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Will Kaku

Date: November 15, 2022
 Interviewer: Yvonne Kwan, Ellina Yin, and Vickie Taketa
 Interviewee: Will Kaku (1960 - )

Of the sansei generation, Will Kaku is a Bay Area native who has instill change through organizations such as the Nihonmachi Outreach Committee. Through his work on boards and organizations, he has sought to draw parallels and connections between different marginalized communities, including LGBTQ rights, Redress & Reparations, anti-Blackness, Muslim Ban.

Transcript of Will Kaku

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Timeframe 00:00 >> 3:03

So this is strange saying my legal name. But it's not Will, it's Wilbur William Kaku. I never liked that name. It's kind of ironic, too, because it had Wilbur has L and R, and my mom is from Japan, so she couldn't pronounce my name. So she would call me Willy, Willy, like Willy, Willy-chan or Willy bei-chan. So, yeah, that's my real name, but I don't like that.

(Interviewer) Who gave you that name?

Had to be my father. I know. My mom could not pronounce it. So for some reason, you know, my father's unofficial name in English was William. So he thought, Oh, that's close. Well, we'll use that. But it's an old-fashioned name. And I would always be teased about that or called a pig constantly in school. You know, Charlotte's Web’s Wilbur. So I even have trouble saying the name. That's how how much I dislike that name. But anyways, that's my legal name. And was it also place of birth?

(Interviewer) Place and date of birth?

Okay. So April 8th, 1960, in Palo Alto, California.

(Interviewer) All right. And then your father's name and place of birth.

Yeah. So his name is a Japanese name, Shogo Kaku. And people call him Bill. And he actually thought his name was Yamashita for a long time, for most of his life, until he went to the camp. And that's where they told him, your name is, last name is Kaku. So his stepfather was Yamashita, and his biological father died a few weeks before he was born. So it's kind of an interesting story there. So he was born in San Jose, California. I think even at the he was born on Sixth Street, I think at the Midwivery. So his mother went there because she was struggling and didn't have a husband. And yeah, I think may have given birth there.

(Interviewer) Around what year was this?

That was 1926. So it's hard to say what his education level was because it was interrupted. Right. So he when you when the internment, the incarceration or he comes out, he was at Peter Burnett Junior High School, so that would be eighth grade. And then his education in the camps was sporadic, I think. I don't think he attended very often. He had to work in the camps, but officially his grade level was 12. But I don't think he really got a lot out of it. Or after camp, he would have been 19 years of age.

Systems & Power Timeframe 3:03 >> 9:44

Okay. So he was in a lot of different camps. So first he was at the the so-called assembly center, the detention centers in Santa Anita, the old racetracks Santa Anita racetrack. And then five months later, there was sent to Heart Mountain, Wyoming, which is a war relocation authority camp. Officially, that's that was a name. But he was in the Heart Mountain Concentration camp.

And then the the questionnaire, the so-called loyalty questionnaire came out, and he was labeled disloyal. And that's a whole story there behind it, too, because the questionnaire there are two controversial questions on a loyalty questionnaire, and one is do for swearing allegiance to the emperor of Japan. And the other one is, are you willing to serve in the United States military, essentially? And he didn't answer the questions he had actually later on, he actually registered for the draft. And but he still didn't answer the questions because his father was really trying to push him to say no to these questions. But he did not want to say no. That's what the government documents stated. He didn't want to say no, so he left them blank.

And so he did not know at that time, if you left the questions blank, that's the same as responding in the negative. And so he was labeled a No-No boy. So he sent to Tule Lake, which is a segregation center, a really harsh detention center, where there were beatings. His brothers were thrown into the stockade, martial law was declared. There were riots in that camp. And so he he changed his whole attitude. He was, as I said, a loyal American who were perceived to be loyal American. And he registered for the draft. But he snaps there. And so he actively starts to protest against his confinement, and he just gets sent for his activities, for his activism. He is sent to a Department of Justice camp. He's is labeled an enemy alien of this country. And so he's in Fort Lincoln, North Dakota, Bismarck, North Dakota, Department of Justice camp, where he's serving time with German soldiers, German P.O.W.s there. So those were the camps that he was in. When he was sent to the Department of Justice camp, when he was called an enemy alien of this country, he renounces his citizenship. He takes that bold step. This is an amazing transition going from somebody who is loyal to his country, who registers for the draft. His hobby was making models of British and American war planes and ships, and then he sees the conditions in Tule Lake the harsh conditions there. And then he takes an about face and he becomes an active demonstrator.

So he has no choice. He loses his citizenship. And his father, who had actually died just before actually he dies after the war. And so they're still being detained in the camps. Even though the war is over, they're still in in the camps. He dies. He's the one who started this, the the movement to repatriate to Japan. But he's now gone. Now, my grandmother has a difficult decision what she's going to do. And so the family is discussing that. And they thought the prospects here were not good. Right. They have nothing. There's nothing for them to go back to. And they lost their citizenship. So they decide my father decides to go to Japan after the war, and he's there in Japan for about, I guess, over ten years. And his his citizenship is restored, and he decides to return back to the United States. Yeah. So that's what his situation. There's so many stories I don't want to take up all the time, but yeah. Horrible situation in postwar Japan. Right? People are starving. People are having a very difficult time. He's lucky because he's working for the United States military.

