(Interviewer) I want to pick up on a question about your appointment to President Clinton's Civil Liberties Public Education Fund (CLPEF) board. How did you get appointed? What was the what was the work that you did? And also, you know, if there was something that you could change, what what kind of what modifications would you have wanted to do?

Well, let's see. I think people started talking about the CLPEF in about, I don't know, maybe 93 or 94, and I had heard that that that there were some people already kind of tagged for the for the commission. And so I, I decided though that I knew somebody in Oakland who was going to put their hat in the ring. And so I decided to do it too. And so I wrote up kind of in Japanese community activity resume for myself and I. The other person in Oakland was also representing NCRR, and so we wanted to make sure that somebody from the NCRR got on this commission. NCRR is the National Coalition for Redress and Reparations. And so I did. And, you know, time goes by and at some point, I was informed that I was going to be vetted for, you know, this position. And so I went through this vetting procedure. The FBI has to vet you and let's see. So I found out that I think that I, I think that the people who were forming the board wanted Fred Korematsu, but he didn't want to do it. So there was an open spot. And then somebody I think they wanted Cherry Kinoshita from the JACL, and she didn't want to do it. And so there was still an open spot. And so I got the open spot. So let's see. So, but, but I was the only NCRR person on there. So. So that was good to get an NCRR person on the board.

So I went through this vetting process and a long, long period of time went by. I don't know if you remember, but the GOP was blocking President Clinton's appointments to everything, and he was having to do recess appointments for everything, basically. And so we were appointed during the recess, and that was all our all of our appointments, even the renewal of our appointments were all done during the recess. So so we never went through a Senate confirmation. Let's see. So when when we finally met the people on the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund board, I think it was pretty clear that people wanted Dale Minami to chair the commission. And I put my name forward to vice chair and so nobody else wanted to do it. So, so I did that. And to me it was really important to try to represent the positions of the National Coalition for Redress Reparations. We were a nationwide grassroots organization, and we had a we played a big role in the redress movement. So it seemed that that was really important. There were former incarcerees on the board, there were Don Nakanishi from UCLA was on the board, Dale and--I'm going blank. Anyway, the corim nobis cases were represented and there were some, there was a Elsa Kudo from representing the Latin Americans, Peruvians was represented, and there was some geographical representation. But I felt it was really important to represent the NCRR. So I had like meetings, public meetings in San Jose to bring back reports and what we were doing and get input. So that was really important to me.

Let’s see. So our-- we were charged with republishing the CWRIC, Commissioner of Wartime Internment and Relocation of Civilians. A report final report. So we published that: “Personal Justice Denied.” And we also had some funds to do a grant program for public education. We produced a PSA. We also did on my initiative, we organized a National Day of Remembrance, and and we did this educational grant program. We had a and educational curriculum summit. And we tried to make a statement about terminology, updating euphemistic terminology through this grant program. And I think there were about almost 150 grants given out. So that was a that was a big accomplishment that we had to do in basically two years. We had to do all those things in two years because the bill would sunset in 1998. I think one of the big contributions that this board made, I think because of the composition of the board, we were able to deal with divisive issues in the community. There were organizations who were unhappy about the grant program and, you know, some of the grant decisions, and I think that we were able to deal with these in a very fair and nonsectarian way. So that was, I think, a big accomplishment.

In the lead up to Trump's election, the 2016 campaign, you know, lasted for two years. Right. And I think that the there was growing racism, especially a lot of anti-Muslim hate. There were a lot of people starting to try to say that what happened to Japanese Americans should happen to Muslims. I think there were a lot of people starting to say, hey, that was a good idea. You know, politicians were starting to say things like that and, uh, what Tom and I decided Tom and I were not involved in an organization at that time, and we wanted to start things going, though we felt that there were a lot of people in the Japanese American community who had been involved in the Redress and Reparations Movement who would agree that this was really important. But somebody had to do something to to try to start making things happen. And one of the things that Tom and I did was we organized something that we kind of facetiously called the Sansei unFocus Group. And our idea was to get together all the sansei that we knew who were kind of connected to the redress movement and to different community activities and to see where people were at and to see if people, you know, wanted to start coming back and getting involved again.

