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Susan Hayase - Part 1 of 2

Date: November 1, 2022
 Interviewer: Yvonne Kwan and Ellina Yin
 Interviewee: Susan Hayase (1956 - )

Susan Hayase is a long-time activist in the San Jose area Japanese American community, and was a part of the grassroots movement for Japanese American redress, working in the Nihonmachi Outreach Committee (NOC) and the National Coalition for Redress/Reparations (NCRR.) She was a performing member of San Jose Taiko from 1980 through 1990, and she was appointed in 1995 to the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund Board by President Clinton and served as its vice-chair. She is one of the founders of San Jose Nikkei Resisters, a grassroots multi-generational community organization whose mission is to unite and mobilize the Japanese American community to oppose Trump's attacks on immigrants and asylum seekers.

Transcript of Susan Hayase

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Systems & Power Timeframe 0:00 >> 3:41

My name is Susan Hayase. I was born in Washington, D.C. on May 25th, 1956. My father's name is Masashi Hayase. He was born in Los Angeles, 1926. My dad was lucky enough to go to college out of Amache, and so he went to the, it was called, Rolla School of Mines. But it was it's now the University of Missouri at Rolla. And it was all engineering in those days. And he studied metallurgy. So his parents, Sakakichi Hayase and Chiyoko Hiayase came from Ehime-ken in Shikoku, and they immigrated, I don't know what year exactly, but I think it was probably around 1919 or 1920, something like that. And they immigrated to San Francisco, and they had a little restaurant. And then they moved. They had two kids and then they moved to Los Angeles and had two more kids.

My mother was Yoneko Matsuo Hayase, and she was born on February 26th, 1925. She was born in... I can't totally remember. It's either Fillmore or Santa Barbara. I think it might have been Fillmore. Her parents Surukichi and Naka Matsuo were migrant farm laborers. So they moved around in the Central Coast area and they had three daughters who were all born in different cities in that area. So my maternal grandfather was a an immigrant, and I don't know when he came, but my maternal grandmother came in 1918 and she was 28. She was a picture bride. And that's very old for a picture bride. She had a daughter in-- that she had to leave in Japan. And the story's a little bit mysterious to us. We don't exactly know. But she might have been widowed or something? And you couldn't bring children. So the picture bride thing was an immigration loophole. Right. So she was able to come, and then she had three daughters in California. Yeah. My mother went to school in Ventura, California, and she went to public schools. And she was very smart. She skipped two grades, and she was planning to attend the Ventura Junior College when war broke out. So she was in her senior year and was not able to finish her senior year, but she was actually very lucky compared to some Nisei. Her principal mailed her her diploma, even though she hadn't completed her senior year. So, yeah, so she-- she had planned to go to junior college and become a lab technician. So her sister, older sister, had attended Ventura Junior College and became a bookkeeper but was not able to get a job as a bookkeeper. So I think there was a lot of employment discrimination. So you could get some education and a certificate or something, but you couldn't get a job.

Systems & Power Timeframe 3:41 >> 7:35

I have three siblings. My sister Marianne is the first born, and she was born in 1955, and I'm second, and my brother Gordon is third. He was born in 1958, and my younger sister Paula is fourth. She was born in 1960. And Marianne and I were born in Washington, D.C., and Gordon and Paula were born in Pennsylvania.

My parents met in Washington, D.C., so my mother and her sister had left camp. At some point, you could leave if you had a job. So they they went to Washington, D.C. My mother's sister had a junior college professor, had gone to work for the federal government, and he contacted her and said, “I'll hire you.” So she went to work and then my mother followed her and got a job with the federal government.

My father had started college just before the end of the war, and he was drafted at the end of the war. So he had to go serve. But he was lucky he wasn't in combat. He was he you know, we asked him, 'What did you do in World War II, dad?' And he says, 'I occupied Germany.' So that's what he did. And then he hurried back to finish his degree because he felt like there was going to be a lot of competition for jobs and a lot of returning GIs. So he was not able to get an engineering job. He he was a Tau Beta Pi graduate, which is like Phi Beta Kappa for engineers. But he was the only one in his graduating class who didn't have a job offer. And so he shoveled coal in Los Angeles, he got a draftman's job, and he finally decided he had to go back east. So he went to work for the federal government at the Naval Gun Factory.

And so he was in Washington, D.C.; my mom was in Washington, D.C. There was a, the National JACL was there. So there were a grouping of young Nisei and they would, you know, socialize with each other. Well, so I didn't really live for very long in in Washington, D.C. My dad got a job with Westinghouse in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And so we moved there. And that's where my brother and sister were born. And we lived there until I was about six. And so I went to kindergarten and part of first grade there. We lived in a suburb of Pittsburgh. It was called Mt. Lebanon. And I remember we lived on a street that was brick, and it was very beautiful. There were no fences, like all the backyards were together, and it was kind of idyllic. I don't remember any racism there. It, it was... we lived on a flat place between two steep hills, so we had like about two houses' width where we could roller skate, you know, without going down the hill. And let's see. Yeah, I remember playing in the backyard, but I don't remember the community. You know, I, we walked to school with all the other kids. Yeah, but then my father finally got a job in aerospace, which was his original goal in California. And I remember my mother didn't want to go back. Her sister was still on the East Coast, and... But we went and the way I talk about it, I said, 'It's our epic 20-year return.' So we returned in 62. So my parents had left California at 42, so.

Joy & Cultural Resistence Timeframe 7:35 >> 15:08

So we moved to Torrance for a year, or maybe a little bit more. And then we moved to Fountain Valley in Orange County. So I mostly grew up in Orange County. Yeah. And it was kind of similar to Silicon Valley in that it was formerly all agriculture, and it was being developed into housing. So I think we lived in the second housing development. We lived in Stardust Homes, very, very glamorous. And the first development was Royal Homes. That was very glamorous, too. And, it was all white, as far as I knew... actually, it wasn't. I-- but I didn't know this, right. Because our neighborhood was all white, and... it was pretty conservative. Everything you've heard about Orange County is true, but it was kind of a home of the John Birch Society, very religious, it... I experienced it as racist. I remember showing up at school and having, you know, white kids, you know, circle me staring at me and commenting on my racial features and I remember-- people didn't say, 'Where are you from?' They said, 'What are you?' And I said I was an American. So I remember being a little kid and having to, you know, debate on the playground why I could be an American, and they would say all these reasons why it was impossible that I was an American.

