<Begin Segment 34>

TI: There was another event I wanted, I just wanted to ask you about, and that was, in 2002, the reenactment. That you did something in Watsonville that I had never heard anyone else do. Can you talk about that and how that came about?

MH: Well, when I was watching... I was asked to a meeting at the public library, and they wanted to do something about Day of Remembrance, and I said, "Okay, what?" And they said, "What about speakers?" And I go, "Speakers? Okay, we can have speakers. We'll have a dozen people there, eleven of them will be Japanese Americans, and then the other will be the librarian." "What about a book display?" I go, "Book display? We just walk by book displays." Then I thought about, you know, there's that Greyhound bus that comes into camp, and these people get out of the bus. I said, "You know, those people have stories to tell. Why don't we tell it?" And that's how it started. We gathered stories and said, "Let's reenact it." We got the street, same street where we had to evacuate. So I asked a few friends what they thought about it, and they jumped on it. And then all of a sudden, we had -- I'm not kidding -- hundreds of people involved in one capacity or another. And it took eighteen months of planning, but we, we pulled it off. And Eric Saul came, and Rudy Tokiwa came, Harry Honda came and such. And they said, "Well done." And if they said it was well done, arigato, thank you. But it was, we could never do that again.

TI: Well, I think you should be commended for doing things like that. Not only the reenactment, but earlier the, the graduation ceremony.

MH: We don't, the point was to tell the non-Nikkei about what happened. We know the story, we need to get the story out to others, that their constitutional rights could be trampled.

<End Segment 34> - Copyright ©2008 Densho and the Watsonville - Santa Cruz JACL. All Rights Reserved.