<Begin Segment 1>

BN: Okay. So we're here on January 13, 2023, and we're interviewing Mike Murase. This is a collaboration with the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, and it's the second interview in the series. Today we'll be focusing primarily on the Gidra years, but we're going to pick up a few other things before and after as well. We're shooting in Little Tokyo at the Visual Communications office, and doing the videography for us is Emory Chao Johnson. So with that, let's get started. So yeah, thank you, Mike, for doing this. And as I mentioned, I wanted to kind of start by picking up on some stuff that we missed the first time around, and in particular, a little bit on your family background. So I wonder if you could just start by telling us what your parents' names were and what you know about their early lives.

MM: Okay, my father's name was Hide Murase. He was born in 1917 in Kingman, Arizona, and I'll get back to that later. My mother is Mitsuko Murase, her maiden name was Oguchi, spelled O-G-U-C-H-I, or sometimes with an O-H-G-U-C-H-I, and she was born in 1924 in Manchuria. And I have to back up a little further than that because the first person in my family to come to America was my paternal grandfather. His name was Eiichi, and he was the fourth son in a farming family in western Japan, not too far from Hiroshima. And by Japanese tradition, the first son got all of the family assets and property, and they were considered what's called atotsugi, or to carry on the family name. But in any case, my grandfather, being the fourth son, didn't have that many opportunities or things to look forward to in his town. So he went out to Yokohama to look for a job where a lot of young men, Japanese men, were going to seek adventure and other opportunities, and he had heard about the U.S. So this would be around, I'm guessing about 1900. And I'll cut this part short, but he went back and forth working on a Merchant Marines ship for an American company. And after maybe thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years, he took a wife in Japan and they moved to Arizona where my father was born. And soon after his birth, my father and the family moved to San Francisco, and so my father grew up in San Francisco Japantown from about two years old to about thirteen years old. And at that time, around 1929, the stock market crashed, the beginning of the Great Depression, and among Japanese Americans or Japanese living in this country, there was a lot of movement. And some went back, and people speculate on, some went back because they were successful and they raised, like they had worked on jobs and was able to save money so they can go home as a success. I think that many people went back because, since they didn't fulfill their aspirations, and then also the fact that the economy in the U.S. -- as in all over the world -- was bad in the beginning of '29. And I think there was also a trend of many Japanese sending their kids back to Japan for a Japanese education, and I know that many immigrant parents, even now, shin-Issei, send their kids to Japan or take them every summer. They want to make sure that they have some level of culture and history and language exposed to them. So anyway, so that's what happened to my father.

So he lived in Japan in the prewar years and leading up to World War II. By that time, he was, I think, a young man going to college and studying to become a dentist. But he always had dreams of coming back to the U.S. and living here, he felt a sense of freedom and some attachment, even though he was very culturally Japanese as a Kibei. So he started thinking about that, but because of the war, he was not able to fulfill that dream. And I think it took until... well, in 1945, the war ended, 1952, the McCarran-Walter Act was passed and some immigration policies changed and naturalization policies changed for Asians. But it wasn't until 1956 that he was able to consummate his arrangements personally for his family. So we came in 1956 when I was nine years old, so that's beginning of my story in the U.S.

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<Begin Segment 2>

BN: Okay, great. To back up a little, you mentioned these various rationales that a lot of Issei had for going back to Japan. Do you know which category your grandparents fell into?

MM: Well, the one that I heard most was that my grandmother wanted my father and his brother to get a Japanese education. And I know that living in San Francisco Japantown, they did go through Japanese school, Kinmon Gakuen, which still exists today. And I'm not really sure on Monday through Friday, the regular schooling. I've seen pictures of him in classrooms with white kids, so I know that he went to regular school as well. So I'm not sure beyond that what the reasons were.

BN: And was the parents your father and then one other?

MM: My father had a younger brother.

BN: Younger brother, yeah. So it was just the four of them. Did you know your paternal grandparents?

MM: Yeah. I grew up with them until I was nine, when I was in Japan as an extended family.

BN: Right, but that's kind of, I was thinking more subsequently, I mean, as an adult.

MM: After I came to this country, my grandfather passed away, so I never saw him again. My grandmother came to stay with us for a while in the 1960s, and she was more the vocal one, sort of take charge kind of person, very outgoing. So she was the one that kind of influenced me more than my grandfather, so I did have some connection.

BN: And then what happened to your uncle?

MM: My uncle, unlike my father, did not want to come back to the U.S. to live, and so he went to medical school and became a doctor, and he had his own sort of practice and a small community clinic in a rural area near the Inland Sea. And he passed away in his fifties due to a traffic accident.

BN: But he basically lived out the rest of his life in Japan?

MM: Yeah. I did visit him a few times.

BN: Okay. And then how much do you know about your dad's, or, I guess, both of your parents' experience? Or particularly your dad's, I guess, since presumably he maintains his U.S. citizenship, right?

MM: Once he went back to Japan? Yeah.

BN: So during the war, he's like this Nisei in wartime Japan. Did he ever talk about what he did during the wartime or pressures to enlist or any of that kind of stuff that a lot of the Nisei faced?

MM: I think my family had some history in Tokyo, but like many other families, they retreated to the countryside during the war years. And so my father grew up mostly in the countryside or small town. And he never talked about discrimination by Japanese of him because he was Japanese American. He also never talked about, he was never conscripted and he never served in the Japanese military. I'm really not clear on what the rules or laws were or what expectations were. I've heard stories on, different accounts of being mistreated by townspeople or being drafted into the Japanese military, that didn't happen with my dad.

BN: Was he already... I mean, if he's born in '17, he's already in his mid, early to mid-twenties during the war. I mean, is he already studying medicine at that point?

MM: Yeah, my dad was studying dentistry.

BN: Dentistry, yeah.

MM: Yeah, he was.

BN: That could have been one reason why he wasn't conscripted, because that's viewed as a vital occupation even in the wartime, because he'd be in his mid-twenties.

MM: Could be like a deferment or something.

BN: Right, yeah.

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<Begin Segment 3>

BN: And then do you know much about how he met your mom?

MM: Okay. So my mom was born in 1924 in Manchuria, as I said. My mother's father was a civilian businessperson and a pharmacist who was encouraged by the Japanese imperial government to colonize Manchuria once the military took over the expansion of Asia. And so he, I guess, volunteered to go to Manchuria. And my mother had an older sister who was born in 1910, and she was born in Manchuria, so my grandfather had been there for, as early as 1910, probably earlier. And during the war, as the Japanese were being defeated throughout and having to retreat back to mainland Japan, my mother came back. And they, not unlike many people in that area, they were a sort of matchmaker, and it was an arranged marriage through the families. And I heard stories of my grandmother having my father go out with other girls and stuff, like regular dating, but he didn't like any of them. And so he just settled for this arranged marriage. And I think statistically, I mean, most arranged marriages worked out just fine. The divorce rate is probably fewer than in dating situations now.

BN: Expectations are different when it's an arranged. Then I think you mentioned that he worked as a dentist in Japan, right?

MM: Yeah, so he had his own practice in a little town called Tsuyama where we grew up. So by 1956, he would have been thirty-nine. So in mid-life, mid-career, in the middle of raising a family, he decided to come. And my mother was just as willing, because I think it's difficult to live with an in-law, my father's mother. And so she was ready to get out of there, too, so they made the trip.