So, yeah, so that was a really strong early memory. I remember also that... being in California was when I first started understanding my racial identity, you know, so when I was, I think I was about seven, my dad brought home this woodcarving set, which is like... today, you would never give a six-year-old wood carving set, right? [Laughter]. It's pretty dangerous. But he made us these little pine bookends, and we were going to carve it, and my sister and I were going to carve it, and my sister knew immediately what she wanted to do. And so she got started. And I asked my dad, I said, 'You know, Dad, I can't I don't know what to carve.' And so he drew me a little design. My dad was an engineer, and he was a designer and he was so he drew a little design, and so I carved it, and the design was on this corner. There was a sun, and over here was a... outline of the United States, the map of the United States. And then around the edge was like a motif that was like the ocean. And he said, 'Your parents came from Japan, the land of the sun, and they went to the United States. And you are a sansei, you are a third-generation Japanese person.' And people didn't say Japanese American in those days. And I remember really strongly being kind of weirded out by, 'Wow, there's this kind of club I belong to, and I didn't even know it and, where are the other members?'

You know, and but that really stuck with me, and I remember really being jealous of other kids when they would we would get an assignment, you know, 'Write your life story' right there. And I, my friend Karen, I remember her story was like two sentences was 'I was born in Van Nuys. Then we moved here.' You know, and my story had to start with my grandparents, you know, and it was very involved because that was part, I had to tell that story so that people would understand why I was an American. And so, and then the thing about my parents and camp, my parents were incarcerated and along with their parents. And so they would talk about camp. And, you know, we knew that they knew somebody from camp. And this was before camp and after camp. And I remember my, my mother had a book, it was called Citizen 13660 by Miné Okubo. And it's like a graphic novel and Miné Okubo drew all these. It was like a diary of camp life, of going to Topaz, of being incarcerated at Tanforan and then going to Topaz.

And I remember, I looked at this book over and over and I read it over and over, and I still remember when it dawned on me, what it was telling me about my parents. And I remember being really angry. I mean, I remember, you know that expression, 'seeing red.' I mean, I remember I was almost blinded with anger and because it kind of made sense why these kids were treating me this way. Right. And I had seen my parents being treated not very respectfully, although you kind of don't you kind of want to ignore it a little bit, but you notice it, right? But I, I was in third grade when I figured that out and I, I went I liked my teacher. Her name was Miss Gormley, and I kind of hung around after class to tell her this. And I she was cleaning the boards and I told her, 'Hey, Miss Gormley, my parents were in a prison camp during World War II.' And she didn't even stop erasing the board. She didn't even look at me. She said, 'That didn't happen.' That was pretty intense, you know. So anyway, I had I I'm very lucky. I've had a lot of experiences that have helped me figure this stuff out.

But so I became very interested in racism. I decided that I would try to figure out what the hell was going on. And for many, many years I decided it was because people were stupid and and I figured that they were not very educated. And I read a lot. And I talked to my mom about a lot of the things I was reading. And she, she told me about government and civics. And she-- because she was very interested in that, although she never went to college. And, so I figured it was lack of education. But then I went to Stanford and discovered it wasn't smarts or education that made people be racist or not racist.

Narrative & Identity Timeframe 15:08 >> 20:03

(Interviewer) So the nisei generation who in particular lived through the prison camps, were often known to be the silent generation and tended to be very protective of their children and didn't really share a lot about camp life. Did you see that was something common in your family as well?

No, and I'm very lucky. I'm very, very lucky. I I know a lot about my parents and I... so a lot of people who are incarcerated, they may talk about it or not, talk about it or talk about it a lot, or not talk about a lot, but they didn't have an overview of it. Nobody had studied it. Right. They didn't go to ethnic studies. Right. So they didn't understand. They had been teenagers, right. And all they knew was what everybody else was telling them and then what they knew personally, right? And their friends and stuff. So, so they couldn't give me an overview. Right. But they could give me information and... the way I kind of looked at it, was my parents--I was so lucky because my parents left all these breadcrumbs that I could follow and try to figure out. So I had to interpret it and I had to struggle to understand where what they were saying. And my parents were very protective. They-- I thought they were very overprotective. And they, you know, didn't let us stay out really late.

But comparatively, it was much freer than now. I mean, you know, we rode our bikes all over the place unsupervised and all this kind of stuff, but they were pretty protective compared to the parents of my friends, and they were like, I remember I went on this big campaign with my parents to I figured, well, I wanted them to give me more freedom. So I decided that, you know, I would prove to them I was trustworthy. I told them what I was thinking, you know, I told them what I thought about my peers, you know. You know, I told them my values so that they would trust me. Right. And I, I remember I can't read what the thing was. If I want to do something, they wouldn't let me do something. And I argued with my dad, you know, 'You can, you know, you can trust me.' And he said, 'I trust you. I don't trust those other people.' So that was kind of an interesting breadcrumb, you know, and my parents are like... here's another breadcrumb. I remember there was some... little kids vandalized our elementary school, and really broke into one of the rooms, really wrecked it up. And I remember talking about that at the kitchen table and my dad said something and he-- every once in a while my dad would say something that had like this real intensity to it, and he'd say, 'Don't you ever do anything like that.' And we were kind of offended because, you know, we weren't going to vandalize the school. You know, he said, 'Don't you ever do anything like that.' And he says, he said, 'They won't even have to get a good look at you to know who you are.' You know? And so, you know, that was kind of that was telling me a lot of information about how he thought about the police, you know, what our chances were.

You know, in the criminal justice system and things like that. So I think, you know, I did get a lot from my parents. My dad told me a story. He was about 15, I think, when they were at Santa Anita. And he said that they were, they had arrived, and they watched other busses arriving and people getting off and people being searched by guards. And he says that they what watched this Issei man get really hassled. And he said people were really mad. And he said people just are really the way he told it. He was. He said people beat up the guard. So I've asked other people to try to corroborate that. And I, you know, can't really corroborate that. But, you know, so, you know, so my parents have told me things about that, and they told me how I have photos, also, from my parents in camp and so that was kind of interesting. So, so yeah, my parents have talked to me about it.

Timeframe 20:03 >> 24:32

(Interviewer) What did you and your family also do for fun on vacations or weekends or just, you know, hanging out with one another?

Yeah, well, we had a lot of fun. I-- my dad, even when we were in Pennsylvania, I remember we had this he bought us this toy and wow, we were popular in our neighborhood because we had this toy. It was called a whirlwind, and it was two cross pieces of metal with a seat on the end. And then you could pump, you could-- there were four kids that could be on it and you'd pump it with your feet and your hands and it would spin. Okay, so this was like incredible. This was a great toy, and everybody wanted to play in our yard. And so, you know, we had a lot of fun like that. My dad built us this jungle gym kind of thing, and then he also erected this, what do you call it, you know, two poles in that cross pole, like for gymnastics? And he showed us, he said, 'I'm going to teach you how to get up on that bar.' And it was pretty high. So you had to jump. And so you jump and then you'd pull yourself up at the same time that you're swinging your feet over the pole and you'd be on top of the bar. And so I, you know, he taught us things like that.

