Densho Digital Repository - Grayce Kaneda Uyehara Interview

Densho Digital Repository
JACL Philadelphia Oral History Collection
Title: Grayce Kaneda Uyehara Interview
Narrator: Grayce Kaneda Uyehara
Interviewer: Herbert J. Horikawa
Location: Medford, New Jersey
Date: October 23, 1994
Densho ID: ddr-phljacl-1-12

<Begin Segment 1>

HH: This is Sunday, the 23rd of October, and we are recording this session in Medford Leas, New Jersey. What is your full name?

GU: My name is... oh, "what is your full name?" My name is Grayce Ritsu Kaneda Uyehara.

HH: And what is the name of your spouse?

GU: Hiroshi Uyehara.

HH: And how many siblings do you have?

GU: Six siblings and one has died.

HH: And what was the gender?

GU: In our family there were four boys and three girls. Oh, I'm forgetting to...

HH: That's all right. Four boys and three girls? And where do you all within that lineup?

GU: I'm the second-born, the oldest girl in the family.

HH: I see. And how many children do you have today, and what are their ages?

GU: How many children do we have? We have four children. The oldest, Chris, is forty-six years old, and he's in Malvern, Pennsylvania. And Lisa, who's forty-four years old, lives in South Hadley, Massachusetts. And Lawrence, Larry, lives in Downingtown, Pennsylvania, and he's forty-two. And the youngest, Paul Uyehara, who lives in Philadelphia, is thirty-nine years old.

HH: I see.

<Begin Segment 2>

HH: Where were you born?

GU: I was born in Stockton, California.

HH: Will you give a brief account of your early life in Stockton, California?

GU: I was born on July 4, 1919, so my name, Ritsu, the Japanese character is "law," because my parents were aware of what Fourth of July was all about. And in our large family, of course, things were very, very hard because my father, who came to California in 1906, went through the very difficult period from the immigrants who were not accepted. And California had gone through pushing Chinese immigrants around, and many people couldn't tell the difference between Japanese and Chinese. And Japanese were only brought in as laborers anyway, and so my father told me that in the early days, when he was driving the laundry wagon in Stockton, these bullies would come around and knock over the laundry wagon so that we all had to start out dealing with some real active racism. And took a long, long time before we could buy a house. We were able to have a little house, which only had two bedrooms, and so the garage was converted into a dormitory for the four boys.

But my mother was a very sociable woman, and it's amazing when I think back, and that little living room that we had that she entertained people who came from Japan, and she also entertained people that my father worked for, particularly New Year's parties. And I recall specifically, whenever I see this Japanese pastry that has an made from bean paste, I'm not too excited about it and never made any. So my husband Hiroshi has to make his own pastry. And the reason why I had such distaste for that particular pastry is that my mother wouldn't let me go to a New Year's Eve dance until I finished stirring for hours until that an got thick enough. And my boyfriend had to sit out there, you know, in the living room, waiting.

So it was a very interesting childhood. We did live in the suburbs in the little town of Stockton, there was the north side where the power structure lived. And then the central part of town, there was Japantown and Chinatown, but we lived on the other side of the bridge on the south side of town. So that was all residential, but many of the Japanese families lived in small homes, but they were farmers who worked for larger corporations. My father worked for the power structure in that he was a day worker. He cleaned their homes and he catered, put on parties for them and things like that. And I recall that, from the south side of town, he would go on his bicycle, taking his waxing iron and all. But he made the difference when it was time for us to go into camp because he worked for the head of the Board of Education and I could get textbooks and start school in camp.

<Begin Segment 3>

GU: When the war broke out, December 7, 1941, I was a senior at the College of the Pacific. And the college president called me into his office and there were some military people around. And I was asked to teach the Japanese language at the quartermaster base. I said that I was a very bad Japanese language student, because my mother was so insistent that I practice the piano, I was a music major. And I said all through high school and all that, I just couldn't do everything. You know how our immigrant parents all expected us to be honor students no matter what, and so I did convince my mother that I should give up studying the Japanese language. And when I explained that, the army folks said, "Don't worry about it. We prepare the lessons at the Presidio, all you have to do is follow the lessons." And so I did that until it was time to leave the town.

