Densho Digital Repository - David Sakura Interview II (Densho ID: ddr-densho-1000-513-8)

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VY: So do you think that the desire to explore and promote redress was intertwined with the reigniting of the New England chapter of the JACL?

DS: To an extent, but in the very early days, there was a lot of outreach to other communities. There was a lot of public presentations on the internment, and once again, it's part of that educational teach-in concept. And so once the chapter was assembled, and it gave us a platform to speak from, that we were able to gain appearances on television, on speaking engagements to different groups. So since the inception in 1979 to 1980, there had been multiple engagements with the press, with television appearances, with public speaking, and with meetings and performances. I think about the movie Hito Hata, it was an early movie describing the internment, and it was sponsored in part by the JACL and the Asian American resource workshop, another example of reaching across the community to other community groups. And I have to mention one of the members of the workshop, Peter Kiang would often sit in on our executive committee meetings, and he would be a very painful and loyal supporter of the New England chapter of the JACL.

VY: So it sounds like a very involved process it must have been to basically transition the JANE group into the JACL. Did all the members of JANE become part of the JACL or did some people...

DS: I think they did. I think the vast majority became members of the JACL, and I think there was a growing enthusiasm for telling the internment story and to reach out to other community groups. There were others that formed the executive committee of the JACL. The chapter itself often had no more than thirty, forty members. It was one of the, if not the smallest chapter in the JACL. With only thirty or forty members, there were maybe a handful of individuals that really push the agenda. And some really key individuals, including... well, I mention, now, his name, Eji Suyama, and Kei Kaneda who were co-chairs of the redress committee. And they were real firebrands, they really reached out, they really drove the redress issue. Gary Glenn and his wife, Gary was sort of the recording secretary and publicist. And I think by default, I ran for and was elected president of the JACL. And I sort of feel that as a default opportunity, because these people were really committed, they spent all their time promoting the JACL drumming up new members and doing all the necessary paperwork and doing the publicity. So I sort of felt like I was the front person, and any time someone needed to speak on behalf of the JACL, they would wheel me out and let me be the face of the New England chapter of the JACL. But it was a core group that really drove the agenda.

VY: So it sounds like you're saying it really was a group effort, but you, as the president of the JACL, were the spokesperson.

DS: Yeah. But I spoke, I had interviews on television, Say, Brother, the PBS Black news program. I spoke on Asian Focus about the internment. There was the first Asian Pacific Islander Heritage Month in 1979, I spoke at that. I then began speaking to different college groups at Dartmouth, at University of Vermont, to a group a high school teachers in New Hampshire. So it was a pretty active speaking schedule.

VY: And what was that like being in that position, going back to what you had talked about earlier, as someone who maybe wasn't that comfortable with public speaking, and now this was a few decades, couple decades later, you are the person, you are the guy who was going out there and talking about all these things?

DS: Well, first of all, you have to recognize that this is a very small group. Everybody had to do everything. And I'm just astounded that this small group, with its connections, with its outreach, could call upon, could take the idea of bringing the commission hearings to Boston, to the Harvard campus. That this small group of key individuals could pull this off. So this is unlike anything that was seen on the West Coast, where there would be hundreds of testimonies, hundreds of different venues, quite a few venues on the West Coast. We had no survivors testifying at the redress commission hearings. But it was a very exciting time because now we had a focus. It reached across the community, and we began to tell the story. I think, at that time, I had finished my training at the school, Harvard School of Public Health, in Health Policy and Management, and taken a number of business courses taught by graduates of the business school, and gained a lot of confidence to take an idea, to show leadership. By that time, I was a consultant for an international consulting firm, where I had consulting assignments throughout the world. So it seems like I had broken through, both on a personal note, but on a professional level.

VY: Yes. And also, in addition to your full-time job, you were doing all these things. You and everybody else was doing all these things to propel forward the New England JACL, and it sounds like it really was an all hands on deck kind of endeavor.

DS: It was, yeah. But it was a very exciting time. And looking at some of the documentation, there were some really key people, including, of course, Kei Kaneda, whose sister was involved with the Philadelphia JACL chapter. And Eji Suyama, and Peter Kiang. By that time, Glen Fukushima had graduated from Harvard, and the other students also began graduating and disappearing. And so all that we were left with, the core group. But there were some really important context that helped propel the concept of having the commission hearings. And by early 1981, in the fall, the National Chapter began to take notice that there is the possibility of a commission and coming to Boston in addition to its West Coast tour.