BN: And did you have siblings also?

MM: I have one older sister who's a year and a half older, and she was a teacher for many years.

BN: I assumed you're like nine or whatever. Did the opinions of either you or your sister have any influence in the family's deciding to move?

MM: Well, I was excited for the adventure, so I don't think I put up any resistance. My sister is quieter and more reflective. And I think she was more concerned about being able to adjust.

BN: Well, even just a couple of years makes a big difference at that age.

MM: It does make a difference.

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<Begin Segment 4>

BN: Were you conscious of your dad being American by citizenship and so forth? Did you know about the history, that in a sense, he was going back at that time?

MM: Well, I only knew vaguely that he was born in America, and that was about it, and he had fond memories of America. I think the other context, too, is that having been defeated by the U.S. in World War II, my grandmother used to talk about how, was just conjecturing about how great a country the U.S. must be to be able to beat Japan, which is kind of an interesting take.

BN: No, it is.

MM: And the other thing that I think I got from my grandmother, and the whole Japanese educational system postwar, based on the peace constitution, was a lot of emphasis on "no more wars." Because they had seen the, firsthand, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Tokyo and all these other cities being bombed, and the war did happen in Japan, right?

BN: Did you have a sense of your dad's or, I guess, both of your parents' politics, having lived through that? I mean, did they talk about that at all?

MM: Well, I think they were very traditionalist, I mean, farming family, small town. And I think there's a little bit of emperor worship, but they were mostly apathetic, apolitical, not very social. And I know that both my father and mother spent most of their energies on the family, the extended family. So I don't know. I mean, I would say with Japan in general, they've been very accepting of the Liberal Democratic party, which is the only ruling party that that country's had for the last seventy years, postwar. And the Liberal Democratic party is neither liberal nor democratic. It's the equivalent of a conservative Republican-type party in Japan, it's a very traditional party. And I think they were not resistant to that, they didn't question it, so they accepted most of what was going on.

BN: Did you have any family members in the U.S. who went to camp or that your family maintained contact with during the time that they were in Japan?

MM: No, not that I know of. Although like my grandmother, who had lived in this country, had several friends who, Niseis who always lived here, but I don't know anything about their stories. There's one family that I remember by face, and I came with them and things, but I don't know what their background or story is. I assume that they went to camp.

BN: So when you were coming to the U.S. and kind of didn't really know anyone then?

MM: Didn't know anything about camps, didn't know JA history at all.

BN: Right.

MM: Didn't speak the language.

BN: Right. How was your dad's English, having gone, because he was, what, twelve, thirteen, when he went over?

MM: I think his comprehension was probably very high. He's academically oriented, anyway, he studied science. He liked gadgets and was interested in innovation, so he read a lot. But he was not a talker, he didn't engage with people a lot. In fact, I rarely heard him speak English. He only spoke English when he had to.

BN: So in your household you were speaking Japanese?

MM: Yeah. In the beginning, in '56, four of us naturally spoke Japanese to each other. And as time went along and I learned to speak more English and got comfortable with it, I would speak in English and they would speak to me in Japanese and we would understand each other. That's also not uncommon.

BN: Yeah, that's a common Nisei-Issei family.

MM: Yeah.

BN: And then occupationally, right, he's a dentist in Japan. Is he able to continue with that in the U.S. or how does that work?

MM: You know, I don't know how much he pursued it, but he was not able to continue. What I heard was that he would be required to go back to dental school for another three or four years to get American dental -- as if American teeth are different from Japanese teeth. And so being thirty-nine, having a family, couldn't afford to do that. So he got a job as a dental technician in a lab basically doing crowns and different kind of things, because he had that skill. He also took other secondary jobs, worked at Grand Central Market for example at night, things like that. So he never practiced here.

BN: Was your standard of living different in Japan versus the U.S. that you noticed?

MM: Well, standard of living, both economically and socially, in Japan he was called Sensei, which was a term of respect. And he was looked up to in that way in the community, and we had our family home with extended family. And as far as I know, it was our ancestral home, so there was no mortgage, no pressures to keep up payments and stuff like that for my father. Coming here, we rented an apartment in South Central L.A., went to find a job, and took the bus to go to this dental. And my mother, who spoke no English at all, she found a job as a seamstress within a week. And I remember her telling me stories about, we lived in South Central, and she took the bus to downtown where most of the factory work was. And to come home, she would remember the landmarks like stores and buildings and things because she couldn't read any of the signs and she couldn't understand if they had any announcements. So that's how she used to commute. So for both of them, I think in terms of lifestyle, they left a pretty comfortable lifestyle both economically and sort of being engaged in the community and all. And had since threw that away for myself and my sister's sake, and I think they, in addition to my father wanting to be here himself, I think he thought that there would be more opportunities for us here, too.

BN: Have you thought about what your life might have been like had they not done that?

MM: Well, not too often. It's too difficult to imagine. I remember my classmates, I was in the third grade in elementary school, and when they threw a going away party for me. So I could remember episodes like that, but I never kept up with my friends, so I don't know what happened to them. Occasionally, after I became an adult, became an activist, I thought about what it would have been like, especially when I had the opportunity to go to Japan on these delegations and things, and met people my age that were in Japan. I learned that my family was not politically active, but there were lots of progressive-minded people in the '60s just like they were here.

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<Begin Segment 5>

BN: And then I guess the last thing I wanted to ask before we jump ahead is, did your parents get involved much in the local Japanese community in terms of church or other types of community organizations when you were here?

MM: There was a... I think they were Issei-aged family that kind of took us in and helped us for the first couple weeks when we came to L.A. And they were members of the West Adams Christian Church, and they encouraged us to go to church. And so we did that for a while as a family. And in fact, we're not big on rituals, Buddhist or Christian, especially my dad. But I guess we were encouraged to get baptized, and I remember being baptized in a Christian church. But even that experience for me was not always pleasant. There was some animosity by Sansei towards FOBs. People don't know what "FOBs" are.

BN: [Laughs] We'll add an asterisk if necessary.

MM: So I think they got involved to the extent that they felt an obligation to, but they were not naturally that sort of person. I mean, as soon as they could afford it, they were taking the Rafu Shimpo just to keep up with what was going on. I also know that, again, like many families that lived in the greater Los Angeles area, they had some connection to Little Tokyo, they came to Little Tokyo for groceries, all the professional and personal care services, from doctors to barber shops, everything in those days was sort of ethnically based, and people came here to get those things done. So to that extent, they were involved. But I wouldn't say that they got involved in any great extent. When I got into high school and I started playing basketball, there were a lot of Nisei men who organized these youth basketball leagues. And many of the Nisei fathers of my teammates participated and had like, tried to build a community around youth sports. My father, or my parents never saw me play basketball. I don't think they would know who all those Nisei parents were, except to the extent that, like, some of them would come and pick me up to take me to practice or a game, and they would say hello to each other then, that's it. So they were not that socially engaged.

BN: Were most of your dad's clientele also Nikkei?

MM: Clientele meaning...

BN: As a dental...

