<Begin Segment 24>

MN: Let me ask you about your time at Gardena High. When did you start teaching at Gardena High School?

MO: I went there in '63 and left in '75.

MN: When you started at Gardena High, were there any other Asian American teachers there?

MO: No, no. They had one Mexican American who taught Spanish.

MN: And then earlier you had shared with us how you started this Asian American Studies class.

MO: Yeah, yeah.

MN: Did you have any push back from the other teachers?

MO: Well, you got to remember, I'm the union rep. [Laughs] I'm the union rep, no one's going to give me any shit.

MN: So how did you go about, like, getting reading materials?

MO: A lot of it you had to create. Yeah, you had to create.

[Interruption]

MN: Now where did you say you got your reading material for these kids?

MO: Well, initially we just had pamphlets. I had to scrounge up some pamphlets. The good part about it was that the head of the social studies for all of Los Angeles was my company commander in the reserve, and he and his nephew and I had gone to college together. But he would scrounge up stuff and get money, and I started out, and I love teaching elective classes because you make up your own course to study, you go at a very leisurely pace. For instance, I taught a California history class, kids today that took that class said that's the best class they ever took. But it was also my favorite class. It's a great class to teach because the history of California is just fascinating. But yeah, I decided that we should have an Asian Studies class, so it was about the Chinese, the Japanese and Koreans. And there weren't many Koreans at that time in the U.S., and we get a lot of non-Asians in the class.

MN: I was kind of just assuming most of your students were Asians who took this class.

MO: No, no. Some would take it because I was the teacher, and others would take it because they had nothing better to do.

MN: You also got involved in this drug program.

MO: Yeah, it was called Come Together. In the late '60s there were seven Japanese American kids who overdosed on drugs, and there was a thought that we ought to do something about that, and the school was unwilling to do anything about it. And luckily we had an individual that worked for the city government named Carl Nobuyuki, and he said, "We got to do something." So we formed this group called Come Together, which was... we knew nothing about drugs, but we were going to offer counseling, or a situation in which we could talk with people about that. Eventually Warren Furutani became part of that group. Assemblyman Warren Furutani -- he's a former student of mine, by the way. And so I've known Warren not only as a high school student, but all throughout his rather tumultuous career as a member of the board and all kinds of things. And I knew his father Jack. Jack was a bit radical. [Laughs]

MN: Now, this Come Together program, how was the Japanese American community in general dealing with the drug problems?

MO: They weren't. It was denial. "My kid didn't die of an overdose of drugs," "My kid didn't commit suicide." Yeah, that's what it was. But that's typical. You can follow that pattern in any community, but in the Japanese community it was well-defined.

MN: I think even in the obituaries in the Rafu they didn't say "drug overdose."

MO: I don't think in any obituary they do that. I mean, not one that's written by the mortuary. Maybe the news columnist is writing an obituary, they're gonna say this rock star died of a drug overdose.

MN: Did this Come Together program eventually become the Asian American Drug Abuse program?

MO: It might have, because since we pretty much resolved the issue about drugs, although drugs were prevalent in high schools at that time and probably still are. But they didn't need my presence there. They would call on me occasionally to come and talk to a group. And then in '75 my wife got transferred to San Fernando so we moved.

MN: Can you share with us your experience serving on the L.A. Unified Book Committee?

MO: Well, Bob Kiskadden was head of the social studies, and as I say, my commanding officer in reserves. And so I get a lot of these perks. Hey, social studies teachers are going here, "Mas, you want to come?" We took trips to various places. And then, "How'd you like to get out of class every so often?" Because I worked downtown for a while and I'd see 'em there. And I didn't like working downtown. Bill Johnson was a friend of mine who was the superintendent, and he'd ask me to work downtown, and I hated working down there. It seemed like everyone was just so worried about their jobs. And it would revolt me because Bill Johnson loved brown suits, and suddenly everyone down there wore a brown suit. The hierarchy in public education is abominable. And here I'm the union guy, and I see all of this crap, and it's really perturbing me. Well, it's more than perturbing. So anyway, I get on the Book Committee, and we're going through all the books that are offered, the publishers have sent them. And I'm looking through this American government, they have two pages on what happened to us, and it's supposed to be taught in every government class. But it's also the last unit that's supposed to be taught. So a lot of people take American government, the teacher never gets there. But our story is there, pictures are there. The three Supreme Court cases are covered. And I look at the history books, and none of them have what happened to me during World War II. And I'm discussing it with my colleagues that are on this book selection committee, and we decided we're not going to order any books this year. L.A. Unified, big book purchaser. So this one little person, me, next year I'm on the Book Committee, all these books, lo and behold, every one of them has my story of what happened to us in the history books. And that pleased me because we often hear that one person can make a difference, but we don't always personally experience it. Probably that's one of the things that my life -- eventually someone would have done it. It's not that it wasn't going to be done, but it eventually was going to be done. We did that with Black History Month and all that.

<End Segment 24> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.