And so that was one thing. And then we also initiated a community program to talk about this growing intolerance, and that was participated in by all the Japanese American organizations in the Japantown area. And we also when Trump was elected, we initiated a program called the The Unity Pledge Project, and we designed a tag that was modeled after the tags that Japanese Americans wore in camp, and it had a pledge on it and said, I pledge to stand up against Trump's policies. I stand up against the Muslim ban. Well, there was no ban at that time, but against the Muslim registry, against deportations. And we printed those out and we started taking them to marches, immigrant rights marches and to like the Korematsu Day program and to the Women's March. And they were wildly popular because I think the election of Trump really, you know, hit people hard and realized that I have to do something and I'm against the policies that he's promoting. I'm against the incredible bigotry that he's promoting. And so people just lined up. And we were also working with the ACLU, Santa Clara Valley chapter at the time, too. And we would do tabling and people would come up and our tags were flying off the presses. But they were we had we had people sign them and hang them up on this structure.

And so that was one of the things that we realized that that actually for a long time, I think people are go along with the status quo. They don't really it's like the frog in the pot. You don't kind of realize how hot the water temperature is getting. But I think the election of Trump really made a difference to a lot of people. And so we were also part of in the North Bay, an organization called Nikkei Resisters started and we were kind of part of that, but it's kind of far. So we drove to some meetings, but and we were working with Nikkei progressives in Los Angeles also. And and we started doing projects with the Japanese American Museum of San Jose. I don't know how to make this sound. It all actually makes sense. We were trying to build something basically. So one of the things that we Tom and I realize is that there there is kind of like a mental block in a lot of people's minds in the Japanese American community about, you know, we just talk about Japanese Americans, you know, and in this acceleration of bigotry.

Right. People were using the incarceration of Japanese Americans as like a rallying point to, you know, to discriminate against other people. But but it wasn't aimed at Japanese Americans. Right. So I think one of the things that we did was we said, you know, one of the communities that's really being targeted by Trump and by the right wing is the immigrant Latino community. And in San Jose, the Japanese American community has sort of had a long relationship with the Mexican American community in the canneries, in agriculture. And so we started a two program series called Don't Exclude US, #Don't Exclude US. And we showed that the oppressive history against Japanese Americans was very similar to that, against Mexican Americans. We showed the we brought a professor from Southern California to talk about the Mexican repatriation or the so-called repatriation, because what it was, was government sanctioned deportations where they would just round people up in the streets and stick them on a train and dump them in Tijuana. And two thirds of the people that were deported in this way were American citizens. They were actually this was in the 1930s. And a lot of these kids were like the contemporaries of Nisei, you know, same generation. They were children of immigrants born here and U.S. citizens. And so we we had that program, we called it “And I never saw my father again.”

And we felt that it had encroached able resonance for Japanese Americans, but also for Mexican Americans. And we had another follow up program about the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Muslim ban and what we were trying to do was bring Japanese Americans into this fight that that it's you know, it's our fight. It's it's almost indistinguishable. Like one of the most dramatic things that we saw was Professor Balderama showed us two photos side by side. One was loading Japanese Americans into the trains for the camps, and the other one was loading Mexican Americans onto the trains for Tijuana. And they're indistinguishable. I mean, the people look the same, and it's just, you know, it it makes you realize that we're all in this together. And so we really started pushing for people to start thinking solidarity, you know, what is actual solidarity mean and what's the role of Japanese Americans?

So meanwhile, this organization was starting in San Francisco, and Tom and I were trying to figure out, you know, what should we do? We need to do something. And we looked at the existing organizations in San Jose, and, you know, we had been very deeply involved in the Nihonmachi Outreach Committee during the 1980s, and we thought, oh, should we go to NOC and see if they want to do this new thing and or should we form our own? And we thought about it for a while and at some point we just decided we're going to just form our own organization. And it happened at the Issei Memorial Building. A person that we know who was working with the San Jose JACL, Sue Uyen, organized and this is after Trump was elected, organized a community day, and a lot of people from multiple different communities.

