Densho Digital Archive - Clifford Uyeda Interview (denshovh-uclifford-01-0002)

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FC: Why did, why did you become president of JACL?

CU: That was purely by accident because I received a call from Ed Yamamoto, who was formerly from Seattle -- not Seattle, but Washington state, and he said, "Would you take, become a chairman of the National JACL Redress Committee?" And I said, "No." I said, "First of all, I was not even in camp. I know very little about the camp so I should not be the chair." And he called me, kept calling me over and over again, and he said, "The reason why I'm calling is because when we had the JACL national board meeting, and you had just completed" -- which was in 1977 -- "The Iva Toguri or the Tokyo Rose campaign." And that was, that took two years. And he said, "JACL considered redress as a priority item at the 1970 convention when Edison Uno brought up the subject." But he said, "Here it was, seven years has gone by and nothing has happened. So since at least you have some experience in running a national campaign, would you take over the redress campaign and see what you could do with it?" I still thought that I was not the one to be chair, because after all, I was not living on the West Coast throughout the war. Since 1936 until 1953, I was not on the West Coast, so I felt that I should not be the person. But then after he kept calling me over and over again, and I said to myself, "Well, at least one thing I think I could do is that I could nationalize the campaign and get it started and then somebody else could take over. So I accepted the position of a redress chair in 1977. And then the first thing I did was to send out questionnaires to find out, do the Niseis really want redress? And however, I did mention in my, a questionnaire that I sent, that, "Give me your real frank opinion: should we go for redress or should we not?" I said, "I will not use your name, so don't be afraid to write whatever you, that comes to your mind. I would only use your age and your sex, that's all."

[Interruption]

CU: The answers I got was a complete surprise to me because so many of so-called leaders of the Japanese American community were not for redress, they were against it. And their reasoning was exactly what Hayakawa was to say later: that, "It is a shame to be asking for handouts from the government, that we should let the bygones be bygones, and we're doing pretty well now. We don't want to stir up any more animosity toward the Japanese Americans." So they said, "Forget about it." That was the... and it was, as I said, it came as such a surprise to me, and I felt that before we could really go for redress, first of all, we have to educate the Niseis more than, you can't expect the Americans to understand us if the Nisei really felt that way. So as redress chair... I had a weekly, very short, not a column, not even a column in --

[Interruption]

FC: So the questionnaire was anonymous. You promised to honor their anonymity. You said the, some old-time leaders of the community... were these leaders of the JACL that were opposed to redress?

CU: Yes, I would say some were, very much of a leader, and they were completely opposed to it. And I was so surprised with this that I, I just, I wondered why I was even the committee chair. But I thought, well, then I thought what we need to do was to educate the Nisei more than the American public at the beginning, so I started the weekly column, short, very short column in the PC, thirty-five came out. It was every week for thirty-five until the following convention time, and I wrote thirty-four and Ray Okamura wrote one, so we had thirty-five articles in the PC saying why we should go for redress. And then we also decided at that time that before the convention, that we should do two things, a few other things. One was to come out with the booklet on why we think we should go for redress, and that was that little pamphlet that possibly you saw: "Japanese American Incarceration: the Case for Redress." We came up with that. And then we felt that we need to have, at the very beginning of the convention at Salt Lake City, which was the 1978 convention, that we'll have a workshop on redress to really have everything out so that we could talk about it. And at that convention, I also felt that for the first time in its history, thought it would be nice to have all the four Supreme Court cases, Nisei cases, people to be there. I asked Gordon Hirabayashi and he said, sure, he would be there. Min Yasui said he will be there, Fred Korematsu said no, he would not want to be there. Mitsuye Endo, I called her, and she said no, she didn't want to be there. So two of the four showed up at the convention. And we rehashed the reason why we thought redress should be taken. And also it was interesting because when we, we also had to write the redress proposal. But that was also done after the convention, when I became president. And when I, I became a president, mainly they thought I became president mainly to start the redress campaign, that was all, no other reason. I didn't have any experience in -- I remember being called aside by Bill Hosokawa later and he said, "Did you know," he said, "you're the first person ever elected to be a president, national president of the JACL who has not even held a position, official position in the chapter level?"