~ Visit the official JAMsj website ~
AAPI & Japanese American Museum of San Jose
Digital Archive

Dale Minami

Date: February 28, 2022
 Interviewer: Ellina Yin and Yvonne Kwan
 Interviewee: Dale Minami (1946 - )

Dale Minami is a prominent Japanese American civil rights and personal injury lawyer based in San Francisco. He led a legal team of pro bono attorneys to successfully reopen and litigate the Korematsu v. United States case. Dale was also one of the early Asian American Studies faculty who taught Asian American jurisprudence.

Transcript of Dale Minami

Click on any section of the transcript to jump directly to that segment of the video. This feature lets you quickly access the content you're interested in without the need to manually search through the entire video. You can also click on the tick below each transcript to expand the text and read the full content without playing that segment of the video.

Timeframe 00:00 >> 4:20

My name is Dale Minami. I was born in the Japanese hospital in East Los Angeles. I grew up in Gardena, and date of birth is 10/13/1946. My father was he Isami Minami. I would call him Sam Minami. Place of birth was Riverside. He was born in 1914 on January 16. Well, he went to Gardena High School, where, of course, I went and then later went to Compton Community College. It was junior college then, and then he had to go to work to support his family.

(Interviewer) And so was your father of the Nisei [generation]?

He was a Nisei born in Riverside.

(Interviewer) I was going to say, so your grandparents must have been Issei. They were. And on one side, they were from Kumamoto. And my mother's side was from Kagoshima.

(Interviewer) Let's focus on your father's side. Why did your father's side of the family decide to migrate to the United States?

We didn't know as much about him. His. My father's mother died when he was 13, so he was left with, you know, I think four brothers and a sister, and they were farmers. And my well, my dad said as my my grandfather, my ojichan on my father's side had decided that I had learned about the streets of gold in just like the Chinese in San Francisco, in the bay Area and all of the United States. So he came here to pick up a few gold bricks and go retire in Japan.

(Interviewer) And then how did he meet your grandmother then?

I don't know because she died at 13. I never met her. Didn't know anything about her, except she had a she had cancer, and they were fairly well off. And then they had to spend all the money on medical care. So they were not what I would call well-off, but they survived.

(Interviewer) Did your father ever talk about his childhood?

He did a little bit. I told us anecdotal stories. He didn't talk about farming or his mother. He talked about smoking cigarettes. And so he did talk a little bit about growing up.

(Interviewer) And then how about your mother's name? Place of birth, Date of birth.

May Minami. She was born in Oxnard, California. Her date of birth is January excuse me, January 26th, 1917. She went through Gardena High School, where she met my father, and she worked in a bank at it was Sumitomo. And I think they took the Bank of Tokyo then, too. And so she mainly helped out my father when he started his business. But up to then she was working in a in a bank.

Oh, yes. My father started out as a gardener when they came back [from camp]. When…while I grew up before that, he was. He ran a really small sporting goods shop that catered to golfers, a lot of them from Japan, because it was a status thing. He had a little basement, a store down below Joseph’s menswear in First Street in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles. So he he worked that and but when he came back from the prisons from rural Arkansas where they were interned, incarcerated excuse me. I hate to use that word interned—incarcerated. He couldn't find a job. He had to be a gardener. But because of his farming background, you know, he's good at it. And he also then eventually took all his savings and the help of a friend to open a sporting goods store in Gardena. So he became a small business owner. My mom worked there and helped out there all the kids. I have two older brothers. They all had to work there, although it was kind of fun sometimes. He was an incredible athlete and so that led easily to, you know, a job that he loved, which was sporting goods.

Timeframe 4:20 >> 9:07

(Interviewer) Were you an athlete?

Actually, I was. I played varsity basketball, Gardena High and Varsity Baseball. I was an all-league selection. Then I actually became a walk on at USC on the Frosh Frosh team, went out to college, but a series of events conspired to keep me from staying on the team. It didn't conspire…They gave me a jersey that was four sizes too big. It would fall off my arms. When I was playing, the pants were on the fall down and they were bunched up and I looked terrible. I just looked so embarrassing. I wasn't going to play anyways. I was the last guy on the team. And then I broke my foot, got a D on a test, and I realized, you know, this is not for me. I'm not going to play. I'm going to look like a clown. So I quit the team.

So I played, and my other brother got a scholarship to in baseball to UC Santa Barbara. So he played my older brother, who was a good tennis player. He was the number one tennis player in Gardena Gardena High School, but he was really gentle and kind. He lacked the killer urge, and so he was not the kind of athlete like my middle brother and I were, which were really hyper competitive, which is why I would get my ass kicked by him all the time.

(Interviewer) Were there any particular celebrity athletes at the time that you admired?

Well, I was a Lakers fan, but before that I was a John Wooden fan, the coach of UCLA, who was losing seasons year after year and then he got some great athletes to play for him. And I don't know why I liked him, but he just seemed to have value more principles than just winning basketball. And so when he recruited a guy named Lew Alcindor who who became changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Lucius Allen, Lynn Shackleford, Mike Leonard, they had an amazing team. Gail Goodrich. And so for those, I'm still a UCLA fan, even though I went to USC, so I liked him more for his principles than anyone else. And I also had a legendary coach that was a coach player that recruited me to play at the NAU ball at UCLA. I mean, excuse me, in Los Angeles. So we played in the Double A league, and he eventually became the first Japanese American or Asian American, a Division I coach named David Yanai at Cal State Dominguez. Then he went to L.A. State and he still around. He's he's probably still played basketball. It was a monster. But I got to play for him. And I think that was it was a stroke of luck. He grew up in Gardena, though, So, you know, there's always that connection. And I was a terrible baseball player, by the way. I got to play at the NAU. And I actually you know…Nisei Athletic Union (NAU). My brother was played in the top league. I played at the top league in basketball. But and baseball has relegated to the secondary league. So I did play there.

But I did play, like I said, varsity baseball. And I hit pretty well. But the only thing is I had such a slow bat; I would never hit a ball to the left of second base. I was right-handed. I was so slow it hit it to the right all the time. One time, though, we're playing the best team and this flamethrower pitcher threw I was the leadoff batter and I got a hit and it started going to the right field line and it went over the first baseman's head and we landed on the on the line. So the dust came up. And so I thought I never got an extra base hit; all it with singles and bunts. So I got to second base. I got to get a triple, I got to get as far as I can. Right Fielder was an all-city player with an arm, like a cannon. They had the ball about ten feet before I even got to third base. And so I tried to fake a slide in there. I was called out. My whole team was laughing so hard. But, you know, it was a hit was a hit for me. I got to at least one double in my varsity career.

Timeframe 9:07 >> 11:03

And my grandfather, it was interesting. He came or he was like a second or third son. So, you know, typically his future in Japan was limited. So he came to Oxnard with some relatives and he tried his hand at farming. And as my mother said, he was a terrible farmer. So they moved to Los Angeles and or Gardena, and he became the first Japanese American New York Life insurance agent. And he did really well because there were no other Japanese Americans. And one of the interesting stories, he convinced his cousin to come from Kagoshima to join him. And it turned out his cousin had a son who became a famous lawyer named Frank Tuman, who wrote Bamboo People, a number of different things, different books, became a really good civil rights lawyer.

(Interviewer) And he do you ever get to get together to talk about the work that you folks do?

You mean Frank? Yes. Well, Frank moved to Thailand, but before he just before he left, he and he still alive. I think he's 101. He just got his degree from USC, which had denied Japanese Americans both a degree and the other schools access to their transcript and the after. It was almost a ten-year fight. They finally apologized to Japanese Americans who were incarcerated, and Frank then wrote a biography. He asked me to do a blurb, but, you know, I do the blurbs in the back of the book, and that was about eight years ago. And we have actually been in touch through email. But he and he's very lucid. But, you know, we don't have like a friendship or frequent communications at all.

Systems & Power Timeframe 11:03 >> 19:43

"(Interviewer) And you said you had two older brothers. [Correct.] And how much older are they?

Well, one is a year and a half. The other one is six years older. Six and a half.

(Interviewer) Did you all have a close relationship or just kind of siblings ganging up on each other?

Well, if you call it getting my ass kicked, close. Physically, Yeah, that was very close. But my older brother was so much older. He kind of lived his own life and did his own thing. He was different school, different grade. But my other brother, I played a lot of sports, so we played a lot together and we had a, you know, love hate relationship. But I learned a lot from both of them in different ways. And over the years, as you mellow, you become very close. And we're really close right now. Well, your brother went to USC and that's probably one of the reasons I went other than I got a scholarship. So I was a little bit seduced because I wanted to go to UCLA, which I got into. And then my other brother, my oldest brother, then Greg, was an older brother, was had a major in engineering. Then he shifted to dentistry, so he became a dentist. Then he decided he wanted to go to medical school. So I went to medical school at USC. Then I decided you want to have a specialty of plastic surgery. So I did a residency at Stanford for five years. So he went to school."

You know, my my dad always told him because of the incarceration, you know, they could take away your freedom, but they can't take away your education. So my brother, I guess, took that literally. And when he decided to go to medical school, my father was a little bit stunned. So he walked around a daze because now he's going to be in school like and residency like 15 years. And that was a lot of time to pay for. Fortunately, he had a wife who was a CPA, and that helped out a lot. My middle [brother] went to Santa Barbara and then got a master’s degree in kinesiology. He became a baseball coach and a teacher, and that's where he spent his whole career teaching.