MM: Dental hygienist? Well, no, he worked for a company, and it was, as far as I know, it was, the owner was white, and I think the other workers were mostly white, too. And so it was kind of a generic...

BN: He was working sort of outside the ethnic sphere?

MM: Right.

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<Begin Segment 6>

BN: Okay. Actually, there was one other thing I wanted to ask you about, which is that when you came over, you and your sister are not U.S. citizens?

MM: No.

BN: And I know you were naturalized later. Do you remember that? Was that a big deal or was that just kind of...

MM: Well, I think I knew that we were not citizens and we had to go through this process. I think for children, I don't know what the immigration laws were specifically, but we were able to become naturalized, in my case, four years later when I was thirteen. The thing that I remember most about the naturalization process is a very formal but very quick process, go to court. But the thing that I remember most is that we had the opportunity to choose our names. Because to petition for a change of name by itself would cost money and have to go through a whole process, a legal process. But at the time of naturalization, you get to change your name for free, and you could pick your own name. So in my case... should I tell this story? Do you want me to go into that?

BN: Yeah, I think this is relevant.

MM: Okay. As I said, we lived in South Central, and that was an area that was in transition but mostly African Americans, but there were quite a few Niseis that lived in that area, too, Nisei and their families. So there's a family across the street from us named the Satos, and they had a couple kids already, but they were expecting a third child. And so the Satos, George and Mary Sato, the Nisei parents, they said to me and to my parents, "Okay, we picked out Michael as the name for, if it's a son, and Donna if it's a girl." It turned out to be a girl, so "Donna" got taken by them. And so they said to me, "You can have 'Michael.'" And so I said, "Okay, thank you," and I took "Michael." And so I used "Michael" for a while. And so my first elementary school friends called me Michael, but with my Japanese language ear, I kept hearing "maiko," like M-A-I-K-O, with a "K-O" ending sound. And so didn't like that because it sounded like a girl's name and I wanted a boy's name. So instead of changing the whole name, I changed it to Mike, which a lot of Niseis, a lot of people did, is they don't use the formal name. And so I became Ichiro Mike Murase, and that name change, I think that's the most, I mean, that was the part of the naturalization process that, in a way, shaped my identity, too. Not so much that I was proud to be a U.S. citizen.

BN: Years later, during the Asian American Movement period, you had some people renouncing their English names and adopting the Japanese names. And I know like with your Little Tokyo book, it's under "Ichiro Mike Murase." Did you also sort of do that or did you always go by Mike?

MM: No, I pretty much stuck by Mike. You know, if I had to do it over again, I might have chosen a different name, maybe a less common name. I know so many Mikes.

BN: Yeah, Mike, Brian, Craig, Keith, the standard Sansei names.

MM: But no... well, first thing is that if I had a name that was fairly common, Japanese name that was fairly common or easy to pronounce, I might have done that. But Ichiro is very difficult for people to say. And it wasn't until way later, decades later, when Suzuki, Ichiro Suzuki --

BN: The baseball player, yeah.

MM: -- became so... I'm the first Ichiro. He's the second, but he's the famous one, so people learned to say "Ichiro." By that time, I didn't want to change my name.

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<Begin Segment 7>

BN: Okay, so we should move ahead now. So yeah, a lot of the rest of your early life, UCLA period and so forth, was covered in a prior interview. So we're going to kind of skip ahead to the Gidra period. But before we do that, I just wanted to get some chronology. So what years were you at UCLA as an undergrad?

MM: Okay. I graduated from L.A. High in 1964, started UCLA as a freshman, fall of 1964, and I was there as an undergrad until 1970, for six years. And the reason for that was I was trying to dodge the draft, or take advantage of my student deferment. And because in those days, the Vietnam War was going on, and the system was, they had a draft system based on a lottery. The lottery was designed so that all the days of the year, from January 1 to December 31st, would be assigned a number based on chance. And so my birthday came up 55 out of 365, so I felt that that's fairly early and I could be drafted at any time. So I decided I didn't want to go to Vietnam, didn't want to fight that war, and so I stayed in school. And then I spent one more year at UCLA as a graduate student in the film school, ethnocommunications. So I was there from '64 to '71.

BN: But you graduated in '70?

MM: Yes.

BN: So this is overlapping, kind of, with the Gidra period.

MM: Right.

BN: And then when did you start law school then?

MM: '72.

BN: So fall of '72?

MM: Yeah.

BN: Okay. So that kind of also coincided...

MM: This is kind of typical, too, because I went to film school. And I had good reasons for it, but it was a two-year program, but I kind of quit in the middle to go to law school. So there's instances of many things that I didn't finish.

BN: Okay, no, this is good. I'll probably return to asking questions about that as it comes up during the Gidra period.

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<Begin Segment 8>

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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<Begin Segment 9>

BN: Now, I know you've told the, kind of, Gidra origin story a lot of times, and I think you referred to it briefly in the first interview, but I still want to go back to it if you could just talk about how it began?

MM: I have to step back a few, a couple years or a few months before Gidra. I'll talk about it through my personal involvement. So when I got to UCLA in 1964, I would say the population of Asian Americans, and among them, Japanese Americans being the most dominant, probably no more than ten percent of UCLA. Unlike subsequent decades when you had like thirty, forty, fifty percent in many colleges. So I think a lot of the Japanese Americans gravitated towards this organization that preexisted us called Nisei Bruin Club, which was a social club started in the prewar years, pre-World War II years. And so we kind of embraced that and took that on as kind of a social club along with Chi Alpha Delta and Theta Kappa something, two sororities that existed. So that was the social milieu that we had on campus. And that was my first two years in college. And then around '66 was when I started getting introduced to different ideas, and it came from all different angles, but it was the middle of the '60s. It was a period in which, throughout the world, things are happening, just great changes taking place. But in the U.S., starting with the Free Speech Movement in 1964, but that also the impact of the Black Panthers being started in 1966, Malcolm X being assassinated in 1965, so all of those things. The Black Civil Rights and Human Rights Movement, the Black Liberation Movement, and the anti-Vietnam War movement were two big catalysts for many students to get involved in questioning things. And part of the questioning was, as we learned more about the reasons for the war, reasons for why the South is the way it is, we started to learn more about U.S. history, the history of racism, and also then to start to think about our own background and history. And despite having taken U.S. history many times, we never learned anything about ourselves, so that idea of creating ethnic studies, I think it took root in places, campuses like San Francisco State, Columbia, Berkeley, all these places. By the time it came to UCLA, it wasn't the great turmoil that it took in those other pioneering campuses. But Chancellor Charles Young was more amenable to having ethnic studies, and so the four studies centers were formed. I don't know if I should explain what our limited understanding was of center versus department, but that came later. We just thought, oh, great, we got ethnic studies.

And then one of the things was to figure out what to do with ethnic studies. We didn't have professors who knew anything about Asian American history, we didn't have books, not compared to now anyway. I mean, we were not that interested in sort of like mainstream or analysis like Harry Kitano, and so we decided to strike out on our own, develop our own ideas, research, go back into the communities, all that. So ethnic studies is one. The other was both organizing, getting the ideas that we had, that we were learning about, out to more people. But also, so there was a component of wanting to chronicle the events that were taking place. One example was that -- this is much later, after we started Gidra, but I'll give you an example. There was a large demonstration on the UCLA campus in May of 1970 after Nixon decided to expand the war into Cambodia and bomb Cambodia. And the demonstrations were so large that the administration called in the police, LAPD, and it was kind of a police riot there. And that politicized a lot of people, and so a lot of people subsequently got involved in Gidra as well.

