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BN: Oh, and the other thing that also kind of overlaps during this period, it actually shows up in Gidra, is your involvement in sports. In fact, early in the Gidra period, there's like an article about basketball exploits and you're referred to as "Shark." Can you talk a little bit about that?

MM: Okay, that's taking things a little bit out of order and also I'll just provide a little bit of context. I grew up playing basketball since I was about twelve, thirteen, fourteen. So by the time we got to UCLA, I reconnected with many people that I played with or played against in the JA leagues. And so we maintained our interest in basketball and sports in general, and as I got involved in the political struggles, social justice movements in the '60s. I still, many of us maintained, are interested in sports. And so what we did was we started a volleyball league, actually, but basketball was ongoing as organized by other people. So we participated in that, and I think the reason why some things appear in Gidra is because I think the idea that we're just ordinary people, we're not, like, quote/unquote "activists" who are different from other people. Just trying to represent different things.

BN: Yeah, there's a reference to like a JAVA, I guess that's Japanese American volleyball?

MM: The Japanese American Volleyball Association was a league that myself and Colin Watanabe started. And you know, Colin and I are very close, were very close. And he actually had a lot of influence on me because I would say that at the beginning of Gidra, starting Gidra, Colin was very influential to many of us. He was a few years older, he was already in graduate school, and he was studying engineering, but he was very sharp and very perceptive about a lot of things and he encouraged people to start things. So we partnered up on a lot of things for a very short period of time, but we worked together a lot UCLA Ethnic Studies, Gidra, volleyball. And in the volleyball, what we did was started a co-ed league for basically, it wasn't explicit, but it was basically for Sansei college-age kids, and it was a way for people from UCLA, USC Long Beach, Occidental, Cal State, all these places in the summer months to get together. And there was an athletic and competitive component to it, but it was mostly social, and it was a way to stay connected as a community.

BN: And then we may get back to that also here and there.

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