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BN: And then the other topic that came to mind, actually, to get to, that wasn't raised in your prior comments about this international influence, well, I think you, it seems like, went to Okinawa, it sounds like, in late '71. There's a reference to you giving a speech at a peace conference, and then you wrote this fairly extensive piece on Okinawa. And then, of course, Evelyn... or I'll ask you to explain how that came about, but I guess Evelyn ends up going on this extended trip to the PRC. So yeah, if you can talk about both of those things.

MM: Okay. As I mentioned, many of us on Gidra were not just movement newspaper guys. We were actively involved in organizing. For myself, I became involved in organizing for peace, and I think that goes back to what I was saying way early in the interview about the influences about that my grandmother had. And postwar Japan, for good or bad, the peace constitution really imbued the idea that Japan never wants to have war anymore, they've suffered enough, kind of. And that was pretty present. But I became involved and started working with a larger group of Nisei, Sansei to put on a demonstration in Little Tokyo. And so that demonstration took place in January of 1970. And so in the months prior to that, I met with various people, and we started the organization called Asian Americans for Peace. You see me with a picket sign. And I think that experience, for me, gave me the idea that, okay, there's lots of people of all ages who were concerned about the Vietnam War, concerned about the Black Civil Rights Movement. I mean, at that time, I had no idea that there were Niseis who participated in the Selma march and different things like that. And so I would say, being involved in the movement meant that sometimes Gidra was secondary. And each activity made us think more and more about, okay, we're for peace, but how do we get peace? How do we achieve lasting peace? And we studied that about Vietnam War, is that basically, U.S. imperialist expansion, and it's a fight between two superpowers for hegemony, for influence, for resources in Southeast Asia. And the idea that Asians who were, the Vietnamese people were becoming fodder to this war between two superpowers. So every step of the way, as my and everybody else's consciousness is being raised, we wanted to expand more and more. And then we'd work with other, what I call mainstream or white peace organizations, and through all of that, I guess at the time, I had no idea that in Japan, for many, many years, every year they had huge Hiroshima, Nagasaki commemorations.

But in 1970, there was a group of people, white activists in the city of L.A., who had relationships with the peace movement in Japan, which I didn't have, which many of our Asian American friends did not have. So they said, okay, they're inviting people from the U.S. peace movement to be a part of this, their commemoration this year. And this one guy that I had worked with said it would be good if we can have Japanese Americans go on this delegation, too. So I don't think there was that much of a discussion, but we talked about it in Gidra and we decided I should be the one to go. And so I went to participate, and the movement in Japan is crazy. There's so many organizations, huge organizations. They included the Japanese socialist party, Japanese communist party, Zengakuren, the Red Army, all kinds of... I can't even remember all the names. But the labor unions, the farmers, all these people are participating. It was a great experience for me. But I think that, for me, but the others were getting different kinds of experiences to get to the same point about needing to understand what was going on in Japan, needing to understand what Ampo Funsai means, you know, the U.S.-Japan Security Act. What is going on in Okinawa, because at that time, Okinawa was still occupied by the U.S., it was a U.S. territory. And it was a funny setup because the U.S. military bases occupied so much of a precious land. And when I went there, it was in the middle of the summer, middle of a drought, and so we went to restaurants. They told us, "We only serve water if you request it." And in the hotel they tell us, "Okay, you can take showers only every third day." This is in the middle of summer, sweltering heat. And then we get driven around the island and we see golf courses at the U.S. military bases with the sprinklers going [imitates sound], wasting water. And the contradiction of that magnified is what the struggle was about, is what I got. A lot of people have different experiences, different kinds of trips, or even just lessons learned here that made us think about all those things and raised our consciousness to a much higher level. And that experience actually led me, years later, to take on more stuff around Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and anti-nuclear movement as well.

BN: I mean, that was a really well-written article, because you also end by kind of tying it back to conditions here, like in your own neighborhood, and drawing the connection.

MM: I'll have to read that again.

BN: Yeah, no, I was impressed. And then how did Evelyn's trip come about?

MM: Now, that was a year later in 1972.

BN: Yeah, '72.

MM: And you know, I really can't tell you how it came about. I think, again, it just makes sense that it was somebody like Evelyn that went. And I remember that we had discussions about who should go, why should we go, all of that. But details, I don't remember.

BN: But it was an invitation from... who was the invitation from?

MM: I don't know.

BN: Okay, how that came about?

MM: Yeah. You know, there were many other, there were other delegations that went to North Korea, that went to Vietnam, places that were embargoed. So a lot of those things were going on.

BN: Right, Cuba.

MM: Yeah, Cuba.

BN: Yeah, I was just curious about that.

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