You know, the whole irony behind that, too, right. He's he refuses to join the United States military during World War Two, yet he's working for the military, and he gets shipped off to Korea, too. So all of that enables him to fly back to the United States free of charge because he's working for the United States government at that time for the United States military. So he gets a free ride back to the United States.

There was one attorney who is with the ACLU, Wayne Collins. Right. And that's a whole story about the ACLU, because they're sole existence, should be able should be centered on trying to defend Americans and their civil rights, too. And yet, mostly they were absent. They did not. The National ACLU did not want to take a stand. Right. For this because of all of these political reasons and the connections to the president. Right. So they were not taking a stand, but the San Francisco chapter of were the biggest advocates. In fact, few people like Wayne Collins fought for peoples to fought for Japanese Americans who who resisted and and protested against their confinement. So he was probably the main person behind reinstating everybody's rights. And he worked all the way until the mid-sixties on some of these issues. So it's pretty amazing story of one person, a few people trying to effect change. Mm hmm. Yeah.

Systems & Power Timeframe 9:44 >> 14:31

(Interviewer) And then your father would return to California. What year?

Yeah. So he returned in 1957. So my older brother was born in Japan. He was five years old. My brother was five years old when he returned. And then my older sister was born about a year later. And he did a bunch of odd jobs helping out with his other brothers who who were here and working on their farms. And and somehow he got involved in a garage as a mechanic and that's what his career was later in life. He owned a service station, a small family business service station.

(Interviewer) And then just a review for your father's side. What was the family immigration experience like? I'm guessing that you’re sansei [third generation]? Your father is nisei [second generation]? Your grandfather was issei [first generation]?

Yeah. So they come to this country? I think my. My my grandfather. Biological grandfather comes here. I think, in 1905, somewhere around there. And he's comes to the throughout I think throughout the Bay Area. But I think he settles in around the Mountain View area and and San Jose area. And yeah, unfortunately he passed away when, just before my father was born.

Yeah. And my grandmother comes here. I'm not exactly sure what period of time. I think it's had to be before she's she was not in the picture bride, but I think she comes in after 1907, after the Gentlemen's Agreement. She comes in. And the interesting thing about her is that she was a tough lady and the immigration wave in the early 1900s is mostly men coming here, especially to the San Jose area here. And that was called the Bachelor Society period in Japantown, almost all men. And with this Bachelor Society, young men were here indulging in all the vices, right? Sort of drinking, gambling, houses of prostitution, all that stuff. And my my step, I guess you call them step grandfather. He was a horrible man. He was an abusive man. Verbally abusive, physically abusive. And people remembered him. Some people would tell me, oh, we saw him driving my grandmother around trying to get the money, because at that time in Japanese culture, still probably it was true in my mom generation, too. The women controlled a lot of the finances. So he would try to wrestle money away so you can go off and gamble away everything that they say. She was a tough lady and she locked all the doors in the house and didn't let my grandfather come back in she had thrown throughout all his belongings outside of the house and said, if you don't shape up, I'm going to divorce you, which is really hard to do back then to divorce, because in Japanese culture you can't do that in Japan. And here it was very rare. But some of the Issei women still really did divorce their husband because this difference, this discrepancy in the number of men versus women, some women would even this one book this professor wrote, she said, picture bride coming this country, met her husband for the first time because she's a picture bride. And at the end, they she said, I don't like you; I want to go off as other married man I just met. So it's. So some women did take that bold step of getting away from bad relationships, divorcing their husband. And it's kind of true in my grandmother's case because my father, my biological grandfather, dies early and well, compared to my father's life and she's had six children. And then within like three or four weeks, she finds another whole bachelor husband to marry.

So I guess that substantiates her claim of this disparity in women versus the number of women versus the number of men.

Timeframe 14:31 >> 16:53

All right. So also, I'm going to switch gears a little bit. Talk about your mother, your mother's name, place of birth and date of birth. Yeah. So her name is Suyako. I can't even pronounce it correct. My Japanese is home to Suyako and her maiden name was a Harada. And. And she was born in Kyushu, Japan. And the interesting thing about her is her town Kogura that area in Japan was the original site plan site for the Nagasaki bomb, atomic bomb. Right. So they were going to go that morning to Kogura, but it was cloudy. So then they diverted to Nagasaki and dropped the atom bomb there. So yeah. So she was a young girl back then and she has all these stories about surviving the bombings and all of the nasty stuff, terrible stuff that she witnessed during those bombings of Japan. Well, I think the story of children during wartime is pretty incredible. There. They try to go about their their own lives. Right. A lot of films and books have been about children during wartime. And we see that in some of the places throughout the world today that they try to live a normal life, but it's not normal. And when she saw some of the the footage of what's happening Ukraine about people, families looking through the rubble of, you know, finding bodies, that's what she remembered, finding her cousin in the rubble. Right. And then seeing from a distance her school being bombed, things like that, going to sleep at night with your shoes on because at night that's when you can get bombed and you have to be able to run to the to the shelter or wherever, run to someplace, some some safe spot. So you always have to be alert like that, but still try to try to be a child, too, that same time. So it's a it's a really sad story, too, but also a story of resilience, too. Yeah.