And we had a little dog, his name was Joey, and we, you know, had a big backyard. And I had a little hill in it and that my dad kind of made. And I remember we'd dress up our dog and put him in a toy baby carriage and give him rides around the yard, and, you know, I remember we had little, with our friends. We'd have little carnivals, we'd try to get people to pay us $0.05 to, you know, give our dog ride around the yard. Things like that. And and I remember I was always the treasurer, so I remember finding a jar of nickels in my closet. [Laughter]. So we had fun. We had a lot of fun. We also, like I said, we had a lot more freedom than kids have nowadays. We you know, as I said, that Fountain Valley was kind of being slowly developed from farmland and and it was also coastal wetlands. Right? So there's this place called the Frog Pond that was, I don't know, probably about a mile from our house. And I remember when we were, when we turned eight, we got a watch and we had to prove that we could tell time and then we could go somewhere and be back at 3:00 or whatever. Right. So we would ride our bikes to the frog pond. It probably wasn't that safe. I remember trying to make little rafts, you know, out of abandoned wood that had nails sticking out. You know, I think we got a lot of tetanus shots and so yeah, so it was really fun. You know, I was lucky, I had friends and so... so that was another lesson.

You know, I had there were people who would objectify me and be racist towards me. But I also had friends who sort of objectified me, you know what I mean? But, but were my friends, too. So it was an interesting experience, you know, and a lot of food for thought. In our in our elementary school, there was a Black family with two sons, but they were like about six years older than us. So we weren't peers. So we never were in the same classes or in the same area. And there was one family that were half Chinese and half white, but they were also a different age. So we were never in the same classes. I, one of my friends was Jewish, and in those days in this place, being Jewish was like being a person of color. So she faced a lot of anti-Semitism. So, you know, which also was an interesting thing because to me, she looked like a white person. Yeah. So that was an interesting lesson. But yeah, there weren't, until I went to high school and then there were like a handful more Asians, and a handful of, you know, mixed race, Asian, white and and a small population of Mexican Americans.

Narrative & Identity Timeframe 24:32 >> 27:46

Oh, well, we loved TV. We watched Saturday morning cartoons religiously. That was so fun. And we watched, you know, sitcoms, and, and in those days, everybody watched the same thing, right? Because it was all network TV. So that was kind of a way that, it was part of social behavior. You talk about the sitcoms, and you know, the, the once yearly, you know, viewing of Wizard of Oz and the once yearly Christmas specials, and, you know, that kind of thing. I remember we watched, Let's Watch the News. So I, I do remember watching antiwar demonstrations on the news and, you know, hearing my parents commentary about that.

(Interviewer) were there any representations of Asians on television or even in film at that time that you were at this age?

I think there was a what was it called, The Courtship of Eddie's Father with, uh, what was her name? Umeki? No. Mieko. I'm sorry. I can't remember her name. She was in Flower Drum Song. And... let me see, who else. Oh, there was Hop Sing on Bonanza, but it was pretty, pretty thin. You know, there wasn't that much. And usually it was kind of embarrassing, you know, trying to remember if there's anything. I think it was kind of alienating, you know, so. So, both of my parents were not kibei, so we didn't speak Japanese in their home. So a Japanese person with a Japanese accent, like on the courtship of Eddie's Father, was kind of foreign to us. I mean, you know, my grandparents, but that's different. So, oh, I forgot to tell you. I went to Nihon Gakko. So from third grade til ninth grade, my father wanted us to-- he didn't speak Japanese. He could understand it, you know, but he couldn't speak it. But he wanted us to go to Japanese school. He was, and so. So we went. It was the Garden Grove Nihon Gakko, and we didn't learn Japanese either. We were kind of determined not to watch Saturday mornings, so that was kind of a pain. But but we did meet other sansei, and, but... yeah so, so the media representations of Japanese Americans or Asians was pretty sparse and if it was there, it was probably kind of embarrassing or kind of, you know, it wasn't like it was something we could relate to.

Systems & Power Timeframe 27:46 >> 30:51

So elementary school. So as as I mentioned, I was trying to figure out why people were so racist and my conclusion at that point was that they were really stupid. I, uh, yeah, I'm not really proud of this, but I had a lot of contempt for my public school. I didn't respect most of the teachers. I was very precocious. I was reading a lot. I, I remember when I read my first book in the library that came from the adult section, you know, I mean, not, you know, not the adult section, but, you know, it was a Biography of Elizabeth the Second. So, and my mother was telling me all these things. So I didn't have that much respect for my teachers. And, and I started playing the flute in third grade and then I discovered that I could play the string bass also so I could get out of class twice, you know, multiple times a week. So that was like, my goal, to get out of class as much as possible. And I'm so glad they let me do that. That was really, really helpful. I really love my music teacher. He was his name was Mr. Orr. He was very sardonic, very different from the other teachers. He didn't talk down to us. Uh... and, um, oh, and I had a really terrible teacher in eighth grade.

And I have to tell you this story because it has to do with my Jewish friend. So I so another reason why I didn't like school-- I, I was a really good reader and I was many grade levels ahead of everybody else. And so what that meant was that my teachers would take advantage of me. They say, 'Oh, can you help so-and-so with their thing, you know, their worksheet or whatever?' And so I was like the assistant teacher, and I didn't-- I felt really strongly I wasn't getting anything out of this, you know, I wasn't-- nobody was teaching me anything. And so I was very resentful. But I, I did it. I help people with their spelling and whatever. And I remember my friend Joy, who was Jewish. She, we were writing our book reports and she said-- she gave me a book report, and says, 'What's wrong with this?' So I read, and I said, 'I thought that was good.' And she says, 'I get a C on every book report.' I said, 'Oh, I get an A on every book report.' So I said, 'Let's have you copy over my book report and put your name on it and I'll copy over your report and put my name on it.' So the one with my name on it got an A in the one with her name on it. Got to see the one that I had written. Right. And so we confronted our eighth grade teacher and she just, you know, yelled at us or deflected it. So if I had been smarter, I maybe-- I could have done something with that. But I didn't know what to do with it.

Timeframe 30:51 >> 35:02

So anyway, that was that was K through eight. [Laughter]. And then I went to Fountain Valley High School and I remember that... and I and I'm really sorry. It probably, just a lot of my stories just started dripping with contempt for my schooling. But I remember my ninth-grade social studies teacher, and he looked like Robert Redford. So all the, all the girls were just gaga for this guy. He was so cute. And I thought he was such an airhead. He was such an airhead. And the only thing I remember that he did was his big project, which I think a lot of people were doing. And he says this was 1970. Okay. He said, 'Okay, I'm going to randomly pass out these little things and some of you are going to get a blue piece of paper and some of you are going to get a green piece of paper and we'll make you guys the green people, and we'll make other people the blue people.' And it was on racism, right? But it was, you know, anyway, I thought it was so stupid, and I don't think it taught anybody anything. And... anyway, I. Oh, I also learned about-- so, I took French and in some ways, I wish I had taken Spanish. It would have been much more useful in California, right. But my sister took Spanish, so I decided to take French. And my teacher was this very prim and proper older single lady. And so, of course, everybody, all the gossipy little kids decided that she was a lesbian. Right. And so I remember thinking, 'Wow.' Well, I you know, I already had kind of an opinion. A lot of these were my friends, right? So I kind of had an opinion of, not a very good opinion of how easily swayed people were by just rumors and things like that.

