish talking about him, do you have a picture of him?

DC: Yes, thank you for reminding me. This is a picture of William. And it's so uniquely him, there he is in his jeans. And he bought a car with the money he received from redress, and then the license plate says "redress" on it. And this card, it's inscribed, it says, "Well, Diana, the plates are the car's best accessory, October 1991, Chicago." He had a great sense of humor, he was just a great person.

VY: That's a great picture.

DC: Yeah, nobody like William, never will be. Pleasure to remember him.

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