(Interviewer) And so earlier you mentioned this already, but as your parents said, is that, you know, they can take away your freedom but not your education. So that kind of hints at or just not directly speaks to the World War two era and the prison camps and incarceration. So can you share if we ever talk explicitly about it, what would they share anything around that.

They did not. Like most of Nisei they didn't really explain the degradation, the humiliation, the dismal conditions they lived in. Once in a while, they'd refer to the friends that they had and they call them camps. But of course we knew their were prisons and they would tell little anecdotal stories, but not none of the probably the most disastrous treatment that they received at all until later on, until the redress movement started. Then their loosened their tongues and they were able to talk and talk and talk and share of up after that. But they did talk so much more after the redress movement started. So we didn't know very much. I knew vaguely that they had to go to Santa Anita horse track to stay. We didn't know there were a horse stables then at that time.

At that time, and my father talked about being the athletic director, everything about it, sports and not everything. I mean, but he was in charge of the sports activities at Rohwer, Arkansas and so then those are the kind of stories they told. I honestly think they tried to shield us from the horror that they suffered during during those really bitter and terrible times.

(Interviewer) So when did you actually learn about the degradation the racism, the all the things that Japanese Americans were subjected to around that incarceration, period?

Well, it was kind of in bits and pieces. There was a paragraph in my high school history book. Then we studied probably about five or six paragraphs of political science at USC. And then it wasn't really till I got to the law school and read the Korematsu, Hirabayashi and Yasui Supreme Court decisions. And I just thought these were absolutely wrong. And the kind of allegation that they were making seemed so detached from my understanding of who my family was, my relatives, my friends, my family's friends who were not spies and saboteurs. But it wasn't until, you know, the Black liberation movement started Black movement started that people started exploring their own history. And part of the history was had to do with, you know, the the foreign miners attacks against Chinese, the laundrymen’s tax, but also about the discriminatory laws against Japanese as well.

The Immigration Act of ’24, 1924, which which really precluded immigration from Japan similar to the 1882 immigration Act against Chinese Americans who had prohibited immigration from China. So when we started studying history, we started learning more about the unfairness of the process. Why didn't they get a trial? Why didn't they get due process? Why didn't they have a right to an attorney? And I did talk to my parents a little bit about it then, and they gave up a little bit more information saying, yeah, we thought it was unfair. But again, they didn't talk about the bad food, the the going to the latrines, the lack of privacy, the too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter. The children who died, the babies who died stillborn, at Rohwer for which they had little tiny markers almost rocks: Baby Yamato, Baby Kato. They didn't even give them names because, you know, they were in a time of war in prison. They now have headstones there, but the headstones there were just a little bit of rocks about so about 13. It was really poignant.

But over the years we started learning more and more and more, and I still learn more. And I would say that I really didn't start learning about the depth of the terrible treatment until maybe, you know, 20, 25 years ago. I think it was I take that back. It was in the redress hearings started. Then we started learning, but more and more details came out and they are still coming out about how people were treated. The Tule Lake prison cell, that's and my friend's parents were forced into these. I mean, this is it was just awful. So the short answer to that is it took me a long time, and I learned it in probably stages over the course of 40 years, maybe almost 50 years, about how bad it was for Japanese Americans. It wasn't a camp. It wasn't like the propaganda films the government shows about with a good food and a community, we build of really nice housing. These people did not have to work. I mean, they told the stories that were both really out there were absurd, outright lies and I just saw one the other day. It was in the films of Remembrance, and they did a contrast between what the government was saying and what the conditions really were. And it was pretty striking in the hypocrisy of the government.

Narrative & Identity Timeframe 19:43 >> 23:04

Of, you know, after the incarceration, my parents well, after I was born, I guess, and we returned to Gardena, you know, we couldn't go into our home or to my grandparents’ home. So we lived in a garage for six months, three families. Then we finally got to go into the house. Of course, I don't remember any of that. I was too young. But as we grew older, we didn't have a consciousness of how it affected us and it didn't come till many, many years later. You know, past your twenties when you realize, you know, what we're encouraged to do is to be white, to be American. My brother and I went to Japanese school for two weeks and we were so ill behaved, and we were not encouraged to do so, to stay there. So we got the opportunity to play baseball instead. So we only stayed there to two weeks. We discounted Japanese culture. We actively disparaged the Japanese nationals. You know, we'd call them F-O-Bs and we didn't talk Japanese at home, except it's surprising how many names, you know, how many words you remember a lot of from, you know, the cultural translator, which is always the mother who, you know, she would say yakamashii a lot, which means too loud.

But we learned I actually do remember quite a few words now that my family all speaks Japanese fluently, except for me. I've had to adapt. So I think one is to try to be white to us, to assimilate, to not stand out, don't be different. Wear clothes like your your your contemporaries wear. Don't speak Japanese. We we didn't observe we did not observe Japanese customs. Although my mom once in a while would have a Boys Day celebration and on New Year we'd go to my aunt's house and she was older. She was actually Kibei because she was stuck in Japan during the war. And so we would have things that were very foreign to me, you know, the roots, the different kind of like lotus roots and yokan and the different foods that you eat in Japanese culture. We do that all the time. Now.

(Interviewer) Did you have your soba, your new year soba?

Yes, sir. I mean, yes, ma'am, we did. We have. We had that. My wife does that because she’s shin Nisei. Her parents are born in Japan, so she keeps up those traditions and especially obachan. I mean, my wife's mother, I should say, sometimes we call her our kids’ mother because she takes care of the kids so much. But she, you know, they actually observe those customs still. But we were told we were discouraged from showing hardly any Japaneseness at the time.

Narrative & Identity Timeframe 23:04 >> 26:21

(Interviewer) And Gardena has a quite sizable number of Japanese Americans.

It did at that time was probably about 15%. It wasn’t huge in terms of numbers, but it was outsized in terms of its influence of of that community and in part, I think it was because the people in Gardena were so less racist than anywhere else, partly because the number of Japanese that were in that community, partly we had a lot of it was a low-income community. So we kind of had to get along together. A lot of Chicanos, there are Latinxs I grew up with and a number of Black people. So we had a pretty diverse community and I'd have to say it was it was really respectful overall because at the time this was the early fifties or so, we did not have to, you know, we did not have the race consciousness that we have now, and we didn't have the kind of virulent right-wing racists that are out there now.

So one thing I can mention is that in in Gardena, because there was a sizable Latino community, you know, we had the Japanese Americans had no identity. So you adopted an identity like a white identity or a Latino. We used to have Pachucos, you know, the the tough Latinos who and they'd wear their shirts buttoned up to the top and pants up to the end. So, you know, Japanese Americans adopted that kind of identity or a Black identity. So we had people because, you know, we lost our identity. Well, and that's one of the enduring deficits or I think is the enduring harm done to us that we're able to achieve a type of identity that was perhaps more connected to being Japanese than to being Caucasian or Latino or Black.

(Interviewer) And later, you know, as the model minority myth would develop, too, though, Japanese Americans were used as a poster child. [Correct. Correct.] It's almost anti-Black racism. Right. Did you see any of that beginning to play out in your childhood?

No, I think I didn't see nor was aware of. So I guess the answer the question is I didn't see it. It might have been there, but I did know that so many teachers favored or Japanese Americans seemed to. And I also know that in years later, when we had these reunions of our school, a lot of high achievers who were not Japanese Americans told me several of them, not just several, a number of them told me that the reason that we were able to, you know, become a doctor, become a professor, is because we had to compete with the Japanese Americans and so they told us it was inspiring. And so it was a very positive thing because, you know, we we tried to help each other out in that sense.

Systems & Power Timeframe 26:21 >> 28:23

Well, we moved once. My father lived on the other side of the tracks. Our family did. Then we moved to the other side of the tracks. It wasn't a huge kind of separation economically. My father was able to have his own house built, which was unusual. And so my grandfather, who was also very unusual, was able to achieve a level of stability. I mean, he had two cars and back in the 1930s, that early thirties, that was really unusual. So, yes, we did move.

(Interviewer) And how was your grandfather impacted by the war then? So for Issei, they sometimes had an even more difficult time resettling.

Yeah, my impression was that it devastated him. And the reason I say that is I didn't know him until I got older, and we moved right next door to him. But he was taken to Tuna Canyon, then Lordsburg and the Crystal City, and then ended up in Santa Fe with the predominantly Issei community. And so he ended up there. But when he came back, you know, he just kind of sat around all it did and look outside, sit around, and he was not active at all. So I just sensed that there was some deep sadness or some harm done to him that took away a lot of his soul.

(Interviewer) From the thirties, having two cars [right] to essentially losing everything.

Yes. Except the house. He was able to leave the house. We had a family friend, apparently, who took care of the house for us, so at least we had a house to come back to.

Timeframe 28:23 >> 33:04

Weekends, we did, you know, things that a lot of poor people do. We took car rides, so we'd go to Palos Verdes, which was undeveloped and buy tamales, and then we'd go to the beach a lot, or parks, you know, all free because again, we didn't have money. But on vacations we had a chance to go places, never flew, never took the train. We always took the car. We always went fishing because my father loved fish. So we'd go a lot to the high Sierras and we'd camp, I don't think, or I don't know if we ever stayed at a hotel or a motel. We'll see was camps and tents. And that's what we did for family vacations. I don't remember ever.

