<Begin Segment 1>

RB: All right. Can you start by stating your full name for the record and also today's date?

MN: I'm Masaru Edmond Nakawatase. Today is May 8, 2023.

RB: Great, thank you very much. Can you tell us when and where you were born?

MN: I was born in Poston, Arizona, on September 29, 1943. Poston being one of the ten internment camps set up after the bombing of Pearl Harbor for Japanese incarcerees.

RB: And what generation are you?

MN: Good question. I'm sort of a tweener in the sense that my father was an Issei. He was born in Japan, and was in Southern California at the time of the war. My mother was born in California, she was Nisei. So I'm somewhere between those two, but in cultural terms, it'd probably be accurate to say I'm more a Sansei than anything else.

RB: Great, thanks. And do you have any siblings?

MN: Well, I have a younger sister, Hisako Wurtzel, who still lives in the Bridgeton area, and I have a late sister, Reiko Nakawatase, who lived in Philadelphia, and both of them have been teachers. And my sister Hisako just retired maybe seven or eight years ago and stayed in administrative posts even after teaching.

RB: Can you describe Reiko a little bit? What was she like as a person?

MN: Well, Reiko was a short, very dynamic person full of energy. Lots of ideas. So very enthusiastic, and I suspect a very good teacher. She taught for many years at what was then the Civic Center in West Philadelphia, and they had a... she was sort of a -- I'm not sure what the concept was -- sort of like a master teacher. In other words, course classes would come to her and they would deal with, you know, various countries and cultures, so that was like her specialty. So she saw students from all over the city. She had initially started as a teacher at the elementary school level in West Philadelphia. And I'm not exactly sure when the shift took place in terms of her position. She was forced to retire because of cancer, bout with cancer, and this was around 1990. And she passed in 2011.

RB: Can you talk a little bit about Reiko's personality?

MN: Sure. She was, as I was saying, energetic, she could she could also be exasperating. We had our struggles. But she was very generous to the core, generous about everything, you know, money, food, opinions. I mean, you name it, she would give it away. [Laughs] And she was always concerned about me. I mean, during the years of the Vietnam War, she was afraid, for example, that I had burned my draft card or done some other crazy thing like that. She was correct. I did burn my draft card later, but that's another issue. But she had a lot of energy for her kids and for teaching. And, you know, I knew for example, like other teachers, she would pay for supplies out of her own pocket. And she would be very enthusiastic about everything she did until whatever the next enthusiasm would be. And we, I think over time, our sharpest differences came over politics. She was a moderate conservative, she was a Republican. She went to American University and graduated in 1963. I went to her commencement. And just coincidentally, I mean, for the record, it was the address was given by President Kennedy. And what I thought... I mean, even then, I thought that it was probably one of the best speeches he ever made. It was about the imperative of a nuclear test ban treaty. and it was a break rhetorically and politically from the Cold War. I mean, because the speech was very much about the mutual danger posed by nuclear weapons and nuclear fallout. And it was the kind of language. Once less than the usual belligerent, bellicose stuff you'd hear on the tube. But anyway, that was my sister's commencement, and I remember in that way, plus, it must have been one of the hottest days of the year, but then this was Washington in June. But she threw herself into everything, and then often tired and exhausted, I think, but in many ways, probably fulfilled. And as I said, we disagreed politically, so it wasn't as sharp as I think some families would be. In other words, we still spoke to each other. [Laughs] And so it was, we were a family for all of that. And I don't think we ever felt that we didn't love each other, and that was important. She was a very enthusiastic supporter of this place, and accordingly, she threw herself into this very enthusiastically and was very engaged in its governance and publicity about it. And I'm sure sometimes was probably a pain, but it was very much to showcase this place as a center of Japanese culture.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 2>

RB: Great. Actually, since we're talking about Reiko and the work that she did here, I'm going to jump around a little bit. So you mentioned that she was very committed to this organization. When did you first hear about Shofuso?

MN: It must have been in the '80s. I couldn't tell you precisely, but because she was engaged in it, and then later on my niece, Reiko's daughter Ilona, and my daughter Michiko worked here, I mean, they were sort of, like, well, whatever it is young people do here. I think they were guides and just general helpers in the house. So they probably could tell you quite a bit about this place, too, actually. And so it was, in that sense, though, I wasn't fully engaged in any kind of real sense, my sister was and my daughter was conscripted, so to speak to work here.

RB: So what exactly was Reiko's involvement here? Do you know what she did here at the house?

MN: I'm not sure altogether, I think she was involved in its governance. And I'm sure there were arguments in that quarter, I wasn't involved in those, for obvious reasons. And I suspect fundraising was an element here, too. And just raising awareness of this place, and it's a little bit of its history and its significance. And it was, you know, I think for many people, and not just people of Japanese descent, I think it was a place of solitude and refuge. You know, lots of people like to watch koi swim around here, and it's a little place out of, a little peaceful place, I think, in an urban scene.

RB: Did Reiko ever talk about why she wanted to get involved in this space, or what she was hoping to accomplish here?

MN: No, she never did. What I'm saying about it is, on her behalf, is mostly what was implicit. Her enthusiasm, I think, indicated a lot, and that included, you know, the sense of its importance, this place's importance. It was also a bridge between, you know, both Japanese national community and Japanese American community, and, of course, then beyond that, to the broader non-Japanese community. I mean, it was a place for celebration, there was an Obon here. There was food cooked here, and those were all very pleasant memories. I always like to stroll around here also.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 3>

RB: Do you see Shofuso as a Japanese American community space?

MN: I do. I mean, I don't know how others feel about it. Having said that, I haven't been here in a while myself. This is my first, shall we say, guest appearance in years. But I find it just as I have always found it. I mean, it's a very comforting space. Others many find other things in it, too, but it is certainly that for me, a place of solitude and peace.

RB: Do you have any specific memories of some of the community events that took place here?

MN: Well, let's see. I think one Obon... I have enough vanity to consider myself somewhat skilled around the grill. And I think there was cooking on a little mini grill, and I'll never forget because I thought they didn't let the fluid burn off. [Laughs] So the early batches of food were a little, shall we say, tainted, at least by my taste. Somehow I remember that. But I my experiences here were quite pleasant except for that time I ate food from the first batch on the grill there. But, you know, I thought that must be a rookie mistake.

RB: Was that at the Natsu Matsuri, the summer festival?

MN: Yeah, I think it was the summer festival. And you also have a lot of interaction, I mean, people were Japanese Americans who lived in Seabrook and were active in the JACL there. They often came up here, too. I mean, there's an Obon there, so there's been that intermingling, if you will, between those two Nikkei communities that pretty much remains to this day. I mean, I guess I'm an example of that to some extent, and other families in the Philadelphia area, I think, some grew up in South Jersey, and some who grew up in South Jersey are in this area, like myself.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 4>

RB: Since we're talking about Seabrook, why don't we pivot more to your childhood in Seabrook and your parents? Maybe we could start by, can you tell me the names of your parents and what they did for work?

