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BN: Now at this time, late '70s, early '80s, it's also the beginning of this whole redress stuff. Did you have any involvement with that or was your family supportive?

JF: I think my family didn't even know about it. For me at the time, it sounds funny, or not funny but kind of sad now. But I thought that the focus of that was too narrow. I don't know why, because now I don't feel that way at all. I think it was a very, a pivotal point in Japanese American history and they effort that they did, resulted in a huge change. But at the time, I just felt like the focus is too narrow, because I was involved with this other WVO group, and their stance is more based along the class differences between people and not so much focused on racial histories and minority or racial lines, and the incidents that happened to this particular minority group. It was kind of a broader perspective, I guess, but the mistake that this group made was thinking that they were like the vanguard of the movement, that the movement needed some kind of a spark to set off people's underlying rage and feelings. Yeah, that created my involvement with that group created kind of a family crisis. I'm not sure if the term "intervention" was around either, but that's what happened, because Jeri, we had been married for, gosh, less than two years, I think. And the people in the organization were trying to tell me that I had to make a choice between what's really important here and decide for myself whether the work with them, they felt, is more important than even my marriage. So that didn't sit too well with Jeri, and my father, who called a family meeting, we went up to their house in the Baldwin Hills, they were still in the Baldwin Hills. And I remember sitting around the table, and my dad was across from me and my mom, and Jeri was next to me, and they just wanted to express their feeling about what was happening to our marriage at the time. And another one of his sayings that he said repeatedly, he said, "Family comes first." It's a common kind of thing for JAs, I think, for I guess any immigrant family or family with immigrant origins, that family was first, so he wanted to make sure that he knew that's where he's coming from and he wanted me to decide along those lines, hopefully, but he just left it up to me, and that's what I decided, too. So ever since then, it's like, okay, I'm going to pull back. I'm going to refocus and just do my best to provide for the family.

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