We never went to Hawaii. We never went to, you know, like Puerto Vallarta or any of the fun places. So we learned we had on weekends for fun that we'd play a lot of sports. And as we got older, we had to work at my father's store. So that was what I call fun. But, you know, we we got to do mostly car trips. My father had a Ford and I forgot what model it was. It was wasn't a model T. Then he then he finally got a after the Ford, he got a Buick Riviera, a 1955 Buick, which I had to buy from him as my first car. But I do remember Ford used to scare the crap out of me because we'd go over the grapevine before it was built out and all these and you could on the right side, you could just see this cliff that you fall down, you're going to die. And so I tried to sit in the middle and then you'd see all these cars really blown up because they couldn't handle the coolant. The coolant take as the hoods are up there smoking and, you know, not smoking, but steam was coming out. But fortunate we made it through the grape the grapevine. It was legendary at that time. But now it's it's really nothing. I remember seeing the truck escape routes, which I don't know if you know you've seen them where on the side of the road, you know, they have a little dirt road build up, going up hills with the cars of big trucks lose their brakes, they go off the freeway and they go up to the top. And I used to have, you know, as a little kid, I used to have nightmares about that. We never had to use it, though. Thank God.

In those days were very different than now. And living in a small city, maybe not so much, but we just rode our bikes around a lot. We'd go fishing at the local Alondra Park. Sometimes we'd go swimming there, sometimes we'd go to what we call the slew. It was just a creek, and we'd go catch frogs and tadpoles and things. We play a lot of sports. I mean, that's all I remember doing. The most of of in my life was playing these kind of games, and I don't remember taking many other trips or doing other kind of activities. I mean, of course we played home when it rained and then we do things like, you know, we or we used to run across the street to Perry Junior High and they had these brick buildings. You would try to climb on the buildings, you know, just using our hands. So it was only a few feet up. And we tried that at home, and I fell off of it. I had a concussion and woke up the next day and my brother had taken all my toys and moved on to his side of the of the desk. I go, What do you doing? He goes, You gave them to me. What my mom said. He said, And you go, he said, Dale, can I have this? I want. Sure you can have this. And so it was a little kid story. So he we got to play a lot. We went to summer school, so we did that. We also went to church every Sunday. My mother was fairly religious, not dogmatically so, but we had a Baptist church that they my father, mother, actually, I think they met there, and that's probably why my dad went to church, because later on he didn't. And we tried to avoid it as much as we could, but we went every Sunday.

Timeframe 33:04 >> 34:34

In a series of... not series, a number of different friends in different capacities because I was working and I'm not working out, playing in different crowds. The baseball team, the basketball team, friends, my middle brother, for all of our fights was also friend. My cousin lived down the streets, folks in the neighborhood, all my friends Joey Wong, the Ito brothers, Kenny Williams, these these are all guys who lived right within of two block radius. But at school, my my best friend was a guy named Craig Yamada. He's a doctor in Sacramento now. And Gary Doi, he was Kristi Yamaguchi’s uncle. And because the Kristy's parents or mother grew up in Gardena a couple of blocks away from us. And so we, we all, we all hung around and played together. And so we stayed friends all the way through college. And Craig is still a friend. Gary once in a while, I’ll email, but others came and went. We do have a group of friends who do zoom now. These are high school friends, and we stayed in touch over the years and have reconnected through Zoom and we have a Zoom team meeting where everybody gets a drink and we just sit around and talk for an hour.

Timeframe 34:34 >> 36:51

Well, you know, I loved comic books, so I used to read comic books all the time. Oh, the media that we had then were three TV station. I remember when they first got the first television on the block because I was born at a time when television just got invented or popularized, and we went to look at this screen. It was about this big and like there's about ten of us going like this gone, Whoa, this is like a miracle. So we watched TV. We had certain TV shows we we liked. Usually our Sunday, we got to watch more and that's where the shows were on of. Yeah. Other than that growing up, you know, there wasn't social media, for example, but I love books. So I would go to the library all the time, spend so much time at the library, and I had really good friends. That was a book group of friends that we would check out books, and then we'd sometimes we'd go to the bookstore, you know, that was about a mile away, and we'd just hang out there and we'd buy all these controversial books that just to be like teenage rebellious types. Like, I remember one was called “You Can Trust the Communists.” And of course, it was to the whole level of to a different way. And it was really a stupid book in the end. But being young, we didn't know we wanted to learn new ideas and the other thing I did is my mom bought us an encyclopedia set. It was one of those Funk and Wagnalls they called it, and you could get one at the Vons market every week. You get it for a discounted price. So took her 26 weeks to get us the whole volume and I would read a lot of vocabulary books, really loved words. And at one point I set out on this mission to read the dictionary. So I got up to the Amazon. It got really boring. So I gave up there. But I did. I read, I read a lot and way more than watching TV, although we watched the Mickey Mouse Club, which is just starting there, what amazing thing that was, and a bunch of other TV serials that, you know, were were entertaining.

Systems & Power Timeframe 36:51 >> 40:07

(Interviewer) Did you notice not seeing any Asian American representation in the media?

No, I did not. It's a good question, because until you became race conscious, until you realized that you are a marginalized person, you look different. And I learned that at USC, they treated you differently. And and at that point, once you become race conscious, you see it at all. And so I just started seeing that more and more as I got older and older and it was one of my pet issues of dealing with the media, of the lack of representation.

And so, you know, one of the projects I had was to do a movie, and I did it with a playwright named Philip Kan Gotanda, who is very well known. And he said, Let's do a movie. We want a movie that portrays Asian Americans. And we felt, you know, this is important, that we have faces of Asian Americans portrayed on the screen because, you know, folks in Kansas who've never met an Asian American then in the 1990s when we made the movie or seen them as normal people, as normalized behavior, speaking without an accent would hopefully dispel some of the stereotypes. So we embarked on this project in 1996. We got two films that were to Sundance, and we did not get distribution. Otherwise I wouldn't even be sitting here. I'd be smoking a cigar on the top of a mountain somewhere and my billion-dollar home. No, I don't know about that, but I would. But we did try to do movies, too. In the media, to me was really critical in conveying images, and I've always been really ticked off at the way that Asians have been and still are being portrayed. It's getting better now with more representation, but I'm really acutely aware of the way Asians are treated. Just like … The other night we watched Cruella. I don't know if you ever saw that, but Cruella De Vil was the star of the one on 101 Dalmatians. And there's a scene there with two cats come out of a box and they've got slanted eyes, and they're talking with an accent and they're We are Siamese, if you please. And then so the next version they do and they remade it. Instead, they got these cats coming out that got this Black accent. They're talking like this, and it's so obnoxious because these cats are the villains of the movie anyway. So when you still see that our kids are really, really aware of it, I think we've made them almost overly race conscious to the degree that everything that's racist. Oh, that's a Karen, you know, So we got to got to balance that out because, you know, I grew up with a lot of different races and really good people. So I have not embraced that too judgmental of vision.

Timeframe 40:07 >> 42:27

(Interviewer) Can you give us your educational background?

I do remember Mrs. Kennedy. Kennedy. Kennedy. I do remember Mrs. Kennedy. She was the first one who made tacos for us. And I've been a taco fan ever since. That's all I remember. Except she was very nice. I do remember Mr. Van der Linden. He was one of the meanest teachers there. And then a Mr. Wren that was in elementary school. What's interesting is junior high. Or they call the junior high middle school. I don't remember anybody. And it's kind of a lost period of life for a lot of adolescents and kids. Even even my kids and my wife says the same thing. So I remember her. Hardly anybody from I remember them, but not their names. And I remember we had a really good biology teacher, and he was a weightlifter. Huge, huge, huge guy.

But in high school, same thing. I don't remember a lot of teachers except for a couple. One was Mrs. Buchanan. Virginia Buchanan, who taught us how to write. She was really an amazing teacher. And a number of writers and well-known people from Gardena took her class. Folks like Garrett Hongo famous poet, Stan Yogi, he’s a writer. You know, they all got their start, in a way, from Mrs. Buchanan. Ms. Buchanan. Excuse me. The other one was Lenora Gray, and she she taught Latin, and she made it so fascinating, so interesting, so unuseful. That's not true, because we did learn a lot of Latin roots, and I was so into words. So Latin became both helpful and interesting to me. But other than that, I remember my varsity baseball coaches and varsity basketball coaches, folks in athletics. And I, you know, they should be considered teachers. So those who I remember, those are people I remember.

(Interviewer) Did Latin ever help you in law school?

A little bit, but not really because, you know, it's not a really spoken language much these days. But there are a lot of Latin words.

Timeframe 42:27 >> 44:50

(Interviewer) Do you remember the name of your own school and middle school? Yes. Denker. Elementary School. Middle School. Perry Junior High School.

K through 12? I remember getting thrown out at third base, trying to stretch to double or triple. I remember once we always had to go to the inner city to play basketball and we always played Black teams. Our team was mixed and our-- but our league was not. And so we went into, you know, played Jordan and Jefferson and some of these schools that were very intimidating schools that would teams that when you got to the free throw line that jump ball they see you're never going to make it back to the bus. We're going to kick your ass either now or when you get out of your shower. And I remember some of our folks were just shivering. You know, I took that as kind of an insult. And I don't know where that came from. But we had to play these games and, you know, we would get killed. But, you know, they really respected those who didn't get scared. And and we had African Americans on the team.

