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BN: Of all these speeches, what was one or what were some of the most memorable in your mind?

SM: Well, they're all memorable. The largest group I had was the small town in Las Cruces, New Mexico. I had a grant from New Mexico to go around the state giving a talk, and Las Cruces, there were over a thousand five hundred students and teachers and parents in an auditorium.

BN: Were there people you knew from back when you lived in...

SM: One of the teachers heard me before and asked me to come. So that was the largest. I've also done San Francisco, Lowell High School, they had about a thousand. The smallest group I've had was one person in Washington, D.C. A young lady in the Smithsonian when I was there, she found out I was in a camp so she wanted me to talk about it. But no, everyone's different, everyone's unique, everyone's memorable. The most meaningful probably were the law schools. I've done Harvard Law School three times, and I've been asked to come back again. So every third year, every new class, I speak. And similarly at Columbia Law School and I had a call the other day from Yale. So those people really could use the knowledge. A lot of those people don't know what happened. A lot of young kids at law schools don't know what happened.

BN: Do you still ask the questions about Korematsu and Endo?

SM: Yes, I do.

BN: And have the responses improved over time or is it the same?

SM: Well, that's a secret. I'm not going to... that's going to be embarrassing. I'm not suggesting that Harvard and Columbia have low grades, too, but let me tell you, they weren't the best scores I've had. [Laughs]

BN: In all of these speeches you've given, have you encountered, like, hostile audiences or people who didn't believe that this was wrong or that kind of thing?

SM: I can remember some hecklers. I could count 'em on one hand. One of 'em in a small town gave a speech after I finished. He started a speech about the brutality about the Japanese army in the Philippines, and he lost his brother. I couldn't turn him off, he was on this emotional kick of telling the audience the Japanese are no good. That was not easy. Oh, another one I remember, typical response, "retribution for Pearl Harbor." The most difficult heckler I had was a really senior attorney, a real senior attorney who tried to teach me that I need to understand the circumstances of 1942. When Pearl Harbor took place and the Japanese in this country clearly had loyalties to Japan, and you have to understand what the rest of us felt. Preaching to me, that was not good. Anyway, those were some outstanding examples of people who didn't agree with me. But I'm talking about maybe four or five people out of ninety thousand, I'll take that risk. That's good odds. But most people don't know.

BN: Do you have different presentations you do for different audiences, whether they're by age or by region?

SM: Absolutely. My first question to people who want to hear me is, "Who am I speaking to? What age group?" I have programs designed for fourth grades, middle school, high school, college, law schools, seniors, I tailor to the group and it works out pretty well.

BN: Do you do different presentations to a group in, say, California, where more people are likely to know about it versus in wherever, Nebraska, were fewer?

SM: Actually, not really much different. A lot of what I talk about is relatively new for anybody.

BN: Right, yeah.

SM: In fact, very few people know there were four out of the five generals in charge of the districts who said, "Don't do it." They didn't know that, they thought it was only DeWitt. They're correct, it was DeWitt, but they didn't know that four of the five said no, don't do it. So that was more, the interesting things I found from history that they didn't know about. So even the Japanese people who knew about what happened, I can tell them some things that they did not know about, which I think is quite important. Lot of people didn't know about there was a lack of adequate medical care in the camps, and I had to explain to them what happened to me.

BN: Yes, firsthand knowledge of that one.

SM: Yes, so that helps.

BN: You've been doing it for, like, what, twelve years now?

SM: Twelve years now.

BN: How has your presentation or your views evolved over time, or have they?

SM: Well, what happened was, I always have a Q&A, and I learn from the Q&A what they're interested in. And I keep a log of all these questions and answers, and I start to see certain patterns of the same questions. And so I tend to focus on those things that are of interest to a lot of people. For example, I started seeing people asking, "Was there any resistance to the camps?" So I built in the resister story at Heart Mountain as part of my story. Lot of people ask about, "How long did it take to 'assimilate,'" unquote, "after you got home?" And I have to explain to them that our parents taught us that you get a good education and you will be assimilated because you'll have a skill that's needed. These kinds of things that developed along the way is based on the questions, it worked out quite well. Even personal ones, what happened, "How did you find your wife?" "How did you decide on going into a speaking career?" These kinds of things I kind of worked into the program.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.