<Begin Segment 11>

BF: I know that you also give a lot of credit to the vets...

TM: Oh.

BF: ...and their service during World War II as, very important.

TM: Well, yeah. That's the other leg of the three-legged stool. Without the vets' history, heroic stories, it would have been very difficult.

BF: Is that a reason why you, you got involved with the, one of your more recent activities?

TM: Oh, the mem --

BF: The memorial project?

TM: Right. I think so. I, when I was told that they were told by Congress, which, they made this decision, which I have to agree with. Congress, I guess, occasionally makes good decision. They wanted to de-emphasize the military aspect of it, or I guess, I don't know how they say it, but they didn't want another memorial, monu -- war monument. So that's one of the reasons they gave me, when they came to me, Frank -- Francis Sogi said that they were looking for non-vets to become members of the board because they were trying to, as you know, the "Go for Broke" group were primarily all vets, started this with Mike Masaoka. But they felt they would not be able to pass it through Congress, if it was not, the emphasis were not changed to Japanese American history. So when they told me that, I said, "Well, that's great." I would, if I serve a role as a non-vet, then so be it. So I got involved. And also it's an opportunity to tell the story, not the only way, but a very important physical, I don't know, monument for it. I don't know about forever, but for a long, long time, to tell the story. And that's, that in itself is not important, but it's a very important component of the necessity to continue to tell the story.

BF: Now this was a national effort, fund-raising effort, right?

TM: Right.

BF: And so you were part of the Seattle part or you were also part of the national board?

TM: The national board member.

BF: Okay, okay. I understand that the Seattle -- maybe I'm wrong, but I heard that the Seattle fund-raising part of it was very successful.

TM: Yes. The board and the subcommittee, I was on the fund-raising subcommittee. I forgot the name of it. We got together. And we'd been meeting every quarter in different cities, and that in itself is quite an experience because you meet the local people in Hawaii and Denver and San Diego. That's -- but anyway, one of those meetings, and I don't know where, but the committee got together and practically just threw a chart on the wall, and says, we got to raise 8.6. Hawaii take this much, southern Cal take this much, Seattle take this much. And at the end of the day, Seattle was assigned approximately $700,000 to raise. It just, it was a factor of Nikkeis. And then --

BF: So not everyone got, it wasn't distributed by just numbers or equal --

TM: No. And just to give you example, southern Cal, like Los Angeles, because of the population, should have had at least eight times that.

BF: Yeah.

TM: But we felt that well, you factored in things like they have other programs, they have other things. So, I can't remember the number, but LA should do 1.5 or something like that. Whatever. But when you think in terms of population, that's not fair because Seattle, Northwest, had to do 700,000. But we kind of all agreed to this. And so we came back to Seattle. And Cressie Nakagawa, who was co-chairing that fund-raising effort, we called him, and I asked him to come to Seattle because he also knew a lot of people here. And we had a meeting in a cocktail party in this room, oh, maybe two, three years ago. And locally, people like Tosh Okamoto, Peter Okada, (Jim) Turk Suzuki, who are all vets, were their spokesperson when it was before the, when it was being run by the "Go for Broke" group. So they were active. So I asked him to come and ask their friends. And lo and behold, Frank Sato and Bob Sato came because... and Bob was asking all these questions, after, Cressie is a very good, articulates well about the program. And Bob was asking a lot of these questions. So I says, "Well, he must be very interested." So Tosh and I took him to the side and says, "Okay, why don't you head the Seattle effort, the Northwest." And he says, "Well, let me think about it. I got some more questions." But he decided to take it on. And through his effort, he was the chair of the Northwest fund-raising effort. And they will now probably raise over 2 million dollars.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.