Narrative & Identity Timeframe 16:53 >> 23:20

(Interviewer) Were there any times in which, like as a child, you noticed that the war or the trauma with you, either your father or your mother, would creep up as you know, in daily life.

With my father especially, you know; my mom has a wartime experience, right? We're not being fired bombs through war or anything like that. So that doesn't come up during these times except when she looked at the Ukraine footage. But with my father it was basically my exposure to racism. And I remember going on a family trip. We didn't take very many vacations, but we did go Oregon in Northern California in Oregon border, you know, the Klamath Falls area, which is close to Tule Lake. Right. And then we would travel and he would always try to find a hotel and us kids were always saying, well, is there, you know, are we there yet? Are we there yet? And he would be trying to get to a motel. And I remember distinctly one time he came back from the office, and he was really distraught, he was angry, and he just said, Oh, that woman behind the counter was so prejudiced. She hated me. And, you know, that was confusing to me as a child. Why would they hate you? You know, and that was my one of my first exposures to adult racism; racism where he was the target. And then much later I realized, oh, we're also near that Tule Lake areas I didn't know anything about Tule Lake when I was a kid. But in retrospect, thinking about that, maybe that had something to do. How he reacted to that hope, that incident.

(Interviewer) And also, can you share a little bit of your your mother's education and her later occupation, if she had one, or what she her main, you know, role was in your life? Yeah. So she, her education was short. She didn't go to college. I only know she went to high school. He was cut short by the war. So she was not an educated person. She came here when she was very young. And my relationship with her, well, it's an interesting one. Because we have this language barrier. She's she speaks mainly Japanese or broken English to me, and I'm teaching her English, too. She's reading my textbooks, my children's textbooks on learning English. And the interesting thing about her is that, well, so she was an immigrant, and I was embarrassed. I was really embarrassed to have kids come to her house and they would say, “Oh, does your mom, you know, read Japanese newspapers or books?” And I would say, no, when that was a lie, you know. Does she watch Japanese movies? I would say no. That was a lie, you know. And so I grew up in almost all white neighborhood. There were only two Asian kids in my class, and I just did not like that. I rejected everything that was Japanese about me. And, you know, as a consequence, even rejecting my mother and who she was. So, yeah, I feel awful about that. But, you know, also going up through school, right, especially with boys who are competitive, they'll say, Jap, you do this or Jap you, you get off that guy when we're doing wrestling during class with the teacher saying, Jap, get off that guy. Right? So that really affected me. So that had a real negative consequence on me interacting with other people in my and my heritage and my family, rejecting everything. And it still persists today, I have to admit. You know, even today we thought, well, we're going to film upstairs, but oh, there's those geisha those those dolls, those Japanese dolls, and I don't want that in the film. Right. So oh, unfortunately it has had a consequence, and I still feel it, even though it's idiotic to feel that way. Right. And it's exacerbated. I married a woman who's from Taiwan. Her family escaped Communist China, went to Taiwan. Her father's village was massacred by the Japanese military. Everybody was against our marriage from over there. They did not want this happen. I had to write an apology, kind of like an apology letter to her father saying, "I have nothing to do with Japan. I deplore all their policies in Japan," you know? Yeah, it was it's like that. And when I go there, I have to pretend I'm not Japanese American. I have to tell people I'm not Japanese American. So all these forces kind of still it continues on with how I felt as a child reject go push your Japanese heritage away. So yeah that's that's how going back to my mother that's that's an unfortunate consequence, pushing away your mother too. So yeah that's. Well, the other thing was that she would speak at Japanese to a child, which is different. It's not conversational. It's "Go do this" or you know, "you're a bad boy," right? So it was at that level she was not communicative anyways, even in Japanese. So but yeah, I reject it. When people even today when people say, can you speak in Japanese, I'll say, no, no it won't even I don't know it at all. I know, you know, maybe a little bit, but and that's true too, but I don't even like to get asked that question.

Timeframe 23:20 >> 25:41

(Interviewer) And then how did your mother end up migrating to the U.S.?

Yeah. So she meets my father in Japan and my father actually told her mother he's not going to come back to the United States. I promise you; I'm not going to go back. There's no future for me there. But, you know, postwar Japan was most awful. And then also his prospects were much better in the United States. Prospects for a Japanese American in Japan is huge; you get that prejudice, too. I think. So there would be a limit as far as how far he can go in Japan. That's what his perception was. So he decides to return back to the United States where he breaks that promise with with her mother.