MN: Yeah. My father was Kenzo Nakawatase. My mother was Aiko Hamashima Nakawatase. They were married, they actually met in camp. So it was maybe one positive thing that came for us out of the incarceration experience. And they married in 1942 and then I was born the following year. They, along with approximately, I think, 2,500 people of Japanese descent, they moved to and worked at Seabrook Farms, Incorporated, and lived in housing provided by the Seabrook Farms Corporation. My father was a mechanic at what was called the plant. This is where the fruits and vegetables were cooked and frozen and shipped. My mother was on what was called the packing line, which was after products were frozen, you have these little waxed boxes, they packed them and then closed them, and then they were shipped, I mean, put down the line and then wrapped in waxed paper and with labels, and all of that, of course, so people would know what they're eating. [Laughs] And then in turn, the produce was shipped all over the country, probably all over the world, actually, at that time, initially. So that... now the question, you were you were asking more about their work. Did you want to...

RB: Yeah, if you have more information about what they did, I guess that's what they were doing initially at Seabrook?

MN: Yeah, that's pretty much what my mother did. My father had tuberculosis, so he was out beginning in the late '50s. He went to a sanitarium in Glen Gardner, New Jersey. It was a state facility for people who were tubercular, and I never analyzed it, but there were probably a disproportionate number who were Japanese Americans. I mean, I can think of about three or four others who were in that sanitarium. And my father was there for about... all together, about five years, I think, five or six years, though he'd be, over time, would mean he would be home more often. But his work could no longer be as strenuous physically as it had been. So it was a good period, though, for me. And if not for him, in the sense that I got to know a little bit more about him or what he felt about things. He was very much, he read a lot, he knew a lot. His English was heavily accented. And he and my mother spoke in Japanese to each other, but not to us. I think it was sort of keeping the code so to speak. And in that period, this was now the early to mid-'60s, I discovered that he opposed the war in Vietnam, for example. Now, I think that comes with a couple of caveats, or maybe at least one caveat. He was essentially a Japanese nationalist. So I think he didn't feel that that any outside country, I mean, any Western outside country should be mucking around in Asia. I mean, if any outside country was gonna be mucking around in Asia, it should be Japanese. I mean, I think there was that dimension to it. But he clearly felt that the war was wrong, so in that sense, we shared a very strong position. He was also, I think, thoughtful about other concerns. I mean, he, when I left to go south and work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, I mean, there were no, there were no statements of alarm or despair. I mean, perhaps part of that was just resignation, in fact, I was gonna do it anyway. But I remember when I got back, I had kind of a snippet of a conversation with him. And his position was, you know, it was important that Black people -- I don't know if he used that term -- organized. In other words, he didn't necessarily buy the line that, you know, they had to do what people under the boot, so to speak, should educate themselves and wash themselves and all. Not that he didn't think they should, but the important thing was being organized. And of course, he was right. So he had some sense of, I think, social dynamics of the time, more than I had thought he did at the time.

RB: It's pretty remarkable for a man of his generation. I'm wondering, so one, one short question, and then maybe a longer question about him and sort of his journey to the United States, because you said he was Issei?

MN: Yeah.

RB: So the short question is, do you know if he contracted tuberculosis in camp, or was that after the war?

MN: Well, it was, all I know is it was diagnosed after camp in the late '50s. And, you know, my family had been out of camp for, what, ten, twelve years. But the fact that there were other Japanese Americans from our community, who also, you know, had tuberculosis. And then, I mean, at a later time, I'm sure this is the kind of thing you investigate and explore. And the CDC would probably check it out as to why the numbers. But we did, or at least other than noting it, there was no research done on it. I don't know the effects long term, I mean, where its origins were. As a result of it, of course, every family member had to take a TB test every year. And there was, it was later and there was also medication. So he was able to leave for the sanitarium. I mean, it had impact on him in terms of other physical effects, difficulty breathing, you know, issues about his and that sort of thing. But I mean, cause and effect. I know there was some, but I don't know how you can, how it would be tracked.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 5>

RB: And then the other question I had about your father, in terms of his journey to the United States, do you know how and why he decided to come to the U.S.?

MN: Well, I actually know very little about it. And what little I now know is that as a result of the fact that he was he was born and raised in Kagoshima on the island of Kyushu. He had a family, two children. He was, I mean, this is this is now information supplied by family links that I didn't know I had until maybe about ten years ago. It was, I think, rare in that it was a romantic, I mean, I think probably pretty rare, for at least my understanding of Japanese culture, it's a romantic marriage. And at some point, I think he connected with his in-laws in such a way that he went, I think with some kind of, some capital, I don't know how much, not too much. But in 1929, he went to the United States to increase the fortune. And that period is mired in darkness, frankly. [Laughs] In other words, I know, next to nothing. I mean, first of all, one question that would be raised to me would be, how did he get into the United States? Because 1929, the immigration laws restricting immigration, certainly immigration of Asians was in full force as of 1924. So how did he get in? That's one thing Two, how did he stay? And, you know, then there were other little snippets that we discovered, I mean, his wife never remarried. His family, his in-laws' family apparently pressed his wife to divorce him. And, of course, she having the usual autonomy that Japanese women did have, which is to say none, they were divorced. He came to the United States in 1929, as I said, which is also a pretty lousy time to come to the United States to make a fortune of any sort. The crash was soon to come. So during the '30s, and up to the war, he was, I think, essentially a single man with a family in Japan.

We were to discover -- I was to discover, along with my younger sister -- that the family, as I was saying, his wife never remarried. They had two children, one who died during World War II, though not, I think, out of the war itself, but I think might have been some sickness or illness contracted perhaps during the war. And his daughter, who lived up until maybe seven or eight years ago, the story that they told was, let's see, as I recall this, that, well, I think when they were notified, I mean, when she was notified, his ex-wife or his former wife, I'm not sure what the status is here, his non-wife. [Laughs] Died, or I think as she was dying, her last words were something like, "Now I will see." Which I thought kind of a poignant comment and probably an indication of this romantic kind of aspect of the relationship. Which seemed to me not your stereotype of Japanese marriage. Well, or whether it was still a marriage... well, they were formally divorced. And he was in Los Angeles, and here again, is a speculation, I think he was doing some small business thing, you know. I think there was some bad blood with his in-laws. He might have been given a stake and blown it, you know, and for all I know, he might have blown it at the track or something. I mean, I don't know, apparently there was some sense that he did wrong by them. So I think that accounted for the pressure to divorce. But as with others of Japanese descent, when the war came, he was rounded up, he won't have been posting in there, he met my mother. So that was one phase.

Now, the difficulty here is because my father died almost fifty years ago now, and my mother has been gone for about twelve years now. So, my goal at one point, and after I retired, which was like seventeen or eighteen years ago, was to get more background, more information about this. And unfortunately, my retirement and my mother's demise, I mean, she had gone through some dementia, and her short term memory was pretty close to nonexistent by the time. So my, you know, we talked a little bit about some of the stories related to growing up, her growing up. But I'd never, that's sort of an unfulfilled mission. And I'm not sure, �there's probably almost no way to retrieve it. There is very little written, and people who could verify stories or tell stories, are pretty much gone. When my mother died, this was in 2011, I think there were only two of her contemporaries who were at the service. And I think neither, basically, were in a position to speak. So there's this huge gap, because it has very much to do with this whole, the camp life, relocation, and the resettlement in South Jersey.

