<Begin Segment 18>

TI: So all these events happened, and then that brings us to, and you just started getting into it, there was a meeting chaired by Cherry Kinoshita, and we're now in 1975 --

HM: No '73.

TI: Seventy-three, I'm sorry. Summer of '73, a JACL meeting that you attended. Let's pick it up there. Why don't you talk about that?

HM: Well, Tomio Moriguchi was the president of the JACL before Ben Nakagawa, and this was in 1972 time period. And that's when Chuck was working on the Japanese Cultural Center, and he needed support politically, so he -- well to go backwards even a little bit better. Chuck's son is the same age as my son, and their stature was very similar. And they were good friends and they used to work out at the Seattle Dojo. And, well, Chuck's family is a real judo family and Shuzo is a black belt eighth grader or ninth grader, somewhere way up there. And so Chuck's family had a lot to do with the judo effort. And so Chuck was into judo and he used to help Shuzo occasionally train the young kids. And since our sons were involved in the thing, Chuck and I used to talk to each other about different things. And he talked to me about this cultural center. And I thought gee, this is a very ambitious program. And one of the things that he wanted to find out was, he was trying to write a whole bunch of justifications for the cultural center and why we needed it. And one of the things that I mentioned to him was the fact that they took away all the martial arts and the relative Japanese cultural activities during the war. And so he says, well -- we got into a long conversation. And I had been studying about all the losses and all the fact that they took all the judo instructors and put 'em into Santa Fe, New Mexico and Missoula, Montana. And took all the kendo instructors, except my dad was obsolete kendo instructor so I guess they didn't take him. But they took a lot of the martial arts people. And I said this is a method that they used to kind of break down the whole martial arts and cultural background of Nikkei Americans. So he said, "Well, here's what I want to do" -- so he described some of the things he wanted to do. He wanted to know where the population was going in terms of the Japanese American population in the Seattle area. Well, I had already researched that area about where the, centrally the population was because I was trying to get some idea as to what was happening to the economics, the thing after World War II. So I was, I had access to the SMA... SMAS data. Statistical Metropolitan Area data. And so I volunteered to help him on this thing. And in terms of determining the center of the Japanese American population, and where centrally it should be located if we were going to have this kind of cultural center. So I got involved with him because of the previous studies I had done in this evacuation.

TI: Because now other people in the community recognized that you were this repository of information data.

HM: Not really. They didn't know what I was doing basically.

TI: Well, but then Chuck...

HM: Chuck finally realized --

TI: ...knew enough to --

HM: Here's Henry doing all this funny stuff. And so we conglomerated the information together and he put it into his proposal. And he thought he had all the skids greased. And so this was a time when he made the presentations at the JACL meeting. And Tomio had encouraged us to show up at the meeting and Tomio said that he would help us in the EEO action against Boeing and some of these other things that unfortunately JACL isn't that rigorous in their capabilities, so some of it didn't go through. But anyway, this is where Chuck and I kind of started assembling our energies together. And at that time Ken Nakano was supporting Chuck because of his Japanese language capability. He was gonna approach the Nikkeijinkai and other organizations. So we became a kind of informal network of cooperation. But Chuck's activities went to naught because they had a competitive proposal put in by another organization here in Seattle Nikkei community. It was a very unfortunate experience for him.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.