(Interviewer) How did your parents meet?

Well, they were related. And so I think they might even I think believe it, their first cousin I mean, first they're half cousins. Yeah. So, yeah, that's legal there. It's illegal in California. Half cousins. Yeah. So my oldest brother is seven years older than me. His name is Bob, Robert, but his he had a Japanese name Shojun, but I think he kind of went through that same thing where I think he legally changed his name to Bob and Shojun is maybe his middle name. Now, my sister is two years older than me and then I have a younger brother, Wayne, who's two years younger. So what do they do? My brother works for, he's about to retired, working for a health company. And I'm not sure exactly; he's in some sort of manager situation. He's got some exposure to high tech, but his background is business. My sister's and my background is microbiology. So she just retired working in labs. My brother is working for health services. And he didn't. My brother just has an AA degree. Yeah.

Narrative & Identity Timeframe 25:41 >> 29:15

(Interviewer) Okay I'm going to let Vickie take over now … I'm just going to circle around. Just the question of clarification. Do you think you were pushing away the Japanese culture?

Yeah, I think some people definitely had that experience where they're pushing back because of what happened to them being put into the camps, to rejecting who you are, rejecting your identity, unfortunately, rejecting your path, rejecting your parents. I think people have gone through that, but a lot of people have circled back, too. So for me, it was kind of like recovering, right? I didn't want to be with any other Asian people. I didn't want to congregate with Asian people. But then I think it was started in high school and then definitely in college and then in the community, realizing we have these shared experiences, right? A lot of people had these experiences, and I didn't know that, you know, I said I was going to school with this one other Asian person.

She was she was Leann Saito, and we would always be paired up for every activity paired up. If you look at our school pictures, we're always next to each other. They always want us to be paired up or for some reason they brought us up to the front of the class, and we had to sing some Japanese song that we didn't know anything about. We didn't know the melody, we didn't know the words, and they forced us to sing this in front of everybody. And so, you know, as a kid, you're trying to fit in. You don't want to stand out like that as being the other. So at such an early age. But the interesting thing about that is other people had that same experience, and I have a friend, she said she grew up too with another Asian boy in her class and when she was in the hospital, she got all these cards, get well soon cards, you know, from the class. And then she opened the one from the boy and it said something like, “I hope you die” because there's that you know, that feeling I don't want to associate with that other Asian kid. I'm like everybody else. So some kids had that situation of being in these all white schools. Being labeled something and putting you to put into a category. So, yeah, so that, that, that's it. But going back to that, yeah, definitely people who were in the camps did not. And some that's why some people didn't want to talk about their camp experience.

They would always say, you know, the tallest nail it's hammered down. Right? They don't want to relive that trauma that they went through. So there was a lot of rejection of that, too. But I think that that question comes up later about redress and how people started telling their story. And then people then felt that, oh, I can tell my story, too, right? And now Japanese American incarceration, I think widely, not everywhere, is considered a civil rights, civil liberties tragedy where it was not so before. So, yeah, that had really lasting repercussions on a lot of people.

Joy & Cultural Resistence Timeframe 29:15 >> 41:45

(Interviewer) During the hearings on Redress in the 1980s, many people remember the sudden outpouring of long emotions because you just talked about the hearings, the emotion, repercussions of the internment defines who many of us are as individuals and as a community. Can you explain what you meant here?

How did I write that? Oh, okay. All right. It sounds like me.

(Interviewer) so how did this impact your organization work in the community?

Okay. Yeah, that's a good question. So when I was, what I was referring to there and again, what I had said that a lot of people didn't like to speak out about what happened to them. And then people after they heard our community talking openly talking about it and they saw the courage of these people who did testify, they felt then that they now have the right to talk about their experience. And all of these stories started coming out, too. And and that moment in time is a really signal to being in the camps was really significant. It's kind of like a double edged sword. It was a terrible, terrible experience it was a really harsh experience, especially for my father's case. Really harsh experience where you it's so harsh that you you decide to renounce your citizenship. But it's a dual edged sword because it's terrible. But also, I think it gives us empathy for other communities that are that become the target of discrimination. And I feel that as a consequence of redress given to my family and to our community, that we have an obligation to speak out and to defend all communities, as they said, when they become the target of discrimination and ask important question to all of us, you know, what will you do when you see your neighbors, your classmates, your colleagues become that target? And are we're going to be silent like a lot of people in the past, or are we going to do something about it? So I can't remember your question, was it how does it affect the organization? Well, you know, the organization I belong to was set up mostly for reading. I think it came before. And I think you might have talked to Tom Izu, who was there at that particular time.

