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BS: Yeah, no, that was a fantastic introduction to her life. And then in 1977, she became, Cherry became the president of the Seattle JACL. So, you talked a little bit about some of her values and characteristics that pushed her towards activism, but what factors motivated her interest in becoming involved specifically with the Japanese American community here in Seattle?

KK: Well, I think what I'll do is I'll talk more extensively like that, maybe in kind of a later question I'll talk more specifically about her role in redress. But I think that her presidency in 1977, and, you know, later on again I'll talk about it, I think she was national vice president at one point during the redress movement. But the presidency in 1977, I remember pretty clearly. Back then, when you became an officer in JACL it was a lot more formal than these days. Because I remember going, they have, every year, what was known as installation banquets, which meant a pretty big banquet where a lot of speaking, and I remember going there just as a family member. But in some ways that was kind of a milepost. Because it was interesting that early on, I talked about how hard she was working to get our family established. I remember, as a young kid, the fact that she had political and activist leanings. One of the first things I remember was that she became and tried to contribute to, in the early '60s, the anti-nuclear the movement for nuclear disarmament. And I think, I suspect that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing impacted her a lot, just in terms of what she saw. She also -- I think this played into it -- had gotten some medical treatment for a skin condition in the '50s, and back then they blasted her skin with x-rays, which had a really kind of bad effect on her health. And I think those two things kind of intersected to her becoming interested in the anti-nuclear movement in the '60s. And I remember tagging along with her to someplace or other where they were running a mimeograph machine -- which, that's way before your time -- but it was basically this big drum like thing that they used to print off, kind of, leaflets. And the leaflets were about disarmament. I remember her talking to somebody in that office -- which clearly was some activist office regarding anti-nuclear movement -- saying that she would do this and that, but she wouldn't picket. And that was kind of where she drew the line. She wasn't gonna picket, which, growing up in the Japanese community, I could see why. I mean, you don't want to stick out there.

But there were other things that kind of clued me in nowadays that she was kind of bound for her role. She was not one of those Nisei that didn't say anything about incarceration. Lots of sons, they had these stories about hearing about camp and talking about this and that, or so and so meeting in camp. And at one point -- I think I must eight -- I finally said, "What is... what are you talking about, this camp?" Because I thought maybe it was a vacation that they hadn't taken me on or something. So, my mom sat me down and actually told me about the incarceration, which was really kind of unusual. You hear stories about Sansei not hearing about incarceration until much, much later in school or something. But she told me about it. And growing up in kind of Cold War America where, "This is greatest democratic country in the world," blah, blah, blah, I remember being as a kid, totally shocked, completely shocked that my entire family had suffered through that. And so, in hindsight, you can kind of tell that this was not something that she was going to be quiet about.

But there are other things along the way, I think that... she was clearly sympathetic to the civil rights movement, even though she wasn't active. I remember clearly an incident as a kid where somebody, some kid in the neighborhood, she heard them use the N-word, I believe they were goofing around. And she made her point to sit me down and talk about how bad that was, how horrible that was, which I, of course, never forgot that. I also remember, in the late '60s, how... I was a Boy Scout and very typically grew up in the Cold War and all the fear about Communism taking over. She was vehemently against the Vietnam War from a very early stage and pretty vocal about it. And she, I was kind of taken aback when she basically said, how bad supporting the Vietnam War was, which just kind of confused me until much later when I grew up a little more and kind of saw that.

So, I think that as I grew up and basically later high school, went off to college, I think she had more time then to be able to get active in the JACL, which she did. And I think we went to, my uncle and cousins were in Chicago, and in 1970 the convention was there. And so we actually all went. My dad, me, it was kind of a vacation. I hadn't seen my cousins for a long, long time. And so she was there at that convention, at which point the idea of redress was introduced by Edison Uno in San Francisco. And even though she didn't talk about it it's pretty clear that that impacted her. She was on the board of JACL in the early '70s, and I know that -- I read about in this book, by the way, which I'll quote from later called Born in Seattle, which if you want to know about redress -- she facilitated a couple of meetings where they, early on some of the people who launched redress talked about it. I don't think at that point that she was a leader in the redress movement, that came later. But I can't help but think that she was pretty sympathetic to it. So that kind of gets you up to where, at a certain point, being on the board, and I would imagine being more and more vocal, that that's how she ended up to be president for the year, 1977. So, I'll stop here.

BS: Yeah, no, that's pretty fascinating.

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