But the other part was because we belonged to the Japanese Christian Presbyterian church, and my uncle was the elder and my mother was very active, I, on December 7th, spent most of my day in church. In the morning I started playing piano for the Sunday school, then I played piano for the English-speaking service, then I played the organ for the immigrant group where the preacher spoke in Japanese. Then we went home, and that's when I heard all about Pearl Harbor.

<Begin Segment 4>

HH: You had been involved with JACL, that is, the Japanese American Citizens League, for many, many years. When did it all start?

GU: It all started back in 1937, which makes me eighteen years old. In those days, all of the leadership felt that it was very important to give the young second generation people an opportunity to learn to become good public speakers. And so with their national conventions, they would put on these oratorical contests. And each district had runoffs in those days, and they were very competitive. And I represented the Stockton chapter, and the runoffs held before the national convention meant that I had to compete with people from central California and northern California because in those days, central California was not a separate district. And in 1938, I attended the Los Angeles National Convention, and I came in second place, though I was first place for northern California. And then also, in those days, the older Nisei would just drive us to these conventions and then they would assign a chaperone. And part of JACL in those days were to find a mate. It wasn't all about civil and human rights. And I wasn't that interested in guys then because I knew there was still a lot of things that I had to do. But I did pay attention and I knew what JACL all about. But the leadership at that time really impressed me. And in 1940, when I went to the Portland convention, again representing northern California, I met Mike M. Masaoka. And Mike M. Masaoka was the most outstanding public speaker that we had in the Japanese American community. When I ran into him in the elevator, he said, "I trained the one who was representing Intermountain, and she's going to win." And sure enough, she took first place and I came in second. So I knew Mike from 1940 on. And these leaders then were so impressive because they were lawyers and physicians and they could be spending all their time making money, but they spent all their volunteer time trying to deal with changing the laws in our country.

<Begin Segment 5>

HH: We'll come back to your involvement with JACL. But before we do that, let's get into the process of the various kinds of concentration camps you were in. You went from Stockton, and where did you go from there, which camps?

GU: Okay. I went, from Stockton, there was a county fairgrounds. And the folks from Stockton, which was the center of the agricultural area, had people from Lodi, French Camp, the other surrounding small towns. So we were all put into the county fairgrounds where they put up the barracks inside the grandstand area and outside. I told you earlier about the fact that I taught Japanese to these young servicemen who came from all over, particularly became friendly with some guys from Iowa and Nebraska, these healthy looking, blond, good-looking young men. And when they found out that I was no longer teaching them because they went into camp, they found out where I was. And the military guard called me out, and there were three of my former students there with a box of chocolate candies and flowers. And they saw where I was, and one fellow actually cried while he told me he was sorry that this had happened. And then from there, then that was from May until October. And I was in the last group to leave the assembly center because I was one of the people who was responsible for the educational program, so we had to put everything together to return to the Stockton Board of Education. But it was in mid-October that I ended up at Rohwer, Arkansas.

HH: I see.

<Begin Segment 6>

HH: And did you go to another camp after Rohwer, or did you leave camp altogether?

GU: Well, I left once because the Midwest opened up first. The two coasts were still closed, and as soon as it was possible to go out, I went to St. Cloud teachers college because my major at the College of the Pacific was in piano, and we had very limited opportunities for Japanese Americans. And so anyone planning for work had to plan that they were going to do something within the Japanese American community, and I was going to become a piano teacher. Knowing that we didn't know when the West Coast would open up, I decided that I had to get education credits to go into public education. So I went to St. Cloud State teacher's college. The program did not compare with the private college that I had attended, the Methodist-backed College of the Pacific. So I only went for the one semester, but during that time, I learned how to operate a lathe, because everybody was into supporting the war effort. I went back to camp in July, and I worked again in camp. This time, I worked in the medical program. Before I went to Minnesota, I was a junior high school music teacher. Then I decided, when the East Coast opened up, someone from the Southern Baptist came to visit, and she offered me housing and said that there would be a position for me to be an editorial secretary with the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Society. Anything to get out. So I got out that fall again, and I was in Richmond, Virginia.

