Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Bert Nakano Interview
Narrator: Bert Nakano
Interviewer: Larry Hashima
Location: University of California, Los Angeles
Date: September 13, 1997
Densho ID: denshovh-nbert-01-0004

<Begin Segment 4>

LH: And you mentioned earlier, too -- I mean, right at the beginning -- that it was really important for the Sansei to get involved. And you'd mentioned your son, who was a Sansei. So how else did the Sansei sort of really energize the movement?

BN: In fact, the Sansei were the whole LTPRO. They came from the 1960s, 1970s, early 1970, during the Vietnam War. They, you know, they had organizations, grassroots organizations, that were anti-war and they were for the African American Civil Rights movement. And all of these Sansei who were going to the university and fighting for ethnic, because of the African Americans, they were coming around with "black power "and "black is beautiful" and the Asians, because we were in camp -- Japanese Americans especially -- we weren't necessarily aggressive. We were like somebody said, like rape victims, you know, you didn't want to talk about it, they were ashamed because they were in camp. You can imagine walking through a column of M.P.s, how you gonna feel? You gonna feel like a prisoner or somebody that's not a part of the society. And then you go into camp and you have these guard towers, guns pointing down, and, you know, fences all around you. I mean, it makes you feel like you don't want to be Japanese American, because everybody in camp looks like you. So, you know, the whole psychology of the thing, it kind of broke down the Japanese American pride. And basically what it did was break up the, disperse the community to a point where you don't have a community, a united community. This was a hard part of redress struggle, to make them come out, to become pride, proud of themselves as Japanese Americans.

LH: Especially in someplace like Los Angeles, which is so spread out and dispersed. So what were some of the strategies that NCRR took in Los Angeles particularly to get that?

BN: We kind of went into a historical perspective of Japanese America. And in other words, we're saying, "It's not your fault, it's the majority community made you feel that way. But you as Japanese American can be proud, the fact that you had farmlands, you made desert bloom, you had railroads that you built, you built communities." Things like that we wanted them to understand why they should be proud of themselves. They shouldn't be ashamed. And we told them about the camps. The camps was not something that happened in aberration of history. It's a long, long history up to the camp. In other words, you had what, 500 anti-Asian legislation in California alone, and this kind of a prejudice and oppression by the majority community led to the camps. And that's the kind of rationale that we tried to bring out to the Japanese American community, and make them feel proud of themselves. Because the Sansei went through that, and the Sansei understands that and that's why they want their parents to feel pride, proud of themselves. And you know, the redress struggle really brought the family together, because the Sansei understood the Nisei, Nisei understood the Sansei. And that's how the whole redress struggle kind of galvanized the whole community.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.