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BY: So one of the reasons we're doing these interviews is to sort of figure out is the connection between the incarceration and community activists now. So in your mind, is there a connection there? In any way, is your activism inspired by the incarceration?

SM: Well, I don't know that it was inspired, but I think all of us in the Sansei generation are impacted positively, negatively, or in between by what happened to our parents' and our grandparents' generation. And if Min Yasui had not had to fight for evacuation claims to help people get their properties back and things like that, and spent his whole life in civil rights, and everything was just hunky dory. You know, I would have been involved, because I'm just a social person. But I might have been involved in less political things, I might have been more mainstream and not rocked the boat as much, you know, like my mom wished that I was. It was like, oh, we don't want to see your name in the paper again, kind of thing. It drove me to do things in a more activist way that I think, had the camps not existed at all, and we were just a middle class family moving along, I would have been active in more middle class things. Because I don't think that it was my nature to not be involved in something. But the things that I chose to be involved in are clearly a reflection of my commitment to justice. And clearly, by the time I was seventeen or eighteen, I knew the camps were injustice. I didn't have the sophistication to understand about all the levels of racism and discrimination and all of that, or to even name it, but I understood that that was not right.

BY: Can you tell the story about how Min would come to your house when you were kids? I think that's an interesting...

SM: Oh, this is a great story. Min and my dad, Min Yasui and my dad were friends, family friends as teenagers and young men. So... and they bought a car together with one of Min's brothers and things like that. So in the 1950s when the war was, World War II was over, there was this Evacuation Claims Act that allowed people who had lost real property to claim what had been theirs before incarceration to try and get it back. So Min, being a young lawyer, decided he was going to like, that was going to be his mission to help community members file their claims. And apparently it was a lot of paperwork. So when he would come to Portland, he would stay at our house, and we had this upstairs, well, it wasn't a guest room, it was more like an attic. But he would stay up there and he would go, like, to a church, and he explained to everybody, you need documentation of this, that, how much your car cost when you bought it, blah, blah, blah, all these little things. Bring your receipts, bring any documentation, all of it. And then he would go back a few days later to the same location and gather up all their documents. So in this big attic room, he had piles of papers which I'm now guessing each family's was a different pile. And he had these piles all over, and then he had a card table that was his desk, and he would work up there on days he didn't go out into the community, he was working like crazy doing that. And as I recall, he got something like 4.6 percent of the 1941 value of what people claimed back, so it was next to nothing. I mean, and we all, in the Seattle area, know the story of the Freeman family that acquired downtown Bellevue, what is now downtown Bellevue, which used to be Japanese strawberry farms. And so there's lots of stories like that all over the place. And I don't really know how far and wide Min went. Did he go all up and down the West Coast? I'm not sure. Or did he just go to the Pacific Northwest or what, I'm not sure. But I remember very clearly 4.6 percent, so that's a very, very small amount.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.