<Begin Segment 23>

FA: Where did you go?

SS: I came back to Seattle to be near my sister and her family and that's when I first met Henry Miyatake.

FA: Were you retired by this time?

SS: Yeah, when I came back to Seattle I had retired.

FA: You met Henry. Henry had this great idea? What do you recall, what can you recall of your first meeting with Henry?

SS: Gosh, I don't know. But anyway, he was quite enthusiastic about doing something about getting some money from the government for our imprisonment. And I was glad to see Henry doing that. That someone was doing it. Because I know the kind of work that involved. Because as you know, the use of the word "Jap" -- I was the one that did the most to stop that - and I knew how much effort that took.

FA: Why were you glad that Henry was proposing reparations from the government?

SS: Well, because I figured somebody has got to start it and he was quite a bit younger then, than he is today. Henry had the drive, he had the determination. He was going to do something about it. So when Henry explained that to me -- I went to a JACL meeting one day, I remember. That was the first time I went back to a JACL meeting.

FA: This was about 1974 or 1975?

SS: About 1970, I guess, I came back.

FA: 1970, wow.

SS: And he was, he was all steamed up. He wanted to do something out it. And that day, the first time I went back to JACL, I looked up on the wall and on the wall and they had pasted a big copy of the disgusting article by...

FA: S.I. Hayakawa?

SS: Not S.I. Hayakawa. The guy who likes to call himself Mr. Moses.

FA: Mike Masaoka.

SS: Mike Masaoka. Right. Mike Masaoka's JACL creed. That was right on the wall there and that disgusted me and so I stood up and I asked all the people who were there, I said, "This thing up here disgusts me. I want to tear it off the wall." I said, "Are there any people here who would object to that being done?" And no hands went up, so I went up and I torn the damn thing off the wall.

FA: No, Shosuke, you didn't. [Laughs]

SS: [Laughs] Yeah, I did.

FA: What did you object to in the JACL creed?

SS: That is the most disgusting confession or declaration of inferiority that I've ever seen and absolutely no reason whatsoever to make such a statement as a human being. You're equal to everybody else in this country, at least in theory, so why not stick with that? And that JACL creed, my God. If you...

FA: J stands for Justice, A stands for Americanism, C stands for citizenship, L stands for loyalty.

SS: Well, I'll tell you. For me that stands for another thing -- the JACL -- I consider that a perfect name for 'Jackal.' So I've called them the 'Jackals' ever since. JACL.

FA: Well, so you made a big splash at your first JACL meeting. How, what did Henry then ask you to do for the redress campaign? What role did you come to play with the redress?

SS: Well, it just... it sort of automatically fell to my role to write what we had to put down in print. And so when I, when Henry told me what he wanted to do, I said, "I think you should do that, Henry," and I said, "I'll help you." And I've long looked at that as being essentially Henry's idea and that I was really trying to help him. And the way I look at it to this day. If he hadn't been so steamed up and willing to do something about it and I knew he needed help: I was the only one available around there who had any writing experience. In the years I worked for Standard and Poor's, I was in a job called re-write analyst. In effect, I was an editor of that service, but I was never really paid for it. But it gave me, I did get an unexpected plus. I got to know all the analysts.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.