It came early on, slightly after the formation of the Nihonmachi Outreach Committee (NOC) was to address redress. But yes, that's that's an important aspect. And I've kind of adopted this quote from Martin Luther King that I put on to the NOC website, and Martin Luther King's quote is, in the end, we'll remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. So that tells me that, you know, with everything that's going on, that we cannot be silent on a lot of these issues that affect other communities as well. The modeling minority aspect is the story that you always hear over and over again about Japanese American incarceration, the story that we love to tell Japanese Americans as well as other Americans, how the story about how Japanese Americans were locked up behind barbed wire, not trusted as ordinary, loyal Americans, yet still people in the camps raise their hand and decide to volunteer to fight for this country.

They formed an all Japanese American fighting unit, primarily of the Japanese American. And incredibly, it became the the most decorated unit in the United States military history for its size and length of service. It's incredible story about how people paid the ultimate sacrifice for this country with their lives while their identity as Americans were being questioned. So that's the that's are you know, can I say this model minority aspect? Well, that's a story we perpetuate. That's the narrative that's brought forward. And it is absolutely 100% true. There's no question about that. But there's another story about how a minority of people exhibit, a significant minority of people, decided to protest against their confinement. And that protest takes many, many different forms going from the No-No boys to the the draft resisters to other defiant groups like my father joins actually, ironically, a pro Japanese faction in the camp. Even though court records show that he was loyal to his country, he takes that additional step of becoming an agitator, confronts the government as part of a “pro.” Well, I want to put quotes on because not everybody was “pro Japan”, but some people would say there's this Japanese faction in the camp. So there's there's there's many ways to protest. Oh, and also, of course, of course, the judicial right. Right. These famous Supreme Court cases that we still talk about in our decisions today, especially as we confront the issues of national security and your civil rights, the Korematsu decision really stands out there that we still it was addressed a few years ago.

Right. The Korematsu decision. So and I want to say that. So it's counter to this this message that we're trying to talk about, in fact, that the redress bill was called H.R. 442 in honor of the 442 veterans. Right. Who paid the ultimate price for this country with their lives? It's called 442. So we don't we did not talk about or very, very few discussions about resistance. And it brings up this question of many questions like what does it mean to be loyal to this country? What does it mean to be patriotic to this country right? What is the role of dissent in a democracy? Can you protest against the policies of the United States government, especially during wartime, and still be considered a loyal American? We go through this through all our military conflicts, and there are many, because the United States has been at war almost every decade in its existence, every decade. It's incredible. We're always in some sort of military engagement. And during these military engagements, people protest. I was protester, too during the Iraq war. I organized protests during the Iraq War. And we're called cowards, we're disloyal. We're called unpatriotic, un-American, right. And when you say something like that, it shuts down any type of dialogue behind whether we should be in this military conflict or not. Right. So and Vietnam is a really, really good example of that, right. And people don't know. I think that now, while three of our last five presidents were Vietnam era men, we had to make these decisions, controversial decisions on what to do. So it keeps coming up this situation of what to do during a military conflict. And so I also want to say that with with his No-No boys and the resisters, they were not enemies of this country. This is my feeling because of my personal experience. They were not enemies of this country. They didn't hate this country. They were just people of high conviction that just wanted this country to uphold its very values and beliefs and laws under the Constitution, because, especially in my family's case, right, true to their word when they're free.

Then after the war, they volunteered for this country. But my father, he's not in the military, but he's in support of the military. He goes in the military to Korea and serves there; my other uncle still young enough to fight the Korean War. And he starts he fights of the Korean War for start to finish and ironically, he becomes a Korean military soldier for this country. But yet they're still remembered for what they did during the Japanese American incarceration and a lot of them ostracized from the Japanese American community because of this narrative that they don't fit under right. So that's why it's important to talk about this particular issue of loyalty, patriotism and protest, and a value of protest, too. So it's an important story, but it's controversial. It created a huge fissure in the Japanese American community. My father was ashamed of the action he took during the war. He did not like to talk about it. He kept his role a secret to his friends. And in fact, during a New Year celebration, my mother had, my father a stroke so he couldn't communicate. She invited my father's best friend, Japanese American World War Two veteran to our house to celebrate New Year's. And he sat around our table and he said, "I will never forgive those people who protested and the No No's especially for what they did." It occurred to me, Oh my father has kept this a secret for 65 years. Right. I said, "oh, you didn't know my father was a was one of the No No Boys?" and he was and it shocked him. It shocked his best friend and he said, oh, I meant everybody except for your father. So the community is still trying to grapple with that today. I can't blame his father's best friend for saying what he said, because if you are a veteran and you go to war and see your buddies get killed in action, can you emotionally forgive somebody who didn't? And that takes a very big leap. It is really difficult to do so. I don't blame him for and all the veterans for going after the No No's, but I also see it from my father's side. People did what they had to do, what they felt was the right thing to do, and they should have never been put in that position in the first place by the United States government. That's my feeling behind it.