RB: So did your parents talk about camp when you were growing up?

MN: No, no. So in other words, my parents were typical, I think, of most JA families. There were very broad details that came out, like how rough the weather was, it was very hot and dusty. The housing was uninsulated, so it also got very cold. Facilities, toilet facilities and washing facilities were communal. And I think the food, I mean, I don't think they got into it in great detail about the food, but from all other reports, it was pretty lousy and certainly not what they were accustomed to eating. Probably, you know, must have been U.S. Army surplus or whatever, was handed to out the other camps as well. So that's... to the extent that any information was important about Poston or camp life in general, that was that was kind of it, at least in my recollection.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 6>

RB: Can you share a little bit about growing up in Seabrook? What was it like? Any memories that you have of school there, childhood activities?

MN: Yeah, sure. I went to Seabrook Elementary School. Seabrook is a village within upper Deerfield Township. This is just to set the stage here. It's located in Cumberland County, which is one of twenty-one counties in the state of New Jersey, and it's one of the few counties in the state that would be designated as rural. I mean, it was farmland, basically. The school during the time I went through the entire system, I mean, starting with kindergarten and going through eighth grade, was heavily populated with Japanese Americans. But the numbers diminish on a fairly consistent basis through the late '40s and early, and through the '50s. So that various friends and neighbors that we had, you know, they would over time be leaving. Some would go back to California, some went to other places to settle. I think �Cleveland was one place where at least a family that we knew and my uncle George, who lived in Seabrook, became a chick sexer, which was apparently a fairly interesting occupation among a number of Nisei men. That at least in that period, in the early, in the early '60s and late '50s, and the operation itself I think, was started in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and then moved south. So my uncle's family, my Uncle George's family, settled in Raleigh, North Carolina. So that was our southern branch of the family.

My sense of growing up in Seabrook in this community was idyllic, which, I mean, it's a phenomenal sort of thing, because I think we were of the generation of Japanese Americans who were probably, there was never any, I can't recall any verbal assaults. I can't remember anybody, any Caucasian calling me a "Jap" or, you know, "slopehead" or any of those other endearing terms. And the community itself was an interesting, had a series of interesting dynamics. I mean, one was people, almost everybody there, without exception, and for most of that period, you couldn't live in Seabrook unless you worked in Seabrook. But they were, during the summer, you had you had basically twelve-hour shifts. So, there was always attention paid to not being too noisy. And the area of Seabrook, which is changed somewhat, but very much open space areas for woods and all that. There was a state park on the lake, state park nearby. And, you know, we were in a, kind of a comfortable situation, I mean, there was no apparent threat to our safety or the endangerment of our community.

And I think the "model minority" stereotype, you know, is seen as an albatross, and I wouldn't deny that, but there were aspects of it where in specific situations. It was, it was an accurate rendition of what was the reality, you know, on the ground, that is to say, Japanese Americans did well in school. You know, we were, if I may say it, we were smart and we were also good athletes. So in that sense, there was a kind of social security that existed in the community and among us. So I don't remember feeling like we were inferior in any kind of way because, well, the objective reality that we knew was we weren't. [Laughs] I mean, you know, they didn't, the white kid, the hakujins, you know, they didn't have anything on us. And that went all the way up to high school. People of Japanese, kids of Japanese descent, I mean, they played football and were captains of the team and played baseball, and were captains of the team, and were in the honor society and on and on. So it kind of created a setting which was comfortable, maybe unreal, in certain ways. But I think that that was what it was. So I, you know, I say to other people, that the lesson for many of us was that white people were overrated, you know, I mean, what have they got going for them, I mean, really? [Laughs] And then, I think I'd sort of maintain that position, or since, pretty much.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 7>

RB: Yeah, so it definitely sounds like Seabrook was a company town. Would you also describe it as a Japantown?

MN: Not entirely. In the late '40s, and I think a little bit to the into the early 50s, refugees from mostly the Baltic states moved into Seabrook. These were, I think, numerically mostly Estonians, but there were others, there were Latvians and Lithuanians, ethnic Germans. There were people who had been in refugee camps after the end of World War II, and some who were in refugee camps for quite a while. They came to Seabrook, they were an interesting community in many ways. In what I've interpreted later, in class terms, you know, we some of the Estonians who did settle, you know, were quite people of some prominence Estonia. I mean, we knew that, I had a couple of friends whose fathers were regional governors, a regional governor, and a mayor of a town in Estonia. And it added a kind of, you know, another element of, I don't know, ethnicity to the community. And there were friendships also that developed that context. Within this broader, kind of multicultural setting, I think the community itself, the Estonians became a quite visible part of this community and the community more broadly, you know, in schools, et cetera. So I think our historians were also smart, at least that's the way I interpreted it. So, you know, it's sort of, they were a positive force in that sense. I would also, in retrospect, you know, they were racist, as were, I think, some of us in terms of the way in which we saw the world, which was still, in spite of ourselves, I think some of us saw it still in black and white terms.

And maybe I should deal with it a little bit here. Seabrook housing was segregated. I mean, in other words, you had a number of types of housing where you had, initially when Japanese Americans, there were these barrack type housing, they're somewhat similar, actually, to the internment camps, probably from the same architect. Courtesy of the U.S. Army probably. But that and then we're called, I think it was Hoover Village and Hoover Annex, and I used to think for years that they were named after Herbert Hoover, but apparently they were named after the housing director at Seabrook. [Laughs] And they were later knocked out, but there were other types of housing. There were cinderblock apartments, there were what were called dormitories, which I think were basically oriented initially towards single men. Then you had two types of housing which existed across Highway 77 in Seabrook, what we used to call bungalows, which are these older single-story houses, and then a newer set, what we call prefabs, which is what they were, that were built later on in the in the early '50s. And there was housing that Black people lived in, remote from those sections I've just described. And there was a stretch of housing on what's called Oak Road, there was also housing near the plant itself, called Foster Village. And it was clearly I mean, when I got back from the South, as you can imagine, my antenna or would be up, looking at what was the reality here. So my sister and I, I think, went to the housing office and said basically, I mean, "What the hell is going on? Why don't Black people live with us?" And there was a� song and dance about it. Nothing very persuasive and nothing that changed either, that I knew of at that time. I mean, this was mid-'60s, I went back to school, as did my sister. And there was, nobody was storming the streets to protest housing displacement or discrimination. And that was that, but we were also, I mean, let's be honest, a number of people who worked at Seabrook Farms were Japanese, they were complicit in the policy, and that's the way it was. So that's a dimension of life and Seabrook that I think, until recently, has not really been focused on much. And understandably, it's not exactly a proud moment in the life of the village. And I think, you know, it's like everything else. It's a little bit of this and a little bit of that, it's mixed. And we tend to favor, you know, that which is the most flattering. And I think that this is one of the realities that needs to be put forward in terms of our story, our collective story.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 8>

RB: Yeah, so you sort of mentioned a little bit about the different JA athletes. Did you yourself participate in any of the Japanese American sports teams? I know that there were several in Seabrook and then also, were you or your family involved with other Japanese American organizations there?

