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LH: Well, sort of jumping off from that point, then talking about the community in sort of moving the leaders, let's talk a little about the lobbying trip that NCRR put together.

BN: We got criticized for sending a lobbying trip, and so-called people in the "beltway," they said that, "Hey, you do, you don't lobby from California to people like, people in Iowa, and, you know, in Montana or down south. You gotta have the constituents go up there and talk to 'em. You gotta know somebody." I said, "We don't believe that." We felt that the gut feeling of the Niseis going up there and telling their story to the Congressmen, whoever they were, they gonna respond because they're human, they understand the human suffering. And when they, the Niseis went up there and talked about their own experience, we had the Congressmen in tears. I mean it was different, it's like Rudy Tokiwa, when we send him to Chairperson Bennett of the Armed Services Committee, Bennett wasn't for redress. He was against it to begin with. But we, when we sent the 442 boys over there to see him, he met them and said that, "Hey, I'm not gonna vote for your bill, but you come in." By the time they got through with him when he went out, "I'll support your bill." That's the kind of influence that we felt was necessary, they had to know because a lot of people didn't know about the camps and what hardships these people went through and when they heard these, you know, Japanese Americans talking about their experience it touched them, no doubt. I have no doubt in my mind. Especially this is the, in the history of the United States, the largest, largest Asian contingent ever to lobby in Congress. Can you imagine, 120 people, teams of four or five walking around all the halls of Congress. People were thinking, "Hey, the Japs invaded here," or something, you know? But we were all over the hall and when we went to lunch, we went and used the congressional lunch room. They saw so many Asians for the first time and it was -- our issue became known because of that. People was asking, "What they doing here? Oh, these guys are for that HR442." And, "What's that?" And that's how information also got around.

So the criticism about people, constituency, seeing the... of course it's good if you had that, but we had, we knew number one, the Lutheran church, Reverend Paul Nakamura, who was the, who gave the Convocation last night, he's from Hawaii. His wife is my Japanese schoolteacher's daughter. And we got him involved, and he turned the whole Lutheran church for redress. And you're talking about white folks. All in the Midwest and their newsletter going around, it was fantastic. We had people going into the Lutheran, knowing that he's a Lutheran. We had people going in talking about the Reverend Paul went there, too. I mean, things like that, we mapped out everything. And who did all this groundwork? Sansei. They had the know-how, they had the tools to do it. And they matched up all these people, like Claude Pepper, who was a champion of the elderly. We sent elderly people there and make sure that they talk about those things. I mean, we matched people according to their background. It was pretty effective. And when they voted in September of 1987, just three months after we took our lobbying trip in July, we went back for the count and we made sure that Rudy would be sitting in the disabled vet area. And Bennett came walking in, he had four House of Representatives, I think it was four. And he's a senior one from Florida, so whichever way he voted, everybody else is gonna vote the same way. And he looked up and it reminded him he has to vote for, because Rudy was there. You know, things like that, I mean, it was, to me it was an effective lobbying trip because we had Niseis all dedicated. They all paid their way, paid the hotel, took time off from work and that's what a grassroots organization can do.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.