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BY: All right. You mentioned Tule Lake, so let's talk about your involvement with the Tule Lake Committee.

SS: Sure. Okay, so Tule Lake was the camp that that my mom's family was sent to from Shelton, Washington. They were put on a train in Olympia and they were sent directly to Tule Lake. They did not go to one of the intermediate, like Puyallup Fairground assembly center, the temporary detention centers. So I've always had an interest in Tule Lake. When I was at Berkeley, UC Berkeley at the Asian Student Union, they were doing a pilgrimage, they were organizing pilgrimages to the Tule Lake camp site. And they did one in '78 that I missed, and then they did one in '79 and '80, which I went to. And in those days, there were about, I don't know, five buses so maybe 250 people total, all from the Bay Area, almost entirely students or recent graduates. I would guess that there were maybe five Nisei, people over the age of thirty who attended. And it was also, because it was so student-oriented, mainly UC Berkeley and San Francisco State, but we did get some students from Stanford and some of the community colleges as well. It was also multicultural, so I remember we had a fairly good-sized contingent from the MECHA and Berkeley and SF State one year. That first year in '79 that I went, it was on Memorial Day, and it was the year that they dedicated the state historic marker at the site of the highway, which the Northern California district of JACL had kind of spearheaded getting that put there. So I just remember about three hundred and fifty, or three hundred people at this unveiling ceremony to dedicate that plaque, two hundred fifty of them were the students from the pilgrimage and then there were maybe thirty or forty dignitaries from the state and from JACL.

BY: But almost no survivors.

SS: Almost none. I mean, I'm sure there were some, but I know within the pilgrimage, there were no more than about, there were literally a handful, I think around five Nisei who had been in camp.

BY: So when did you become one of the organizers?

SS: Well, within the Asian Student Union I became a junior member of the organizing committee, I think, CANE, Committee Against Nihonmachi Evictions, was the primary organizer in '79. But they got a lot of support from the Asian student unions at UC Berkeley and SF State. So I got tasks like I was on the security detail where we were staying at the fairgrounds and literally camping out. We brought our sleeping bags and we rolled them out on the floor of this exhibition hall and then we'd cook our own meals. And we weren't sure about the reception from local folks. So we would have security, we had people stay up all night and patrol the perimeter of the exhibition hall area and escort people if they needed to go to the bathrooms at night, which I remember having, like, the two to four a.m. shift. And then when I moved to Seattle in '81, there wasn't a pilgrimage that year, but in '82 and '84, there were pilgrimages. And so I was asked to... I wanted to organize some people to go from Seattle, so I did that in '82 and '84. I think '82 was memorable because... oh, that was before I started working on redress with the regional office. We wanted to get a bus to take to the Tule Lake pilgrimage, so we went to Seattle JACL to ask for a thousand dollars so we could rent a bus to go down.

I remember that JACL was starting to try to do a transition in leadership from the Nisei to the Sansei. So all the officers, president, vice president, treasurer, secretary, were Sansei. But they had like a twenty-four member board, and almost everyone else were Nisei. So I remember we had to make a presentation as to why we needed a thousand dollars for this, and I could tell that the Sansei officers were not feeling like they wanted to spend a thousand dollars on this kind of thing. And I know that the treasurer in particular was kind of looking down and shaking his head, so we were not feeling good. But then one of the Nisei board members said, "Well, so who's going on this thing anyway?" So I said, "Well, you know, we have a bunch of students from UW, like five or six students from UW, there were some of these community activists from the ID, and then there's these ten Issei from Kawabe House. And when I said the word "Issei," you could see every Nisei in the room, they suddenly sat up. And I thought some of them were falling asleep, it's like someone just jolted them with electricity, all the Nisei sat up and then they said, "Well, if the Issei want to go, of course we'll fund this." You know, the Sansei officers still thought it was a bad way to spend the money, but they could see that all the Nisei were going to vote yes on this, so then it passed unanimously.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.