MN: Let's see, starting with the last question first. We were, I mean, I used to attend a Japanese American Christian church, which was held, services were held during the time I was there in the, what was called the Community House, which, like its name, I mean, it was a very active place that offered a number of services. There was a library there, there were meeting rooms, there was a gym, which is where a number of us learned to play basketball. And there was actually as part of Community House, there was a place where tofu was made, there was an infirmary. And then, as I said, there was a library. I remember looking through these National Geographics circa 1929, 1930, when it was all black and white and no ads. And you know, all the usual stuff about naked African women and all that. It's a little exaggerated, but there were things visible in there, but you had access to it. Let's see, think I'm digressing.

RB: Japanese American community organizations?

MN: Oh, yeah. Yeah, besides the church, there was also a Japanese, there was a Buddhist temple. And so those are sort of the two religious bases, I think the Buddhist temple was, should be given a lot of credit for sustaining the culture. I mean, they had a language school taught there, they were much more focused, I think, on at least some understanding of Japanese culture than the Christian church was. I guess if you were to crudely define them, I mean, probably the Christian church was more of an assimilationist force. I mean, it wasn't put in terms of, well, we're gonna make you good Americans or anything like that. But I think the net effect that you had services in English, you know, and that's the operational language that was used. There was a Boy Scout and I think Girl Scout troops. And early on, there was a JACL chapter, I think probably might have started right around the same time as the Philadelphia chapter in the mid to late '40s. My father, as I mentioned, this is an interesting perspective, because I would have been, it would have been fascinating to talk to him about it. But even after national legislation was passed, which made it possible for Japanese to be naturalized Americans, my father didn't do it. And my take on it, which could be wrong, was that it was a kind of protest, you know? And in that sense, I remember thinking, well, probably the Issei have a clearer sense of themselves in that way, the confusion about who they were in the culture, it's probably not so strong there. They were Japanese, you know, and that was that. And I was to discover during the redress campaign, that there were quite a few cleavages within the Japanese American community that remained, you know, through all of those years and into the redress struggle, but there was a great unity that was developed because of the redress campaign. But, you know, the attitudes about the Japanese American Citizens League, for example, some people never forgave it for its position during the war, it's, or I think some thought to be its acquiescence or its selling out, depending on how you might want to describe it. And that I think that remains. It was, you know, just never explicitly serviced. I mean, the JACL was the hegemonic organization in the Japanese American community, still is. But I think all of these criticisms have been internalized. I mean, some of them have faded, and some, perhaps, in some quarters disappeared. But I can't help but think it probably remains there in some measure.

As for other types of organizations, I think there was generally, there was a kind of a simulation aspect of it. I mean, we had at least one or two members of the 442nd and we joined and that sort of thing. In other words, I think Japanese Americans were very much became part of the broader community. Sports leagues, sports teams, et cetera. That was a that was pretty much, I'm just trying to think of, there were not that many Japanese Americans who are active politically that I can recall, There might have been one or two members, the local township committee, which was the government at the local level, but I don't think that the Japanese American community organized themselves in that way. Which is not unusual, I mean, I think, under the circumstances, I think the first impulse was, you know, cohesion and survival. And that is exceeded, certainly, on those terms.

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<Begin Segment 9>

RB: All right. Let's pivot then to some of your own work as an activist. Can you start by telling us a little bit about how you became involved in the Civil Rights Movement and kind of the origins of your work with SNCC?

MN: Yeah, I think that was something that developed over time, I mean, I can probably track some of it to high school. For various reasons, not all of which I can explain or understand, I was just sort of drawn to the struggle of Black people. I mean, or I think I had some sense of being or sharing or supporting this notion of being an underdog. You know, I mean, when, well, just as a kind of a light example, when I was a ninth grader, the freshman basketball coach was a Japanese American named Kunishima. And Kunishima, bless his soul, was a classmate of Richard Nixon at Whittier College. And so he became a quite prominent supporter. Kunishima, though, also took a bunch of us to scout other teams, basketball teams, high school basketball teams, and I remember that was drawn, we would have this task of just checking where the shots were taken, marking where they were made, giving some indication of, you know, the overall percentages, but also where they shot, you know, where the other team shot. And we were, Bridgeton was in, Bridgeton High School, where I went to high school, was in group four, which was the biggest category of high schools, they were the largest population schools. And I remember watching Camden High School, which was, the team was all Black, or at least there might have been, might have been a white guy or two on the squad but never came in to the game. And the coach was white, of course, at that time, but I remember kind of instinctively rooting for them, always, I mean, and there was a game once that we were scouting, where Camden played Collingswood. And there, you know, writ small was kind of a racial struggle. [Laughs] Camden's all-Black, Collingswood's all white, and of course, I'm rooting for the Black guys. You know, he was like that. It was like that. I mean, plus, they were a fun team to watch. You know, they played clean, they played exciting, quick basketball. So I think that impulse was around all the time.

You know, when I read about Emmett Till, I read about the Montgomery bus boycott, my empathy was with them. I read about the sit-ins my junior year, I did a research paper in my English class about the sit-in movement. And then I went to college in '62. And then, you know, things were beginning to bubble up a bit. And then that spring, you have the Children's Crusade in Birmingham, you know, which was just incredibly important in my consciousness. You know, I felt that this is something I want to be a part of. I mean, I didn't stand on top of the mountain and say that and I just, this is something that's crucial. So it all seemed terribly exciting. In school, I wasn't displeased or anything, I just figured, I think I'll go where the excitement is. That's what I did, essentially. So I dropped out of Rutgers. And with an incredible degree of arrogance, or ignorance, or probably both, I just figured I'd go south, I'd go to Atlanta, I'd been attracted to a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, from what I could read or see on TV. And that's all I did, I mean, in the sense that I had no local contacts. I didn't know anybody. So I took a bus, I went from Bridgeton to Atlanta, I wound up in Atlanta twenty-four hours later. I think I booked a room or two, I booked a room over at the Butler Street Y, which is the Black Y, and went over to the SNCC office. I mean, not knowing anybody, not written anybody, I hadn't been asked. I just figured, of course, they had lots of room for my hopes and dreams. I mean, on the face of it, it was crazy. I mean, I think about it, you know, twenty, thirty years later, I mean, there was no resume sent in, there was no letter of interest, no references. You know, it was just this movement in the sense that you could do something.

