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PW: I mean, you're describing again, not only the city and proximity of the walking and the coincidences that could happen. But not only what's happening in the larger picture of the war, right across from the East Bay, you got political uprisings with the Black Panthers and a very righteous movement moving in. How does that come down at San Francisco State? What's happening at San Francisco State?

PY: Well, all those things, San Francisco State is one of the central hubs of that, and maybe I'm being parochial, but even in a certain way, more substantial than was happening in Berkeley. But Penny Nakatsu had, in the summer of '67, had attended the conference at Berkeley where Asian American Alliance was formed. And she came back to San Francisco, was the one who formed the chapter at San Francisco State, and that really is the beginning of, first, kind of, my serious understanding of myself as a Japanese American, Asian American. Because that's where I meet Francis Oka, George Leong, Stan Wong, Miyo Ota. And eventually through that connection, people, Janice Mirikitani and Neil Gotanda, but AAPA was the, even though Neil and Janice weren't students, they were all kind of members of AAPA.

PW: Tell me a little bit more about some of the people you just named. Let's start with Penny, tell me what you know about her and how did you two actually meet beyond the organization?

PY: Well, that was, AAPA, although it was pan-Asian, the nucleus was Japanese American. Part of that was that, the reason why that was is that Japanese American of the Asian American students were the last to be organized. The Chinese American and the Filipino Americans had their own organizations. And Japanese Americans, I guess, you could call us at that point unaffiliated. And so the core group, initial core group of AAPA at San Francisco State was Japanese American, Sanseis And Penny was kind of the leader of that. The politics of the Third World at that time, and the politics of progressives of all stripes was... one of the negative things that was shared in common was the sexism. You could call yourself a cultural nationalist, you could call yourself a Communist, you could call yourself a Troskyist, whatever. But what was common to all those, people would argue all those points vociferously, those differences. But what bound them all together was, for the males, was the sexism. It was just kind of egregious, and it was shared by anybody in leadership and most of the rank and file. So Penny suffered from that, and so she was on the central committee of the Third World Liberation Front which was the organizing group where all the various ethnic and cultural organizations had formed a political bond to fight for the College of Ethnic Studies and to kind of hire more faculty of color, and also to kind of bring in more students of color. This was the last gasp of the Johnson administration, you know, Pew programs, economic. And so all these organizations had done this intense work over the previous several years of going into the high schools and whether it's Bayview, Hunters Point or the Mission or Chinatown, to prepare students who might not have thought about college or thought that college was an opportunity for them, say that, "There's money here for you, there is this program, and we can bring you in in a way that's not going to be totally alienating and help you go through these things." And this was grassroots work done by the Black Students Union and ICSA, which was the Chinese and the Filipinos and the various Latino organizations. In San Francisco, because the difference for the San Francisco Japanese community rather than Southern California, there was less class diversity.

I didn't realize this until much later, but just my very, kind of myopic experience at St. Mary's, like I had said earlier, that I thought all Japanese Americans were Episcopalians and professionals. But over time, I meet all these people who, kind of like, Japanese Americans who grew up in South Central, who grew up on the east side, and were clearly Japanese American but also culturally had bonded with a Latino identity or African American identity, and that was kind of the... there was no equivalent to the Yellow Brotherhood up here in any organized way. There was a couple individuals like the Kanzaki brothers who ended up working more in Chinatown than J-Town. But for the majority of Washington High School, twelve, that was much more middle-class oriented. And so for the Southern Californians who came up here, one of the differences is that, particularly for the Southern California Buddhaheads who were more working class, and they felt that San Francisco, particularly the Washington High School kids, were verbally un-adept, but they couldn't defend themselves, and people were always capping on each other.

PW: You mentioned Yellow Brotherhood. Were you involved at all in Yellow Brotherhood in L.A.?

PY: No. I didn't get to know those folks until much later, like after I was clearly part of the San Francisco Asian American movement. And then there was a lot of back and forth between Southern California and Northern California. There again, there was another music bridge there, getting involved in the Asian American music community. We got to know people from all those communities. So that kind of reconnected me to Southern California and to people working at Little Tokyo at that time, Gidra and YB. Mas Kodani working down in South Central, and various jazz groups as well as people looking at taiko and gagaku and all those.

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