In Richmond, Virginia, a tall lieutenant was assigned to keep track of me, because Richmond was too close to Norfolk. And he was really embarrassed when he saw that here was this woman who was less than five feet tall, and he had to follow me around Richmond and keep track of me. So these two women -- and they were women in their thirties with whom I lived -- they said, "Let's prepare a sukiyaki dinner for him and invite him to dinner." And I think he eventually convinced him that it was ridiculous for him to be keeping track of me, so they stopped that.

But in the meantime, my brother, Ben, who is number three among the boys in our family, decided to come to Temple University. And he found out how the Quakers were really interested in helping the Japanese Americans to come out of camp, and wrote to me in Richmond. And again, I was the only one who had graduated from college so far that, "Come up and see what we can do about getting the parents and the other two siblings out of the Rohwer camp." And so I came here in the late spring of 1944 to Philadelphia from Richmond, Virginia. But my War Relocation Authority information about me has me out of camp. When I went to Richmond, Virginia, they called that the "final departure." By then, I guess they were, all of the other departures were considered temporary when people went out to harvest crops, et cetera.

HH: I see.

<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.

<Begin Segment 8>

HH: Getting back to the redress movement, I understand that much of your work had to be that of a lobbyist. Where did you get your training or orientation to be a lobbyist?

GU: Well, that's why I was talking about the time that I was helping the War Relocation Authority. That was the time that the only work that the Isseis and those of us who were looking for jobs could find were service jobs. Because other people who were doing those jobs would find better-paying war industry jobs, so that was what was left for the people who came out to these cities. And so it was a very, very difficult time, and I felt that I could tell the story. I went out and talked to church groups trying to get jobs for the new arrivals and to communicate what we have to do to get reestablished. Because by the time we were seeking redress, there were stories about the "quiet Japanese Americans" and how well they're doing. They're well-educated, nobody really knew the story about what an actual struggle it was.

HH: One of the things that you did when you were, more or less, living in Washington during the redress movement was you had to go visit a number of congressional offices. And there's a certain way of doing things in Washington, kind of a protocol. How did you learn that all that business?

GU: Well, I learned a lot from Mike Masaoka. I know that some of the younger, the Sanseis who had gone to follow him to be the Washington rep never called on Mike's experience. But remember way back, I told you I was so impressed with Mike, and that impression that I had of him remained with me. And so the first thing I did when I went to Washington was to call on Mike and told him that I would be looking to him to help me. And he also was very honest with me, and he said to me, "Grayce, you have to know that things are different from the time that I lobbied in Washington." He said, "The members of Congress at that time only had one secretary." He says, "It's a very different Washington today." You're not going to be able to talk with the members of Congress in all instances. You'll be talking with a staff person who's assigned to the issue." And so that made me feel better because if I never got to see the members of Congress unless I really sat their stubbornly and waited, and I couldn't afford that kind of time, Mike told me about the difference. But we knew that in our case we were representing one of the smallest minority groups in this country. And when we say we're looking for grassroots support, we weren't looking just to get our people mobilized. We had to find substitute Japanese Americans. We knew that that was going to be our strategy, so we had to reach out to all the other organizations established in Washington for a long time who were also there concerned about human and civil rights for their people and for their issues. So we turned to the two groups, and one was the human and civil rights group such as the Mexican American group, the Jewish organizations, the Jewish veterans and the Anti-Defamation League, et cetera. And they were very sensitive to our issue. They were our major supporters. Then we turned to the church group. The American Friends had a lobbying program, and the Methodists and the Presbyterians, and in the meantime, Japanese Americans are members of those churches. So those churches pass national resolutions, and then we could turn to their lobbyists so that it wasn't just Grayce Uyehara going to talk with the members of Congress in Washington.

But then through Mike, I had a lot of support from our Japanese American members of Congress, Senator Dan Inouye and Spark Matsunaga, and then Congressman Bob Matsui and Norman Mineta, and later on, Pat Saiki. These people were always helpful, and they always met with me. And if I had a problem, I could go to these real pros and ask them to give me direction. But the major issue, major way of setting up the lobbying, as I said, was through these organizations. So I met with the representatives from these organizations once a month.

<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.