I think this was advertised at the Day of Remembrance possibly, but a lot of people came and the idea was to talk about different ideas of what to do. And so I just, you know, raised my hand and said, I'm going to whoever wants to help me form San Jose Nikkei Resisters come out to the patio. And so a lot of people came out and there's actually Sue. I'm so grateful she took a picture. So there's some evidence that this happened. And that was the beginning of San Jose Nikkei Resisters. And we were not actually the same organization as the East Bay one. They kind of took off in a different direction. But we're a multi-generational grassroots community organization. The core came out of the San Jose Redress Reparations movement. So a lot of the people that we worked with are from from there. But we also attracted some people who were not involved in the redress movement. We had people who were in camp, we had people who were from Gen X, you know, kind of in their forties, fifties. And then we had some millennials and we started our first thing to do was we really wanted Japanese Americans to show up at these immigration rights rallies and at these meetings of the Board of Supervisors to defend the sanctuary policy of Santa Clara County and different issues like that, because I think we felt that it's it's really important that Asians be seen together as a group, you know, opposing these bigoted policies. And so and that's part of fighting the model minority strategy. And it's also part of fighting the isolation and the dispersal of Asian Americans so that you've got to stand together and to do something. And I think that I feel that the vast majority of Asian Americans lean to progressive politics and are fair minded and democracy minded.

But I think that you have to you have to show people that and you have to make sure that people recognize that you can't just sit at your home and have your progressive opinion. You have to get out there and do something and so that was the beginnings of San Jose Nikkei Resisters. And our our mission was to unite and mobilize the Japanese American community. And that's actually really important because a lot of people, when they organize, they they I think what they're thinking in their head is I'm going to get together a little group of people and we're going to just have put out a really progressive position and that's it. And I think the thinking is, is that automatically everybody will rally to us. But I think that what we felt was really important, you have to consciously say, I'm going to unite people, you know, and the community is very diverse. So it's not like we're all the same and it's not just attracting the people who are all the same. You know, we're going to unite this broad community on certain things, and then we're going to try to mobilize people. You know, we're not going to just, I don't know, be an example. You know, we actually want to build something. So that was that was what we did. Yeah.

(Interviewer) So how did you build bridges with leaders in the Black, Native, Latinx communities?

Yeah, that's a really good question, and that's like a big challenge for all of us. I mean, it's a challenge for other communities and it's challenge for us. So one of the things that we learned is we have to have a strong identity ourselves, right? So that's part of this building, the collective memory. We have to know who we are in order to have a relationship with other people. Right? And so so we learn more and more about who we are in all our diversity in our group, the diversity inside of our group. Right. And then we learn about other people's history, like, you know, the don't exclude as program. We learned about Mexican repatriation, and we had speakers who whose parents had grown up working with Japanese Americans in the canneries. So we learn other people's histories, right? So that's really important because we don't want to treat other communities as a monolith either. We want to be because we understand we're not. We have to really be open minded and understand that, oh, we just met one Black person. And so all Black people are like that. You know, we have to really use our understanding of ourselves to to understand other people. So so one of the things that we've been trying to do is learn more about the history and the present of the different communities. You know, like so there are a lot of agencies actually in Santa Clara County, there are a lot of service agencies, nonprofits, and they represent different communities. So, you know, so one thing is kind of learning about their history and what do they do and what's their audience is what their clientele is.

But specifically, specifically, I think in this recent period, one of the the really important campaigns that we decided to work on is to build support in the Japanese American community for H.R. 40. So H.R. 40 is the federal bill that's sitting in Congress. Still hasn't been voted on, but it's for African American reparations. It's to create a commission to study reparations for African Americans and to recommend a proposal, recommend make recommendations. And I felt very strongly in like when when they're starting to be some momentum on H.R. 40, there were some hearings. Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a really excellent Atlantic magazine article about the case for reparations. And and it started coming up. And and I felt like even though I think a lot of Japanese American redress activists support black reparations, I felt that we had to mobilize ourselves, our community, because, you know, as other people have said, you know, the model minority is so strong, it's so deeply embedded. And we kind of don't even see it sometimes. And it's kind of embedded in the Japanese American story, too. Right. So what I was really afraid of is, is some journalist was going to say, oh, you know, Japanese Americans want to be redress, so let's go interview them and stick a microphone in front of some guy's face. And without thinking about it, might say something really terrible.