But just to back up to why we started it, in addition to chronicling, we felt that there were, we wanted to create a vehicle to give voice to young people. Because if you look at television news, LA Times, Rafu Shimpo, there was nothing that was really reflecting our feelings, developing our identity and such. And as young people, I think we felt that we had the right to pursue and seek our own identity and figure out who we are in this country. Because the other paradigm at the time was, it was very black and white. And at the time, I don't remember that much about sort of a societal influence of Mexican Americans or Latinos at that time. And so for Asian Americans in a society that's sort of black and white, how do we fit in? Where do we fit in? And I think that was a part of the, a big part of an identity-seeking process. So I think the earlier issues particularly of Gidra, poetry and expressions of emotional things, or even things like this essay on white male qualities. A woman, a Sansei woman wrote that, extolling the virtues of white males, comparing to Japanese American men. I mean, you know, that would never appear in anything else but Gidra. And I think we wanted to make room for that, too. I mean, we disagreed with it, but we wanted to print that. I think... yeah, so there were a lot of things that young people were thinking about that wouldn't have got captured if we didn't have Gidra.

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<Begin Segment 10>

BN: So what were the mechanics in terms of how it actually began? Because it started at UCLA and then kind of moves off campus.

MM: So what happened was that we... the studies centers in Campbell Hall, they were all babies. We were just trying to figure out how to move forward. But I think that was Colin again, but I think we all noticed that the Mexican American Studies Center and the Black... I forgot what it was called. Was it called Black Studies Center at the time? It could have been Black or African American Studies, I'm not sure.

BN: It may have been "Afro American" at the time.

MM: Anyway, so they had campus newspapers in addition to the Daily Bruin. They had, it was called NOMMO and... I can't remember now. So we said, "Let's go to the administration and ask if we can have a newspaper." And I don't remember who we spoke to, Winston Doby or someone, and said, "We want to put out a publication. Would you pay for it?" And they said, "We can do that, but we have to have editorial control. We have to look at your galleys or your proofs before it gets printed." So we said no thank you, and that's how we started. We collected some money among four or five of us. I remember the number differently depending on what it is, but four or five got together on the third floor of Campbell Hall, talked about it, and we decided, this was probably like January of 1969. And then by April we were able to put out our maiden issue, a modest, four-page tabloid, and we put all that together in a Campbell Hall office. And I think the first one might have been typed, I'm not sure, on a regular typewriter. Because you'll notice that a lot of the graphics are handwritten or those press-on types and things like that, very primitive way of putting together a paper, but that's what we had. And at that time, because it was on the UCLA campus, most of the people that participated were UCLA students, and they were people who were, did not have the background of coming from Asian communities, but grew up in other areas, so we had a mix of people who became the core of Gidra in the first year. But after the second or third issue, we talked about moving the newspaper operation off campus because we were spending so much time closer to downtown anyway, and to other enclaves of Japanese and other Asian Americans. And so we decided to... many of us grew up in the Crenshaw area, Colin, Tracy, myself, James Okazaki, a number of people. So we decided, okay, we'll look for an office. So we found one on Jefferson, and this Nisei man who was either the owner or the, I don't know he was the landlord or the property manager, but he was friendly to us and he let us rent two offices, and that's how we got started.

And I think it was not just a matter of convenience, but I think it was a political decision to say, number one, that UCLA will not control what we say. Number two is that we're going to be community based, we're going to be with our people. And "our people" is not going to be just UCLA students who are Asian American, this will be for the community. Because at that time, there were a lot of young people who were, despite the myth, there were a lot of people who were not going to school, who were not doing well in school. People who were into gangs, people who, some who got into heavy drug use and abuse, and so there's a whole range of people. And the Crenshaw area is a working-class community, was, and if you think about it in the 1960s, it was after a period of the Niseis and their families coming back from camp, resettling and rebuilding their own families and their communities. And then at the same time, there was a fairly significant number, probably a, still a small minority, but a significant number of shin-Issei families, new immigrant families that came after World War II like mine. And so there's quite a mix of people in that area. So it was a political decision as well to say we want to be based there and work with those people. Like in my case, I was still enrolled in school, so I went to campus when I had to. But for the first two years, the campus was my life. It was like I spent all my waking hours on the UCLA campus. Later on it became the opposite.

BN: Couple of related questions. I noticed the first issue lists a publication address of 1157 Muirfield Road?

MM: Yeah.

BN: What was that?

MM: Okay. We didn't have the office on Jefferson yet, so 1157 Muirfield Road is my parents' family house.

BN: Okay. And then what were the print runs at that point, like at the very beginning?

MM: You know, I regret not having all these records, but I think it was around three thousand. Depending on what was in the issue, we increased or decreased it. For example, the women's issue, or some other special issues, we would increase the print run.

BN: Then how did the distribution and the financial side work? I know it changes over time, sort of towards the beginning.

MM: Okay. I don't really remember that well. Alan Ota did a lot of that. But I think in terms of distribution, we might have had the price, twenty-five cents or something on it, but we kind of liberally distributed it free when we went to Asian American Studies conferences, went to dances, we went to anywhere young people congregated, we passed them out for free. And then for a period of time, once we started working with the Yellow Brotherhood, people even younger than us, they're high school kids, and we were able to use their labor to even deliver them to houses. I mean, there were like throwaway papers, they were not subscriptions, though. And in the Jefferson area and also in the areas both to the east and west of Holiday Bowl, where there were large numbers of Japanese American families, we used to hand deliver them to their houses. And then after a while we started doing mail-in subscriptions. One thing that we know is that from earlier on, even from the first issue, it was the kind of paper that got read, one copy got read by many people, because it got passed along. And so we think that the influence of Gidra at the time grew because of that, and people who visited from the Bay Area, from New York, other different places who were interested, they would take a copy with them, take them back home, and start circulating in those communities. And the fact that Gidra was sort of the seminal or thought to be one of the first Asian American movement publications, had a lot of influence.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 11>

BN: I know you've talked about this a lot before, but I still want to have you mention it, going back a little, is the name, Gidra, kind of that story.

MM: Okay. We were in Campbell Hall, on the third floor. And before the Asian American Studies offices were really set up, we had the space available, so there were like two empty rooms. And we used to hang out there a lot and just shoot the breeze, talk about a lot of different things. As far as I know, there wasn't much drunk usage. I'm not going to blame drunks for this, but maybe some drinking or whatever, I didn't participate in a lot of that. One of the discussions about the newspaper when we talked about what the name should be, and we considered other names. I remember, for example, we considered Epicanthus, you know, for the epicanthic fold that is typical of Asians having single eyelids, things like that, I guess East Asians, really. And we had several other names, but somebody, I think it was Tracy that suggested Gidra because in his recollection of Japanese sci-fi movies, Gidra was a good monster that saved the people of Japan. And we said, okay, that sounds like a good story. And the idea was to pick a name or word that had no prior association. So we didn't want to use something that was generic or something that already had some meaning to people, so Gidra was kind of a nonsensical word. So we picked this worm as kind of the mascot, the smaller version of the monster. And I don't know if people know this, but the sword is supposed to be a pen. So that's how we came up with the name. As it turned out, I think the name in sci-fi films is really spelled G-H-I-D-O-R-A-H, and Ghidorah was a three-headed monster who was a bad monster. I don't know the details. But it didn't matter by then.

