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MR: When did thoughts about redress start to surface?

HY: Oh, for me... gee. I guess it must have been about 1980, I think. It was, was the Salt Lake City convention, I think it was the Salt Lake City convention. I think it was 1980, and that's when I believe it was Edison Uno who got up and says, hey, we ought to pursue this. Well, at the same time -- oh, it was not only Edison Uno but Min Masuda who was the Seattle chapter and Henry Miyatake from Seattle. But also at the Salt Lake City meeting -- I'm not positive it was 1980 but somewhere around there -- the then Senator Sam Hayakawa was there, and he was adamantly against the idea of redress. He says, "It makes my skin crawl to think that we would ask for redress." Well, this damn guy was never incarcerated in the first place, and besides. he was a Canadian citizen originally in the second place, and he was a big blowhard in the third place, so nobody had much sympathy for him. So people like Min Masuda and Henry Miyatake, they walked out right while he was speaking. That's when I became aware, oh, there's something going on here, and that's when I became interested, whatever that Salt Lake City convention was, because I realized hey, there were real strong feelings here, even amongst our own people, real strong.

MR: Were there any special activities that you personally took part in, in the redress movement?

HY: Well, yeah. They had what they call a fundraiser for the legislative education committee, and it was broken down in the district, and I was one of the members of that. Then they had the redress committee for the Portland Chapter JACL, and I was co-chair with Peggy Nagae on that originally. And then we had meetings, this is later on, but they had meetings with the main speaker like Min, and Min... not Min, Hohri, William Hohri, speaking on redress, and so we had a lot of speakers. And then the Pacific Northwest Chapter, Pacific Northwest District Council JACL had a lot of meetings on that. So from 1980 on, there were things going on all the time, the national conventions. They were always bringing up, they'd have workshops on that, so I was involved in all of those. And then the culmination of this was in 1988 when, that was the Seattle convention that year, and that's the year that it came up that Reagan was going to sign the redress bill. So a bunch of us put our money down, and we flew to Washington, D.C. and actually witnessed that, and I was one of them. That was really a highlight for me.

MR: Can you talk about that experience?

HY: Oh, yeah. This is, during the convention, they made a special announcement that President Reagan will sign the Civil Rights Bill of 1988. Those who want to go, go. And you know this is just like that off the floor, so, and this is Seattle. They had room I think for nationwide something like two hundred people, so I talked to Miki and says, "Gee, can I go? I want to go." So she says, "Sure, go." So I pull out my credit card and get signed up, and Tru didn't want to, this is Min's wife, the widow actually. She didn't want to go. I says, "Hey, Tru, you got to go, you're Min's surrogate." She says, "I've been his surrogate all my life. I don't want to go." "Well, maybe so, but I think this is a real good time for you to go, Tru. Hey, Min worked all his life for something like this." So she says, "Oh, okay, I'll go. Will you go with me?" I said, "Sure I'll go with you," so we went. So it was hotter than heck there too. This is Washington, D.C. in August, and it was hot. But there were, then we met Norman Mineta who was a representative at that time and had lunch with him and so on. And then we all filed in this big, it was very impressive to me. The thing that impressed me the most is, I don't know if you've seen the picture, but Reagan is on a side of a, behind a horseshoe shaped desk, and he's signing it, and then all the Japanese senators and the president of JACL are behind him lined up watching him sign. But that moment, I thought, God, Min should have been here, and that to me was very poignant. He wasn't there.

MR: And he worked very hard for this too?

HY: Uh-huh.

MR: I do have a question about the redress. Apparently there were two, two directions that could be taken, to go through a committee and take testimony or to go kind of on a fast track, am I correct in that?

HY: You're correct, except the, let me clarify that. One was a legislative approach which is the one where you take testimony and so on. The other one was the, not the legislate, the legal, suit, a lawsuit, and those were the two basic types. The lawsuit one was actually chaired by a man named William Hohri who's still alive, and it was called the National Council for Japanese American Redress. And what they want to do is sue the United States government on a class-action basis for something like for twenty billion dollars, and they had I don't know twenty-two courses of action. Well, that failed. The legislative approach which went, was a commission approach did succeed, but after intense work, and I have to say it was JACL that was the sparkplug. Without two groups, this would never have happened; one was the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, and the other one was National JACL. Without that, Nikkei redress would never have been won in my opinion.

MR: Which of these two choices did you favor?

HY: Oh, hey, I was a JACL boy, still am.

MR: How did the community feel about redress in general, do you think? Did it make a difference to them?

HY: You mean during, before --

MR: After. When it was achieved, what, how were people speaking about it?

HY: Well, I think most of the people that I'm familiar with were happy that they got it. But you know, people are so different, Margaret. I think of people who say, "I'm not going to work on this," this is before. "I'm not going to work. I got no chance. Why beat a dead horse? You got no chance of getting this. I'm not going to help you. But if they give it to me, sure I'll take it." And so it runs the whole gamut of feelings and emotions. But generally, after it was won, I've had people say, "I wouldn't give $1,000 for this redress campaign any more than I want to pay $1,000 to watch Jesus Christ walk across the Columbia River." I've heard that too. Holy cow. But after winning redress, everybody took the money. I'm sure that people may have donated. I heard some people donated the $20,000 to Loma Linda or whatever college or whatever they wanted to do, but I think that there were very, very, few. This one was driven, I'm convinced, by a minority group. And the other thing that you will hear and I dispute this is that it was the Sansei that drove this, and I say not so. It was not the Sansei. It was the Nisei that drove this. Without the Nisei JACL, it would never have happened. Without the Nisei Regimental Combat Team, it would never have happened, and I still stand on that one.

MR: Is it Bill Hosokawa who termed the Nisei the "quiet Americans"?

HY: He's the man.

MR: After redress, did the redress and the signing of this bill change that attitude in the Nisei if it ever was?

HY: Well, no. I think that Hosokawa's obligation is correct as far as the Nisei goes. Now when he says the "quiet American," he's specifically addressing the Nisei generation. He's not talking about... now the, in my view, the Nisei are still generally quiet. Most of us are not very outspoken. Most of us would rather take a small profile. We'd rather have problems come to us. We'd rather have people make proposals to us that we can look at and examine and comment on. We do not say, well, we ought to do this, that, and the other thing. We're not like that. Now the Sansei may be a different generation, different point of view. They are probably more proactive than the Nisei ever were. Nisei are not proactive as a general rule. So we are still the "quiet American." The Sansei are not that much like that, but they are compared to most other Americans. The Sansei too are not as proactive as a lot of other people.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.