I also remember being the president of my junior high and high school. I don't know where I had this ambition, and I don't know if it came from my parents, or it was just some innate drive or like I was on the chess club. I was on the Letterman's club, the key club. I think I just had a very short attention span. And so I did all all these different things. So there was not any specific memorable, mostly in athletics again, and I don't remember any other specific things that happened that were dramatic, although I remember having to not argue. My friends argued with the Latin teacher because I was given a B in the class, even though I got all A's and she nice lady, and she and the reason was I was very disruptive. I remember being disruptive in class, talked a lot. I would play pranks all the time and we rarely got caught. So we were lucky.

Timeframe 44:50 >> 46:07

(Interviewer) And when did you start kind of developing the idea of wanting to be a lawyer? Was that during high school, or how did you decide?

Not at all. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I went to college, and at college I started developing an interest in international relations, political science. And that's what you take, if you like, is where I was. I won this award in high school. It was a math math science award, and I had to compete for a cash prize. I came in second place in my area, and the reason I got to that award because is I got good grades. But the reason I got good grades, I realized, was not because I took these tests and was so brilliant, I didn't never understand molecules fit together, you know, or these things. And but I could talk my way into getting an A. I would say, well, don't don't agree that improvement and I figure all these arguments. So by the time I got to college, I just did not want to take any science. But you had to. So I took astronomy, which I really loved. I really liked it. And so, oh, I'm sorry about the question.

Narrative & Identity Timeframe 46:07 >> 50:58

(Interviewer) So you got into and you went straight into USC that you had the scholarship. And when did you start developing your idea of wanting go into law?

Oh, yeah. Well, you know, as as I neared my junior year, you know, I got really taken by social psychology. I thought that was fascinating to me. And so I was thinking of going to grad school, but my dad always wanted to be a lawyer. He didn't overly express express it. And like many Japanese American families, you know, the parents are incredibly influential, but leave no fingerprints on, you know, you must do this. You must do that in the Japanese American families that we grew up in. But somehow they'd suddenly influence you. This was not so subtle. My dad made a very smart, logical point. He said, look, if you don't want to know what you want to do, you might try law school because at least you can get a foundation of skills that will allow you to make a living in other areas. You could work for the government, you could do this or that. And for him, financial security was very important because of what happened to him, excuse me, because of what happened to him in our family. So that makes sense.

So then I of I applied to the several schools, UCLA, USC at Berkeley, and I got accepted to Berkeley. And because Gardena was so insular in a way, in L.A., was so conservative culturally, I really wanted to get away. In Gardena, everybody knew your business. So, you know, I had the reputation here a president, you were an athlete, you got great grades, but I basically was a screw off, you know, inside my head. I was an imposter. And so I actually wanted to go somewhere and see who I really was, in a way. So I told my dad, I'm going to Berkeley, my dad's that's not a good choice because, you know, they have anarchists there, they got communists, they got radicals, they have free love. And I thought, that's perfect. So I went to Berkeley, and I didn't get a scholarship because my my then my parents just were basically over the guidelines for a state scholarship for what you used to be able to get.

And so that's how I went to law school. And it wasn't any lofty mission of doing justice, although, you know, the whole idea of the incarceration and that intergenerational influence of what happens to your parents filters down and I realized as I went on to life or I just had this huge dedication to justice and fairness, whether it was in law or somewhere else.

And you ask that about a some of the events that happened. And besides, in K-through-12, even in college, I remember in 1965, I was driving down the freeway from a volleyball game going home, and it looked like all of Los Angeles was on fire. It was the Watts Rebellion of 1965, followed sooner thereafter by by similar ones in Chicago and Newark and Trenton and all over the country. It was an amazing time. And that kind of put me on the road to try to understand more and more about African Americans. And that's when I started reading in Social Psychology, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, The Invisible Man, Black Like me, all these these iconic or very historic novels that have become, you know, primers or primers for for learning about Black history. And so that was a separate political development, although perhaps because I, I felt driven to these books, because I actually think I felt a connection to them from the historical incarceration of Japanese Americans. And in the and I felt like the marginalized people whose history was lost, African Americans or fabricated about slavery was a good thing for them, which is the same false narrative told about Japanese American. So I think I did feel that kind of kinship, and yet I lacked the consciousness about Asian Americans and Japanese Americans completely. I applied it to this other race of people, but not my own family or life.

Timeframe 50:58 >> 52:45

Well, it was like night and day. Berkeley was a microcosm of this country. It was sexist, it was racist, it was elitist. It was run by a oligarchy of of fraternities. And so it was and it was much more structured in a way. Berkeley was pretty wild because, I mean, just an example, the day almost the day I stepped on campus, just a month later, a third rule strike had begun. And it was chaos. It was demonstrations every day in Berkeley law near on campus. It was tear gas that well-fitted riot into our dorm because it was facing right on the campus and the wind blew right into our, you know, our window, and I think USC was just a whole different world, more way, more conservative has changed. There's a lot better now. But then it was it was a terrible place for person of color to be at unless you were a famous athlete.

So when I say night and day, it truly was a huge difference to be in a place where people didn't care if you wore a tuxedo or were half dressed or, you know, looked a little weird. You know, people accepted each other for their for their humanity, which was kind of a cliche because times have changed to now. But at that time it was way more tolerant and which allowed you to find yourself because nobody was judging you. And not neighbors or not talking to the other neighbors about somebody's son or daughter had done like they did in Gardena. So much. So it was a revelation for me and allowed me freedom to really explore.

Narrative & Identity Timeframe 52:45 >> 55:12

(Interviewer) And how did you…what was the impression of the Third World Strike and being just right in the middle of.

The year before the strike, 1960 was probably the most consequential year of my generation. You know, there were huge violent riots against the Vietnam War. There were civil rights protests all over the place, the cultural counterculture, you know, which advise you to draw a drop in, drop out and whatevers, you know, changed everybody's perception of what society should be. The Chicago riots, Martin Luther King Junior gets assassinated. Robert Kennedy gets assassinated. The Black Fist in Mexico Olympics by Tommie Smith and Lee Evans. And these people who really…John Carlos excuse me, who took a stand, a courageous stand. And I really identified with that. Having read all this literature now and understanding better, you know, why African Americans are so aggrieved, I still hear more and more and learn more and more because it's way deeper than I understood it then I just knew there was slavery and discrimination.

And so that put me on that path toward a more political path, a more exploratory consciousness about my own life, my own family, my own people, and Asian Americans. Because the difference in L.A., where Japanese Americans pretty much ran things, you know, they were the biggest minority, was not before 1965. Then when the immigration law changed in 65, you know, the country was flooded. I wouldn't say flooded were a lot more a non-Japanese Americans. And up here, San Francisco had an established huge Chinese American community. So I got introduced to a whole new set of Asian Pacific Americans, a Filipino community that I got introduced to. And and to me that was rounded out my concept of being Asian Pacific American. It wasn't just being Japanese as it was being part of this group that kind of looked like I had similar cultural attributes. And it was it was really easy to belong to this type of group.

Transformation & Change Timeframe 55:12 >> 1:01:52

(Interviewer) Would you say you were impacted by the Asian American movement?

It was very dramatic because once I started delving into or diving into this whole sense of why we were marginalized, why are we treated differently, you know, and then you know it in part of the elite in Gardena High, I am going to be in a worm at USC, you know, and then going to Berkeley and being whoever we wanted was liberating and then exploring, you know, Japanese American history, Asian Pacific American history was a godsend.

And as the Third Strike progressed and more information came out, you know, I was involved in it at that time, but I was influenced by it. And then I got a record quest to get involved with the Asian American students at Berkeley. There are only five in my class at Berkeley Law. There are six in the class after me and then after affirmative action, 23 became a first-year students, and so they had formed in a APALSA (Asian Pacific American Law Students Association), and I hadn't done anything on that until they asked me to join, which I did. And at that time, attorney named Ken Koichi was had this idea of an Asian law commune where a group of lawyers would live together. They'd fight for progressive causes; they'd try to empower this Asian Pacific American community. The bad part of that idea is nobody wanted to live together. So and Ken kind of had got sidetracked a little bit, so it became incumbent on me to stay there and try to help develop this nonprofit, to help Asian Pacific Americans to become equal participants in this so-called egalitarian society.

The problem was I didn't have a job, but the solution was my two friends or one of them was a friend from UCLA, Colin Watanabe and his the co-coordinator, Pat Hayashi, were the leaders of the Asian American Studies program at that time. And they said, Yeah, we'll give you a job. So I got a job lecturing there, and I also got a job at Mills College teaching ethnic studies. But in order to teach these courses, I had to learn about Asian American history, which I was only, you know, conversant with barely. And I started studying in earnest and I started reading more and more and more. And it was like a revelation to me. It was like a doors opening to a new world. And that changed me completely to the point that I understand then the connection to African Americans that a lot of Latinx and other marginalized groups, Native Americans. Later more advanced when I became understanding more about the gender inequality two or LGBT. But this opportunity to teach really was more of an opportunity to learn. And so to that extent, that reinforced my my knowledge about Asian Americans, which informed my work for the Asian Law Caucus, doing legal work on behalf of Asian Americans to, you know, take no crap from people, you know, we need to fight.

