<Begin Segment 7>

HH: One of the things that you were deeply involved with was the redress movement. How did you get involved with the redress movement?

GU: Well, first, when Japanese American Citizens League decided at the National Convention in Salt Lake City in 1978, that it was time to take our grievance to the government about what had happened to us, I was then serving on the JACL Redress Committee, the national committee, from 1978 until 1980, it was just more or less looking into information, taking surveys, things like that. But in 1980, when President Jimmy Carter signed the law to set up the commission to find out what actually happened back in 1942 where the Executive Order 9066, we knew that once that information became available, we would have to go full scale into campaigning so that it would no longer just be a national committee, that we would have to separate from JACL in order to lobby, because JACL is a non-taxable organization. Because I had been chairing the East Coast effort, Mike Masaoka and some of the leadership in Washington, and the members of Congress evidently had a meeting with Min Yasui, who was chairing the National Redress Committee. And they decided -- and this was told to me by Mike afterwards, and it's in his book that he had written -- that because JACL really didn't have that much money, and when the legislative education committee went on a big fundraising effort, nobody believed that we would ever get a bill through Congress. So people weren't generous; they didn't give that much money. And instead of getting three hundred thousand dollars which we needed to kick off, we had fifty thousand dollars in our kitty when we said we were going to start later that year.

So these folks talked it over, and Min Yasui and Mike Masaoka said to me, would I be willing to come to Washington? And I had already made up my mind that summer that I would leave my job with the Lower Merion School District because I recall Bill Marutani saying that the Japanese Americans haven't given the redress effort its best shot, and that meant that we, win or lose, had to do that much for our people. And so after hearing that and having these guys saying that I was doing the best job in terms of getting support, because what we were then doing was to do an educational program, and many people in the Philadelphia chapter and other East Coast chapters were out there talking about our experience. And I also felt that because I came to Philadelphia early and helped with the resettlement program and worked for the War Relocation Authority and did a lot of speaking at that particular time, I knew what the first generation Issei had gone through. They were only in their fifties and sixties when they came, I just having, in the meantime, gone to University of Pennsylvania and having earned my master's in social work, and helping the people right after the war, not just the Japanese American, but the displaced people from Europe, I know how difficult it is for people who have spent their whole lifetime struggling to get on their feet and then to have their underpinnings just knocked down, for people to start all over in their fifties and sixties, was really a tough job.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 1994 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.