BN: Who came up with the graphic of the...

MM: Of the worm?

BN: Yeah.

MM: Okay. So I had a friend named Rick Kasuyama who was a basketball teammate, went to L.A. High. And he was a good illustrator. He was not involved in Gidra, but I asked a personal favor and said, "Would you design something for it?" That's what he did. And so that was the only involvement in Gidra that Rick had.

BN: Well, I'm sure he's been collecting royalties all these years. [Laughs]

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 12>

BN: So in the last issue, you wrote this long essay kind of outlining the history of Gidra. And you wrote that there was kind of this philosophical dispute that led to a split of this original group a few months in. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that. I know some of the early founders of the group kind of move on at this point, and then other new people come in as well.

MM: Yeah. So the original group included, as I mentioned, Colin Watanabe, but also, there were three Chinese American women who, they didn't come as a group either, but they were each individually very political, very persuasive. That was Dinora Gil, Suzie Wong, and Laura Ho. And they, I think they were in that mix because they were at UCLA and they were relating to the whole student movement there. But I think from the beginning, I think we had, I wouldn't say political differences, but differences in priority about what we wanted to do during that time. And I think some were more interested in immediate organizing, like maybe labor organizing on campus, the kind of confrontational things, well, different things. But we thought of a longer-term building process, and process that involved community. But I think the three of them didn't have that much connection to a specific community, and they were also engaged in some struggles on their own about their identity, but I think from the beginning, they didn't see newspaper work as their mission. And then for Colin, I think, I don't know what it is. After he left, he's been sort of hard to reach, and think there have been different efforts, but I think he's moved on from them, so he wasn't that interested in reengaging at any time. So I don't really know, but I think he kind of dropped out of the whole Asian American movement scene, and he moved to the Bay Area. But the new crop -- and then there were many other people who took part in it during that time. I'm naming a few people, but there are quite a few other people who were there in that first year, the first twelve months. As I mentioned earlier, the first issue of Gidra was April of 1969. The bombing of Cambodia took place in May of 1970, a year later. By that time, on the UCLA campus, the police riots that I spoke of earlier, a lot of activity going on with the mainstream peace movement. Sometimes as Asian American peace activists, we had to engage with them about the mainstream movement's racism as well. So we were working on that, but one thing that all of the activity on the UCLA campus, marches and rallies and demonstrations, all these things going on, faculty were becoming involved, because there were a lot of progressive faculty, too. And so it was becoming something that you could not ignore. And people who were taking Asian American Studies classes for the first time, there was a great interest in it, and so I think all the activities around May 1970 period really politicized a whole new group of Asian Americans at UCLA, but also on other campuses. Because things were going on at Cal State Long Beach and other places, too. But politicized us to the extent that, like one of our Gidra core people, Steve Tatsukawa, got (beaten by the police), Colin got arrested, so the two of them were involved in all that. So people like Duane Kubo, Doug Aihara, Jeff Furumura, Amy Murakami, Tom (Okabe), the number of people, a whole new core of people came to Gidra to start working on Gidra. So from the second to the fifth year, the last four years of Gidra, that core of people that I mentioned, and a number of others, became the mainstays of Gidra.

BN: And then you also wrote in that piece that there was kind of a shift in the way decision making was made around that same time. But I actually want to back up a little, and one of those things notable about Gidra is that there's no editor listed. It's like things are decided kind of collaboratively presumably. So I'm wondering if you could just walk us through how that worked, like how does an issue, how did an issue actually come together? And maybe the implication is that it sort of changed around the middle of '70. So if you could talk about it, like how it was before and maybe after that time?

MM: Yeah. I think, you know, when we started Gidra, I think we kind of naturally functioned the way we thought other newspapers functioned. And even though we didn't name the editor and things, and so we had a sort of hierarchy of decision-making, and I was part of that hierarchy. And I think one of the things that happened was that we were becoming more and more like traditional structures. And so other people had to raise issues about how are things decided here? What are the policies, and kind of challenging us to think about, okay, if we're going to do this long term, we need more, like a collective understanding of things. And I would say, for example, one voice, Evelyn Yoshimura, she came before the May 1970 period, or Bruce Iwasaki. I think a number of those people in that core raised questions not only about how decisions were made and the hierarchy, the structure, but also about male chauvinism, other shortcomings in the work that we were doing. So it was a challenge for me personally because it was something that I was learning. I think my natural tendency was to be a decision-maker, be a leading force, and to put out my opinion. I don't talk a lot, but I put out my opinions. And in a way, I think I was not as conscious of the collective process or what other people were thinking. And so I think the work in Gidra, I think, allow me to really question... I mean, people struggled with me, "That's not right. You can't make decisions by yourself," different things. And so it was a very good process for all of us to get better at what we did, being better human beings. And I would say even though Gidra as a newspaper had this big, broad impact, and, as we see today, fifty, sixty years later, still has some resonance. But for me and for a lot of people that worked on Gidra, what you don't see though, the process of working together, the meetings, the discussions, how you learned to depend on each other, who's going to get this done and that done? All of those things strengthened us, and I think that's not captured anywhere, but it's something that brought us together. I mean, in a sense, that's why, like, many of us are very good friends after all these years. You could see how people ask, "Why do camps have reunions?" "Why do the 442 have reunions? They're just reliving bad times. But it's not true. It's like when people work together under harsh conditions or against the common enemy or doing something to... really, you build that trust and rapport and collectivity and friendship and all of that. So I think that aspect of Gidra is not in the newspaper. Maybe it is to some degree.

BN: I think it comes through.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 13>

BN: So how did it... did it change then, or how did the decision-making shift after this time period then? And then like if I wanted to write an article for Gidra, what would the process be?

MM: Okay, I don't want to make it sound like it was a very organized and conscious process.

BN: That also comes through. There's a certain level of...

MM: Because sometimes it may be whoever sees it last gets to say how it's edited or how... it doesn't have to do with title or position.

BN: Well, there were no titles.

MM: Yeah. And I think we were trying to, we were experimenting, we were trying to learn ourselves, what is the best process, what is the way that we can function that lives up to our values? We want to include everybody, we want to hear the voices of people who don't speak up. We want to allow opportunities for people to play an important role. We were conscious of that, but we didn't really know how to exactly do that. And one of the things that we did -- and I don't remember exactly what month -- but we started a system of "issue editors." And so there may be one, two or three people who take responsibility for leading that particular issue, and then later on, we had a lot of specific, like high school issue, women's issue, different kinds of things like that, that that group of people would take on leadership. But I think the idea was to be flexible enough to incorporate the many people who were just curious, but also structured enough so that we can get the paper out. And I know that there was one month that is... you know, we have sixty issues from April to April. April to April should be sixty-one, but there's one issue missing because we had kind of an organizational crisis that we just could not, we didn't have the capacity to actually push through and get that issue done, so we did a combined June/July issue.