And so I went to the SNCC office, I spoke to two great staff people, a man named Worth Long, who later became a staffperson at the Smithsonian Institute. And Ruby Doris Robinson, was somebody who should be known more prominently than it is, but she was it. She was an early leader of SNCC, female, tough. And I had a great conversation with them. You know, so in other words, I go to this place, not only do I not know them, they don't know me either. And within about a month or so, I wind up being on the payroll. I mean, so I don't know what the lesson of that is precisely, but for me, you know, go where your heart is. And so I wound up being the person on the Watts line. The Watts line was the white area telephone service, which I think had just been initiated by AT&T, where you paid a flat fee and you can make unlimited long distance calls. And SNCC had an approach where people in the field offices, which ranged from Southern Virginia to the Mississippi Delta, would check in, and the process would be that they would they would call collect at the desk in Atlanta, you'd refuse the call, and when they'd call collect, that was a signal for getting back to them. And then you'd write up whatever happened during the day, on the night. And there was always something, you know, some petty harassment, some, you know, traffic charge, a broken window, maybe graffiti. It was like that, and sometimes worse. But it was all chronicled, and that was sort of my job at that point.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 10>

MN: And then I later worked with what was called the Production Department. And one of the things that they did, SNCC had organized the Freedom Democratic Party in Mississippi, and they conducted, essentially, a political campaign for governor and senator, I mean, to underscore the point that most Blacks in the state were forbidden to vote, functionally forbidden to vote, practically forbidden to vote. And one purpose of the campaign was to expose the lie that it was because of apathy or indifference to the business of voting, which was absolutely not true. So, the Production office would produce leaflets, posters, written materials for that campaign. They also produced written materials for everything else, including brochures, which I wish I had kept one of, Freedom Summer, which was, which developed later that year. So that I was involved in that. And the Production Department also produced the Student Voice, which was the newsletter at SNCC that was edited by Julian Bond. And then later in SNCC I was, I became a member of the research staff. And one of the things that, one of the things that the research department did was to look into the concept of power structures within, say, particular areas of the south, cities, but also entire states, and what the links were between people who owned the local ruling classes, you called it the white power structure, and the connections between their wealth, their companies, their influences, their economic life, their relationship to the political structure and links even socially. So one of the tasks that I had, and other people on the staff, I tell people, so I wound up reading some of the worst newspapers in the English-speaking world. I yield to no one, in thinking the Jackson Daily News, the Jackson Clarion Ledger and the Greenwood Commonwealth. And I don't know how terrible the tabloids are in England, but it couldn't have been worse than those papers, I mean just for sheer disinformation and racism, which was kind of absolute. But we soldiered on. And it was revealing in a broad context. So that was what I did. There were lots of other things, there were demonstrations, they got arrested, had an inadvertent sit-in.

We went to, a number of staff, SNCC staff went to a reception for the vice president of a newly independent government of Kenya. And we went to what was then the only integrated hotel in all of Atlanta. Atlanta had a better reputation than the reality in that sense. And afterwards, after we left, some bright person from our group said, "Hey, let's go get a cup of coffee and something to eat." I guess they hadn't fed us at the reception. So we got down to this Toddle House, which was a chain of diners in the area. And we went to sit down, and we sat down and we waited and we waited and we waited. It was pretty clear they weren't gonna serve us. So the manger calls the cops and I can't remember now, maybe we had twelve or fifteen people total, maybe about half of that total was female and the other half were male. And there was then a moment which I think of as one of the, kind of underscores the total absurdity of racism as well as its cruelty, I suppose, in certain ways. A guy looks at me, I mean, everybody else in the male group was Black, and there was me. And they were going to put all of them in the same jail, obviously. But then they were going to put me elsewhere, and I said, "Look, why don't you put me in jail with those guys? I mean, I came in with them, I might as well go out with them." And the jailer looks at me and he says, "Well, you're not colored, meaning Black, though, of course, by some definitions now, I would be "colored," but that's another issue. So you're Black, I mean, you're white. And believe me, at no point did that seem more of an insult than it did at that particular moment. [Laughs] So I wound up in the Atlanta City Jail for two nights, and that was a fascinating experience. I was there with a group of students from Oglethorpe University who had apparently had too rowdy a party, and then a cluster of drunks, and they sort of basically swept the streets and put 'em in jail. So in the morning, the Oglethorpe students, I guess, got bail and went out. I mean, our policy for SNCC was "no jail, no bail." This was also just before Christmas, this was about two or three days before Christmas, which was not the greatest time to be in jail and certainly not the greatest time to call your parents. And then we got transferred after two nights to the Fulton County Jail. And it certainly was an upgrade. Not by much, but it was an upgrade. The floors were warm, you had a bed, and I was keeping company with an interesting range of felons, including a wife-beater and bad check passer and who knows? One of the things is you don't ask, "What are you in here for?" At least I didn't ask. And after five days total, turns out that the company that owned Toddle House basically surrendered there, and then a whole series of mass demonstrations in Atlanta, calling on them to desegregate, and they decided to do that. So at that point, I was released. There was a colleague of mine from SNCC, a white guy, who had gotten, also gotten imprisoned after about two or three days, and so we left together, his name was Sam Shira, he was a white southerner. It's a very interesting side story, I mean, he and John Lewis grew up in the same town, but obviously not in the same neighborhood, nor did they ever grow up together. Anyway, so we got out and that was my life as a jailbird, essentially. My character was strengthened immeasurably from that experience. [Laughs] So that was one of the... I've actually written this up somewhere else, but I was very, it was an important experience, I mean, on all kinds of levels, not the least of which was the absolute stupidity, the notions of race. I mean, why not be Black in the context that they had?

But anyway, I flew home, I mean, I got a free, as a staffperson, I got a flight back here. There were obvious questions about what happened and what was that all about? And then I flew back. At some point, I think within the next month, we went to the same Toddle House, and then we were greeted by the manager, the same guy that called the cops, like a long-lost friend. I mean, one of the people we had jailed, by the way, was John Lewis, who was part of one group.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 11>

RB: But I did want to ask, as a non-white and non-Black person in the Jim Crow South, working with SNCC, getting involved in this movement, how did people respond to you from either community and assuming that there probably weren't very many other Asians at that time?

MN: Yeah. Well, let me say that there was one other Asian at least in SNCC, his name was Tameo Wakayama, he was a Japanese Canadian. And unbeknownst to me and unbeknownst to him, we sort of came to SNCC at around the same time. He was further along in his studies than I was, he'd been going, I think, to the university in Ontario. I think he, being sort of, of the same sensibility as me, I mean, I think what he did is he had a Volkswagen beetle and just go from Canada to Birmingham after the, shortly after, maybe right around the same time as the bombing that killed the four girls at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. And he had quite an experience. He passed about five years ago, and he was a very dear friend. We had gotten very close, I mean, for all kinds of reasons, ethnicity being one of them. But he became, he set up a darkroom for SNCC and then later became a photographer for SNCC, and he covered much of Freedom Summer, for example, for them. He found his calling, I thought. And we became close, but we were out of touch for like twenty years, and we reconnected in the mid-'80s when I was working with the Friends Service Committee, and we had organized a staff retreat up in rural Washington state. And he came down and he came down and he had moved to Vancouver, and we stayed in touch until he died. But he was the other Japanese that I knew in SNCC. There was one other, there was a Chinese American named Carl Young, and he was from Hawaii. He became later very active in support of the Native Hawaiian movement in Hawaii. He worked in Freedom Summer, I think it might have been Clarksdale. And later, he made a connection. I saw him just by strange coincidence. I mean, I think he went with Judy Wicks from Philadelphia and Cuba, to Cuba, and then on the way back, we connected, because I had known of him but not ever met him. We stayed in touch afterwards, I mean, for some things related to my job, I was out in Hawaii and I saw him a few times. So those were the three Asian Americans, or one Asian Canadian and two Asian Americans. Kiyoshi Kuromiya, I think, later worked on voter registration, maybe in '65, and I'm sure there were others. Bill Marutani was counsel on the Loving case before the Supreme Court. So there were Asians who were involved in it, but it certainly, speaking for myself, and I suspect for Tameo, too, the movement captured our imagination, captured a lot of other things, too, but certainly that.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 12>