Right. And that's happened, too. It's it's not you know, there have been Japanese Americans who've said really terrible things about reparations so for Black people. So so we started having discussions amongst ourselves and we tried to expand that to different community organizations in our Japanese American community here to talk about to remind people about our reparations, our reparations struggle. So younger generations weren't involved and they didn't know that much about it because it's been left out of the Japanese American story. So we talked about that. And then we started learning about reparations for slavery, like what is the basis like for black reparations organizations? What are they saying? You know what? How are they couching the the proposals for H.R. 40 and stuff like that? And so we started we had a program online. This was during the pandemic. Also, we had a program online about, you know, why should Japanese Americans support H.R. 40? And I participated in an ACLU panel on, you know, H.R. 40. And we started talking to other Japanese American organizations, mainly in Los Angeles, about that. And they started doing their own organizing work in there on their local level. And so there also was this really great film that John Ozaki of San Francisco produced this film called Reparations, and we showed it and we reached out to different Black people that we knew who were in organizations to see if they were interested. And we worked with Olivia Foster from the African American Community Services Agency and had him on a panel with San Jose Nikkei Resisters and the filmmaker. When we did this showing at the Silicon Valley Asian American Film Festival, and that was really successful. It was really positive responses. And we are now participating in a Santa Clara County wide coalition that's led by the African American Community Services Agency on reparations, both nationally and locally and on the state level.

So when I was younger and didn't have kids, I was really busy. I was working full time. I was in the San Jose Taiko group, I was in the Nihonmachi Outreach Committee. And we also at different times did different things like the Asian Americans for Jesse Jackson and so, you know, I didn't have any responsibilities. I was I was just interested in it was my social life, you know, it was really fun. And when there was kind of a break because in so time I got married in 1984 and in 1989, Tom's father passed away. And then in shortly after that, in 1990, his mother passed away. And then the next year, in 1991, my father passed away. So we had this almost two year period of it was really sad. We were very depressed, and it was really difficult. But, you know, we wanted to have kids. So we had two kids, Tomio and Kiyoshi, in 1992 and 1995, and you know, mostly during that time we were working and taking care of our kids. It was pretty hard to do a lot of stuff. But in 95 was appointed to the CLPEF and that was the year that Kiyoshi was born. So that wasn't that demanding. It wasn't like every day or anything. But in 2000 was the attack on the World Trade Center.

And I think a lot of Japanese Americans, we felt like we had to hit the ground running because they started calling it Pearl Harbor. And I'm kind of getting emotional because it makes me so angry. They start going after Muslim Americans. And it was so familiar, you know, that just vitriol and hatred. And so I think a lot of Japanese Americans felt like they had to come out and show support and defend. You know, I think I guess this is just part of my personal trauma. It's not a big deal. But I guess it just it's always kind of bother me. These things. I don't think it's a terrible thing. But yeah, so that was a big turning point. And so the activity level kind of ramped up and it was it was difficult to manage community political activities and family and job. I think there also was we had a big struggle with the San Jose Unified School District over providing adequate and appropriate services to our child. Kiyoshi, who was diagnosed with dyslexia. And so that became a huge time sink in terms of just dealing with that issue and making sure that he learned how to read so yeah, so during that that time period, we weren't as active. We sometimes would go out and speak at events and stuff like that, but we didn't take main responsibility for an organization. So we kind of kept our hand in. We went to different events and we, we helped with certain types of activities, but we weren't shouldering the main load during that time period, which I guess I don't know. I guess maybe that's advice how to do that. But yeah, so we became more active as our children became more independent.