And so I thought that was interesting. And then turns out she was the girl's tennis coach. And of course, anything had to do with athletics for girls was also associated with being a lesbian. Right. So that too, to everybody, all my peers, that just sealed the deal. She you know, she looked like a lesbian and she did sports, so she must be a lesbian, right? And so I played on this tennis team, the girls tennis team. And it was really fun. And when I was a senior, I continued on the tennis team. When I was a senior, they scheduled physics, which I wanted to take during the practice time for the girls tennis team because obviously the girls weren't going to take physics, and they didn't in those days. Actually, I was one of only two girls to take physics that year, and I went to the principal, and I said, 'How dare you, you know, make me choose between physics and tennis.' And so one of my friends who's a white girl, but she was very aggressive and she she helped me kind of maneuver this thing where she and I would play on the boys tennis team. So, so she and I played on the boys tennis team, and she was much better than me. I wasn't that good. I never really competed, but, so I could take physics. And at the end of that year, I discovered that all the boys in all the sports thought that she and I were lesbians because we played on the boys-- you know? And so like that was another thing like, 'Oh my God, these people are so stupid.' [Laughter]. Anyway, it was, you know, it was like just more evidence of just small mindedness and yeah. So I couldn't wait to get away, but. [Laughter]. Oh, I'm sorry.

Timeframe 35:02 >> 37:00

Oh, I took piano lessons. My mother wanted us to play the piano, but she wasn't like a stage mom or anything. She didn't, you know, make us do recitals or anything. And... let's see, I was in a club. Well, I was-- in in high school I was in the orchestra. And I also auditioned for and was accepted into the All Southern California Honor Orchestra, which was practiced in at CSU Northridge. So at some point I got my driver's license and my friend Gina and I, she played the violin, and we would drive ourselves to Northridge for rehearsals and stuff. And so being in a in music was kind of fun, because you know, people were more accepting, it was more eccentric students and, you know, and let me see... Also I was, I was in a I was in a gifted program in 10th and 11th grade for English and Social Studies. And those teachers were really good. And it was a... more nurturing environment. Yeah.

(Interviewer) Can you state the name of your elementary school and middle school?

Oh, sure. James O. Harper Elementary School and no middle school. That was K through eight. And then high school Fountain Valley High School.

Narrative & Identity Timeframe 37:00 >> 45:50

(Interviewer) So moving on to college, when and where did you attend college and what was your major and why did you select it?

So a lot of people, including my parents, told me, 'Oh, you can do whatever you want.' So this is not helpful even information, right? Because I think that it's, anyway, nobody helps you figure it out, right? They just say, 'Oh, you've got so much potential, and you can do anything you want.' What? And so I didn't really know. My dad told me, he thought I should become a biochemist and I didn't like chemistry because it involved washing pipettes and I didn't like washing things. I mean, that's very deep, right? Yes. So I, I, I applied to some really selective colleges and didn't get in except for Stanford. And, and I applied to UC Berkeley and in those days, it was easier to get into all these schools. So UC Berkeley was my backup school, which it couldn't be in these days. Right? I don't think I'd get in to any of these places, but, uh, let's see.

So. So my dad told me that it's better to be in some kind of technical field, some scientific or technical field. And he-- and the reason he said was because, and this is another big fat breadcrumb, he says, 'Because then people don't have to like you.' You know, he said, 'If you're a lawyer, there's a lot of schmoozing and people have to like you to hire you,' you know? But if you know something, they don't have to like you, right?' So, so, so I just put down engineering or something in my application. And so I got into Stanford and, I remember that this was in 1974 and I remember they sent me a letter that said 'Congratulations. And are you interested in living in the Asian American themed dorm?' Which had been established maybe a year or two before that, after a lot of, you know, organizing at Stanford by a lot of Asian American students. And I went to my parents, and I said, you know, 'I think I'd like to live here.' And by this time, I pretty much had figured out that, I guess the way I looked at it was, that I was of I was really damaged by not being around other Asians, you know, and I needed to do that, you know. And my parents a little bit, to my surprise, but not totally to my surprise, said, you know, 'We don't think you should do that.' And they said it's it's bad to get too much attention for being Asian. You know. And so I disagreed with them, but I was obedient and I didn't do it.

Well, so it turns out it's a really common experience to be isolated as an Asian, right? So. Oh, sorry. I've got to tell you, there's this high school story that's just kind of related. So there was this Japanese-American sansei guy in my gifted program, English Social Studies, in 10th and 11th grade. His name was Victor, and he was really cute. He was an athlete, and he was very nice. Right. But we could never really talk to each other because of that thing, right? Being the only Asians. Right. And my the the English teacher in that program, she was really nice. She was very blustery, very extroverted, very warm and friendly woman. Right. So one time she called us to her office or something in the classroom and she said, 'I have these tickets to this thing.' I don't know what it was, you know, some events and and she wanted me and Victor to go, but of course, we couldn't go with each other, you know, it was just not possible, you know. And so that was part of so I knew, I knew that, you know, I felt really uncomfortable around Asians. I knew that that was unnatural, you know, that that was there was something wrong with that. And I knew it was because of the way I had grown up and the environment, you know. So, so when I went to Stanford, I, I was in a regular dorm, and I had a white roommate and most of the students were white. There were a couple of Asians. And I noticed that they were, also had grown up isolated.

You know, so and also I think the big change from Fountain Valley to Stanford was... in Fountain Valley, I kind of learned about racist hate, you know. But at Stanford, I learned about racist love, you know, because whoa! You know, suddenly I was really-- I didn't date in high school, you know, I felt like I must be, like, incredibly unattractive. And in college, it was like, 'Wow, I'm so popular suddenly,' you know? And, uh, anyway, there's anecdotes that go with that, but, you know, but anyway, so I, I, I, I lived in that world for two years, but I was, I knew that I had to kind of deal with stuff. And I, even, I went to, when I first got to Stanford, I went to the counseling center to try to get a counselor, but they assigned me this old white male Freudian guy. And I just went once, and it just wasn't doing it for me. And so at some point there was a demonstration to get Stanford out of apartheid, to lose the, to divest. And I attended that demonstration. And I was so scared because, you know, my parents, you know, 'They don't even have to get a good look at you to see who you are.' You know, there's a lot of but I went, and I met some Asian-American students who were in the Asian American Students Association, who lived in the Asian American theme house and I decided I had to go. And so I did. And I still remember my first meeting. I was so scared. I was really, um, uh, I was really affected by all this stuff.

