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BN: So as you're getting, doing the Gidra stuff, getting more politically involved, what's the reaction of your family and how does that...

JF: You know, my parents really never understood what we were doing. I remember when, maybe about six months into the collective started, that collective was called 2412 by us, but by outsiders, they would refer to it as the Ping Pong Hotel because we had ping pong tables set up in this covered lanai that was screened in. And it was not really part of the house-house, but it was right adjacent to it. So he could walk into it from the house. And so we would have these pretty competitive ping pong games there. Anyway, and then other people called it the Gidra House, which kind of was a misnomer.

BN: That's how I've heard it referred to.

JF: Oh, okay. Maybe because most of the people who started it were there, Gidra.

BN: But there wasn't any actual connection?

JF: I don't recall, other than...

BN: People, some people from Gidra lived there.

JF: And we would have meetings there, but other organizations would come to the house, because it was a big West Adams two-story, kind of a mansion almost. Yeah, so we were there. What was the question? I forgot it already. [Laughs]

BN: What your parents or...

JF: Oh, my parents. So they were in, all the parents of the six or seven of us who had started this house, we invited all our parents and we had an open house for the parents, so that was kind of different. [Laughs] And we were tasked with speaking about individually taking turns and introducing our parents to the other parents because they'd never met each other. And then each of us would give a little spiel about what we were involved in at the time. But that was the first time, first and only time I think my parents were exposed to what I was doing. They never sat in on a Gidra meeting, thank god. And they never, I don't think they ever saw an issue of the paper physically, so they weren't involved, but I didn't expect them to be involved. So, yeah, my father, he was an educator, and he used to say this phrase that would come up occasionally. Said, yeah, you have to get an education because they can't take that away from you. And I was wondering, who's "they" to him? Who are "they"? But I think looking back on his life and what they lost as a family, they used to run Parkview Dry Cleaners, no, Parkview Cleaners in the Boyle Heights area. And at the time that they were incarcerated, they lost everything. I'm just going to assume that that's where that phrase of his comes from, because he was a UCLA graduate and had lots of opportunities that came out of that. And he suffered a lot of loss personally, like his five year old kid brother, I think he was, my dad was twelve at the time, and they were flying kites together, and they lived at the bottom of, like where Angels Flight is, Bunker Hill. And a car, so we're talking about... what year would that be? He was twelve, so 1928, something like that. Anyway, the car loses its brakes, jumps the curb and strikes Eddie and kills him there, right in front of my dad. So I'm sure that kind of, it's kind of a traumatic experience for anybody to go through, much less a twelve-year-old kid. And so I think that's why he retreated to the main library which was close by there. And another one of his sayings was, "Books make good friends." [Laughs] I couldn't relate to that one too well.

But yeah, so he grew up and then felt later that he understood what we were trying to do, what this whole movement thing was about, and I remember at the dinner table before Gidra, he would say things like, "Yeah, if it weren't for what Black folks are doing in the streets, we would be nowhere. And we owe whatever progress we made as Japanese Americans to what they're doing out there in the street," so wow, okay. And then when we would have events, not necessarily Gidra sponsored, but maybe somebody would get married or some kind of non-related thing, but hosted by young people. I kind of remember Patty Iwataki for some reason, in charge of some event. But anyway, he would get up, and after singing - because he liked to sing, he was a singer at Heart Mountain -- not the George Izumi band, but when George left, one of the band members, Tets Bessho, he took it over. And so he sang as the lead singer for the Tets Bessho band, thought that was impressive. And so he would sing, but then later at these events, he would say things like, "I really support what you young people are doing," and in that way he was public about his support for community efforts. So that was kind of nice.

BN: Yes, it is. Most of the stories I've heard are not that. [Laughs]

JF: Yeah. He never tried to stop me from doing what I was doing, probably because he knew it would be a futile exercise.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.