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JT: And so then I got involved with reparations, I got to know Edison really well. And Edison's the one who told me, "If it's going to happen, it's going to happen in the JACL. All this other stuff is fine, but it's only gonna happen in the JACL, that's where it going to start." And then I got to know Clifford Uyeda, who was also a community activist, really a wonderful, wonderful man. And Clifford really distrusted the organization. He had been involved in several issues that were relevant to the JACL, but would not get involved with the organization. The most telling was when he led the campaign to get an exoneration for Iva Toguri for her conviction as Tokyo Rose. Which in itself was really absurd, but, you know, it was a conviction. And so Clifford led this campaign, and the JACL national board invited him to come and do a presentation. And he did, and then they said, "We'd like to have the JACL involved in this campaign," and Clifford said, "No, absolutely not. This is an independent campaign." He didn't trust the JACL. I had very similar feelings, but I joined him on the Iva Toguri campaign, joined him on the whole protest of the Sierra Club boycotting J-town in San Francisco. And so we crossed paths at different points. And I was running the Northern Cal District program, the redress program, and I did this survey. I decided, I started going on media, doing television and radio. And the question always came up... or the comment and question about, "I understand," the hosts would say, "I understand that a lot of Japanese Americans are opposed to this, this reparations thing." I said, "Oh, no, that's not true at all. You know, we're about ninety-eight percent unified on this issue," which was absolute nonsense, because we were split. We weren't even split down the middle, I would say forty-five percent supported redress, and fifty-five percent were against it. It wasn't they were against redress, they were against doing anything, bringing up the past.

TI: So I'm curious, why did you then respond to these radio people...

JT: Oh, I just lied. I felt like I needed to convince the public that Japanese Americans felt strongly about this issue, that we needed to have a unified position on the issue. Otherwise, the public would never buy it.

TI: But within the community, though, they would know that they heard you say that. They'd say, "Well, John's just inflating that number."

JT: Yeah.

TI: And so how did the community react to that?

JT: Well, I remember going to one meeting at the cultural center not long after I had done the program. And this one Nisei guy got up just angry at me and said, "You've been lying to the public about this. We're not in favor of redress." And he said, "How many of you in the room?" And there were maybe a couple hundred people. Said, "How many of you are in favor of redress or reparations?" And a sprinkling of hands went up. And I said, "You're right, I haven't been telling the whole truth." I said, "But you're not opposed to redress, you're just opposed to not having to deal with the camp issue. And that's fine, and I understand that, but at some point, you're going to have to, and this going to happen." And I said, "If we don't, if I don't get out there and give the public the view of Japanese Americans being unified on this issue, it discounts everything camp was about. It tells them that we don't believe we were treated unjustly." I said, "So all of you in here, how many of you think it was okay? How many in the room think camp was okay, that it was right, that it was justified?" And not a single hand went up. And I said, "So what I'm inferring from this is that you don't oppose the idea of trying to rectify the injustice, you just don't want to have to deal with this publicly." And I said, "I've got to tell you, as the chair of the JACL committee here in Northern Cal, if this goes anywhere, you're going to have to talk about it." And I said, "I apologize at this point for forcing this, but you're the only ones who can talk about camp. I can talk about it. Mine was a very different experience."

TI: Still, that was a very bold move, though. I mean, you're really pushing the community faster than they wanted to go. So that's very bold. Again, I mean, it makes sense, but there still must have been a lot of resistance.

JT: Oh, tremendous resistance. I mean, I was, I was really criticized in the community, the JACL was criticized, and there were those who were the more radical thinkers in the community, younger people who had this view of, "How dare the JACL even talk about camp and try to do something like this?" That we had no right in the organization to do this, after all, we're the ones who led the community into the camps.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.