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CN: So how did you originally get involved with the JACL?

RC: With the JACL, so I've always kind of, even before JACL, I kind of volunteered on different things, although it wasn't in the arena of social justice and civil rights. But when I... and I had always actually kind of wondered, or I had wondered how to get involved. I became aware of JACL because my uncle was the president of JACL, Kip Tokuda, for a time, and so my grandmother would, she would make note of it, I would visit her every Tuesday night for dinner. And so it was just something that she made me keenly aware of when I was a child, and I always was kind of curious, like, okay, so what do they do and how do I get involved? And back then -- we're talking about like the '90s -- so this is like before really the internet took off and stuff like that. So you would mainly hear about like the activities and how to get involved just through like word of mouth or someone directly or the newsletter. So I didn't really for a long time know how to get involved and especially in my, when I was younger. But I applied for a scholarship my junior year at the U-Dub, and I ended up winning a scholarship. And that kind of started my involvement. And it started very slow or where it was, I won the scholarship. And I was also friends with some people on the board, actually, my dentist at the time or still my dentist, Dr. Christine Shigaki, was on the board. And she invited me to come to a meeting just to see, "Hey, would you like to come to a meeting?" This was like after winning the scholarship. And I was like, "Oh, yeah," and then it kind of really came up with that where people were like, "Okay, you're at this meeting? Oh, would you like to join the board? Okay. Okay, would you like to get involved at the district level in being like our youth Rep?" and it just kind of, like, cascaded from there.

CN: So like, as a student at U-Dub, I know you said that like it kind of built kind of slowly, your involvement. But like, when you were younger, like college age, or like, just after college, what work did you do with JACL? Like, outside of just like going to meetings and being aware of it?

RC: Yeah, so let's see. And things escalated quickly. At the beginning, I was just on the board, and maybe for, like, the first few months to maybe the first year, I was kind of observing, trying to get my lay of the land trying to figure out like... and, quite honestly, as a young person observing, I just kind of wanted to figure out my place. Like you don't know... like what should you say, what might be a waste of people's time, et cetera, et cetera. I kind of wanted to get a feel just like what was appropriate, what's valuable, and things like that. But slowly, I would just do the things that they would ask of board members. And then I don't even remember what the origin of this was. But I had the idea of doing a fundraiser to see if we could get more money for youth activities. So for... and I don't even know how I came up with this idea. So I ended up putting on like a fundraiser where we sold curry dinners, like Japanese curry. And then for some reason I intertwined like a silent auction and then a book sale into it. Even though it was... there was like, it was an open time window, and it wasn't like... there was no like, show or anything to go along with it.

RC: So I ended up doing that, like in my first year, and also at the time, the governor, the person in charge of JACL for the Pacific Northwest region, so like Alaska, Washington, and Oregon, from our board, Elaine Akagi. And so Elaine was like... each district typically, amongst their leadership, has a youth representative. And so she asked me, "Do you want to be the youth representative?" And so I did that. And that gave me exposure to more the national organization. So being kind of a district rep. there was like a National Youth Conference and some different events, in particular for youth. And so that quickly escalated, like within a year or so, for me like running for the National Board of JACL, which I ran for the Vice President of Public Affairs. So the board has a president and then it has four vice presidents under it. So I ran for one of the positions, I ran unopposed. But, and to be frank, there was some challenges there just because, one, I always have looked -- you probably empathize -- I have always looked younger than my real age. And my real age was twenty-three, twenty-four, so that was not something that was customary at that point. I think maybe things have changed since then. But even running unopposed, there was like some worry or thoughts among the people that were kind of in my circle of my campaign in terms of, will people vote -- because they don't have to vote for anyone -- will people vote for someone that looks so young and is quite frankly, so young? But they did. And it's kind of like how my involvement went.

And it was, that was a very interesting time, this is like 2000. And so how terms run for national JACL is they run for two-year terms. And so in 2001, was 9/11. And in 9/11, obviously, there was the terrorist attack. And as a part of that, there was mass confusion and a lot of paranoia. And so the talk became, there were murmurs of should we... would it be appropriate to kind of create something like, not exactly like camps, but should there be something that... a way of cordoning off people, even though they're Americans. So in particular, like, people may be that were Muslim, or people that some in the general public associated with the terrorist attacks. So that was an interesting time. And there was... also in conjunction -- well, not in conjunction with that -- but there was, there's still a lot of stuff in relation to like, anti-defamation, like there was a movie for Pearl Harbor, a Ben Affleck movie. And so during that time, we got involved with other organizations in making sure that we were able to kind of like, preview some of these things that were coming out in terms of media that might contribute to anti-defamation. And figuring out, how can we make sure that the story is, I guess you could say, somewhat balanced? Or how do we make sure that we're not completely villainized, to be frank. So that was really, it was a good, a great time. I mean, public affairs' role is to kind of establish the stance of the JACL in terms of what policies are pursued and how we pursue them. So being a part of that was interesting.

I worked real close with the D.C. director at that time, Christine Minami. And as a part of that, that was really great, because she was also young, too, and anything I wanted to push, and I push really hard, she would, generally help out with that, too. So we... I wrote a lot of press releases with her, and taking stances and a lot of our position papers I wrote personally. Which... and that's just part of the nature of how... I have an aggressive personality, because there's a little bit of growing with that. I mean, because first, even after I got elected, there's still a little bit of feeling out from everyone else that was elected and even staff trying to figure out what, how much can we turn over the reins? Or how much can we give this twenty-three year old? And since I'm so aggressive, normally, the board only sets policies, and especially at that level where there's paid staff. But since I wanted to pursue a lot of stuff, and there just wasn't enough staff to pursue it, that's how I ended up doing things like writing some of the press releases. And really, in the infancy of the national website, trying to, I kind of took that under my own reins and actually did a lot of it myself. But it's just a shortage of staff at the time, which you'll always have at nonprofits. But yeah, that's kind of my early involvement. I would say that's a look at my first three to five years getting involved in JACL.

CN: I didn't realize you were so young when you were the vice president. That's amazing. So Bill had mentioned that you won like a chapter award when you were student. Is that different than like this the scholarship that you were talking about?

RC: Yeah.

CN: So I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit more about the award and like, what kind of student activities you did that led to you receiving it?

RC: Oh, I don't think it was related necessarily to any student activities, it was mainly related to some of the stuff that I did at the time. And really, I think it really was surprising to a lot of people that you could have someone who's like twenty-one or twenty-two just volunteer to create their own fundraiser and kind of run the show on it, run point on it. And that kind of... that's kind of my interpretation of what, one of the drivers that led to that award. The award was this kind of a discretionary award, like at the annual banquet, they're set awards, but this one was, I think, it was just called the Presidential Award. So it was basically, it's not an award they gave out every year, it's just, they decided ad hoc to give me an award at the banquet that year.

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