Densho Digital Archive - George Iseri Interview (denshovh-igeorge

<Begin Segment 21>

AC: Were you very active in the JACL?

GI: I'm a past president.

AC: What was it like after the war?

GI: Yes. We had, we were part of the Inter-Mountain District Council that includes all of Idaho, Southern Idaho and Ontario and Utah, and I never became, might have been a treasurer for Inter-Mountain. I don't remember. But I was president here in the local club. I made lots of friends because of that through Idaho here. And by the way, that's provided me a whole bunch of customers for my travel business through the years. Another thing that I should mention. I think the main reason I mentioned this is, as you know, we had the Buddhist temple here. I've been a Buddhist all my life. I've gone to Christian church though as a kid. When I went, used to go to Christian Sunday school as well at that time. But our temple here was built in 1959 with volunteer labor. We just hired one carpenter and brick layer, things like that. But we built that temple and completely without going in debt even a nickel. Our shrine inside is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, just the shrine alone. I was the first Nisei president. My son is running it now. And I became, we have what we call the Buddhist Churches of America. Herb Osaki, he's now in Portland, he was a national, president of the National Hongwanji after me, three, four years after I was president of National Hongwanji for one year. And we've done a lot to, we got a lot more to do but a lot to entice non-Japanese people to become members. We got a few.

AC: How did you feel when the talk about redress started bubbling up?

GI: Very frankly, I felt a little sheepish about it. By that I mean I, they can't undo a wrong by money or anything. But then I got to thinking about some speeches and some reasons. And perhaps the biggest reason that I felt that it was okay is because of penalties. You know, there's, at that time, we hear about million dollar settlements with somebody that was abused by police, job discriminations, so on and so forth, and if there's money, substantial money tied into it, that's a kind of a bite that they don't forget, and surely it did that. Surely even today, like this guy that's a councilman in our city council here today, it made him speak up. It made more people aware of what happened to us and the reason for getting the redress. And perhaps as a good seed with a good seed for having what we're doing today is getting the story out to prevent such a thing from happening again. I have friends that I know that were against it, getting it, when we were applying for it, some of them who didn't qualify for it and a few who did qualify for it, but I'm sure that every single one of them accepted the check. [Laughs]