<Begin Segment 10>

HH: What were the major frustrations and obstacles that you had to deal with in this project?

GU: Well, I guess if everybody knows that I speak out, I'm pretty straightforward, I don't know why the leadership asked a female. Because generally, the leadership was still the older Japanese Americans, and you know, women in JACL did all the gofer kinds of things, the things that kept the organization going but never took any leadership role. And to have these same fellows decide that I was the one to go to Washington, I always wondered in the back of my mind, was it based on the fact that they didn't have money to pay anybody? I did six months of volunteer work, and until they could get beyond that fifty thousand dollars, and eventually when they got over the two hundred dollars, then we had a meeting in Senator Inouye's chambers. And I said, well, it looks like we have money now to hire a professional fundraiser. And I'm sitting next to the senator, and he turns around and looks at me and says, "Why do we need a professional fundraiser? We have Grayce Uyehara here." And he said, "That's all we need. And here I thought I was going to finish my stint after six months. So by then, I had gone on social security so that they still they still couldn't pay me enough to overcome that. And so I just worked mainly for expenses and what social security would allow me at that phase. And it ended up as my three-year stint in Washington.

And so one of the things is that I had to deal with a Japanese male ego, and all of them were pretty strong individuals: Min Yasui, Mike Masaoka, Grant Ujifusa. But we still kept our eyes on the ball, and we kept working at it. And the one who was the leader in the Senate was Senator Spark Matsunaga. And he was such an effervescent individual. And you know, after the first go-around, you have to start all over again in the new congressional session. And he only had twenty-nine the previous session, and after we got to twenty-nine, I said, "Senator, are you going to introduce the bill?" He says, "No, Grayce, I think we can go for more. Let's be set to overcome any veto," which meant that he was going for about seventy. I thought, "Oh, my goodness." So I thought when we got to fifty supporters signing on from the Senate, he would change his mind, but he really went "go for broke." And the plan was that the House had to introduce the bill first, and then Norman and Bob agreed with the important, key players on the House side. We just had to wait 'til we had Barney Frank of Massachusetts. First go-round was Sam Hall, he wasn't any good, from Texas, and he really insulted Mike Masaoka at the hearings. Then the next time was a congressman from Kansas, and he just wasn't willing to take any risks, but along comes Barney Frank, and he said, "We're going to get it through this time." And so they decided that they would shoot for the bicentennial of the United States Constitution, because the whole issue was a denial of our constitutional rights. And so they were going to put it vote then, and I said, "Wait a minute, everybody's going to leave Washington to go celebrate." "No, no, no, there will be enough votes. That will make an impression." And so when it passed in the House, we just, Mike sitting next to me, Grant and myself, I just started to cry. And Norm and Bob were waving to us from down there. And so then we planned that once the House bill went through, it wasn't going to be that tough, because the Senate is much smaller and they were going to introduce it. But what happens next month? October of 1987, there's a Wall Street crash, and you just cannot introduce a bill with money attached. So they said, well, we just can't do it, we're going to have to wait for the next session. And so Senator had to start all over again, and it took until, I think it was in June of 1988, and then the committee met, the bill was put into committee, and they came through in July, and President Reagan signed the bill, August 10 -- I hope I have the right date -- 1988.

<Begin Segment 11>

HH: The last question, Grayce, is that as you look back on all these experiences you've had, if you had to do something, one or two things differently, what might they be?

GU: Do one or two things differently?

HH: Yeah, any phase of your involvement with JACL or redress?

GU: Well, one is a real personal thing. You know, being the oldest girl, my mother placed a lot of responsibility on me. And when I was here in Philadelphia, well, actually, even in California, I wanted to go to law school. And she said that, "You would not be marriageable," and, of course, that was very important for the daughter to set an example, and if I didn't get married properly, then it would be bad. So I always was frustrated, so let me just say that I don't know whether my mother is squirming because once I retired and came here to Medford Leas, when the state of New Jersey started the mediation program, I signed up for it and now I am a mediator in the Burlington County Courts, so that I handle many of the cases that the judge turns over and feels that the mediator can handle, and I'm saving taxpayers' money, so that's something, I think I made the difference.

HH: Thank you very much.