Transformation & Change Timeframe 41:45 >> 45:20

I was a person who arrived at community work very late in my forties, and this was after 9/11. This is about the time that after 9/11, I went to one of the day remembrances hosted by the Nihonmachi Outreach Committee, and I saw them reaching out to the some Palestinian group through a cultural segment where there were dancers from the Palestinian, who gave a great performance. I thought, well, this is kind of interesting reaching out to another community, but still it had not sunk in as far as getting involved, I would go to some of their events. And but one event in particular I went to and this is around the time of the Iraq invasion, and I went to the event and they showed a film, I think it was called Caught in Between by, I forgot her name, Hushino, which showed, you know, the struggles of and parallels with the Muslim American community. And I was really touched when I saw Japanese Americans. It happened to be one of the founders of this museum. Jimmy Yamaichi, passed away several years ago. He was up there in the Muslim Community Association Mosque. And he had this, I don't know how many cranes, you know, Japanese Americans have this tradition of building cranes, cranes, cranes, a symbol of peace and all sorts of other symbols. I mean, he was there trying to place it at the mosque, and that was a really positive image. And at that particular time, I was going through, I was into the antiwar protests. I really hated what this country was doing. We had losses in the LGBTQ movement, too, we're losing there. And then we reelected George W Bush, which was a really painful experience because he was, I really was against the war. And so there all these things. And in parallel, I was tracing my father's understanding what he did at that particular time. I went to the Tule Lake Pilgrimage and got a better understanding of what was happening. So there was all these parallel things that were propelling me to join up. And I remember the end of this film, the last words again, which I adopt as the motto for NOC, "in the end we will remember, not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” And that really resonated with me strongly. And I remember going home and those those words were really powerful. And I felt I was one of those silent people. I was passively participating in events, but I decided I can't be silent anymore. I was, I thought, I shall be silent no more forever. And so I joined NOC at that time. And now that was a really big moment in my life. But did to do some, you know, things before that but not propel myself to commitment to an ongoing organization.

Transformation & Change Timeframe 45:20 >> 51:21

(Interviewer) How what were some of the initiatives you championed after joining NOC? And in addition to those, if you can also talk about any major challenges you experienced as well?

Yeah, that's a good question. So I remember one of the early points that I wanted to address was LGBTQ equality, and I was really disturbed at what was happening at that particular time. I was really distraught, and I would drive, and run, drive, driving down streets and I would see homophobic messages in front of churches, you know, post I can't remember what Prop it was maybe it's Prop 22 or something around that time.

(Interviewer) So Prop Eight?

Oh well Prop 8 was 2008, there was some things happening before that. And so there was, there's and I felt like there is some religious groups are getting together and trying to trying to support Proposition 8 and other measures like that. I can kind of remember I thought, well, God, you know, that's too bad. People are being indoctrined in this way indoctrined that way. And I thought, well, maybe we can approach some of the sources of this by going to local churches. And then at the same time, forgot the name again, you know, had another film called it was called “In God's House” about Asian American, LGBTQ people in church. And so I found this film. I thought, oh, this is perfect. Let's, let's go talk to some of the churches. So I got together and got some people from NOC and Wesley across the street, United Methodist Church. And then we had this meeting, and I felt kind of awkward because I'm an atheist and what am I going to do? Tell them to do this? And I said, “Well, here's a film and maybe you're interested in this and showing this.” And they said, yes. And there were a lot of supportive people, a lot of supportive people. I was thrilled by that. And so we were able to show the film. We had invited people from the film to come speak. I was one of the speakers too, but I felt, again, you know, I'm I didn't say I was an atheist and I talked to the congregation about why I was doing this. So, so said I was one of the early things. And, and some guy talked to me at the end of the event, and he said he left this area, he left the church. He moved to San Francisco, but he found out we were doing this program and came back and it gave him hope. He says, maybe I'll rejoin now.

Right. So I felt thrilled about that that was reflecting people like that. So I wanted to really make a statement about equality. And again, this issue of targeting communities because of their race, their religion, their sex, their identity, whatever that happens to be, we have to defend these people, right? So yeah, so and then also other things of identification with other communities too. NOC it already had this relationship with a Muslim American community, which is great. But I also invited the people from the Sikh community come. They were targeted. There was this massacre in Wisconsin where all of these people were killed. I brought them over into our conversation. I visited various Arab American, Muslim American organizations here, brought some of them in too, to talk. And we would go over there and have discussions, too. And then recently with the Black Lives Matter movement, bringing in the NAACP speakers into our programs and just that's one of my goals is to try to bring in diverse, different communities that have been the target of discrimination, systemic discrimination, too, and engage in dialogue and discuss our shared values, our shared experiences and show solidarity with all these communities.

(Interviewer) Why is that so important?