So I was, you know, I, I, I could intellectually understand what was happening to me, but I still felt it, you know? And so I was, I was scared. I remember I sat there, and my hands were shaking and... anyway, and the rest is history. I made some really good friends who are still friends of mine today. And I, I feel very lucky that I had that option to do that. But I also have to take some credit for doing it because I know a lot of people didn't do that, you know, and I know a lot of people who seemed like they were kind of on a parallel path as me and they didn't perceive any of this stuff. And I think for a variety of reasons, I'm not saying that they're dumb or anything, but they didn't experience it the way I did. I think I was very emotional, and I identified really strongly with my parents. So I... yeah. So anyway, I had a very intense college experience, and I was also majoring in engineering, which was a very hostile environment there. Lot of things I don't remember about Stanford, and I think it's because I was so stressed out that I had blacked it out.

Systems & Power Timeframe 45:50 >> 52:01

So I started... so the curriculum for engineers is pretty intense. I mean, there's like millions of things you have to take, and prerequisites for all those things. So it's pretty prescribed, right? So I, I took calculus, and I took physics, and I took all these things, but I-- let's see. So I was in classes with a lot of men who were pursuing engineering, and I had some friends from my dorm who were, a couple who were white men who were very friendly to me, and one who was an Iranian American who was very friendly to me. And we would talk about our classes sometimes. And I remember sitting next to one of my friends in a pretty large lecture hall for one of the classes, and the professor hadn't arrived yet. And my friend and I were sitting there kind of chatting, and so my friend asked me and he says, 'So, Susan, I noticed you're taking calculus and physics and all these other classes. So what's your major? Are you majoring in engineering?' And there was this-- at that time, there was this commercial that that went like this, 'Oh, my broker's E.F. Hutton. And he says...' and everybody in the room goes like this. It was just like that. Everybody stopped talking to hear what I was going to say. Or that's that's the way I experienced this moment anyway. [Laughter].

And I was one of, I think, three women that eventually decided to major in electrical engineering. And I didn't know the other women. One was a Chinese American woman, one was a white woman. And we didn't relate to each other. And... it was extremely hostile. I remember going to a lab and every single lab meeting, the T.A., who was an Asian male, asked me, 'Are you still here? Are you still coming? What are you doing here?' And I mean, it was openly hostile. And I remember our classmates, if, you know, if I asked them something like, Oh, I missed the page number that that was on, and they wouldn't tell me. I mean, it was very hostile and I remember one of my professors-- even people who weren't hostile, it was pretty weird, right? Like I remember I had to go see my professor once and I, I never went to see professors. He was an Italian. He spoke with a heavy Italian accent because Stanford Engineering in Italy, you know, and he was this white haired, very elegant gentleman, very nice guy. And I came to his office hours and he stood up and he rustled-- and he pulled out the chair for me because I was a lady, you know. And let me tell you, that's very othering, you know what I mean? Like, I'm sure he didn't do that for his male students. I mean, the whole thing was really intense. I mean, it was... Yeah. So. So you asked me, so what was I-- so, so at some point, like I mentioned that I kind of got together with other Asian American students, some of whom were engineers. Right? A lot of were engineers or pre-med, right. And I remember. Oh, shit. I just lost my train of thought. What was I going to say?

Oh, yeah, yeah. So, so a lot of students were talking about-- a lot of very progressive students talk about, you know, what are you going to do with your privileged Stanford education? Are you going to give back to the community and blah-blah-blah, or are you going to just be a capitalist? You know, and, and so I remember feeling like, you know, when I became an engineer, I would have social status that would give my words weight, you know, and that's very naive, right? I think I don't know what I thought was going to happen, but anyway, that was something that I told myself. But yeah, I, I, but I also felt like, I felt like people of color had the right to pursue a professional career, you know. So there were a lot of white leftists at Stanford, and I lived in one of the co-ops with a lot of white leftists. I had a friend who lived there, and she convinced me to go live there with her. And I remember this one woman had such disdain for me. She, she said, she said she was a white woman and she said she was majoring in poetry or something. And she said, you know, 'I can't believe you're going to go be a capitalist.' And then she went off to live on a kibbutz in the occupied West Bank. Anyway, I that was interesting. So yeah, I didn't really have a very clear image of what it would be. I, I was kind of riding this wave and trying to stay afloat and I, I wasn't in charge of my, I don't think I was really in charge of my career trajectory at that point. I was trying to stay alive. Yeah.

Timeframe 52:01 >> 53:18

(Interviewer) Were there any extracurricular on top of engineering?

Um. Let's see, I, I did some things that were really fun. I had a roommate in the or, she was not a roommate, she was a dorm mate, but she was really into drama. And so she organized some plays. So I was in a couple of plays, and I was in “The Importance of Being Earnest,” and I was in Lysistrata and it was just an independent, not sanctioned. It wasn't a club, it was just a bunch of dorm mates. And we put on these productions in our dorm, and it was really fun. And so I did that. I, I didn't play the flute or the bass anymore, did I? No. And, and then I, I started doing a lot of things with the Asian American students in my junior and senior year. So I was at Stanford from 74 to 78. And so I guess I don't remember meeting Vietnamese American students. Actually, it was mainly Chinese, Japanese and Filipino. Yeah. And a few Koreans. But yeah, I don't remember meeting any Vietnamese.

Timeframe 53:18 >> 58:49

(Interviewer) So partnership and marriage. How did you meet your husband?

Let me see. I think so. So when I got out of college, I started working, and at some point I became involved with the Nihonmachi Outreach Committee, and Tom was there also. But the first time I met him was I didn't know who he was. I in 1979, I went on the 1979 Tule Lake pilgrimage. And those were very, very community oriented. They were community organized, and I was the emcee of the program at Tule Lake. And Tom was a student at UC Santa Cruz, and he was the speaker at the program. And we did the programs in English and Japanese. And so the speaker would talk a little bit in English, and then the translator would translate it and stuff. And Tom was really nervous, and I didn't know him. And when his remarks were being translated into Japanese, I as the emcee, I went over to him, and I whispered in his ear. I said, Slow down, you know. And so then he goes back up and he doesn't slow down. And and there's there's a photo of him, you know, giving his speech. And there's me on the side going. And I didn't know him then. And so we met later. We didn't really realize that was until we saw the picture. It's like, oh, dear, that was you, you know? But yes, I met him in the Nihonmachi Outreach Committee, which was originally mainly focused on trying to keep the community involved in issues of redevelopment and but then shifted over to to become part of the redress reparations movement. And I remember I remember him. I really liked him. He was really funny. He was really smart and really committed. And that, that was like a thing. I, I guess it's kind of probably a thing now too, but, you know, you noticed when people were committed to the work and stuff and so I really admired that. But then I noticed that every time I volunteered for something, he volunteered for the same thing. And later actually he told me that some of our mutual friends said, “Ask her out, ask her out.” You. So anyway, so we got together during that period.