BN: This is June '70.

MM: Yeah. And that also had to do with not only internal issues, but all the things, the activity of the movement. Because we were all participating in the movement, too.

BN: We were just talking about the police riot, that's exactly that period. In terms of your own role, I noticed that around this time, in the '70s, you have a lot of photo credits and cover designs and so forth. Was that always something you were interested in and how did that kind of come about?

MM: I was interested in photography on and off. I used to... in 1970 or whatever that time period is, I must have gotten a new camera or something, but we're all using 35-millimeter film. But beyond that, 1970, I'm not sure, that was before I started, it was that time period that I was in film school. By '72 I was in law school, so that was kind of a balancing act, too. So there's no specific reason for when I took pictures and when I wrote.

BN: Although the fact that, now that you mention it, coinciding with the film school kind of makes sense.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 14>

BN: Another thing you kind of wrote about in the "Towards Barefoot Journalism" piece is that -- this is around '71 -- that there was complaints from readers about negativity and wanting more hopeful articles. And you wrote, "People can't relate to something that jumps out at you every month to remind you how messed up society is." And you talk about how now things like recipes and sewing patterns and how to fix a toilet and things like that start to appear. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that. Little bit of a shift or expansion, maybe.

MM: Yeah. As we were growing up, way before Gidra, many of us were influenced by the Black community, as I said, and culturally relating to Motown, R&B and all of that. Others of us were more, like Steve was a Deadhead, Grateful Dead, the Beatles, hippie movement, Woodstock. There were so many influences in the 1960s on all of us, and so I think incorporating all those things and saying, part of it is like one, I wouldn't even say groups of people, but one idea might have been to say we have to point out these shortcomings, these wrongs in society. Because we're in the process of wanting to change society, change those things. Others might have taken the view more like, maybe not even verbalized, but to say, "Yeah, this society's fucked up, I'm going to retreat from it." Kind of like develop ourselves, we're not going to count on society changing for us to us to feel better, we're going to grow our own vegetables. And that was a trend that came out of the hippie era, sort of drop out of society. So there were all those influences that are at play. I don't think there was anyone who advocated strongly for one or the other or other kinds of things. But that's part of the Asian American experience, too, because as a relatively small minority in this country, we were impacted by other cultures, other norms, and we took whatever we felt was right for us.

BN: Then to what extent did you kind of consciously try to cover and/or build bridges with sort of other Third World peoples or other communities of color at that time? Because that does come up a lot in the articles.

MM: Yeah. I think in the core of it, I think most of us felt an identity with what was called "The Third World," or people of color, BIPOC, whatever terms that they use now, but I think we related to and appreciated their... and part of learning our history is to learn about the history of other people who were also ignored or marginalized in society and to find commonalities. And so we did do that, but even that was kind of haphazard. We had exchanges with all kinds of newspapers, movement newspapers, radical newspapers, underground newspapers. We had the Young Lords of New York, Black Panthers in Oakland, Akwesasne Notes, the Native American paper. And there was a white youth-led revolutionary organization in Chicago that used to put out a paper, we had exchanges with them. And so we tried to learn as much as we could from them, but we didn't ever get to the point where we had person to person, face to face exchanges with them or anything like that, or to even think about building the movement together. But we appreciated all those independent efforts that were going on. Also you had to remember, too, the international influence. The fact that there were countries all over Africa and Latin America who were fighting for national liberation from colonialism, winning, and becoming... it was a very turbulent but exciting times. The fact that the People's Republic of China, and Vietnam, and all these, what were considered less developed countries, were becoming greater influences. Because I think irrespective of how things turned out now, I think China was a big influence on all of us, and Chairman Mao was a big influence. And I think many people either embraced Marxism or Leninism as a worldview in a conscious way, or others of us took parts of it and applied it to our situation. So all these influences, I think nationally and internationally, played a role in that.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 15>

BN: I have a couple places I want to go, but with regard to, you talk about the exchanges with these other newspapers which made me wonder what your relationship, if any, was with the other Japanese American papers. I know you personally at Gidra, in particular, in general, were often critical of the Rafu Shimpo, but there was also newspapers as well. Did you have any exchange or relationship with kind of the old Japanese American media?

MM: Not per se, but Rafu Shimpo, we had that parody issue called "Rafu Shrimpo." And we criticized Ellen by name, Ellen Endo was the editor of the Rafu Shimpo at the time. And I guess her failure to cover or to not cover accurately the Noguchi hearings at the time, but I'm not going to get into that, anyway. But I think, more than that, we wanted to have a relationship with them. I think the established Japanese newspapers, Japanese American newspapers, the Pacific Citizen, Kashu Mainichi, Rafu Shimpo, I think they were struggling to figure out how to respond to us. And I think on the one hand, liberal progressive Nisei activists and people who were civically engaged, they wanted to support us. So they would complain about language and different things that kind of rubbed them the wrong way. And I understand that, I mean, sometimes it's hard to hear. Not just the cuss words, but the things we say without sort of, very few filters. And I think, yeah, so we never had a, what would you call it, a fraternal or cordial relationship with other papers. But I think individuals like Kats Kunitsugu, Sue Embrey, people in JACL, Ellen Endo, I think all of them struggled with how to look at us. But I ended up working with all of them personally.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 16>

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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<Begin Segment 17>

BN: I think one of the other kind of well-known articles that you wrote were, well, one was, there was a letter to the editor, I think, of someone who was kind of taking Gidra to task for not supporting McGovern. I think this is in the '72 election, I think you wrote the response. And I was just kind of curious about, are you writing as yourself or is that just kind of representing the perspective of Gidra as a whole, or was there any sort of difference of opinion within Gidra on that issue?

MM: Okay, I don't remember the contents of both the letter and my response. But what I would guess is that... I'm thinking it might have been a letter from Laura Tokunaga. But anyway, I think it may have been questioning the point of view that the electoral system and politicians...

BN: Yeah, it was Laura Tokunaga.

MM: In a way, irredeemable, I guess. And so why should we participate in electoral politics? And I think Laura was saying we should. When we see progressive candidates or liberal candidates, one is better than the other. And I think whether it represented either of those points of view, represented a whole group, no, I don't think so. I think we all had different versions of them. In a way, I had been struggling with that question myself. And I did understand fairly deeply, both sides of it. But as far as becoming more involved in electoral politics, it wasn't until decades later, the '84 Jesse Jackson campaign.

BN: Yeah, that's the next interview.

MM: Yeah, we could talk about. But at that time, I think we were seeing, like 1968, Bobby Kennedy was killed, Martin Luther King was killed, way before that. It's not related to electoral politics, but another Black leader, Malcolm X, being killed. All of those assassinations and violence taking place, and then also seeing that the limits of, like, for example, the Chicago convention and the trial of the Chicago 8, to demonstrate against the Democratic party and Mayor Daley, Democrat of Chicago, suppressed that whole dissent. All of that was going on, so we could really see the limits of working with politicians. But we also saw that we couldn't ignore them. And I personally did not know of any, sort of, historical tradition in the Japanese or the Asian American communities in the way that you see in the Black community, particularly in the South. I mean, electoral politics was one expression of the liberation struggle for them. And conditions were very different, too, because before, in the '40s and '50s, you had so many preachers, ministers, be the community and political leaders because they had no elected... they had no congresspersons that represented the Black community. So, in the same way, like in here, I think having Daniel Inouye, Spark Matsunaga, was too remote for us. And even in the city, we had people like Tom Bradley, David Cunningham, George Takei ran for that seat, all of those things are going on. But we didn't play -- Gidra or myself -- didn't play that much of a role, and kind of were spectators to most of that.

