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IM: So basically, you graduate college with a psychology degree, and you're talking about JACS and how you volunteered for that, and then you eventually, after graduation, come back to L.A. and work on, kind of, counseling, drug abuse issues. How did that, how did you start?

KM: You know, I was living at home, and I don't remember my first step, but I know that I went to some meetings, I think, and I met some people. And I feel like this is probably how I got into... oh, I met Merilynne Hamano who was at UCLA, but she was also doing some things. And then she invited me, I think, to come to the women's group meeting and picked me up, she lived in Silver Lake. So she picked me up, and that was actually very impactful because... I forgot to write that down. So I went to a meeting in the Crenshaw area, and there were like thirty women at this house, and I was like, whoa. You asked about women, this was all women, and these were women that were all involved. So I meet all these women and I said, "Wow, okay." And this was a women's group, and they're studying sisterhood, it's powerful. And so I get to know some of the women, and we go, one of the first things we did was, besides studying the book, was organize these skits about male chauvinism. And we'd go into Chino prison to perform. And I think we did performances somewhere else, but we created these skits and we'd do these performances, and it probably coincided with the time that I started to volunteer at the JACS office as well. But before that, I was going to these meetings around mental health. I think I meet Shinya Ono, I think, at that time. And I'm kind of debating whether to become a social worker, and I get hired by DPSS, actually, to be a first level bilingual Japanese. My Japanese was actually adequate to be that level of a social worker, and I get offered a job. And by that time, I am volunteering and I say, "No, I'm going to do this." My whole life is going to doing this JACS office, community, I'm not going to work in social work, that's it. So I do some things around education, we're checking out what's happening with young kids in some of the elementary schools, working with a couple of people. That doesn't quite take hold.

And then again with Merilynne, we're kind of looking into mental health and mental health training. I can't really remember if this is the same time that Shinya got a job at Resthaven, but they were doing some mental health work at Resthaven in the community. So we're talking about the role of mental health and thinking it was very western, how do we make it work for us as Japanese American? Because for many of us, sharing our feelings, and also confronting things is not what we do. So assertion training was one of the things that John Hatakeyama was doing. So Merilynne and I went to this training together. Every week we went to his office, and we were talking about how... what's the word? How different it is to be assertive as Japanese Americans, but it's something we needed to do. But it's kind of like not our culture. We don't really want to do that, but sometimes we have to do it. So had a lot of discussions and stuff like that about it. And then I started to get involved in the JACS office. And to get thrown into this area called Youth and Drugs Division, they had all these areas. They had Medical Division, and I can't remember the other one, but Youth and Drugs. And I thought, "I don't really know anything about youth or drugs." I mean, I'm a young person, but... especially drugs, I mean, the only thing I knew about drugs was a little bit of weed and a little bit of peyote, but nothing else.

So I'd meet these guys from the west side, people like Nick Nagatani, Greg Fukuda, Larry Iba, so different from me. And we'd start working with young people that are overdosing, or that "overdose," using drugs, we'd get calls from parents. "My daughter is gone," or whatever, we'd have people would go out running, looking for them. Then that was the summer, and I don't know if it was one month. I think that's wrong, but thirty-one young people overdosed that year? I can't believe it was one month, but it could have been. And it became a big thing because people were saying that they had heart attacks, and we said no. Heart attacks? No, not really. It was denial. So again, we were saying our community needs to confront, needs to be open, that we need to talk about this. Not everybody is doing well in school, there's a lot of reasons why. And so the JACS office along with, I think, the JACL, because they were right across the hall from the JACS office, and there were a lot of young people working there like Warren, Victor Shibata, Ron Wakabayashi, was sort of over that area, and Willie Fujinami. So they're working over there, and I think the idea started because of that. So the Asian Community Drug Offensive, I'm a little fuzzy on this because I was new. And the JACS board all kind of launched this offensive called the Asian Community Drug Offensive, because there was big press conference, and I remember dressing up and being told, taken over to the Horikawa restaurant where they had this press conference, and I didn't know anything. But somehow I was thrust into this situation where I was supposed to be part of this, help lead it. And the first press conference, actually, I didn't even know if I said anything or what, but this Asian Community Drug Offensive's role was to talk about the overproduction of drugs by Eli Lilly Company, and also to talk about the drug problem in the community, and to bring it out. So we had two things going on. A petition about the production, and we had a plan of talking about teach-ins to bring our community and start talking about why we have a drug problem. So that was what I was working on and working, one of the main things I did.

And then with Nick, Greg and Larry, we were looking at why were so many people overdosing, what was the problem? And one of the things we said, besides the identity, was the communication in the family. So we said, "Let's start a parents group." And I don't know what we were thinking, but again, the philosophy of the JACS office, and we thought we could do anything. We'd serve the people, relate, educate, organize and mobilize. So I don't know how we figured this out, but we decided that we were going to start a parents group. And somehow we had the support of the social workers that were at USC, four or five of them. And we had been working some with Amy Mass, but not much, but she was somehow in the picture. So she was like the mentor person. So we started having these meetings in about '71, '72, in Senshin Buddhist Temple, because George Abe was involved with us. He said, "Oh, we could use Senshin, we could meet there." So we reached out to the parents and to the young people. We thought we'd get the kids, too, the kids fell out, the parents stayed. So we had these groups that had social workers leading them, discussion groups about family communication. Shinya led a Japanese-speaking group, and then we'd all get together afterwards and talk about... I don't even know, we would all get to come back, assemble, talk together about... and it was really quite good. And we met every week, and people would come, and at the end of a session, we'd have a huge potluck, and even my father participated, I don't know why. He came to the Japanese-speaking group. My father is a curious guy, so he came to the Japanese-speaking group. Then we'd have these potlucks, and at the first potluck we had, we had someone playing the flute, my father did shigin, Reverend Kodani was starting the taiko, so they played the taiko. It was just very homey. So that was kind of... I think, actually, a very good example of what a project like that could be. Created a little community of people. And we were employing mental health techniques in the small groups. They were having these discussions and talking to people, sharing what they felt. It was all, of course, private, confidential. But yeah, so that was one of the first projects that I worked on along with the Community Drug Offensive, all about drugs.

<End Segment 25> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.