(Interviewer) Did he purposely volunteer because he knew you were going to? Or were you just aligned?

I don't really know. I think we're interested in the same things, but you know, who knows? I started noticing. We got married in 1984. And let's see. Yeah. So we that was 1984 and we didn't have kids till 1992. And so we had Tomio in 1992 and Kiyoshi in 1995. And I think probably our plans were to start a little bit earlier, probably one and a half or two years earlier. But in 1989, Tom's father passed, very suddenly of a heart attack right before the Loma Prieta earthquake. And then his mother died in January of 1990 of cancer. And then my father died in February of 1991 of a heart attack. And so we were we were really gobsmacked. I mean, we were I mean, to lose three parents all at once like that was really hard. So we were depressed for a long time and at some point didn't feel like we could conceive. You know, it was just, like, not happening. And then, yeah, so I got pregnant in 1992. We were let's see. One was that so 1990. So 1989, we I was in the San Jose Taiko Group from 1980 to 1990. So there's some overlap. We were also still involved in the redress movement with an outreach committee. So we had support from our friends, and we were connected with other people, but it was still pretty hard. Yeah, but then, you know, at some point there was a big cohort of us who were around the same age and people all started having kids. So yeah, so it was much harder to, you know, work full time, and have little kids and, and also be involved in stuff. So it was a little harder.

Timeframe 58:49 >> 1:01:01

So Tomio and both our kids their we hyphenated their last names so Tomio Hayase-Izu, and he is a, what do they call it, I guess an analyst at the county. He's an analyst at the county. He works in the public health department, and he went to UC Davis and he studied environmental, environmental, science, technology and planning, I think, and policy, which is kind of like a a particular take on urban planning I think. Yeah. And then Kiyoshi Hayase-Ize is a emergency medical technician with 911 with the county, and although he works with one of the contractors and he yeah, he, he, I say about Kiyoshi. So Kiyoshi had some learning disabilities, and he was dyslexic. And that's another whole story that from the time that he was in kindergarten to the time that he finished high school was a big battle with San Jose Unified School District because of their failure to provide him with appropriate instruction. So we had to do a lot of things to make sure that he learned how to read and anyway, so he he decided not to go to college except for to get his certificate.

Systems & Power Timeframe 1:01:01 >> 1:10:56

So as I mentioned, my career was I wasn't really in charge of it, and I had a summer job the year before my senior year and I met some women students who were in-- this was my summer job was in Berkeley and I met some student women students who were in engineering, and they I went to a meeting of the women in science and engineering. And I was they they told me that they were collecting resumes, and they were going to give them to companies. And so I wrote up my resume and stuck in the box, and that was how I got my job at Hewlett-Packard. And in in those days, HP was growing like 30% a year and it was kind of like college. I mean, they were they were hiring so many people every year that it was just there were a lot of young people. And the year that I was hired, I remember there were hundreds of new hires in the Bay Area, and I went to a new hire dinner in Cupertino, you know, where the Apple thing is now. And it was in the cafeteria and there were hundreds of people there. And the president came down and John Young, CEO of Hewlett Packard, and he talked about the wide range of, you know, new engineers that they'd hired and that the salaries went from this to that. And that's how I discovered they offered me the lowest salary that they were offering. And it was mostly men. And it was mostly my perception was there were a lot of of people from other places like the Midwest and also, you know, so I started out being an electrical engineer, hardware engineer and I worked in this, I had a lab coat, we were in R&D, so we were in the lab.

I had a big drawing table. We, we drew circuits on large pieces of paper. And I had a electric eraser and a little brush and little eraser shield. And if you needed to use a computer, you had to go sign up for these terminals that were in this bank of seats and go type in your code for it. And let's see. So when I first hired in, I was in a little group and there was another woman engineer. She was a Black woman. She was very unusual. That was even more unusual than an Asian woman. But there were hardly any Asians in Hewlett-Packard at that time. And it was. Yeah, so let's see. Trying to remember what my job was exactly. Um, oh, I think my first project was to, I had to pick up this kind of initial design for a fiber optic data communications modem and take it to manufacturing. But that whole project didn't actually go anywhere. It was in those days, projects were like, it was like a five-year project that was late. So it was like a seven-year project. So, you know, projects aren't like that these days, but yeah, it was it was pretty interesting. It was, you know, there were a lot of young people, but there also were older engineers there too. So there was kind of this older engineering vibe to it, very different from the way Silicon Valley is portrayed today. You know, like people talk about Google and the work environment and stuff, it was really different. I mean, we didn't even have cubicles at first. You just bunch of desks, some dividers. It was it was also pretty-- well, I mean, I don't want to be such a downer, but it was also kind of racist and sexist.

So and people would comment on what I was wearing, what I looked like and stuff like that. People would hit on me, and I had a stalker. Uh, this guy, he, I would go visit my friend from Stanford who also worked there, this guy that I knew from Stanford, and he was a coworker of my friend, and he just decided he would keep asking me out. I was not interested, and he would follow me around. I remember once in the courtyard when nobody else was around. He just let me have it. He yelled at me and told me I was all these bad things because I wouldn't go out with him and, you know, ungrateful or something, I don't know. And he wrote me a nasty letter. And years later I saw him with his Asian wife, and little have Asian kids at a Nikkei Matsuri and he had been successful at whatever his goals anyway.

Yeah, it was kind of yeah it was pretty intense too. I remember I remember this one older engineer who was from England, and he had interesting hobbies. He had like a binocular camera so he could take 3-D pictures and stuff. And so he was showing me some of his photos and I was going, “Oh, that's nice.” You know, I was looking at his stack of photos, and the next photo is like a picture of a nude woman right in a hot tub. And he says, “Oh, my wife and I like to like our hot tub. Would you like to join us?” So anyway, there were a lot of things like that. It was it was pretty weird; you know, and so it was like being the center of attention for, you know. And at some point, I switched to software engineering. They were starting to outsource a lot of the hardware. And so I switched to software engineering. I, I took a class that Stanford was offering to kind of get hardware engineers kind of more up to speed on software and, you know, I worked on a lot of different things at Stanford. So the testing did some firmware design.

