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TI: So I'm going to switch gears a little bit. So earlier we had talked about, around this time was when you also took that trip to Topaz with your family. And so a lot's going on in your life, I mean, your law school, you're working with immigrant issues, you're forming coalitions with other ethnic groups, and you're also now learning a little bit more about your history or your family's history. Talk about some of the connections that are going through your mind now in terms of things that happened to your parents and your grandparents, and some of the issues that you're dealing with today. What are some connections that you're starting to make at this time?

RK: Well, I think one of the things that started to occur to me -- and I think it kind of was a slow process of kind of seeing how some of the new immigrant Korean coworkers I had just had difficulties or barriers. And it kind of occurred to me that those barriers were there for my grandparents and parents as well. And then in working with the other kind of ethnic organizations and hearing some of the issues that they're facing, and then seeing, as we started the Asian Law Alliances, some of the individual clients and some of the concerns they had. I remember there was this incident when we were first starting out the Asian Law Alliance involving a Japanese foreign student that lived in Hollister, which is kind of south of here, and I guess he was in a class, a history class, and his history teacher had this Pearl Harbor speech that he had that he talked about. And he proceeded to talk about Pearl Harbor, and then started to use "Jap" and other derogatory terms. And the student was very upset about it. And so the San Benito JACL kind of called north to the San Jose JACL for help. And so as it was, since we were sitting in the JACL office, then we took the call, and eventually a bunch of us from the Asian Law Alliance that was starting, made a lot of trips down to San Benito and heard about how the student felt so isolated and how, how that Pearl Harbor speech had impacted him directly. His English wasn't the greatest, so one of our, one of our staff members was bilingual, so he would go down with us and try to talk to the guy and try to make him more comfortable. I remember that experience of being involved with that issue was something that was special to me in terms of seeing how we could offer some assistance to a community or to some folks who felt like they were really isolated down there and needed some help.

TI: And as you, during this time, as you learned more about, I guess, maybe the history of what happened to Japanese Americans, were there certain things that really, especially with your legal training, really came to the forefront as important for other people to know about what happened in terms of the experience? I mean, we talk about, oftentimes the community talks about the suffering, and oftentimes they say the injustice. But with your legal background, what does that mean to you? When you think about the injustice or what happened to our community, what comes to mind in terms of what was wrong with that?

RK: Well, I guess the thing is that you would hope that people would have the right to individual determination if they did something wrong or not wrong, and that's the way it's supposed to be instead of en masse being deemed enemies, or "alien enemies" or what have you. So to me, the key point was that the experience that our community felt or suffered under was something that shouldn't happen to others. So when Gulf War number one occurred, I remember there was a group of us from both the Asian Law Alliance, the Nihonmachi Outreach Committee, the Japanese American Citizens League and other groups who kind of came together and had a, kind of a solidarity press conference with Arab Americans and others. Same thing was true after 9/11 and some of the, during the next Gulf War, that there's been those kind of efforts. And I can remember being at a, on a panel down at Santa Cruz. I think it was after Gulf War number one, and you know there were Arab Americans and others, and my part was kind of to talk about how the internment of Japanese Americans, and how it occurred and what the impact was, and then the other members of the panel were speaking about how they have felt after the war had started and how they felt that they were being targeted by the FBI or being, they were under suspicion. And so I think that panel discussion was a very lively one where people from Santa Cruz were there listening, and I think they got a lot out of it as well as I did, just listening in the first person to some Arab Americans in terms of some of the issues and concerns they felt at that time when the war had broken out in the Gulf.

TI: And is the connection, what you said earlier, was the sense of being, I guess, profiled. Because you're part of a group, you're profiled or you're targeted in a way that, not because of anything you did as an individual, but because of being part of a group? Is that the context that you set up when you do this?

RK: Right. I mean, so again, it's that you're guilty by your, by the color of your skin or your ancestry instead of what you did as an individual.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.