Oh, yeah, that's that's a really good question. But I think it's just like what I said before or that we were the targets of discrimination. I personally was the target of discrimination and is a double-edged sword where it gives us empathy for other groups. And too, when Japanese Americans were put in the camps, very few organizations spoke up and did anything. So again, it's a quote by Martin Luther King coming up again. That's why we should reach out. Those are our friends. We need to pull them and show that we're going to support you. And I think I'm very proud of Japanese American community for reaching out to the Muslim American community. Some people don't like that. Right. And some people will. Right. I'm specifically talking about a few authors like Michelle Malkin, that commentator for Fox News who wrote in defense of Internment, which is trying to justify Japanese American concentration. And her motivation. Her motivation is to strike down or efforts to support other communities, especially the Muslim American community in that case. Right. So that's why we have to keep speaking out and reaching out to other communities as well.

Transformation & Change Timeframe 51:21 >> 1:01:04

(Interviewer) Why is it important to keep the Day of Remembrance alive in San Jose and beyond? What do you want a Japanese Americans and other Asian American, AAPI communities and the community at large to remember?

Yeah, there's there's so many aspects of that, too. And I said some of them already one is that during wartime, anything can happen. Right. And I feel like Japanese American incarceration, another thing like that probably can't happen. But as some people said, like Justice Scalia, one of the most conservative justices we've ever had, when asked this question, can this happen again? And he basically said, of course it can happen because in wartime, anything can happen every, every military engagements we've had in this country, communities have been targeted. People try to do things in the name of national security against that particular community. So we have to be very vigilant on that. But also, there's the general question of just targeting communities based on racism, too, not just during wartime, but any time we've seen that with these AAPI attacks too, being treated as the other, all these particular things. The child separation policy by the last administration was horrible, horrible. That was actually compared against Japanese American incarceration. When Laura Bush visited the detention centers, she said this is eerily reminiscent of the Japanese American incarceration, paraphrasing, she says, eerily reminiscent of what happened to Japanese Americans child separation, which did happen in the camps, too. So it connects to a lot of different issues here. And I would like us to again, reach out to other communities, see it as a bigger issue. It's not just it's not just a Japanese American issue it's an American issue as a humanitarian issue that affects all communities. That's what I would like to see.

I think there's some misconceptions and that's part of racism, too, misconceptions about other communities, unfortunately. And so some of these tragedies like the AAPI hate situation, I heard some really awful things even from Asian Americans and from Japanese Americans. I can't believe what they had said, saying this group. I don't want to say it, this group is attacking us. Right. And that's something we have to fight against. Right. They're saying the Black community is attacking us. Well, you know, maybe these one or two viral videos show that. But no, as a whole, that's not true. And there are a lot of people from both communities that are trying to solve some of these very difficult issues together.Right. But there's that unfortunate, unfortunate perception from some of the, a few of these viral videos, that that show this and there's some resentment and back clash against other community. So I think it's really, really important to solidarity Black and Asian solidarity. Right. That we are supporting each other and we always have. But unfortunately, this incident has fostered this other aspect, this really dark aspect of this. And that's that's horrible. It's horrible. So that's one concern I have right away. And it's something that's happening today. Right. Some of these attitudes. There's other also, when we talk about AAPI, Asian Americans, that's so broad, right. Sounds monolithic and especially today, now we're we're going to be, we're butting heads. Right. There's a, I don't want to generalize, too, but, you know, there's a segment of immigrant populations that are opposed to affirmative action, which I firmly support right now.

That's going to be the Supreme Court decision, I think, next year. Right. The Harvard case. No, I'm not in support of that. Yeah. And a lot of the old time people who like myself support affirmative action or our community worked in support of Proposition 16, yeah, Proposition 16. But there's another segment of the, a prominent segment, of even more wealthy segment, highly educated, that is opposing that. So have some what does that mean? I don't know that, maybe it's natural that they go that way. But that's one of the challenges that we have is for us who do believe in leveling the playing field for all communities of color and sex and so on. That's the challenge that there are some segments that are growing in size who are anti affirmative action and sometimes anti LGBTQ, right? So so that's something I'm concerned about. There's another aspect that I'm concerned about which is, you know the conservatives trying to draw in, this segment right, pitting us against other people of color. There's an active movement to do that. There's an active movement which I think is totally misplaced, trying to stop what we're doing here, talking about our past movements by prominent leaders like DeSantis, right. He's pushing them in Florida. And there's a misconception of what critical race theory is. But that's that's how the conservative, you know, boogeyman right at that point. And people are misinterpreting it. And this is my feeling, misinterpreting it. And saying, we can't even talk about our own past. Right. We're not blaming particular children for this. We're not doing that. There's no blame like that. But that's how they're they're framing that conversation. So that's one of our big challenges, is talking about our history and the history of other communities, too, and reaching out to them. And that's what I would like to see actually academic institutions San Jose State. Right. Maybe can educate the public on what critical race theory is and what it isn't. Right. And even, you know, I don't know too I have not read the seminal papers on that. That's that's my goal too, I guess it's for professors maybe here who talked about that. But I need to educate myself about it. But I think I'm pretty I'm pretty certain it doesn't try to say it doesn't say anything about putting blame on schoolchildren for what's happened in our country's past, too. But they're bringing that up i the school boards, they're pushing it into city councils, even the Supreme Court nomination of Justice Jackson to that came up there in Florida. That's a whole big issue. That's one of the boogeymen that directly confronts what we're talking about. Right. So we should, it would be great if an academic institution could bring up people. And as I said, even the people who are against, who follow what I'm saying, I don't think they have a, we have a clear picture on critical race theory, too. That was and where they brush it off, oh, it's an academic exercise or it's a legal aspect. But I don't think that it's some tenets, I don't think, you know, people can understand who don't have a legal framework. So that could be something useful. I think you'll get a lot of people who come to the event, who really have this other view of CRT. So that's why we don't, in our Day of Remembrance program, we're not talking, another one proposed to talk about CRT, but that's going to bring in some people who could disrupt the program, too. So and we've seen that. But I think that's that's one of the articles on how we're talking about some of these subjects being Asian American professors. Right now. I don't know if you've encountered that, but I've heard people talking to me about critical race theory, saying some things I just talked about. So it's coming around now.

