<Begin Segment 20>

HM: So, well Chuck and I at that point -- on the redress process, when I indicated hey, I'm thinking about the thing... and this was now in '73. And after these exposure to the Caucasian groups, I was getting kind of -- started feeling well, maybe this is a possibility. And when they had the JACL meeting in '73 -- I had attended several meetings prior to that. And Ben Nakagawa was the president in '73 and he went on summer vacation. And he put Cherry Kinoshita in charge of that meeting. And Cherry read a letter from Barry Matsumoto who was the Washington JACL representative and he indicated that although the reparations subject has come up in various national conventions, nothing was done, but he wanted to ferret out ideas from the different chapters to see if we could get a coordinated activity going on. So that was a letter that she read, and she asked if anybody wanted to volunteer for this thing. So by that time I had a lot of these flip charts already made because I had already made these presentations previously and that's the media I was using. And I decided --

TI: At this point had you formed an opinion about reparations and what should be done in terms of...?

HM: Yeah. I had, for the ones that I had intended to use for the Nikkei one, I did have the reparation things in there. The other ones were more -- for the students they were more historical. They showed the losses, they showed what psychologically had been done to us and things of this nature. And I talked about things like what happens to prisoners of war for their lost salaries and damages and so forth. But I didn't prepare money values for the reparations thing like I did for the ones I intended for the Japanese Americans. So...

TI: So at this point, at this first meeting, were you a member of the JACL?

HM: Yeah, I was a member because Tomio induced us to become members because he said -- and Tom Koizumi decided we're going to try to empower the JACL and make it a progressive organization. And Tom had a lot of data processing background. This was his business management role. And he felt that the way that JACL was running their business, especially out of the national headquarters was so obsolete that he wanted to make complete revamp and change of the thing. So Tomio induced us to join, and we joined en masse.

TI: So you joined the year before, in 1972?

HM: Yeah, yeah so we joined in a big bunch. And we started attending the meetings and started to become active in the proposition.

TI: Okay, so then at this summer of '73 meeting, Cherry read this letter from Barry about reparations and so you volunteered to look into it?

HM: Yeah. Well, I already had the material so I figured well, I'm gonna put this in a form and I'll see if I can use this chapter as a start off point, and maybe we could do something with it. And that was my intent.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.