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BN: So going back to Gidra, I just wanted to ask about, kind of... well, one thing was, we talked about during the break, the story behind those little blurbs that started to appear under the... I mean, how did that evolve and who wrote those?

MM: You know, I don't know who wrote them. I might have written some, and other people, but I would think somebody like Bruce, Steve, others, wrote them. And they were probably very spontaneous, off the cuff.

BN: Yeah, they read that way.

MM: And I don't remember any discussions post-publication about any of those blurbs either. I think we had the freedom to sort of incorporate little, like nuanced things big and small. And so people took advantage of it, and I think we were not, overall not that critical about, "Well, you shouldn't do that because you didn't run it by us," that kind of thing. By that time, the readers understood that we were many voices.

BN: So in the last year or six months, who was the core group at that point?

MM: Well, still Evelyn, Steve, Duane, Doug, Bruce, there were a few others.

BN: Pretty much all male except Evelyn?

MM: In the, I would say the smallest circle. And then there were a number of other people around, people like Amy Murakami, Jeannie Nishimura, (later) Chizuko Endo, others like that that kind of associated with Gidra. Somebody like Mitchell Matsumura who's younger, he was a high school student at the time, but he's doing a lot of stuff with Facebook Sansei Legacy, right? But I think his exposure to that kind of thing came through Gidra. So I think he's doing a good job. And then there were a number of other people who were both leaders in other parts of the movement as well as people who are just in the neighborhood, who would come by all the time. You know, like I try to do a listing of all the people that ever worked on Gidra, I think it's one to two, three hundred people. I had that list somewhere, but maybe you can rebuilt that list.

BN: It's probably sitting with my index somewhere. So at what point was the decision made to go on hiatus as you said in that last issue?

MM: So the idea of, sort of like, "we can't go on this way" idea probably existed for at least six months, maybe even longer. But I'm not recollecting anything specific, but I'm sure it took us two or three months prior that last issue for us to have all those discussions, for me to write that article. And I think just to say that we will cease publication was too painful for us, and I think that's why it was a sort of a copout to say, okay, if things work out, maybe we'll get back together. And in a way, that part of it stayed true for the people. As we got involved in other things, we had families and all these things, we had some connections to each other.

BN: I know that there was sort of a... when we were having discussions about the digitization, you had this small group of people that sort of represented Gidra. Was that something from the time you stopped publication, did you kind of keep this core group intact, or how did that work? Or did you kind of reform years later?

MM: Not that conscious. And I should say, too, that, was it the ten-year issue or a twenty-year issue?

BN: That was twenty. Yeah, there was that twenty-year anniversary issue.

MM: That twenty-year anniversary issue. By that time, I still had a relationship with people, but I did not play a big role in that. And so it's pretty much like people chose, and I don't think there was an explicit named core of people that stayed together. It's whoever could participate at whatever project or discussion. And that's kind of how Gidra was throughout anyway.

BN: I know that there was at least, there was a, not a spinoff, but there were other publications inspired by Gidra in other places, Rodan comes to mind, which had the obvious tie. But were you involved, you personally or other Gidra staff involved at all in any of these other Gidra-inspired publications that emerged? And then what did you feel, how did you view those?

MM: Yeah, no, I think... I don't think we were that involved with the proliferation of publications. I think the grassroots ones, some of them tended to be organs of grassroots organizations, LTPRO and CANE, (Committee Against Nihonmachi Evictions), people organized in Chinatowns, Chinese awareness was another. And so we kind of looked at all those things as positive developments. We thought it was good. For example, for Chinese Awareness, because it was in L.A. Chinatown, we work with their staff and they used our offices and facilities and equipment to produce their papers. And so we had a good fraternal relationship with them. For Rodan and others, I don't remember having that kind of relationship. I mean, years later, even Giant Robot, I think, looks at Gidra as a predecessor to their efforts. And today there are some other spinoff kind of things that I don't know very much about.

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