So no real activism inside the company. Although I did make it a point to meet all the Japanese Americans and there weren't that many of us, but let's see. And I, I was still kind of in the loop in terms of like the student organizations and stuff. So people would ask me to come speak to their student group, you know, although at some point I felt kind of bad about telling people how terrible it was in engineering. You know, I didn't really want to discourage people, but but it was so we were so outnumbered, you know, it was pretty difficult. But but when I was I think I had been there for a couple of years when HP decided that they needed to have some kind of policies about racism and sexism. And my coworker, the Black woman engineer, she and I complained a lot about the way people were treated. You know, she was she couldn't work late. There was an engineer who was also stalking her, you know, so so anyway, to kind of mollify us, they said, why don't you two sit in on this kind of prototype class for managers on how to avoid being racist and sexist. And it was taught by a bBack man who was in HR. And he was a really good guy. He he later we met him as part of the Jesse Jackson campaign. But, but he was trying to teach this class to all these white managers and man, they were so aggrieved that they wouldn't be able to tell a racist joke, you know, that their whole joy in life would be, you know, just destroyed if they couldn't do that. And so it was really interesting. But, you know, they they had to come up with a policy and so I don't know if that's activism exactly, but but I was there and yeah.

Transformation & Change Timeframe 1:10:56 >> 1:13:27

And I think the thing that you were asking about before, I think when when this was in 1979, when I went to the Tule Lake pilgrimage, I was working at HP at the same time, and I-- they were talking about redress and reparations, and I was just floored. I, I was so astounded and I was kind of astounded that it never occurred to me that this kind of thing was possible. And I knew immediately that I wanted to be a part of it. I had to be a part of it. I had this mental image of me punching somebody out. I wanted I wanted it to be my hand. I didn't just want to be a supporter. I wanted to be in there doing it. And so I, I knew that I had to learn how to speak. And I, I wasn't a speaker. I mean, I never I never spoke in college. I never said anything in class. I never said anything I knew that I had something to say because I'd started to get really tense in my heart would start beating because I knew I had something to say, but I just couldn't do it. And I. I figured that I better if I was going to be if I was going to play a role in the redress movement, I had to learn how to do that. So I took this class on presentation, said Hewlett Packard. And I think the purpose of this class was to teach people how to give professional presentations about their project. And but I figured, you know, what the hell. And, and so I, I, everybody else gave a presentation about their project and I gave a presentation about the incarceration of Japanese Americans. And, and it was just a really short one, like probably 3 to 5 minutes. And I think I had an impact on the people who were there and, and it kind of liberated me. You know, I, I, I've always been somebody who felt like, you know, I was somebody who could do something hard. If it was hard, I could do it. And I, because I knew that a lot of people can't do hard things. And I figured I could do hard things so I could learn how to speak and. Oh, yeah, so that was, you know, I didn't yeah, that was what I did with that class.

Transformation & Change Timeframe 1:13:27 >> 1:27:16

So a lot of that time period was spent really digging deep and learning the history like there's a there's a book that was like my Bible. It was called “Years of Infamy” by Mitchie Wakelin. And it talks about a lot of things that other accounts of the incarceration didn't talk about, like it talked about the inner conflict and the loyalty disloyalty thing and how that, you know, created incredible, you know, fissures in the community and in that in families and things like that. And so I learned about things like that and I learned about civil liberties. I also was a part of the formation of the National Coalition for Redress Reparations [NCRR]. NOC [Nihonmachi Outreach Committee] was a founding member in 1980 ,and we had principles of unity that were a part of my political education. So one was we demanded an apology and an acknowledgment that it was wrong and we demanded individual monetary compensation. And the reason that we demanded that was because we felt, even though we knew that it couldn't be more than token for a variety of reasons, that that it was too easy to give an apology with nothing else. We demanded restitution to the community because many people try to portray the incarceration is just this individual violation. But it was actually a violation of the entire community, and it was a destruction based on deliberate government policies to cut off the head of the Japanese community and to destroy it and disperse it.

So that was really important. Another principle that came out of the student movement was to support the struggles of other oppressed peoples, that it wasn't just about Japanese Americans, that it was it couldn't happen without an acknowledgment and solidarity with and for other people who had suffered similar kinds of oppression. And there was another one. I can't remember what it was. Was it? Oh, another one was overturning the legal basis for the camps. So I think and then the NCRR was a grassroots organization, so that made it different from the other Japanese American redress organizations. The JACL was much more oriented towards the professional class and people who were interested in moving into like electoral, political office and things like that. Also, it was mostly Nisei and NCJARR. The National Council on Japanese American Redress and Reparations [NCJARR] was a group that wanted to do a class action suit. And when reparations through the court system and the NCR, we felt that the the broad grouping of people who were incarcerated, a huge percentage of them were working class Nisei and we felt that their voice was not heard or amplified through the other organizations and so so that was part of my political education also.

One of the things that is really striking, I've talked to some of my friends, including some of my friends that I met at Stanford and also who were also part of the Redress Movement in San Jose that, you know, when when Japanese Americans asked Black civil rights organizations for support, they immediately said yes. And we asked Latino immigrant rights organizations to support. They immediately said yes. And there were people like Don Edwards, who was a representative in Congress, and he immediately said, yes. And I think what is really striking to many of us is that Japanese Americans were so were so oppressed that we couldn't say, yes. You know, it was it was a struggle inside of our community to get to the point where we could say, yes, you know, and I mean, obviously, there were some people who were pushing for it and had been pushing it for it for decades.

Right. But I think for the bulk of the community to come around was a big struggle. You know, I think that it was, you know, it's hard to really imagine now, but the dominant story about Japanese Americans was, oh, how quiet they are. You know, and isn't that great, you know? And oh, I have a Japanese American neighbor and they were in a camp, but they're not bitter. That was a big thing. Right? Like like it was like the the news media, every time they talked about Japanese Americans, that's what they were saying. And that's what politicians said. And that's what, you know, you were just erased, and nobody talked about it. Right. So it was just having been totally erased. We had to. So there so there were people objecting to redress from inside the community because of that erasure. There was no support for it. Right. We had to we had to create a critical mass of people who were able to not only articulate the reasons and the political and legal basis for going for it, but also we had to create a critical and legal critical mass for the emotional courage to do it, and that's really hard.

So that was so one of the things that we did was we had house meetings in San Jose and NCRR and other places did this too. We met some of the people who had been keeping the flame alive, you know, and we said, can we have a house meeting? Can you invite your relatives? And one such person was Sue Tokishige of San Jose and her husband Yoshio Tokishige and they invited their in-laws and some of their neighbors and we would some of us NOC folks, we would with three or four of us would come and we'd bring our slideshow in a slideshow and we'd show slide show about kind of the over, you know, kind of an overview of the politics of the E.O. 9066. And then we'd talk about our demands, the principles of unity for NCRR, and then we'd ask people, so what happened to you? And a lot of times people would just start crying and they hadn't talked about it for like at that point, like 35 years. Right?

