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BN: And then afterwards, NCRR is continuing to organize the Days of Remembrance, support the hearings of the various bills and so forth. NCRR kind of, was sort of known for also supporting other community struggles, and was that something that was, early on you were doing and talking about?

KM: Yeah. I think whenever it came up, we were pretty... we didn't look for it, but if things came to us, we responded. Like Hopi Navajo support. And early on, we had them at the DOR, we did a fundraiser film showing of Broken Rainbow or Broken Arrow? One of those titles. And the theater was filled, the Japan-America Theater, so that takes a lot to fill it. But I was always amazed at the response of our community to things like that, support for that event and also later on, support for minorities from Japan. A lot of interest in those kinds of things, so that was good. But I just want to backtrack a little bit to say that I think one of the biggest things that NCRR did, which we're probably looking at now, was Black reparations, because we did so much outreach. We very fortunately, Duane Kubo quickly got the hearing tapes and edited it down. So we had something, I think it was really an hour and a half, which was quite long, but we had the Beta tapes. And we took those... I was on the outreach committee, so I had a list of all the places we took it. I don't know where that list is now, but we took it to every place we could. And people wanted it, like Karen (Ishizuka) was teaching at USC, she took it to her class. But the churches, the communities, everywhere, and we took those tapes. And I think the thing that I'm most proud of is that we really demonstrated intergenerational organizing. So it's kind of like we had these Nisei guys carrying monitors, because we didn't have, the screens were huge. So they carried monitors, and we had Takashi Fujii with all his cables from Visual Communications that we needed to connect everything, and the deck, and spoke together, the Nisei men and women, and Frank Emi, all those guys are carrying stuff. And we were speaking and presenting to these senior citizen group, whatever it might be, and we did a lot of that. They always shared their experiences and we would say what the campaign was about, what we're trying to do. It worked out really well, but we were constantly doing that long list of outreach.

BN: What other types of groups were you speaking to?

KM: Churches. I remember the Monterey Park senior citizens groups in West L.A. It's whatever group we could get. But the issue was getting, of course, a lot of awareness, so it wasn't that hard to set up these different speaking things. But our main motive was to get the other Nisei to speak, too, and the audience to hear these testimonies and to feel that this is a valid thing to talk about and to support it.

BN: And then were you asking the audience to do anything in particular? Contribute, write letters?

KM: At different times, it was different things. So, I mean, we had the Dymally Bill initially. And then sometimes we were sending people to visit. We had a small lobbying group, so we were doing fundraising, to donate. We did a lot of letter writing, of course, throughout the years. We did telegramming, we had to raise money for telegrams. We did a lot of mailouts, a lot of mailouts, bulk mail. But those were good opportunities for us to get together and talk, so those were great organizing times for NCRR. We did a lot of things democratically. We had general meetings once a month, we had CC meetings once a month in the evening, and people that were working in the daytime could come at night, the working people, and participate. Everything was open, all decisions. I know that I was accused of being a "process person," but Alan and I would fight a lot, because he'd be like, "We got to move this along." "Wait, let's hear what people have to say." And so it would take longer, but I always felt that that was more important than maybe making the decision, so we bumped heads a lot during those days.

BN: Was there much interaction between your L.A. group and the NCRRs and the Bay Area and elsewhere?

KM: Yeah. I don't know if I was in all of those meetings, but we had statewide steering committees. So we would meet sometimes here, sometimes up there, I was at a couple up there. I don't know if we ever met mid-point. So there were those steering committee meetings. I don't think I was always at all of those because we had different leadership throughout the years of NCRR, right? I mean, I was co-chair with Alan towards the end of the '80s during the time that we were lobbying in D.C., the big delegation, and then the time that everything (bills) was starting to pass, and we had a lot of press conferences and stuff like that up until the ten-year anniversary in 1990. But prior to that, we had a lot of different co-chairs. Always women, men, older, younger, hopefully. So June Kizu, May Love, different combinations of people were co-chairs throughout the years.

BN: Were you involved with the Dymally Bill at all?

KM: You mean creating that? You know, I remember it. And so much was discussed in the meetings, I don't know how much was discussed outside the meetings. And we had those whole phone tree, whenever a decision had to be made, we all had this long list of, you're calling three people. And we tried to get people's opinion and then bring it back up again, stuff like that. But we talked a lot about... there was a lot of process. When we decided to support the anti-apartheid struggle, we had a lot of discussion. And I do have to say, though, because I was aware of the league, and there were a number of people in the league that were in NCRR, that sometimes I felt some views were being pushed, and maybe that's why I kind of said, "Let's hear other people." Because I felt, wait a minute, we're not hearing, let's hear people that don't agree, loaded up with everybody that supports it, because it was kind of important that the Nisei speak that didn't really, that might question it. And they did. Jim would often say, too, it's got to fit within our priorities of reparations, and he was very clear about that. And then some of the Nisei would ask questions, but eventually people would actually support, after much discussion. The only issue that people didn't support, I think, and the comfort women was a difficult issue, that came later.

BN: Oh, really? Okay, I'll ask you about that later. What was the rough Nisei-Sansei kind of...

KM: Breakdown?

BN: Breakdown, more or less? I always viewed it as largely Sansei, but there were quite a few Nisei.

KM: I don't think they were a majority, though. They always had a significant number, but it probably was majority Sansei. However, of course, it was Bert and Lillian, although Lillian's a Sansei, right?

BN: But Nisei age.

KM: Yeah, it was majority Sansei and a handful of Nisei. Like Frank Emi didn't come into NCRR 'til later, because I think he was still very hesitant to come out as a draft resister. And so he came to NCRR because some of our folks, I think Merilynne and another woman named Sandee Suzuki, went to a program at Cal State on Heart Mountain. And they met him and they talked to him, and I think he felt like, oh, maybe NCRR is the kind of group that he could relate to. And then he came to our meeting, they invited him. That's how he became a part of NCRR, and that's how we learned about draft resisters. So I don't think we had a lot of Nisei, actually, at the beginning a handful, the Jim Saito. And then Tom Shiroishi's a truck driver, Shiroishi, was a truck driver, so he couldn't always make it. Says, "Is there a meeting tonight?" and they'd come. He'd always check to see.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.