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BY: So talk a little bit about APALA, and I don't remember what that stands for, so if you can...

SS: Okay. So APALA is Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance. It's the API caucus within the AFL-CIO, so it's recognized by the labor, the major labor federation in the U.S., and gets some funding from them, I don't think it's a whole lot. But they have an office in D.C., and they have chapters all over the country, New York, San Diego, San Francisco, L.A., Seattle, Chicago. I think there's one in Atlanta, D.C. And they advocate for Asian Pacific Islander issues within the labor movement as well as internationally, because a lot of unions have international connections. So we have ties with unions in the Philippines and Okinawa and Japan and Cambodia. And the Seattle chapter is one of the more active chapters. My wife is a past president of the Seattle chapter of APALA, she also was on the national board of APALA for many years.

BY: So is that how you became involved?

SS: So I became, yeah, because we hold the chapter meetings, or before Covid, we held the chapter meetings at our house, and we'd have anywhere from ten to fifteen, occasionally twenty people come, but it would always be a potluck, a dinner potluck meeting. So I would mainly watch the tables and do the dishes and make sure the teapots were full, and just kind of listen in from the side.

BY: So what is your role now with that organization?

SS: I'm just a dues-paying member, but I did go on... there was a visitation exposure tour to Okinawa and Japan in 2019. And one of the founding members who works at the UCLA Labor Center, Kent Wong, has close ties with people in Okinawa and also in Tokyo in the labor movement there. So he organized this tour, so I went with my wife Tracy. And about, I think there were maybe ten of us total, ten or twelve. And so I've kind of become active in support for Okinawa in particular. There's an effort to... well, so the U.S. has many bases in Okinawa. And one of them, Futenma air base, is located in the middle of Ginowan city, it's literally... there's ocean on one side and the other three sides are the city of Ginowan. So we visited an elementary school that, there's the school building, there's the playground, and then there's the fence surrounding the airfield. And they've had incidents where planes flying overhead, things have dropped off. Like a door from one of the Ospreys broke off and landed in a playfield. So they have what looked like... like when you go to a baseball field, there's little dugouts for the teams? So they have what looks like that, but they're actually reinforced concrete, they're bunkers for safety. So if any aircraft crash or drop stuff, they can tell the kids to go run to the bunkers and they'll be safe from falling material. Anyway, so they're moving that airbase, or the plan is to move that airbase to a less populated part of the island, which is at Henoko, which is on Oura Bay. And Oura Bay is a wildlife refuge; it's got like five thousand different species. It's got almost as much biological diversity as that national monument off of Hawaii, which was, I don't know, like five times as big and had seven thousand different species. This one is one-fifth the size but it has five thousand different species, some of which are endangered. And they're doing the construction on one side of that bay. So Okinawa is against it, the governor is against it, the legislature, state legislature is against it, the people held a referendum and seventy percent voted against it. But Japan's federal government is pushing it forward as well as the U.S. So we're trying to help lobby the U.S. Congress to stop that program.

BY: And so APALA is involved in that fight then?

SS: Yeah.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.