And fortunately, that generation of people in the late sixties start started to stand up, rise up and pretty much continue not at the extremes of the Chicago riots, Democratic Party riots when the convention and its riots in 1968, by the way. But all of these these events and the ability to teach and learn brought it all together in kind of a package for me to to make me understand now this is who I am, this is what I have to do. There were very, very little material at that time. In 1971, when I started preparing to teach, there were there were cases, legal cases, because I later taught Asian Americans in the law the next year, 1972. And, you know, there were the Korematsu case. There was, you know, Yick Wo v. Hopkins. There were a ton of cases that I won't bore you with, but they all had influence on American jurisprudence. But there wasn't any coherent summary or analysis of these cases. And the influence of Asian Americans had on American law. But there were a few: “To serve the devil.” It was one of them. There were a few books about Japanese Americans. There were some of them were not as accurate or the perspective was assimilation is the answer. There were, you know, some books about Chinese American history, but there were very little material to work from as opposed to having an Asian American studies department or organization today, which is critically important to the advancement of knowledge about and tolerance for Asian Pacific Americans.

So anyway, so what I had to do is I took articles from these different papers from GIDRA in L.A. or Rodan in San Francisco or Asian Week or and I had I had a mimeograph. Then they just invented the copy machine then. So I hate to talk about how old I am, but when when I use the word mimeograph, the students look at me like I see talking about and I have to explain, this is a machine that you got high off of by lists, smelling the liquid that copied the papers. So I got all these purple pages, purple, purple printed things out that I had to give the students. So devoured the book. I mean, a not a book, a textbook, really, about that thick. I had a lot of materials from I read all the papers all around ethnic papers. And so I got that's where I got a lot of information.

Narrative & Identity Timeframe 1:01:52 >> 1:05:18

(Interviewer) And so in the recent times, there have been legislation that have institutionalize ethnic studies across K through 12 college issues in the U.S. system. But there's also been pushback against this as well. And so even though it's been more than 50 years since the founding of ethnic studies, what do you think? There's still so much people don't know?

You know, I think there's of a lot of people are not.. let me take it back. They are given the opportunity to learn they're not taught this. A lot of people deny it even happens. So if you have a perspective like the white nationalists have now, which is filtered into all closer to the mainstream, then you're going to have a resistance to discussing anything about marginalized or people of color. And so I think that resistance is there. There there is, though. I mean, it's not that black and white or yellow and white or brown or white, whatever you want to call it. There are a lot of groups in the middle, non-Asians whatever, who would like to learn about it but don't have the access. And they're they're not given the opportunity.

And I think education about Asian American studies, for example, is the one area is perhaps the best long term answer to anti-Asian hate violence. That and mental health treatment for people. But people have to even if you're mentally ill. And that's been the excuse for a lot of people. Oh, they're just crazy. They're just mentally ill. Why are they mentally ill against Asians? Why does that happen? It's because the narrative that has been told all these years is demonized are people. And if you have the chance to educate them, if you have the chance to teach them, you know that your history is not that different than mine and you're not responsible. What Mr. White person or Miss White person. But you should understand that you benefited from this and you shouldn't necessarily feel guilty about it, but you should understand that this should not be a threat to you, but an opportunity for you to help all of us rise up together as a country, as a people, and not as a people like just Black Americans or Asian Americans.

But as you know, Americans actually and like these were Americans because it really should be is United States citizens or United States residents because America, United States is a sidetrack. It's the United States is appropriate of America as it is a synonym for the United States is not you know, Canada is America. South America is America. So Central America and Nicaragua is America, although that's a dictatorship now, but Honduras. So for us to call ourselves Americans, we're taking it. We're diminishing everyone else. So but I don't know a better word for it. That's sure to tell. You know, they use too many words. Residents of the United States just long.

Transformation & Change Timeframe 1:05:18 >> 1:09:29

You run the whole spectrum. I've influenced some people; others blew me off. Lots of them were sleeping in class or some of them were. And I would be outraged. I think you know why they listen what I'm saying so important. Then I kind of realized I had to be empathetic that, you know, when I was in class in law school, that I would go to the back, go to sleep. So I think as a number of people got influenced, a number of people became lawyers. When I taught Asian Americans the law, some became judges, some became really well-known civil rights lawyers. And for that, I’m maybe the most proud because I think that whole area of education and this is why, you know, I get credit for working on the Korematsu case, but I really appreciate credit for getting helping to get done Nakanishi tenure at UCLA. That was a slog. That was a battle by feel that was done. It becomes such a brilliant leader. He has influence more people about education, about Asian Americans than Asian Pacific Americans than anyone else in history and unfortunately passed away. But I mean, he did an amazing job. And for that, I’m grateful to be able to have helped him get tenure.

(Interviewer) I was his last student at UCLA.

You were? Oh, my gosh.

(Interviewer) In the master's program.

Before he passed or before.

(Interviewer) He passed.

Oh, jeez. Yes, in the master's program. Yeah. He a quick story about oh, and one of the stories you asked with him, one of the moments you remember and the negotiated with Don Nakanishi was the ones I remember as vividly as anything in the world there was in there when, you know, the massive demonstrations, sit ins, boycotts of the money, of holding his money up in the legislature. We tried everything we could. We're fighting the most powerful institution around, and we're just a group of Asian Americans. So we met at Laurel Heights not far from here. And he was just he's six four big guy, blistering, blistering, mad. And he into variety of tables is why you guys are holding my thing hostage. Blah blah blah, and then I just said, I remember and Don remembers the same way.

I said, okay, you finished because I have some things to get off my chest too. And Don tells me later he goes, Oh, no, what's he going to say? And I went into him. I said, you took our best and our brightest. This guy's we won two grievances against you because it's clear you biased against him. Then we didn't come out of the prisons to come here and be a second-class citizen. We came here to get our rights. And if you look at what we've done is done. If you look at compare him to what these other professors have done, if you compare the type of discrimination that happens against him, the fake reviews you've given to him, then you should be embarrassed. If you're not embarrassed about this, then you're not paying attention and Don's going for Jesus, you know, this guy's going, I was really pissed.

And to his credit he goes, Okay, I get what you're saying because he tried to intimidate us and that should never happen. When you when you get the strength that somehow you call up, perhaps from your ancestors, your history, from hating to be humiliated or taking second class status. He then said, he goes, Let's change the subject. You know, Dale, where'd you go to school? College? I said, I went to USC anyway, no wonder. And we all laughed, and it broke the ice. And then we had a really good conversation and we essentially cut a deal that nobody knows about because we couldn't. We're not supposed to. That he did get us tenure anyways. That was one of those vivid moments I remember more than as much as any other moment of my in my life. I would say.

Narrative & Identity Timeframe 1:09:29 >> 1:10:40

You know, I can't predict how [Asian American Studies] it changed me. Maybe it would’ve turned into an entrepreneur that just wants to make a lot of money. I don't think so. I think, oh, I'm not sure that changed me. I think because of the surprise and revelations and excitement, I had when I first learned about it, when there was very little material, I was kind of like a treasure that nobody knew about it. I felt so entitled to be able to are privileged to know this with a valuable knowledge. I had. It might not have changed me at all because what I did out of straight out of law school excuse me, what I did straight out of law school was help start the Asian Law Caucus and taught Asian American studies. So I'm not sure learning about it beforehand would have put me on a different path.

You know, it's possible I could have been a teacher. No. You know, the reason I would not be a teacher is and the reason I quit teaching was I couldn't stand grading papers, really. So I had, you know, I, I just decided to turn the class over to someone else.

Timeframe 1:10:40 >> 1:17:26

Right. I, I was married before, but that's not a great story anyways. But oh, no children. And then for 14 years and then I was single for another ten years. At least ten years. And my wife, my now wife was a law law student, law clerk in my office and and she was very young looking. And so I was surprised when somebody hired her. And when we discussed cases, we got into arguments. I thought, what an arrogant little jerk. And she thought I was a, you know, domineering male type. So we didn't like each other at first. And then we had to work on a case together. And so you have to cooperate. So I met her. She is she became a lawyer. She had been working on the YWCA case. The case up here, which the YWCA essentially stole this property from Japanese American women and tried to sell it. And so she worked on the case with my partner, Don, and other folks to stop the sale, which they did, and were able to to retain possession or gain possession. So she had at least some kind of consciousness that I thought. And as we started going out kind of secretly off, because, you know, you don't take associates, you became an associate of in our firm. She realized that's how we fell in love. And she then went to work for the Court of Appeal, now works for the Supreme Court as an attorney, which explains why we have two children. And I had my first daughter, Allie, at age 63, my second at age 66.

It was surreal. It still is surreal. But she had convinced me that we should have a child and I didn't want to have kids. Although we tried to adopt in my first marriage, that didn't work out. But but she she and I won't go into. But she our arguments were so persuasive. Seriously. It was like, okay, I give up this, do it. So we had kids. We had first kid, then we argued about the second one and she was a brilliant second kid. So she's from San Francisco, born and bred. Her parents are from Tokyo. She's speaks fluent Japanese. She writes Japanese at about the college level. Our kids speak fluent Japanese and write Japanese because they go to this Japanese school called Hoshuko is really super intense.

