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TI: So today is Saturday, July 5, 2008. We're in Denver at the JANM national conference, and we have John Tateishi here. I'm Tom Ikeda, I'm the interviewer, and on camera we have Dana Hoshide. So, John, I'm going to jump right in and really focus on redress. And so the first question is when did you first hear about the idea of redress for Japanese Americans?

JT: You know, in the '60s, I was at Berkeley, and I got wind of it through some people I knew on campus, Japanese Americans. They talked about reparations, there was this thing going on in Los Angeles. But it really didn't amount to much. I mean, this is in the latter part of the '60s, after the civil rights movement. And there was some talk going on on the street, mainly, street activists, guys like Warren Furutani, Alan Nishio, Ron Wakabayashi, a group called EO 9066. This is a, sort of a... I don't know if I'd call 'em left wing, but they were, they were the activists, the more radical group of Japanese Americans, young Japanese Americans, kind of the yellow power raised fists type. And they were talking about reparations. And that was really the first time I'd heard about it. And then I went to grad school, and after I had been in grad school for a while, went to England. Lived in England until '71, came back, and moved to -- my wife and I decided San Francisco. So we moved to San Francisco, and I would hear things every now and then about reparations. I was really interested in the issue and the topic, because it's something that, personally, I had an interest in. But there was no cohesive movement or discussion going on. It was all bits and pieces at the time.

TI: And so when you said you had an interest, I mean, interest in seeing it happen, or just interest in watching the process? What do you mean by interest?

JT: Oh, I definitely had an interest in seeing something happen. Some way to rectify the injustice of the camps. Because I was in Manzanar as a kid, and growing up after the war, I had to deal with all this crap that we had to deal with, the prejudice. Not from only our schoolmates, but teachers, and from adults, the kind of look you get from adults that really kind of burn your soul. And so I grew up feeling somewhere we need to do something, or I need to do something. "We" meaning me or my brothers and me, or my family, or the community.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.