<Begin Segment 9>

HH: By the way, who were some of the, other than Mike Masaoka, who were some of the key people in the Japanese American community that were involved in this movement aside from the people you met from Congress?

GU: Well, Min Yasui. Min Yasui could have very well been the person to carry on the fight in Washington, but Min, being a fiery orator, just wanted to go around and speak all over the country, particularly at universities and colleges, because the students never heard about what happened to Japanese Americans. And he wanted to do that, and so he didn't want to stay in one place. And incidentally, I commuted to Washington. I left on Monday morning and came back on Thursday nights, because Congress usually, members of Congress went home on Friday. And so Min Yasui was the chairperson of the JACL Legislative Education Committee. And I had to keep in touch with him, and he had to give me his schedule because he was running all around the country. And then we had one younger person, a Sansei, who's a graduate of Harvard... pulling a blank. He's in New York now. It's terrible that I'm pulling a blank on him, because... can't I call for help? Hiro. The other person who played a major role was really somebody who knows the Washington scene because he and Mike Barone wrote the Almanac of American Politics, which is issued every two years. Both are Harvard graduates, and Mike Barone was also an editorial writer with the Washington Post. And so they know the background of every member of Congress, and I used this Almanac to support the grassroots lobby, because if the person's Presbyterian background, then you use that information, or you knew whether the person was conservative or moderate or liberal, those kinds of things. But Grant wrote out the strategy for the JACL LEC. But being a younger Sansei, I had to bear down on him to make him produce that lobbying philosophy.

The other person I would have to say that we should mention, Shig Wakamatsu, who had to keep track of the funds that we had. But then two people were involved with fundraising, Harry Kajihara, former national JACL president, and then after he became ill, then Mae Takahashi of Fresno took over with the fundraising, because without money, we just couldn't keep it going. And then Cherry Kinoshita was a very, very hard worker in the Pacific Northwest.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 1994 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.