And so and she's also a math whiz, my wife. And she had won what they call the grand championship of California when she was like 12 years old or so. She was competing against a 24-year-old from Berkeley, and she's holding this trophy that's about almost as big as her. And she's wearing these really funky clothes. She had a polo shirt, this buttoned top. But it was I thought it was kind of cute and that she has a skill which she said is mental math. You learn you have an abacus in your brain and that's how you, you know, learn how to do it. So you can multiply in your brain. Oh, sure. Yeah. I go, okay, what's 242 times 925? And she goes, 2,322,045 and. All right. But holy shit. I mean I said holy cow; it's amazing. And so she's, there are all these other qualities she had and that just being very smart, very quirky, and we just got along well. That's my family. I still have my brothers still around. We get together, I think the special person in our family, other than our little dog that we just got is my mother-in-law, who is a remarkable woman.

They're very quirky, her family. That's why she's so quirky. Her father became a photographer and was able to become a professional photographer here, doing interesting kind of jobs. Mother was a graduate of Waseda and the second woman on the Kendo team and the best mountain climber. Plus she can cook. She could also do ikebana. She does. She wanted to be a construction worker, so she's very good at constructing, fixing things. Plus, she loves our daughters, thank God. So she comes over every day, every day to see them and cooks and does a whole bunch of stuff.

(Interviewer) How old are your daughters now?

  1. And she just turned-- my other daughter turned 11 two days ago. And help is critical and being semi-retired is also critical. So I drive one daughter across the Golden Gate field. I mean, Golden Gate Park to to and from school. She goes the Presidio. So it's a distance away, and I have more time to do. I do more cooking and cleaning. I've always been a little bit domestic that way, shopping and and I and I and my wife has to work every day. I mean, she's got to work to get her paycheck. So she's the one that has to balance more than I do. So I have a somewhat easier job, but at the same time, I get more demands for favors for projects. For like this week, I'm hosting a book party for Warren Furatani, who's a famous activist that I grew up with, and and then going to the Asian Law Alliance dinner on Friday and meeting a lot of my San Jose friends along the way so I'm taking this little trip to see them. So I do a lot of different other projects. I have. One day I made a list of all the different projects I have and it was it really depressed me, you know, and I don't have to do all of them every day, all the time. But I do like, you know, practicing law, But I do a lot of projects and favors for folks now.
Transformation & Change Timeframe 1:17:26 >> 1:23:22

Impact cases, exactly what it sounds like as an impact on more than one person usually, or on an issue if it's just one person that's bringing the case. It's got to have ripple effects on policy, on politics, on social movements, on social organizing. It's got to affect more than just one person. And so that's why it's called an impact case. Yeah, the ideas of the Asian Law Caucus was try to affect more people's lives than just one person in one case. And so the kind of cases we hoped to bring were those that could have ramifications beyond just an individual's rights or recovery. And so one of the first cases was a lawsuit against the San Francisco Police Department.

They were randomly, not randomly. I should take it back, or one when our first cases was against the San Francisco Police Department. They're rounding up all these young men in Chinatown. Chinese men. That was a crime. Ethnicity just like the Japanese crime was being of Japanese ancestry during World War Two. And they would handcuff them, take them down to the Central station. They would mugshot them, take their fingerprints and let them go. Well, under the Constitution, you have to have reasonable cause to arrest somebody, a reasonable cause for a crime. They don't have any reasonable cause. These young men were doing nothing, and yet they herded them all way. It was until later on. So we sued to stop that and eventually came to a settlement where they agreed to stop doing that.

But the damage was done because two years later we sued the attorney general for producing this really racially biased or stereotypical report by the attorney general that chronicled the crime…the Chinese American criminal syndicates, they're there are tendency toward crime, their use of opium. It was really a horrible piece of stereotyping and racism. And we learned that time that that was the sweep of Chinatown that we first brought a suit for was part of a coordinated attack by law enforcement in Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles and San Francisco To round up all these people, these young Chinese men take their mug shots so they would have a gang, a gang book that they could give to each other. And it was we lost that suit because we sued on the basis of group defamation, which was a brand new theory. But we brought a lot of publicity to the idea of that police were really going after Chinese American men without any probable cause. So that was one case.

We always felt that we should do more. So we brought a case on behalf of Filipino nurses, and it was against Blue Shield and there was a class action again and called an impact. They're sometimes used interchangeably. And what we discovered is that the Filipino nurses were brought here and after the Immigration Act of 65, which coincidentally was the start of Medicare, Medicaid. And so the United States labor, which we discovered a market needed trained medical personnel to administer this enormous program that the government was rolling out during the Great Society. And so that's one reason Immigration Act passed. And what could they find these people, people with medical training, people who spoke English, the Philippines, it was natural. And so all these nurses came over and they got low paying jobs. They had to train their successors, who are almost always Caucasian. So they got leapfrogged for promotions all the time.

And one woman, Emma Salazar, just said stood up, said, this is this is B.S. Can we sue them? And so we so we we found the evidence of the disparities in statistics. That's a story in itself, which I haven't told much, but we filed a Fair Employment Housing Commission complaint. It was an agency that was around. Then they did an investigation of the Department of Fair Employment. Housing did an investigation. They gathered all these statistics. So I went to visit the investigator and I said, Can I get those statistics? And she said, I'm sorry. By law, we're not allowed to give that information up now until you bring a lawsuit. And then she said, is in a binder. He said, I see that I have to go to the bathroom for 15 minutes. She turned it around and shoved it and said, So I'll see you in 15 minutes. I copied all the statistics down and. And so she was the one who helped us. She was a Latina and later on became a judge who ruled in favor of my Chinese American client on an accent discrimination trial. So I got to go to see her twice in my life.

And I wish I could get in touch with her again. I yeah, I'm part of it so much. Life is luck and lawyers don't like to use luck unless they lose a case. Then it's bad luck. But. But really, so much. Is the stars lining up? Some people say, may you make your own karma. I think that's partly true.

Systems & Power Timeframe 1:23:22 >> 1:28:02

(Interviewer) And so from there, you know, you you worked on a nonprofit practice field at a private practice or some of the motivations and challenges from that journey of.

You know, we started out as a nonprofit, public interest, community interest law firm. And part of our theory was to bring new people in, old people leave, new people come in to get the chance to get a feel for for what is the law practice in the public interest. So we moved on as a as pursuant to the theory that we had adopted. But unfortunately, we moved on to a nonprofit private practice. We didn't expect it that way, but we had to learn the lessons of making money, and doing good and doing well, which is what we tried to do. And the biggest obstacle was financial. We barely survived. And because we came from a nonprofit background, people on the only people who called us were people who wanted free services or you can't eat on free services. So we had to go on to one.

We did marketing, and two, we started doing we got cases from the courts in Alameda. You could do what they call conflict cases. So we did criminal defense. When there's two co-defendants, they can't be represented by the same person. So the clerks of the court of the judges would appoint a private attorney to represent the other defendant. So Garrick Liu, my partner, I did criminal law and I did criminal law for six years doing conflict cases on appointment by by the county. So so one is financial. Two is getting a reputation. Get your name heard. And we had to actually just go beg for cases. We to ask people, you know, we do paying work to like this, this and this. And we because of all the community work we did, all these groups that we helped, you know, they were good enough. A lot of them, you know, when they had a big case, they would go downtown to a white shoes firm, you know, with big high offices. But we asked them to send us cases and we then we just kind of of stumbled along like that.

We still did a lot of community interest. We did a lot of class actions still, which were mostly mostly for free. But in I had done everything almost, you know, divorces, criminal defense, employment discrimination, conservatorships, construction cases. I mean, it just goes on and on. But I found the most lucrative was personal injury and all the and so we got a lot of those cases and that really financed a lot of the pro bono work we did down the line.

(Interviewer) It sounded like you learned a lot of different areas of law, right? Was that something that was self-taught? You had to go out? And how did that kind of feed into your your activism besides the financial support?

I think part of it was a failure on my part because I was so fiercely independent. I didn't want to rely on anyone, which is a fault because the learning curve is like this, you know? So every Wednesday I'd make a lunch and then I'd go to the Alameda County Law Library. I all day I would read practice books, how to do this, how to do that. And so about 80% of what I learned was self-taught. It was it was very difficult of and painful. And and I'm just lucky I didn't commit any malpractice, you know, I know of. So it was it fed into our notion of being independent, which is similar to the idea of self-determination, which is similar to the idea that marginalized people should have a choice in what happens to them in this country, which is similar to the concept of equality. So they all kind of like wrapped together into both a personality and a political perspective. So in a sense, I was able to be a little bit consistent and not hate my job at all because I was doing what I felt my mission was.

Transformation & Change Timeframe 1:28:02 >> 1:32:44

You know, I remember the first time I heard about [the redress movement] was Edison Uno who was the father or the progenitor of the whole redress movement, along with some people in Seattle too, wanted money and an apology. And he asked me when I was at the Asian Law Caucus, because can you research this issue for me? Can we sue to get redress from the government? So we did a lot of well, not a lot. We did enough research because there wasn't a lot of precedence out there except for Germany, you know, with the Jews, reparation and our conclusion we have to win this case not in a court of law, but of the court of public opinion.

