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BY: So I want to switch and talk a little bit about your community involvement in activism, so outside of your paying jobs. So what organizations have you belonged to? And that could be Japanese American organizations as well as other organizations?

SM: Well, there are several different strains of activism, first and foremost is political. And I worked on Bobby Kennedy's presidential campaign, and I was an organizer for college campuses around the northwest. It was unpaid, but it was like a job.

BY: Was that when you were in college?

SM: Yeah. I was in my last year of school. And volunteered on many, many political campaigns on national, state and local level. As I matured in my own skill-building, then I started looking for young people who would be appropriate candidates and kind of helping to nurture them to go that direction when I saw people who really had the skill and the heart and the soul to run for office. I started out, and in more recent years, that's been my major involvement in politics, is really mentoring and helping new candidates, mostly people of color.

BY: Have some of those people become successful?

SM: Oh, yes.

BY: Like tell us, name us some names. [Laughs]

SM: Well, like Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, who would have done it all on her own by herself. But, I mean, I worked on her first state senate campaign, I organized her press announcement that she was going to run for Congress, and I'm very involved with a whole lot of people in the community. Rebecca Saldana, who's a state senator, Teresa Mosqueda, who's a city council member, Tammy Morales, who's a city council member, there's sort of a theme here, "women of color."

BY: Have you been involved at all with Sharon Tomiko Santos?

SM: I was in the early days, but you know, she wins by like eighty-seven percent. So this is part of my choice. Some people say I'm a gadfly, but my choice of engagement is more with those who need a little oomph, or those who have some obstacles to overcome. So even with my donations to community organizations, if it's a multi-million dollar organization that's doing very well, even though I love them, I will give them a small donation. I will give the larger donation to that grassroots group that's just starting out that really needs, where fifty or a hundred dollars really makes a difference to them. So I've always picked the spots where... I mean, and frankly, I don't work on Pramila's campaigns anymore. I mean, when she wins by that kind of amount, or Sharon Tomiko Santos, I don't work on their campaigns. I mean, I would endorse them, although I couldn't when I was working in media. But the rest of the time, I would endorse them and that sort of thing but I just... I'm not needed there. I feel like I can be of more help with people that need the push still, or need to be introduced to more people in the community or whatever.

BY: Okay. So besides political involvement --

SM: So then I've also been involved in... well, you asked about JA organizations. I've supported most of them, and for a hot minute I was on the board of the JACL years ago when Dr. Lindy Sato was president of the board. And he pushed really hard for the Sansei generation to get engaged. And so on one particular year, Kip Tokuda and myself and others were all added on to the board as sort of the first wave of Sanseis to be on the board. But I didn't stay involved. I mean, I went to meetings and things, but JACL meetings were so horrendous. [Laughs] They were so long and they would decide something, and then the person who was on the minority side would bring the issue up the next meeting and they'd discuss it all over again. And I got really anxious. I didn't want to just sit there and go through things over and over and over again. I was involved in the redress movement to some degree, but I was mostly living in California during that time. So I was mostly using Pacifica Radio, the medium, and helping behind the scenes on writing press releases and things like that.

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