RB: So can you talk about how you went from working for SNCC then to the American Friends Service Committee? What did you do in between and what was that transition like for you?

MN: Well, it's actually pretty much of a straight line. I left SNCC just as the war in Vietnam was beginning to, as they say, escalate, and there were more troops being called up, bombing was commenced in Vietnam, and I went back to school. At that point, this is late '64, early '65, being a college student at that point was enough to keep you out of the draft. And that summer, there was, I saw a story about the American Friends Service Committee doing a project in South Jersey. This was just as the War on Poverty began. Congress had passed the legislation establishing the Office of Economic Opportunity, and what was being developed in New Jersey. New Jersey then had a contract with the American Friends Service Committee to do organizing work in South Jersey. And in SNCC, the premise, one of the major premises was that local people should do organizing because once all the cameras go and the mics are gone, the big names are gone, people still had to live there, and then you've got to make those changes, so I thought, well, that sounds right. And there was this opportunity. It was also... so I was hired as an organizer, whatever that meant at that point. And I think the operational model, if I can digress here just a little bit, was a model established or probably affirmed might be the better word, by Robert Moses, who worked in the Mississippi Delta. And there are at least a couple of competing notions of organizing, and they're not conflicting necessarily, but one is kind of focusing on the particular ills and oppressions in our community, and to develop maximum visibility, challenge, this is the kind of model I think we associated with, say, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, maximize visibility. There was another approach, and here again, I said it wasn't necessarily, I didn't see them as being in conflict, but that it was also the work of seeing what people needed, and to have them talk through what they needed and what they were willing to do to get those things. It's a model that, I think, was particularly important in the South among Black people because for hundreds of years, these were people that were told that they were nothing, they were nobodies, incapable of self-governing, incapable of any number of things. And the beauty of the model that Moses was putting forth was, well, everybody is somebody, and let's hear what you have to say about your conditions. It's a very, very slow benefit, and it operates, I think, against a lot of middle class, college-educated notions, you put yourself out there and put yourself forward. It works in the opposite direction. You put yourself back, you hear people out, and it became, essentially, a kind of operational model with SNCC. And so I thought, well, let me give it a shot. So I worked around the area where I lived, these rural areas in Cumberland County, and there was certainly poverty, to say nothing of extended sense of oppression and a feeling of being nothing.

So I worked there for the American Friends Service Committee for that summer, then I went back to college after... and then after one semester back in college, basically it was a... the hell with it. I went back, dropped out again, and then the Service Committee still had an office, it was then shifting gears, working on school desegregation in Bridgeton. We got involved in that issue, also got involved in opposition to police brutality, which I think for non-Black people, didn't exist. Police did what they had to do, for that notion, to protect the "community," which actually meant white people.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 13>

MN: So that's... and then I had gotten a draft notice, and that was clear, this was like 1966 now, I was clear, "I'm not going." I mean, I may go to prison, but I'm not going to go to Vietnam. I'm not going to support this war, and so I went on the bus, there was this bus that went up to Newark to the induction center. I had applied for conscientious objector status and was turned down, but I was supreme in my confidence that since I wasn't going to be going into the army, I was going to be coming back home. I mean, my father was a little upset in the sense that, being Japanese, and not unfamiliar with the ethos of the military there, to go into the military means you're going to die, essentially. And I said, "Pop, don't worry." [Laughs] "I'll be back." Sounded like Arnold Schwarzenegger or something. So I go up on the bus, and I'd been counseled by some truly expert people on the draft. And one thing you should not do when you're out there, is when they say, "Step forward," don't step forward. Because when you step forward, you're in. And I was there, they asked who were conscientious objectors, so I was among this cluster of people, most of whom were Seventh Day Adventists, and they were going to be going into the military, I mean, the medical corps. And so I said, well, I'm not going either. I mean, one of the ironic aspects of this, to me, was that this might have been the most integrated work site I've ever seen, was the U.S. induction center, in terms of Black officers directing white guys, and giving orders, all that. So he looks at it, and this was a Black guy, he looks at my papers, and he said, "Well, you need to take another physical." This would be like my third one or something. And at this point, I'm just psyched up, essentially, if that's the right term, to go to jail. Henry Thoreau, here I come, kind of thing. [Laughs] It was like that. Or Eugene Debs, I mean, so I go through this whole physical routine again for about an hour, the test and all that. And they'd tell me, "Well, you're 4-F because of your eyes." I could have told you that before, but they let me go through before. And I tell people at that moment, I felt like saying, "You can't fire me, I quit," [Laughs] but I resisted, and that was it. After that, there was no threat of going into the... well, there was never a threat about going into the military. The only threat was whether or not I was going to go to prison, and I wasn't. So no term in Leavenworth or wherever they put hardcore COs.

And from that point on, I did various projects for the Friends Service Committee. In '69, I was sort of a little footloose, but I got some... I did things like, I was part of a team that went down to Mississippi in '69 after Hurricane Camille hit the Gulf Coast there, Mississippi Gulf Coast. It was at that time, I think maybe it still is, it was the strongest storm that ever hit the coast. Winds were clocked I think at about two hundred miles an hour, and our task was to look at how the relief aid was disbursed, and surprise, it was disbursed along racial and class lines. And at that time, this was pre-FEMA, and the task of the government was just seen as putting physical things back together, and they then jobbed out long term support, or even short term support like feeding people, putting up temporary housing, that sort of thing. And we issued a report, it was team of four of us, and it a report, we got national coverage on the Today show, and then there were later congressional hearings on the Gulf Coast that were chaired by Senator Bayh from Indiana. Senator Bayh had a notion that it was going to be important to expand the federal role in federal disaster relief. So we had these hearings, my job was to round up witnesses who we had previously interviewed, and with the same kind of story. And basically got jobbed out, the relief aid was slow in coming if it came at all, it was inadequate, and people on top got more aid. Anyway, so it was actually, in retrospect, it was sort of the beginning of FEMA, the notion that you needed a national federal agency that could deal with these issues, and that just replaced one batch, torn concrete with repaired concrete, basically. So that was sort of what I did with the Service Committee then. I was on one of their committees dealing with domestic stuff. And in 1972 I became a staffperson, one of the staffpersons for the Thoreau Coalition, which was an internal caucus within the organization of people of color. So our job was to... I mean, we were sort of like institutionalized gadflies, our task was to increase the number of people and broaden their placement in the organization, but also understanding that you can't just drop people cold, they needed to have the support structures and all that, so we had annual meetings. And it was a fascinating job, and after two years of that, I started working as the National Representative for Native American Affairs for the Service Committee. Started in 1974, and I did that for thirty-one years and then I retired. And I lived happily ever after, I guess. [Laughs]

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 14>

RB: So between the work that you were doing with the American Indian Movement and other Native American entities, and as the staffperson, did your identity as a Japanese American ever factor into it in terms of the people that you've worked with, the native indigenous communities themselves, relatability to certain issues of displacement?