So the best route to do this is legislative and Edison and propose that earlier on and it confirmed what he wanted it to do. And so that was a start of the journey. I didn't participate as actively except with Edison. I would kind of trail him going to the JACL convention in Portland in 1974, trying to get a resolution passed, trying to get JACL to do something as they were torn. Some of the folks didn't want to do anything. They didn't want to rock the boat. Edison rocked every boat he could find and enlisted a bunch of people, like-minded people a lot from Seattle, some from the Central Valley, some from Sacramento or foreign JACL. And they started from a critical mass of people calling for redress. So, JACL, how could the Japanese American citizens, they couldn't ignore that anymore. And in the meantime, the National Coalition of Redress and Reparations was starting up.

There was another group called the National…NCJAR: National Coalition for Japanese American Redress was started in Chicago, and all of them were pushing with different emphases. Eventually, they kind of conjoin together to support each other were at the very start. They were very divided and very critical of each other. And so I wasn't as involved in that part of, part of the, uh, the battle. Although some of the folks with NCJAR and the lawsuit in NCRR I knew were friends, I was just supporting whatever efforts were made to, to obtain redress and reparations. And then in 1982, when redress the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Civilians was started and the folks had become more unified, NCJAR wanted to bring their own sued for damages, which I had earlier felt was not going to survive.

Then Fred Korematsu walks in the door to the voice of Peter Irons, who had discovered this evidence that the government had altered, suppressed and destroyed evidence that contradicted their claims of Japanese Americans are disloyal. They're prone to disloyalty. They had committed acts of espionage and sabotage. And we didn't have time to tell the lawyer from the disloyal. The evidence found by Aiko Yoshinaga-Herzig, which was the last piece of that, came together with Peter. Peter called me up. I didn't know. He said, Can you help me reopen these cases? I said, those guys still alive? It's just like 40 years ago. Their names on a landmark decisions in 1943 and 44. He said, Yes, they are, and they want to reopen their cases. And that's how it started, because in Seattle, Gordon had already been contacted by Peter Gordon and already gotten his had has an had an attorney named Catherine Bonai. But I, who also was from Gardena, grew up there, who also was my summer law clerk one year and also was a sister of my then associate, Lorraine Bonai. So there's a lot of weird connections going on. And so we teamed up with Catherine. I found the only attorney, Japanese American attorney I knew in Portland. That was Peggy Nagai, and it turns out she was a civil rights attorney. And I had met her just once or twice in the Bay Area. And that's how I knew her. And to Peter's credit, he wanted to he said, I think Japanese Americans need to lead this. Lawyers need to lead this. And I got your name from Min Yasui. And can you help us? And so we got our teams together and the rest is actually history, I guess.

Transformation & Change Timeframe 1:32:44 >> 1:42:25

(Interviewer) And there was also the the Federal Communications Commission. What was their role in the court case?

Well, the one of the reports that went to the Supreme Court in a very underhanded way, which is takes too long to explain, was a claim that Japanese Americans were committing espionage by exchanging radio signals off the West Coast of the United States. And so the general DeWitt was head of the command in that area. His men said, you know, the Jap-- Japanese Americans are signaling to the Japanese and back and forth. Well, they did an investigation and the Federal Communications Commission looked at every instance and investigated evidence in there, all false. The FBI, J. Edgar Hoover did as well and said, these are all false. What's happening is these are non-Japanese speaking. Radio operators are hearing Japanese on their earphones, and they're assuming that's coming from Japanese Americans. They just made this huge leap because they were so ignorant and racist.

So both J. Edgar Hoover and William Fly, the head of the FCC Federal Communications Commissions, reported in writing that these are investigated every single instance and not one is in it and sense sensitive espionage by Japanese Americans. And they put it in writing. They sent it to the lawyer who was handling the Korematsu case, the Hirabayashi Yasui case. He says, Oh, my gosh, we're telling lies to the Supreme Court because they're arguing Japanese Americans are claiming espionage. And he said, we cannot let these lies go uncorrected. It would be highly unfair to this minority group that these lies go uncorrected. This is exact words he writes to his superior, who's arguing in the Supreme Court. Superior suppresses that evidence, suppresses the memo from these ethical lawyers who say we are committing ethical violations. And that's where the FCC report comes in, along with, you know, the report from Katie Ringo, an investigator who spent four years researching Japanese Americans, saying that there is no cause for concern.

That report was suppressed, saying Japanese Americans are no less disloyal than any other American that was suppressed. And there's a third piece of evidence that Aiko found that contradicted their claim in the Supreme Court. And in the Supreme Court, the United States was saying there was not enough time to separate the law from the disloyal. And that's the reason we're going to uphold the exclusion and curfew and laws. Well, Aiko found a different version. The other ones had been destroyed, but one remained. And it said exactly the opposite. It's not a matter of time. We had time to separate them. The problem essentially stated was these are inscrutable people. You can't tell if they're loyal or disloyal. Nobody understands them. So they burned all the books that said those statements and changed it 180 degrees. There's not enough time. But they left one book and Aiko found that one that became part of our case. And why that was important, because when we got to judicial declaration, which had never been done before, before Marilyn Hall, Patel and the Korematsu case, it was the first declaration that declared a wrongdoing, that there was no military necessity, that there was racism.

And before that, Congressman Matsui and Mineta would tell us that, you know, excuse me, that the opponents, they would tell us the opponents of the Supreme Court were arguing that, wait, this is all legal. The Supreme Court rules legally 1943 and 44, but we were able to do was provide them with a counter-narrative, a counter argument by a judge that says they're lying. And so Mineta and Matsui and others, Sparky Matsunaga, were able to rebut the opponents who claimed it was legal by this new decision that said it was a fate decisions in 1943 or 44, their fraud fraudulent. So that was our other contribution, I think, to the redress movement. And that's when we got really involved.

(Interviewer) For those of us who do, who don't know, how does a document get suppressed?

They just don't show it to the Supreme Court. You have a duty, assuming you have a duty as a prosecutor or a government official, to to give the court evidence. Even if it hurts your case, you can't hide things. That said, oh, your guy says he was the one who did the murder, but we're not going to tell the court to let this innocent man go to prison forever. You're supposed to disclose evidence, good and bad. If you're a prosecutor. And so what they did did do was suppressed by not disclosing, by destroying the original DeWitt report that had the the statement about the time was not a problem. And also by suppressing by not showing the Ringo report to the Supreme Court. So in other words, the person who owed who did it was what's his name, Free, the solicitor general. And he made a decision not to show the Supreme Court. So it's just like taking all this good evidence and just hiding it somewhere. And that's highly illegal and unethical.

(Interviewer) So at the end of the day, though, that that court or that Supreme Court decision was overturned.

No. No. Everybody thinks that the Supreme Court decision was overturned in Trump versus Hawaii, but it was not officially overturned. It was a fake overturning. It was a appeasement to Justice Sotomayor's dissent, say in this case, denying Muslim majority countries entry into the United States is just like Korematsu. You're you're not seeing the evidence because it's suppressed, which was the report. You haven't shown any kind of instances of espionage or sabotage. You have no showing no danger. It's just like Korematsu. So instead of overruling Korematsu directly, which it could have the court let Korematsu stand but made, these are really merely miles names. Korematsu have been overruled in the court of history. Well, that's not this court, the Supreme Court. It's the court of history. There's no such thing as the court of history except as as a of there's no such thing as a court of history. And so would he let stand Justice Roberts is the most pernicious and dangerous of the precedents that in times of crisis, we cannot we cannot contradict the Supreme Court. I mean, we cannot in times of crisis, we cannot order out excuse me, in a time of crisis, we cannot overrule the president of the United States. That's exactly the ruling of Korematsu. That's the exact ruling of Trump vs. Hawaii. So that precedent is dangerously alive today. So Korematsu was not specifically overruled. It was a pretend overrule.

(Interviewer) And what are your thoughts on that and how it's being used today with real debate?

You know, that's a whole different kind of animal in a way. And the way that they phrased it was so diabolically hypocritical. Roe versus Wade, women were given the right to an abortion and now it's taken away by by the Supreme Court. You know, Fred Korematsu had his rights and they were taken away, but they weren't even taken away. They were just ignored. And so it's a very it's a different situation. Using Korematsu is really an awful use of that, where, you know, you had rights once that were granted by the Supreme Court and now you overrule yourself to take it away. Well, that didn't happen. Korematsu was just his rights are just taken away right away. So it doesn't. And Korematsu, of course, was criticized for the same thing, for not for being having his rights taken away without any any type of due process. So it's absolutely different. And it's a very cynical use of Korematsu to cite that. And they do it in the affirmative action cases, too. You know, any way that they could reach a result that they like, they will make up some argument.

Narrative & Identity Timeframe 1:42:25 >> 1:45:54

You know, I could turn that around because the black liberation struggle, the fight that they had, the assertiveness that they showed by sitting in, by demanding their rights, taught Asian Americans to do the same. They were an inspiration for us. They were the the light to the fire of our imagination to demand our own rights just like they did. So any time, you know, marginalized groups stands up and fights, it's got to be an inspiration to others to try to gain their rights as well. And these the Korematsu, for example, expands far beyond just this United States. It was used as a precedent in the Nigerian case. It was using a precedent in the Jeju massacre in South Korea, where the murdered, I think it was 30,000 people and only many, many years later, decades later, were they able to get some redress using Korematsu as an example of of of a terrible mistake and why this country or the court at that time needed to make these both descendants and protagonists who lived through the Jeju Massacre compensation, give them compensation. So the legal precedent is only so much. I think it's the political precedent.

