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HM: So we decided to go and expose this information to Blaine Methodist. And then Sam Shoji, being president of JACL said, "Hey, I want you to present it to St. Peters. And I could get you on the calendar." So we started doing this stuff. And we started going, and then we decided hey, we're gonna have to get the Nikkeijinkai involved in this thing. So we said okay Ken, you make the translations on this thing --

TI: This is Ken Nakano, that you're talking about?

HM: Yeah. And so he agreed to it and so we presented it to the Nikkeijinkai. And the first meeting we had with them, they didn't know what to think about it. They were kind of lost. For one thing we were talking about going after the U.S. Government [Laughs] and man, that really caused them to think twice, or three times. But after we got the exposure and information to them -- and then the second time we had to explain all the reasoning behind it. They started to accept the reasoning process that we went through. And I think about the third meeting they agreed to support us.

TI: So pretty much were all these community groups in support of what you were talking about?

HM: Yeah, Every one of them eventually supported us. Well, the one meeting that we had with the Nisei Vets was a kind of a excited meeting, but we never anticipated that type of excitement.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.