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KO: You know, I'm circling around, but I was afraid I was going to forget that one of the strategies of the ORA towards the end -- I'm zooming ahead, okay -- was to find the "unknowns", the people that the ORA could not find. And, of course that was part of their mission, too. So I'm estimating that there were at least 3,500, maybe more, of people in the "unknowns" of which the ORA issued a publication, a little booklet with all their names and last known locations, that kind of thing, and distributed it to key people in the community. It was amazing that the Rafu Shimpo printed all those names. I have the cutouts of the Rafu Shimpo, they used whole page, half page, for, it seemed like, weeks on end, for the most bang for getting those names put out there. And through your efforts at the ORA as well as everybody else's efforts to try to locate people, I think that, at the end, there were only twelve hundred and fifty "unknowns". Which is unfortunate, but we understand. Starting with over, well, 120,000 or more, trying to find them, etcetera.

Okay, I know I'm skipping around, but the "unknowns", oh my gosh, Sox Kitashima. This is a story... I think I put it in the NCRR book, many people have heard this story. But she was such a workhorse. She worked every angle, she went out to talk to so many people. Of course she called the ORA every single day, and everybody there knew her so well. She was that kind of sparkly... she was a bubbly woman with high energy. And she was not a young woman at the start of all this, too, but she was a really great role model for me, too, as well as everybody else at NCRR. She was in NCRR and JACL, so she wore two hats, and did it well. But she located a person who had not applied for redress and reparations, and it may have been through your office that she got these names directly. And he, unfortunately, was imprisoned. He was, oh my gosh, the one by... was he in Folsom, or was he in... some place about an hour or two away from where she lived, okay, and I can't remember the exact location. But she made Jeff Adachi, who was a young community activist and attorney at that time, drive her -- because she wasn't going to drive that far -- down to the prison, get her in to visit the person, and help him apply for redress and reparations. And I think as the story goes, he didn't feel he deserved it, and she and Jeff were able to convince him that he needed to apply, and that was the length to which Sox would go. And so I think that's a wonderful story about how people, you know, really pounded the streets to find people to get the redress and reparations. And so where were we? [Laughs] Circling back to where we started.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2020 Emi Kuboyama. All Rights Reserved.