And some people there, the pressure came from inside their family. Right. Their kids didn't want them to talk about it. And, you know, so I think, you know, so basically these were incredibly important meetings and very moving. And I think they were the basis for kind of the what ended up being a deep commitment by sansei activists. You know, and this was like we weren't directly related to these people, but they were like our family members and had similar stories as our family members. And so I it was oh, so that's part of building this, you know, like encouraging people and giving them support, acknowledging people.

And people would say, I don't have a story to tell and would say, you know, you just told me a story. And that's significant and that's important for you to testify, because this was part of our mobilization for the commission, our wartime relocation, internment of civilians hearings. So so the conflicts in the community, the, the one of the big ones was a conflict of should I say something or not? Yes, right. Come out or not. Another big conflict was that stemmed from the camps, which was, you know, the the federal government picked up community leaders and took them away. And then they took these really young Nisei who were like in their early twenties, and they said you'd be the spokesperson for your entire community. And that was like Mike Masaoka and the JACL, right? So they didn't have the sense or the political wherewithal to understand what was happening to them. I mean, in the sense of being placed in the leadership of the community that had just been decapitated. Right?

So a lot of the conflict in camp was between people who were encouraging compliance with the federal government policies and those who were encouraging resistance, you know, like the draft resisters and the people who answered no, no or no, yes or yes, no, you know, all the dissidents. All right. So that conflict existed in 1980 when we were getting going on mobilization for the commission hearings. So that was one reason why the NCRR formed, is that we realized that there needed to be another organization that was not the JACL, that if it was only the JCL, that half of Japanese Americans would not participate. So so that was one way to deal with conflict. So so some people fought it out inside the JACL in different chapters.

But another way to deal with that conflict was to form a new organization and to also struggle for unity, for principled unity. So what that means is you don't have to personally like these people. You don't have to agree with them about every last thing. But we're going to unite in this effort to win reparations, you know, and we're going to struggle. We had this process. We said unity, struggle, unity, you know. So we are united around this this understanding of who's responsible for the concentration camps. You know, we can't say that the JACL is responsive for the concentration camps. Right. We're united around that and then will struggle about the policies because we were attacked, there were a lot of attacks, personal red baiting, you know, people trying to make you look bad in front of the community and that kind of thing.

So unity, struggle, unity, we had to you know, it could have devolved into just, you know, open warfare. Right. But I think that that was not in the interests of the community to win reparations. Right. So I think that was that was a big struggle. I mean, you know, there were people that we worked with who were overall positive but who were nasty to. So, you know, it's kind of a thing. It was kind of a real maturing kind of a process, political maturity. You had to develop political maturity to deal with that. You know that there are people in the community that you're not going to like. There are people in the community who have class interests, who are that are different from yours. Right. But they're part of the community, too. Right. And they all went to camp, too. So it's that was a big lesson.

Timeframe 1:27:16 >> 1:31:01

(Interviewer) Were you ever caught personally in the middle of all this or where you were viewing it from like a top 100 ft perspective or were you like in the center?

We were in it because so I remember one story. So we so a one of the founders of JAMsj is Jimmy Yamaichi, and we didn't know him very well, although he was a friend of Tom's family, his mother's family. But we didn't know him that while we didn't know about his history. But he was the original organizer of Nikkei Matsuri, which was this big festival that spanned the entire community, not just like Obon, which was the Buddhist temple, and, you know, the Wesley Church did their own thing, but this was a festival that was for the entire community. And and this was in the eighties. And he was a contractor. He had to work with a lot of white people who were very racist. Right. And he was motivated to protect the community. And so there were rules about what you could have at this festival. And there was you know, I remember, you know, there was no printed material. It has to be just crafts. And I remember we in NOC, we made t shirts and they had to examine them to see if there were secret messages in there. I'm kind of joking, but you know, but to see if they were okay. And I remember part of the redress movement was doing a lot of letter writing. We would we would issue letters and have people sign them. We'd send them in bulk to congressional people. Right. And so we had a stack of letters and we, you know, they weren't welcome at Nikkei Matsuri.

But I remember coming to we came out today when people were all setting up, and I saw Gary Okihiro, who is another founding member of JAMsj, and he was a professor at Santa Clara University, and he was sitting at the volunteer table or some information table, and he was really friendly to us. And I said, “Hey, can we put these at your table?” And he said, “Sure.” And so he moved the stuff over and we put our letters there, and in the distance I could see Jimmy and he was talking to one of his we called them his lieutenants, his people, and the lieutenant started coming over, and I knew he was going to tell us to take it off. So before he could say anything, I stuck out my hand and I introduced myself and I said, Thank you so much for providing this space that we could get information out to the community. And he was so gob smacked that he just kind of smiled and nodded and left. And so I think, you know, we had to figure out how to deal with stuff, you know, and and we could just fight with people. But it wasn't productive. Right.

And we had people who like my friend Yumi, she went to a meeting to give a presentation about redress. And somebody, you know, yelled at her and said, “Sit down, young lady, old enough to be your grandfather.” You know? And you know. So there was stuff like that and there were people who got redbaited. You know, there were people in the JACL who redbaited NCRR people to other JACL people. So yeah, so it was personal. I mean, it was, it was all around us and yeah.

Narrative & Identity Timeframe 1:31:01 >> end

(Interviewer) how did an identity Asian American rather than ethnic specific identity like Japanese become a priority?

So when I was a little kid, we were Japanese. That's what my dad said. We were Japanese everywhere else, and we were Japanese. So in the seventies, I remember my parents received The Pacific Citizen, which is the newspaper of the JACL, and I remember when there was first some discussion of we should call ourselves Japanese Americans, and then other people wanted to be American, Japanese and all that kind of stuff, right? But so, so I went to college in 1974, so I, I, I usually think of myself as kind of a midrange baby boomer. You know, I wasn't at the leading edge, right? So a lot of the people at the front edge of the baby boom were the people who really fought it out in terms of building the Asian American movement and building the fight for ethnic studies as Asian Americans. And in those days, it was mostly Chinese, Japanese and Filipino. So by the time I got to college, we were Asian Americans. But but we also had a really strong identity as Japanese Americans, too. So I think they're very intertwined. I mean, I think that unity among Asian Americans was really important.

And actually, there were there were generations of Asian American college students who were part of the redress movement. Right. Whether they were Japanese American or not. So I think that that was a really important understanding that you know, we were Japanese Americans, but we're also Asian Americans. I mean, I think Japanese Americans feel that really strongly. I mean, I think there were other Asian ethnic groups who didn't feel that as strongly. Right. But I think for Japanese Americans and and descendants of of Chinese Americans who've been here for a while, I think it was pretty clear, you know, that that understanding was pretty clear.