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KU: And then in terms of the idea of a Third World, the concept of the Third World that grew out of that period...

MM: Yeah. So I think in retrospect, I think I was being introduced to a lot of different kinds of ideas and perspectives as a college student, as a freshman and sophomore. I would go check out different lectures on campus and outside the classroom. And I think initially I think my development of the consciousness about my identity had to do with being Japanese, Japanese American. And I think within that, I realized that I was a little bit different from the Sanseis, too. I was able to make a lot of friends, maybe, at UCLA. And there was a group called the Nisei Bruin Club. By the time we were at UCLA, most of us were Sansei, but the name and the organization, Nisei Bruin Club, that was founded before the war, was still around. So we sort of revived that and created a social organization around that. But at the same time, we were noticing that there were very few Brown and Black students here. And so I think we started out kind of not really thinking about them very much, but I think the concept of Third World, in working with other minority students, came, I think, probably the biggest impetus was the Third World Strike at San Francisco State, that was already '69. But prior to that, I think influences from... I told this story many times before, but I was at UCLA when Malcolm X was assassinated in New York, and how much impact that assassination and the life of Malcolm X had on Black students, the few Black students that I knew on campus, I think maybe made me think about, I want to know more about their history. And then by 1966 when the Black Panthers were formed, they had good relations with students on the Berkeley campus, but then they expanded and they started making trips down south and had speaking engagements at UCLA. I remember in particular, Eldridge Cleaver speaking at Pauley Pavilion, and that was kind of an eye-opening thing to me, too. And I think whenever we took up campus struggles, we tried to talk to the Black students and other students as well.

And the concept of Third World really comes out of a paradigm or kind of a social construct that existed at that time where the world was divided up into First World, Second World and Third World. And at that time, the First World was the two superpowers, the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The Second World was the developing countries like countries in Europe, Japan, Australia. And then the Third World was considered "under" or "undeveloped" countries. That's a term of art. So that included most of Africa, most of Asia, most of Latin America, and so that was the Third World. In terms of us as minority people in this country, we started using the term Third World people because we identify with all those international struggles. I would say in today's vocabulary it would be POC or BIPOC, that sort of concept of uniting people of color. And I think today it expands beyond that to women, the disabled, LGBT community, all of that. And any people who are disadvantaged, marginalized, oppressed by the society. But back in those days, we were talking mostly about race and ethnicity.

KU: I think during that time there were a lot of independence movements going on, and a lot in a lot of the formerly colonized countries. What did people think about those movements and how did people relate any similarities or differences under that term?

MM: I think for Asian Americans, probably the biggest international influence was the fact that the Vietnam War was going on. So I think we started learning about why it was going on, and we naturally were opposed to wars and military expansion, and so we were for peace. But as we studied the situation in Vietnam, started learning about U.S. imperialism, the quest for hegemony and control of the world and the competition between the two superpowers, Soviet Union and the U.S. And so I would say, like all of those influences, starting with Vietnam, but other parts of Southeast Asia and Asia, Latin America. There were people like Che Guevara and Castro and the Cuban revolution and all of that. And if you looked at Africa as, I don't know, something like fifty-four countries or something, and all of them were colonized prior to that. You talk about the Belgian Congo, Cameroon, the French, the British, the Dutch, all of those European, Portuguese, had economic and political control of many of those countries in Africa. But in the 1960s, there was a, sort of a mass spark that was lit of these national liberation struggles. And so there's a slogan, "Nations want liberation, countries want freedom and people want revolution." And basically, I think, out of all those struggles were thinkers, philosophers, political leaders, who wrote about those experiences. And so we started studying how did they go about waging a national liberation struggle, a freedom struggle. And naturally, we wanted to support those struggles, too. And so little by little we learned about the connections between the oppression in this country and the impact that capitalism and imperialism has internationally.

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