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<Begin Segment 18>

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.

<Begin Segment 19>

BN: Okay. So I wanted to continue with, we're kind of going chronologically. So now I believe you said fall of '72 is when you started law school?

MM: Right.

BN: And you're still... which I can't believe, knowing how onerous law school is, you're still kind of in the core group of Gidra, putting out issues and writing pieces. But you also wrote that, at this time, I think you said that December '72 almost didn't come out, and that there were issues with staffing. And then the other thing I wanted to ask you about is that you also wrote that you had this group of artists, David Monkawa, Dean Toji, Glen Iwasaki, who start coming in and playing a larger role. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about kind of the look of Gidra. Because it really, looking at the first year to later years, it evolved greatly in terms of the way it looks.

MM: So let me talk a little bit about, sort of, the mechanics of everything. And for today's audience, you have to remember that this is pre-computer, pre-internet, pre-cell phone. And so the tools that were available to us for research as well as for graphics and art and all of those things, are very primitive, pre-digital. So what that meant on the one hand is that the products reflected that sort of primitiveness. But at the same time, it meant that I think the production process tended to be more collective, we're in the same room. When people read about cut-and-paste on the computer, they probably don't realize that it comes from cut and paste physically. Like we used to have razor blades to cut out mistakes on a piece of paper, and then to replace it with the correct spelling, for example. The type setting itself was also like, if we made a mistake, we might have to start over, or to figure out ways to... and I won't get too detailed into this, but even this idea of what's called right-justified, columns being even on both ends. To do that, we had to type every text twice. You type it once as a rough, ragged edge, and then we adjust and add spaces so that would become straight, things like that

�So the context is that none of us were journalists, none of us were newspaper... or even being trained to do that. We were just people who were involved in the movement, who liked writing, we liked engaging in things, getting people exposed to new ideas, all those things. Now, so a lot of the actual production, I mean, all of the production was done by just a bunch of amateurs, basically, us. What I think happened was that we had people like David Monkawa who became involved sometime, I don't know exactly when, and Dean Toji. They were studying to be artists, graphic artists, so that was their training. And they also had friends like Alan Takemoto, who was probably the most recognizable of the illustrators by their product, very popular sketch artists. So anyway, they came in, and I think for a period of time, there were differences between the editors, writers, editors, and the artists. But I think we found a good blend of things where they were able to contribute. In the beginning, people who wrote articles were just asking them, "Can you illustrate what I'm saying here?" And I think they did that, and they did that well, but after a while they got kind of, they found that role to be too limiting. So they'll continue to do that but they wanted to produce things on their own. So we have art that stands on its own and makes points in a very poignant or very smart way of communicating. And I guess, in a way, some of them went into marketing later on and all. But that addition of this cadre of graphic artists and visual artists really, I think, enhanced the product itself and really made it the kind of, what would you say, the feel that Gidra has. And a lot of it is, sort of, it's eclectic but it's irreverent, in your face, and very humorous and captures a lot of good things.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 20>

BN: And I think that's what draws a lot of young people to today is the irreverence and the look, the graphic look of it. In the May '73 issue, you wrote a story about Manzanar when you went to the pilgrimage. And you may not remember the details of the story, but what I wanted to ask you about is what your own understanding or relationship was to the incarceration given that you didn't have a family direct familial connection to that story as did most other Sansei.

MM: Yeah. I think it happened for me gradually. But as I learned, it's kind of like, if you go in steps, like I'm in search of myself, who am I, where do I fit? And being a Japanese American being a big part of that. But who am I as a man or a boy or whatever, who am I as a student, a son, a brother, all those different kinds of things. But in thinking about all those things, I had to look beyond just me and look at the Japanese American community, look at U.S. society. And I'm exposed to all those things because of the political atmosphere that we had in the '60s. And a part of that is like, in going back to Little Tokyo, going back to the Crenshaw area with new, fresh eyes, asking questions and what happened before I was here? And learning about the Issei experience of migration, the wataridori experience, the labor that they contributed. And then the war years, all of those things, I think I was kind of absorbing it as studying someone else's life, but over time it became clear to me that, as a Japanese American who came here post-World War II, can still embrace and really kind of a have a duty to embrace the community's history as my own, too. So as a fresh off the boat shin-Issei postwar immigrant, I cannot say that the history of Japanese America begins when I came here. I see it as something that becomes part of my life when I'd learn about all these things. And many of my friends have families that experienced the concentration camps, the World War II and all that. My girlfriend at the time was, I know the father was out of 442, he had lost a leg. So learning about all these things made it real to me that this is something that I embraced even though none of my immediate family members are in camp. And so I would say for young people or anybody today that I think I advocate for a lot of the shin-Isseis, "Why do you guys keep talking about camps and why is all that important?" I say it is important because it's kind of a... well, in the case of Japanese Americans, it's a unifying experience that happened to everybody that was here at the time. I mean, there are exceptions. And to not understand that as part of your experience as a Japanese American living in this society, it's missing the point. I mean, we should embrace all of that. I would say, too, like I think we need to do better. "We" meaning acculturated, Americanized people, to understand the experiences that new immigrants, and we were talking about immigrants who came in the '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s on, and even as recent as now, and understanding their experiences. Because I think one regretful -- or I don't know what the term is -- but condition that exists, is there are Japanese Americans and shin-Issei communities that are sort of like parallel existence, largely because of language and culture, but because of misunderstandings or not knowing about each other's histories, and I think that is... not that it's all that important if the two communities never come together, maybe it's okay. But I feel like understanding is a way of sustaining our community, too.

BN: Did you feel that growing up? I guess you're Sansei, technically, but with this different experience, did you feel that from other Sansei as being kind of this different or...

MM: Yeah, I haven't talked about it with other people who had a similar immigration experience as me, but I did feel like I was different from other Sansei growing up. And in fact, in the earlier years, in my first couple years in elementary school, and when I went to middle school, junior high school, I would say I got along better with my Black friends than I did with Japanese American Sansei friends because, I think, I mean, we all know the history now about Niseis being told not to be too "Japanesey," in short. And that being reflected on, like, "Well, we don't want to be with FOBs." I've heard that said to me, "You're an FOB," that sort of thing. And so it took a while, and I think it's me becoming more Sansei culturally, that made it possible. And I don't think everybody has that opportunity, same opportunity to become acculturated or be in the settings of both communities.

BN: Were you able to maintain your Japanese-speaking ability?

