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KU: Okay. So I thought we could go into your work in the Japanese American, Asian American communities, and I know that I met you in Little Tokyo in the '70s. But you had left UCLA, you graduated in 1970. So if you can maybe talk about your transition to the community, because it wasn't like an abrupt... you were from the community, you were doing work in the community, it's just that your focus of attention kind of shifted there with your work with JWRO, LTSC and LTPRO, all of that stuff. Maybe you could just paint a, start by painting just a chronology of that transition after UCLA.

MM: Okay. So I actually started going back to Little Tokyo as an adult right around 1969 because of the Ethnic Studies issue. Well, let me explain that, too. So I was on the campus of UCLA. And many of us who became activists fought for Ethnic Studies and won the right to have Asian American Studies Center along with the other three centers, and to offer an Ethnic Studies class as an experimental program. And so once we had that, said, "What do we do?" Since we didn't have professors that we could have teach the classes, we didn't have very many textbooks. So different one of us, everything that I'm talking about today, too, I just wanted to be clear that I'm talking in the first person, but I considered it's like a, more of a collective experience of a whole generational cohort of, in my case, Japanese American Sansei, third generation, and in other cases, culturally and socially we're Sansei, same as baby boomers. But so after we had Ethnic Studies, we decided we're going to back to our communities to learn more about our history since there aren't any books. And that's what we did. So in the case of Japanese Americans, many of us, not only from UCLA, but from many other places, went back to Little Tokyo and also to the Crenshaw area. And the Crenshaw area was the home base for Gidra, the publication. But in Little Tokyo, there were already people there, obviously, that were doing political and social work and social services. So we don't want to represent as if the Sansei generation of activists in the '60s invented all this.

But as we went back, we sought out people who could teach us about their immigration experience, about the work in this country. And we met a number of elders that we could talk to. And in my case, because I had some fluency in Japanese, I started working with people who were Japanese speaking. And by that time, in the history of Little Tokyo, by the '60s and '70s, most of the people who remained there as residents were monolingual seniors. Because by that time, many of the Japanese Americans' families who had reestablished themselves in Little Tokyo after World War II, they were finding other neighborhoods to move to, so there was this dispersal of people. But the older people, they had lived in this country, for many of them, like fifty, sixty years, but really not had any opportunities beyond the Japanese American community. And so we started working with them, learning from them, but also trying to address the needs that they had. And the biggest among them was they had social service needs, what sometimes is called case management. But helping people figure out what the priority problems and obstacles are to moving forward, or just to take care of just mundane things, day-to-day basis. I always give this example. I remember a lady coming with a plastic bag full of envelopes, and she would say, "I don't know what to do with this." And it was basically mail that she compiled over a months' time or something. And some of it might be advertisement from a department store, some might be renewal of the green card, some might be a social security check, but many cases, monolingual people could not understand these letters. There's no pictures, it's all English. And despite having lived here for a long time, because they were living in segregated communities, they weren't facile in English, so that's what we helped them do. That's one example.

But a Japanese Welfare Rights Organization, somehow I found in the, what was called the Sun Building, they had a lot of nonprofits providing services. And JWRO was made up of many seniors as the welfare rights name suggests, people who were limited income, formerly working class but mostly retired, and needing ways to sort of just navigate the rest of their life. And we also learned at a lot of these things that they were seeking, there were services that they were entitled to because they had paid taxes, paid into social security, all these things, but they were not accessible to non-English-speaking people. Because if they went to the county government or the city hall or to wherever, most of those places did not have Japanese-speaking people. So to earn the right to access resources that you're entitled to, they had to get translators, and that became what I did some part of the time, too, translate for people as they interacted with, sort of, government and other resources outside the community. So that's how I got involved.

But just to back up a little bit, though, I used to go to Little Tokyo as a child because my father wouldn't take me there. And this is a very common experience for immigrant children or maybe for Japanese Americans, too. But as we dispersed residentially to suburbs and other neighborhoods, we still had connections to Little Tokyo. And in my case, my dad would take me to Little Tokyo to get a haircut. There's a barber shop in the San Pedro Firm Building. It's a different barber shop now, but that's where I used to go. And on the way there from Crenshaw, we would pass other barber shops along the way but we never stopped there, my father would always take me to Little Tokyo. The reason is because, while he's getting a haircut, and I'm getting a haircut, it was a chance to talk to, conversation in Japanese with someone who was very familiar with Little Tokyo and talks to a lot of other Little Tokyo people, and so just to exchange gossip and learn about what's going on. And then after our haircuts, we would go out to eat at a restaurant and would go to a market to buy provisions for the following week. Because in those days, you had to go to Little Tokyo to get some kinds of Japanese foods. It's not like nowadays where you have Marukai and Tokyo Central, Nijiya, Mitsuwa, all these places in the surrounding communities. So that experience of kind of being able to relate to Little Tokyo as a child, I think, made it comfortable for me to be in that setting again, and this time as someone who's intentionally wanting to learn more about that neighborhood. And so that's how I got involved, and then later on, we took on Anti-Eviction Task Force and all these things.

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