MN: Well, yeah, I think it did. I think that the relationship, being a person who was not black, not white, and who often looked like, you know, an indigenous person. I think that helped. I mean... and sometimes, I'd get mistaken for them. And I have to confess that there were moments I felt, well, maybe I could pull a con job on this, you know, pretend I'm Hopi or Navajo. And somebody mentioned that, you know, my name was, could probably pass as a Hopi name. I didn't. But I think it was an important experience for me, because, in a number of ways. I mean, one is the way in which the issues for Native peoples are defined. They're both similar, but significantly different. In other words, native peoples are poor people. You know, they have, they're structurally oppressed. And, you know, the history, of course, you know, as part of one of the cornerstones of this nation. So there's that aspect of it. So they share, if that's the right term here, a kind of a collective history with the other people of color. But what makes it different, -- and Native peoples would be among the first to tell you -- is their status, that as sovereign people, and sovereign people, usually with governments, and the historical relationships that flow out of that. So when you're talking about Native peoples, it's not a sort of generic Native peoples. You know, you're Cherokee or Lakota, they're Apache, Wabanaki, et cetera, each with their own creation myth, each with their own political and social histories, usually with their own treaties, and that makes them different. So their struggle in that sense, is not for equality as such, but for sovereignty or self-determination. Because they've been around as discrete peoples before there were any other people on this continent, and they'll persist as they have always. I mean, some in diminished numbers, obviously. So that casts another dimension to the struggle.

So one of the discoveries that I have made for myself is in speaking of political coalitions of the poor in the press, you have to be, you know, you have to be mindful of that difference also. In other words, it's not being poor and oppressed, because that's a broad brush. Accurate, but in this sense, incomplete, and that was important to know. And, you know, it gives you also a sense of history about this nation and their history, too. I mean, indigenous peoples. I think there is such a historical sense in this country, and in this culture, you know, I don't know that we comprehend what it means to be part of a community that has lived on this particular stretch of land or identified with a particular stretch of land, not just for, you know, a couple of generations, but three hundred, four hundred, five hundred years going back. And I think we're just beginning, as non-indigenous peoples, to understand what that means, and also to begin to pay homage to whose land this is. And I don't think we've yet developed a political response appropriate, you know, to that discovery. In other words, I thought about structures that could develop, you know, maybe there should be a "Supreme Indian Court," for example, and why not have Native representation in Congress, or certainly at the state legislative levels? I mean, they do in Maine, for example. There are delegates, I think, one Passamaquoddy, one Penobscot, to the state legislature, why shouldn't that be larger? I mean, why shouldn't there be ten Navajos in the Arizona legislature? I mean, why shouldn't our political seamwork reflect something with accuracy and political reality? I mean, yes, the numbers are small, but so are farmers, so are residents of Wyoming, you know. So it's not just size, it's political realities and historical ones. So it makes you think a lot, frankly, I mean, at least for me, that it's not a single fit.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 15>

LG: So I guess we can pick off where Rob left off, the question that he wanted to move to? I'm trying to remember what it...

MN: It had to do with the Commission on Wartime Relocation?

LG: Yeah, do you want to talk a little bit about that?

MN: Yeah. Let's say, it... I think this goes back now to the early '80s. The Commission had been established, I think it had ten members appointed by President Jimmy Carter. And it was... I think the chair of that committee was Arthur Goldberg, former Supreme Court Justice. And it included a number of former government officials, and included Bill Marutani, who was a Common Pleas Court judge here, he was the only, I think he was the only Japanese American on that body. And the Commission made recommendations with one dissent, I think, the congressional member from California, I think his name was Dan Lungren who opposed the recommendations. But the recommendations included having a payment of twenty thousand dollars to each internee, surviving internee, and a formal apology from the United States government. And then funds, whatever leftover funds that were, would be used to develop curricula and artifacts and other items and materials to note this experience, you know, the internment, its meaning. So, anyway, I think that's the backdrop for it. You're probably familiar with it, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to repeat the obvious, but I attended one of the public sessions of the Commission. And I attended it with Lou Schneider, Lou Schneider had been the former general secretary of the American Friends Service Committee. This was, I think, maybe a year or two after he had retired. And I had been, I had helped craft the -- excuse me -- the testimony of the American Friends Service Committee for the Commission, in which we supported all those things that had just been advocated, or advocated, which the Commission also supported.

And the Commission, let's see, as I recall it, the hearings were... let's see. So this must have been 1981 or '82. And what I remember about it was that Lou spoke on behalf of the organization, and we submitted the testimony. And as we both rose to leave the room, there was sort of, this was a spontaneous standing up of, I think, probably most of the Nikkei in the room to applaud, because they were applauding the work of the American Friends Service Committee during that period of the internment. The Service Committee had been one of the only organizations that offered support direct support and material assistance to the internees, and they also provided assistance for internees who were being relocated throughout the country. So there were these centers in places like Des Moines, Iowa, you know, and there had also been college students who were sustained by, you know, assistance that was organized by the Service Committee, so that they could, you know, go to Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, or Haverford or Grinnell, or in Bill Marutani's case, South Dakota Wesleyan, where he was a classmate of then to be Senator George McGovern, turns out. But anyway, as we were rising to get out, I remember this spontaneous standing of when he came here, and they were applauding, because it was an applause, not for us, or at least not for us alone. But I think for the Friends Service Committee, and not only for Quakers in general, for their role, it was a very, very moving experience, certainly for me. And I've said this before, that it was probably one of the proudest moments I've ever had as a staffperson for the Friends Service Committee. Since there was, it was one of those things where they didn't have to do the right thing, but they did. And there was, you know, it was against the grain. I mean, the war was popular, probably hardly anyone knew much about the internment east of the Mississippi, you know, at that time, and a lot of people west of the Mississippi didn't know much about it either. So it was a nice moment, and I still remember it.

LG: So happened after this moment? How did your work continue?

