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TI: Let's go back to the JACL. That you -- we talked about the district JACL meeting, where you educated them for two days. So what was the outcome of that meeting? This was March, 1974.

HM Okay. The guys that I thought we were going to have hundred percent support from, they didn't come through. They were either negative or they kept their mouth shut. And I was kinda surprised at that.

TI: Now, how did you figure out or think in terms of who would be supportive and who not? I mean, how would you figure this out?

HM: By looking at how they voted on Title II repeal.

TI: Okay.

HM: That for one. Because Title II repeal to me was indicative of how they felt about evacuation, whether they felt evacuation was justified. And if they felt evacuation was justified, they would vote for maintaining Title II and setting up these camps. And the guys that were opposed to it were really opposed to evacuation in essence because that represented the camps. So I had a knowledge of the Title II actions that were going on. The only people that really surprised me was Don Kazama who really fought hard to lobby those people to vote against the redress process. He had his own reasons. I didn't agree with him but --

TI: Did you ever talk to him about those?

HM: Yeah we used to have, we used to go out after the meetings and we used to argue the point.

TI: And what was his argument?

HM: Well, he says, "You're gonna do psychological damage to the Nikkei population." And I'm not that good of a psychologist. I've taken some psychology courses, but I wasn't able to fight him on that. But I found this to be the prevailing mode of feeling of a lot of the psychologists, Sam Shoji being the exception. He was a very strong supporter of redress. But Don was really anti-redress. And he was a pretty powerful influence in the district meetings. Him and Ellis, anyway, that's a husband and wife team. Edna was the wife. She was a supporter of redress. She counteracted the vote of Paul Ellis who was anti-redress. And I thought Paul would be totally for redress. I misjudged him entirely. But his wife negated his votes. In fact they were doing complete negation process all along the whole road to redress. Edna was a very well-educated person, she had background in comparative relations and things of this nature. And Paul was this minister type. But between the two, there was complete conflict in some of these different principles of what I felt about the Constitution anyway.

TI: So what was the outcome of that meeting?

HM: Well, they voted for supporting the redress plan. And they also supported having that presentation made to the National Board meeting, which was November of 1974.

TI: Now was that the intent, going back to the original memo that Cherry read at that meeting, and they're looking for sorta chapter feedback, was the expectation that it would sort of flow up this way? All the way through the chain?

HM: Well unfortunately Barry Matsumoto quit his job as the Washington DC rep for JACL. So all the stuff that he was trying to do went down the tube because the following person wasn't interested in doing anything.

TI: Okay, so the only way that it would get up there would have to have to go through the chapter.

HM: Yeah, chapter, district, and then to the national.

TI: Okay.

<End Segment 27> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.