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BN: So anyway, yeah, so I wanted to ask you about a few of the articles. Offhand, do you remember any of the ones you wrote?

JF: The toilet one thanks to Mike Yanagita, who, at the time, was an apprentice plumber. And I think I also, seems like no matter where I live, I have this problem with a leaky toilet.

BN: So semi-autobiographical.

JF: Yeah. And I knew I couldn't be the only person in the world who has this kind of problem all the time.

BN: And it was actually, there were a series of articles like that, right, on just how to sew and just everyday kind of life skills.

JF: Oh, yeah. I think Murase did that, how to sew one.

BN: How to make a shirt, and there were different ones.

JF: Wow. Okay, yeah.

BN: But yours might have been the first or one of the first? I mean, how did that come about?

JF: It's related to that whole self change thing where you want to, one of the attributes that you're trying to demonstrate, is your self-reliance. You don't need to call a plumber to fix your leaky toilet, and you could do that yourself. This is how you could do it. I think all our articles were kind of written in that vein, it's to build that feeling that we don't need professionals to do it for us, we can do a lot of stuff ourselves. But I don't know why that one struck a chord. It wound up being reprinted by this paper out of Atlanta, The Big Bird, which I know nothing about other than that. I think it was Alan Ota or Steve Tatsukawa who told me that they had picked it up and reprinted it, so I don't know. That's pretty funny.

BN: Something everyone should know. [Laughs]

JF: Then you did also a multi-part article on an Asian American or Japanese American street gangs.

BN: Oh, yeah. Like the [inaudible] with Roy Nakano and Tom Okabe. How did that one come about?

JF: Good grief, I have no idea, other than these guys, like Ats Sasaki and Gary Asamura, they were kind of like street legends growing up in the Crenshaw area.

BN: But you knew them from before?

JF: I knew of them, yeah. And then a friend who was in the same YMCA group, Danny Uematsu, he became part of the Ministers, III, three being the third generation. And then Little Danny Wong, they called him Little Danny Wong, I don't know why, there must have been a bigger Danny Wong, he was also a part of the Ministers. And we knew each other personally, so there's that connection. But yeah, as far as the originals, we wanted, because everyone knew about them but didn't really know their origin story, we kind of felt like we could do that and that would be of interest to some.

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