So what's happening now with reparations for African Americans? You know, I've been on panels with those who want a reparations in the African American community, and I think they have a precedent, legal precedent, but they also have a political precedent, which was, you know, suggested to them by my partner, Don Tamaki, who's on that commission. He's saying, you've got to tell you stories. You got it. We have to soften the the the public knowledge or excuse me, the public resistance to reparations. And to do so, we want to tell the human stories, which is the way the Japanese Americans did. So it wasn't just the Korematsu case, it was the whole redress movement. And the idea that you can masses and groups of people, it doesn't have to be all these important people. But when the stars line up with Congress, when you have a legal case that we tend to have every day, people demanding their congressperson, they vote for redress, or when you have Japanese Americans, veterans lobby the VFW, veterans of Foreign Wars and other veterans groups, then you have a not just a critical mass, you have a powerful mass and engaging not just with Japanese Americans, but with people of all color.

So the lessons for those African American reparations, for example, are are are can be seen pretty clearly in Japanese American redress. It's going to be difficult, but, you know, we thought reparations would never happen either. There's a lot there. From from my perspective, there's a lot of solidarity and building off each other's. There are. It's a whole movement. And. Yeah, you got to bring in outside people, I mean, not people outside of your community.

Transformation & Change Timeframe 1:45:54 >> 1:48:56

You know, it's a the idea to start a bar association grew out of a number of different issues. One of them, some people wanted to have a group that just traded cases for us, for the minority groups. I mean, excuse me for several people like Mike Lee and myself who were part of the original founders. You know, we suffered a lot of discrimination in court, outright racism. I'd go into like chambers and turn the corner and hear the judge talk about niggers out there. I had judges asked me to translate for my Chinese client who couldn't speak English, and he said, Well, why? Why can't you do it? I said, Your Honor, he's from China. My ass is from Japan. There I was really pissed as they speak, two different languages. One is Japanese, one is Chinese. So therefore I cannot translate for him. He knew it. He was messing with me. And those experiences of racism with judges and also other attorneys who would just kind of dismiss you. They would say pretty racist things; impelled us to organize because in an organizations way more power, we needed to be able to be a counterweight against the racism that we faced.

The judges that we felt were biased. And so that was one of the reasons we formed. It's also so social solidarity to have emotional support. It was hard to be a person of color. In 1972, when I started, almost nobody went to court. I didn't see any Asians in court. And to also dispel the notion it was prevalent in our communities that, oh, you can't go to an Asian attorney, they just don't have any juice, they don't have the skills, just go downtown to this other Caucasian firm and you know, they'll do better.

And so we want to dispel that notion that we are not we are just as competent as anyone else. And so that idea that we started here in the Bay Area, the first Asian American Bar Association, we copied actually from the Southern California Chinese American Association, the Japanese American Bar Association. But the idea when you do that together, like with the Asian Law Caucus, was the same idea. We didn't do this just to empower our San Francisco Bay Area community. We wanted this to be copied all around the nation so that everyone else could create their own model, whether you work together or not, at least you will fight for the rights of the people in your community. And so that's how I performed. And then a few years later, probably about two or three, some other younger folks were able to put together a national organization called the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association. And that explains how, you know, your power just increase is enhanced with organizations and more people.

Narrative & Identity Timeframe 1:48:56 >> 1:54:00

You know, I didn't have mentors that would take you under your wing. There were a few lawyers that helped us out. Joe Morizumi, Ken Kawaiichi, but they were so busy with their own practice; they didn't have time to help me with day to day cases, which is why I had to go to the library and learn this. We had people gave us tips known then to inspire us, but I wouldn't call them mentors. There were heroes that I had, you know, Ken Kawaiichi, Joe Morizumi, a judge in L.A. named Bob Takasugi, a quirky lawyer named Dennis Roberts. And I think from afar, Thurgood Marshall. Somebody who slog through to had the most courage to go to the south and fight battles there, risking, you know, death or or maiming or other types of injuries. And for that man to do that for so long with his brilliance was an inspiration. So those are my heroes more than anyone else.

I know less about Santa Clara County, but I also go back to the idea of impact litigation. And it just doesn't mean and our theory was not just to affect a lot of people, but it was to help people organize politically. So the idea of just bringing a lawsuit that brings people together to exercise power is the best impact you could have. You can win a case in court, and it can get overruled or it goes away the next day. But if you build a solid organization base that sticks around for a while, then you've got something more lasting. I think in Santa Clara, what I've seen is the Asian Law Alliance bringing election reapportionment issues. I just think that wonderful and I think bringing in groups to help support that will lobby the politicians and other lawmakers to, you know, follow in the footsteps of the lawsuit or even lead it sometimes.

I think what we see here is the anti-Asian hate violence. And it's not just violence, it's harassment. So that it's an act of terrorism when you have harass and usually it's women, 60% of them are who are harassed. If you harass one person in that community, it's an act of terrorism because it scares an entire community. And that's what terrorism is. So those have to be countered. And I think the long term, like I mentioned, has got to be Asian American studies are learning about Asian Americans. It's got to be really aggressive efforts to meet with each other, learn each other, have the leaders work together. So anti-hate violence is really critical now that China has become more. China has become the enemy and is in the papers now more and more about the economic enemy. They're supporting Russia, they claim, and the exported the coronavirus. They're just fear in every way to, I think, revitalize this. Now revitalize it's always been there, that river of racism that started out with slavery, that continued on against Chinese and other Asian groups and during times of crisis, like a recession now or almost recession, those rivers of racism overflow.

And with a leader like Trump or some of those other leaders who are encouraging violence essentially just are encouraging actual violence against against people of color, we have a real challenge, and I think it means that we have to speak out. We've got to stand up. We've got to be more noticeable. Are we? You know, I hate to say we have to form our vigilante groups because that would be illegal. But I do think that we have to exercise our power and whatever means necessary to fight this type of scourge of anti-Asian violence. There are a lot of issues still going on, but I think that issue of racism that wells up and is now becoming more prevalent is going to manifest themselves in different forms. Besides the violence, there's going to be other stereotypes. There's going to be other types of possibly media caricatures or portraiture portraits. So it's up to us to speak out every time this happens in an organized way, if we can, and for the long term to establish in Asian American studies K through 12 teaching and in every every college, you can hopefully establish that program.

Systems & Power Timeframe 1:54:00 >> end

(Interviewer) So last question. You know this where this whole project is really to serve the next generation, present the next generation, and and develop that Asian American history. So speaking to them now, how would you define activism.

Is pretty simple as just do something, do something positive to advance the cause of social justice. You know, I heard the term slacktivism. That means people sign petitions, people just from their armchair yell at the television. You know, I know a lot of folks like that by the way, and they don't do anything. You know, if you don't take an active role in your own people's future and your own people's social justice movement, you know, and just talking gets you gets you very little. You know, when I was in Asian American studies, we heard we all see these armchair radicals talk about revolution. And we need to do this. We need to do that. They didn't do anything and they eventually faded away and became very, very middle class. I'd say, in the sense that they did not continue the struggle. So I think you you activism has to it has to touch you somewhere. This notion of being social justice or this notion of being equal or the notion of being empowered and not dismissed, and sometimes it's by experience, something bad happens to you that get you so mad and outraged. You do something. Sometimes you read something that'll kind of spark a knowledge that will lead to action. But you know, you have to do something. So activism to me is taking control of you in this community's future and doing something to improve it other than just talk or just, you know, sign a petition here and there.

(Interviewer) Last question was regarding anti-Asian hate. It has existed for a lot longer than what's happening right now. Correct. Present generation, we're experiencing it for the first time and there could be shock or hopelessness. What would your message be to them as they're going through this?

I think one is to understand history, understand that this has been going on for a long time. And the other thing is, I think we've got to not only have people understand that, but understand that we have allies out there. You know, I think like there are techniques and there are strategies. You can use some of the videos I've seen that talk about how to diffuse anti-Asian hate are okay, but they don't explain what happens if an Asian woman is getting harassed by somebody non-Asian and an Asian man comes in to intervene. I've never seen what happens. The Asian man show. So it's harder to intervene. You've got to figure out all these iterations. I've heard about distraction. I think one of the best suggestions was to engage and get help. So there has to be specific techniques to be like in identify the person you hate you on the bus. Can you help me? Can you help me or can you help her? And if you could gather, you know, again, allies, it's a it's a microcosm or a miniature political activism compared to, you know, our redress movement. You say we need help. We need help. You know, instead of confronting the person directly, you know, get enough allies together. There are many more techniques that could be taught.

And I think folks have to be aware of that. I think they've got to be aware of the problem first, are aware that this has happened historically, which deepens their understanding and then work with people to be safer, which means having escorts, which means, you know, seeing yourself in certain places on the bus, which means traveling with people, which means learning techniques to diffuse anti-Asian violence. The long run is again, education. If you don't stop people from doing this and and I did suggest this earlier, is to get really a lot of more mental health funds for the people who are mentally ill racists.