MM: You know, I passed myself off as fluent, I mean, I'm really conversational. And what happened with my Japanese was that it stopped when I came here at age nine. And I wasn't sent to Japanese school or being exposed other than my parents. So outside the home, there's no, really, exposure to Japanese. But when I took up ethnic studies, took up coming to Little Tokyo, I was motivated to re-learn Japanese. And so I used to carry around a Japanese dictionary with me all the time so that I can engage in conversation with the people that I wanted to learn from, to take that to ethnic studies. And what I think happened was that, in terms of my language skills, my teenage years, I had no connection to Japan or Japanese. So if I wanted to strike up a conversation with a girl, to do whatever, the social kind of things that teenagers do, I don't have the vocabulary for that, I know only children's language. Then the things that I studied, so I learned about how to say "politics," how to say "revolution," how to say "imperialism," how to say "Black liberation." Anyway, those kinds of vocabulary words, and string together sentences about those kind of things. And when I was more engaged with the seniors in social services, I learned what's called Senmon Yo, or the vernacular of that profession. So I would say it's very difficult to learn Japanese, too, because if you have the ability to read and write kanji, you can create a lot of words and understand a lot of words with compounds. But without that, it's all pure memory. I wish I could have kept that up more. I envy people who are multilingual.

BN: Yeah, me too.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 21>

BN: So going back to your parents, how did they feel about your path in life, become more of an activist and getting involved in all these political things? And you said they were largely apolitical.

MM: Well, you know, my parents, I think, again, not unlike many immigrant parents, their children were their life, or lives. And I think... you know, in retrospect, I'm sure it's been very difficult. Because while on the one hand, I mean, I recognize things like the fact that they worked their asses off. They worked so hard to do better for themselves and their kids. But also I didn't think enough about maybe the insecurities they had about me learning things that they had no idea about, they didn't understand. It's not like arithmetic in elementary school, they can help me with that. But beyond that, I'm learning things. Not even before I got political, just things in society. How to navigate various systems of government or transportation, all these kind of things, how to make a reservation at a restaurant, a lot of mundane things. I think about maybe they had to second guess themselves a lot to keep up with me. I think they were proud of me for doing well academically, and I think they expected me to have sort of the traditional path of whatever I ended up being, like a doctor, lawyer, engineer. I was an engineering major when I first got to UCLA, like many other Sansei guys were. But anyway, interesting, though, as I became more political, and I was very open about what I thought was going on and other things. They were very, I would say, I don't know if they were open but they were not resistant, they tried to support me. In fact, in that Asian Americans for Peace rally that we did, that I spoke of earlier, I wanted to get some signs and some buttons made, and I wanted them to be in kanji, in the Chinese characters. So I had my father do the brush calligraphy of peace, heiwa, and love, ai, and I made buttons out of them. And they would support me because I wanted them to do that for me in that way. And I think, like I remember even like when I worked on Gidra, like day and night, sometimes they would bring me lunch or dinner to the office. And people, other people would say, "Hey, what's this? Your parents sure are nice," that kind of thing. So I feel very blessed to have had that kind of relationship with them. And I think over time, as my profile, and I guess I settled down a little bit, and I did accomplish certain things that I wanted to do, so I think they were proud of that.

And I would say for... my dad passed away earlier, but my mom in later stages, she followed the news, she would discuss it with me, she would discuss it with me, she would have points of view sometimes I'd disagree with. But a lot of times she had embraced what I had been saying for years. And, for example, this is a small example, but when my parents first registered to vote in the '50s, they said they signed up as Republicans because FDR is the one that signed Executive Order 9066 and he's a Democrat, so the Republicans must be better. But over time, like we talked about that, and years later, it became Nixon and Reagan. So they reregistered, both of them became Democrats. And I was way beyond being a Democrat by that time, but I was happy that they were trying to be, I was kind of framing their perspectives around what I thought to solve. And then towards the end, like my mom passed away four years ago, and so she was very aware of Trump by then, and she hated Trump, you know, like that kind of thing. So I don't know what the experience of many other immigrant parents are. I think some of them were more hard-nosed and insistent on a path that they had determined for their kids.

BN: You read a lot about those stories, yeah.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 22>

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.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 23>

BN: Well, let me get to... let's see. We only have a few minutes. One thing we always ask people is -- well, one thing with regard to Gidra is, at the time you were working on it in the, right after it closed down, were you aware of the historical significance of it? I mean, you must have been to some degree, right? Because you had carefully kept all the issues and you had bound copies and all of that. I mean, were you kind of cognizant of the impact that it had and would have in the years to come?

MM: Well, I think in some ways, you can answer this better. But my guess is that for a period of time after '74, it was not... it was not that relevant to most people, it was kind of lost in the dustbin. But after a while, even before Densho digitized, there seemed to be a development of more interest. And it might have had to do with more people going into Asian American Studies. You remember we had Roots and Counterpoint, and then beyond that, there were very little. But after a while, Amerasia Journal is another sort of a pioneering publication. But there's lots of publications like that. I think I never saw Gidra as sort of this preeminent thing that surpasses all others, or something like that. There was one of many efforts that people contributed to, and I had no idea that we'd be sitting here how many years later? Fifty-something years?

BN: Fifty-plus.

MM: That we would even be talking about it. And I mentioned earlier, we didn't have that perspective of documenting everything that we did in the way traditional newspapers do, or that academia requires. But it's a strange thing, because on the one hand, I never thought the reach would be beyond the '60s and '70s. But on the other hand, I'm very grateful that people -- this is sort of a revival -- and I think Brian and Densho had a lot to do with the accessibility to accommodate that appetite. Because you don't have to go see Margie to ask for something. You can go look it up. And fight her for whatever she's holding out there. Anyway, so I think... so on the one hand, I feel like I'm really grateful that people take an interest in it, and in a way, I'm kind of fascinated by that myself. Why do people see Gidra as something that, that sort of entry point for, like, exploration of a lot of things. And I would say this, too, since we're winding down. Some of the lessons, I mean, I feel like, as I mentioned, baby boomers, Sansei generation, that whole era in which we grew up, where we thought anything is possible and we can just have an influence on lots of different things, I think that's an important thing for young people in any era to sort of capture and hopefully get in their minds and their souls and feel like we could do something. If we don't like something, let's try to change it. We like something, let's try to build on it, that sort of thing. I think about, like nowadays, like even in nonprofits or other things that we talk about, who should play what leadership position. And age comes up, like, wow, that person is only twenty-five, or that person is twenty. Well, have to remember a time when we were leading major things in our twenties, twenty-five, and there's that saying about you're never too young to lead and never too old to learn. And I think that is a really fitting thing to keep in mind. And another thing that I heard my old boss say is, "Give yourself permission." You don't need permission from somebody else older than you or somebody in a higher position. If you think something should be done, go and do it. And you rally people around you and do something. And I think that spirit, I hope young people can take that spirit and feel like it is possible. I mean, the first point about the young people leading, you have to remember, Martin Luther King was twenty-five years old when he led the Montgomery bus boycotts and Rosa Parks and all that. And he was in a minister's conference of maybe a hundred and fifty, two hundred people where the average age was about seventy. And he was given the opportunity to lead, and he led that. Fred Hampton was twenty-one years old, a Black Panther leader in Chicago. There's so many other examples of young people making a difference because they dared to do it. And I think that's a big lesson for Gidra, and it applies to a lot of other things, too.

BN: Very good. I think that's a good place to close for now. So, yeah, thank you very much.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.