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BN: We have maybe a half hour left, so I'm going to jump around to some things. So I think you allude later on to, as time goes on into '73, that you start to have, kind of, people's lives change, you're in law school, other people are moving on in life, and it seems like it's getting harder and harder to get issues out because you have a shrinking core group. I mean, can you talk about that, the difficulties in that, in just getting the paper out at this point? And also, related maybe is how did the finances work? Because I know at some point their ads started to appear and other subscriptions. How did that work?

MM: Okay. Maybe I'll take that first, and then remind me of the first question. So, you know, the '60s generally were a time period in which there was so much happening. And things were developing, our consciousness was being developed at warp speed. I mean, in six months, we were not the same person as we were six months ago, we just learned so much. And I think the confluence of several things. When you look at the '60s, as a country and as a world, the baby boomers who were born between 1946 and 1964, were becoming such a big influence on society disproportionate to maybe where we should have been. But there was a large group of people, baby boomers, Sanseis almost perfectly fit that. And so Sansei in the Japanese American community, I think we felt invincible. We kind of dictated the trends and everything. Because Niseis were not as engaged in that way, and they had other priorities. Or young people think we can change the world, and so we became involved in a lot of that. And we rarely thought about, okay, how are we going to sustain this for years to come, for decades to come? We weren't thinking about it like how Rafu Shimpo has lasted for a hundred years. We didn't know what next year would look like. Similarly, you'll notice that many things that appear in the newspaper, you don't have bylines, you don't have credits, photo credits, a lot of things. You can't rebuild things. Because we weren't really concerned about all that. We weren't really concerned about intellectual property and we weren't concerned about longevity and all this. We weren't concerned about finances either, and I really can't tell you for sure. We did have subscriptions, but I mean, twenty-five cents or three dollars a year or whatever, that's what it was. We had ads, but we had ads from, like Tak's Cafe or Hardware or whatever. Whatever small amounts that they were willing to donate is what we got for that. We also had some funding. There were some, in the beginning we had funding from UCLA that was sort of, probably not recorded anywhere. But beyond that, we now, like the era of nonprofits didn't come until much later. So we were incorporated as a nonprofit, but we weren't thinking about maintaining that apparatus. It is mostly more about, as a group of people that enjoyed what we were doing and we felt the sense of mission, sense of purpose, and that's what we did. And I think, towards the end when we decided that we would suspend publication, possibly come back, I think it was a little bit of a copout because I think most of us knew that we probably would not come back in that way. And there might have been hard feelings. Some people resented that other people were moving on to other things or whatever. But all of us recognized that we're approaching that age that we dreaded, you know, like twenty-five to thirty, and had to kind of figure things out. And I think that kind of a youthful, like a consuming kind of project could not sustain itself. And because we had to have other jobs to sustain ourselves, we had other sources of income. So everybody had to work, and work more hours, work longer hours. We were becoming interested in other things as well. Some of the other things had to do, some were political things. I think some of us, including myself, I became more involved in more explicitly political, explicitly revolutionary movements. And others more took on, like there were people that worked on Visual Communications, Amerasia bookstore, lots of other institution building things as well. I mean, I think of Visual Communications and Gidra as like sisters that grew up during the same time but developed in very different ways, and they're both good.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.