MN: Well, we were advocates for internment -- I mean, not for internment, for redress. We were, that was around '81, '82, the redress bill, I think, didn't pass until, I think it was 1988. And the dispersal of redress funds didn't take place until I think around the early '90s. So it was a long, extended process, and, of course, you had the movement which preceded it, and lots of strategic discussion and disagreement about how to proceed, you know, about redress. We had talked earlier about some of the conflicts of which, you know, to which the Japanese American Citizens League was a part. And one of, there were people in the Japanese American community who felt that, "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, let's go to court right now." There were those who said, well, let's put a bill in right now. And I think what evolved was first the establishment of this commission, precedence for that, on the very logical grounds, then most people didn't know much, if anything, about the internment. And I think that was, by might sights, a master stroke because it provided a process of public education about the internment. And I think also... and this is also very important to me, it facilitated unity in the Japanese American community, and whatever disagreements that were and would continue. The process of getting witnesses, for example, I'm putting aside all the conflicts about what the JACL did or didn't do, or should have done and didn't do, were put aside and so that people could speak about their experiences, basically, as prisoners of the United States, and what that meant. So it was a very effective process, I believe, and it took it out of the realm of being just a process of special pleading. It made it a kind of fundamental human rights question, and that was very important. I mean, it's not unfamiliar in Washington, I think, when you were trying to sneak a deal through, essentially, you know, playing all the access games that you have to play to get something through. And this was quite the opposite, and it was, I think the country is better because of it, because it became a public issue, in the center of the discussion.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 16>

LG: So, shifting a little bit, I did want to cover just a, more biographical details. If you could talk about children, if you got married.

MN: Oh, yeah, sure. I am married, my partner is Jean Hunt, we've been together for now fifty-one years, the first twenty of which were out of wedlock and the rest in wedlock. I have two adult children, a daughter named Michiko Hunt, in good feminist fashion, took her mother's name. And then a son, Kenzo Nakawatase, in traditional fashion, took his father's name, last name, and my grandfather's, his grandfather's name. They both have their own families, they both have two kids. My daughter works as an all-around staff, development staffperson at Greene Street Friends School in Germantown. My son is a writer, I mean, I think a writer for pay. [Laughs] It's not, he's not working on the Great American Novel, at least not that I know of, but it's a living. And they both live in Germantown. My son moved back to Germantown after his wife finished her coursework for her PhD in urban education at Teacher's College, so they moved back last spring. And so I have four grandkids, and they all, everybody lives within ten minutes, so it's a nice thing.

LG: Raising your children, did you share stories about your experiences, your activism with them, even with your grandchildren?

MN: Well, not so much, not yet with my grandchildren. It's interesting, of our two children, my daughter feels the strongest in terms of racial consciousness or a sense, they're both socially conscious, but I think she at least has been first in sort of thinking about these issues, but they're issues not only of the Japanese experience, but also being a hapa, you know, her being Japanese on one side. And so, and her kids, her husband is half Italian and half Jewish, my son's wife is Cape Verdean. So that adds another degree of, you know, change, difference. So it's an interesting mix within our own family. So I call it "the wave of the present" in terms of, you know, the American experience now, in terms of this rather polyglot sense of who is an American. But they're both, as I said, very socially conscious, and I suspect they're very clear about how that's affected things in their lives, and probably are going to learn more about it. As for how much they know about me, you know, a little bit, but some of it's just kind of implicit. But a lot of it's not been told by me, but maybe by other people, and the grandkids don't know much. Of course, one of my grandkids is only about seven months old. Anyway, that's who knows what, at least today.

LG: So, maybe if you didn't talk to them so much explicitly about your experiences, were there certain characteristics or qualities that you tried to instill in them?

MN: Well, they have a clear sense of justice, and a very clear sense of what's right and what's wrong, and what's just and unjust. And they certainly are not afraid to express those feelings and sentiments. So that's very much the scene, and I'm very proud of that. I'm glad about that. They have their own tastes, you know, all kinds of things. My son, like my son is a big music person, and we generally agree on much, but he's much more of a fan of rap than I am. And you know, I think we're kind of on the same progressive page, if you will, and we support and deplore some of the same things as you can imagine.

LG: How did you meet your wife?

MN: Well, it was through the American Friends Service Committee. We were active where we were members of a committee, and we got to know each other that way, the committee looking at what a new society would look like. And that was in the early '70s, so the rest is history, or her story. [Laughs]

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 17>

LG: So currently, you said that you were on the board for Seabrook working on education. I'm curious, obviously, education and awareness is pretty important to you, so I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about your current work and what that means in connection to your own story?

MN: Yeah. Well, I'm the president of the board of the Seabrook Education and Cultural Center, which was established in 1994. And it was set up to commemorate the history of the community, which, you know, the initial focus was on the relocation there of Japanese Americans, and then also the Estonian and then other refugees from the Baltic countries who settled later. I think the perspective there is to see what that process was, I mean, who was involved, what kind of interactions there were. And in a broader sense, I mean, what does that all mean? What does that say? And we're also, I think, very much engaged and trying to broaden out the community, the sense of the community itself. Because, I think many people who were involved in establishing the center focused very much on the, you know, the Estonians and the Japanese Americans, particularly, but not the African Americans. And then there were other groups that settled in the area. There were, besides African Americans, there were Jamaican contract workers whose families stayed, there were Appalachian whites. And I'm not, I don't think that those stories have yet been fully told or in the interactions. And of course, we live in an area, a region, which was very conservative, and we had been very white, though the immediate area was not. So that's obviously another part of this story. I tend to be more skeptical than some about, you this ever less rosy view, let's put it that way, of this country in terms of being a land of opportunity, but I can certainly speak to other great and positive contradictions involved in that experience. And that has to be told, too.

LG: I see here, I think you've kind of covered all of the questions that we had. Is there anything that you want to talk about that we didn't ask you or anything you think we're missing or anything?

MN: I must admit, I can't think of any at the moment, truth be told. [Laughs] I think it is important to have a sense, I mean, to have a greater sort of view of popular history. I mean, it's clear from reading, just over the years, what's going on in this country, that a lot of what's... there's a lot that's just unknown, and there's also much that's known that's just not true. I mean, some of that's, I'm not saying that there's a single truth, but I am saying that I think there are interpretations, which seem to be inadequate in explaining and understanding events and people. I mean, you know, all the struggles around what's woke and what CRT is, and, you know, what's the American experience. I think that's very much up for grabs in terms of, you know, what we know, and how much we know. So we're all part of that particular struggle, I think.

LG: So do you see yourself continuing this activism for a while?

MN: Well, yeah, I mean, within limits. I'm getting a little old for this, you know, but I do a lot of this stuff, you know, it's interviews and discussions, and I enjoy it. My capacity for hitting the streets is not as great as it used to be, I must admit. But I also think about the importance of writing down things that relate to just my own experiences. I mean, I've begun, I hope, I'm going to continue this for a while, to explore some of the files, for example, of the Friends Service Committee, pretty comprehensive archives downtown and look at some of the some of the stuff I wrote. And the stuff that was written about things that were going on in some very turbulent periods. So I would like to see myself in that sense as a kind of historian. But then I think, you know, probably many of us are really, without getting paid for it, or being explicitly listed as our occupation.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.