Narrative & Identity Timeframe 1:01:04 >> 1:04:31

(Interviewer) So you are a docent here at JAMsj and here we were just talking about what else, more we can do. What are some of the initiatives you would like to see JAMsj spearhead and how do you approach your work here in kind of everything that you spoke about, critical race theory and building solidarity and sharing about the history of what happened?

Yeah, so the composition, I'm no longer on the board. I quit many years ago, but now the composition of the board has changed at the museum. And I think that they do see that they need to reach out to other communities and tell their stories as well, or relate our story to theirs. So that's what I like to see. When I was on the board, I was kind of pushing for that too, but I was getting blowback too, because especially during the Iraq wartime, it was pulled by, oh, let's not bring that in. So I do like the museum trying to to further those efforts. Now being a docent is, it gives me another perspective. I am able to talk to hundreds of people each year and the thing about this museum, which is different from other museum, it's not really structured as far as how we present them to each docent. And this is good and bad that each docent has freedom to create their own narrative. And sometimes I'll hear another docent I would say that's a far draw that's as factually incorrect. And it's a hard thing to to talk about. Well, so we have total freedom of it. And the way I give my narrative talks about the situation, what happened, let's say, to the Chinese community here, because Japanese American incarceration does not occur in a vacuum. Right? There's all this stuff that leads up to Japanese American incarceration that maybe the German community, German American or the Italian American community to encounter. So I go through this whole thing, which all these anti-CRT will probably hit me really hard on right. That's why I'm concerned about that, too. But the other aspect that I like to convey to people is that this is not a 100-year-old story. This is not an 80-year-old story. This is an issue that resonates with us today for all those reasons that I talk about, especially wartime hysteria and what happened after 9/11. I go through all of that and I connect the issues of today, even the child separation policy, the Vietnam War. When I talk about military engagements and the question of loyalty and what does patriotism mean; that means something different to each of us. I really hone in on those aspects, whereas some other docents don't. They just talk about, Well, this was what the life in camps were. This is what they ate. Yeah, it's nice and a lot of the kids like that. But but to me it's really important to connect the dots from the past to our life today and I'm not making this stuff up. I firmly believe that there's this connective tissue between the two. So that's what I would like us to continue doing. And that's my approach to telling this. This story. Yeah. Yeah.

Timeframe 1:04:31 >> 1:06:09

(Interviewer) So how do you manage your job, family and being active?

I don't know. You know, like I said, I work for a startup company, so it's really a challenge. I can work, I don't know, so many hours every week. And like I said last night, I think I went to bed, finished up around three something, got up, came home. So managing, I don't think I'm managing it. It's. It's out of control. I really I think I'm sacrificing my health. And that's what my wife will say, sacrificing my health. And it's really hard. It's really, really hard to do. And I there's some things I want to do for my own personal enrichment, too. So where do I fit those things in? I don't know. I don't have any children. So I think that was one of the questions. I don't have any children. So maybe that gives me time. And my wife is very, very independent. Some people don't even think I have a wife and one person spread this rumor, at my company, [they] said, I killed my wife and she's in my backyard under the flower bed because they don't see her at all. I don't think Vickie [interviewer] has ever. I don't think a lot of people I've never met. So people think I have a mythical wife because she runs her own foundation, a nonprofit, which I try to help with, too. So it's, I guess I live life to the fullest, I guess. Right.

Transformation & Change Timeframe 1:06:09 >> 1:19:17

How do you define there's different types of activism, right? And all sorts. There's there's left activism, politically left, politically right. There's even my wife being an animal activist. But basically, you know, you're trying to affect change. Whatever change that is, you're trying to push the ball in your perspective forward to hopefully an ultimate goal that you've defined, which can be hard to define. But you, you're trapped. So you're trying to push forward and push for particular causes and trying to affect change. And as I said, you don't have to be a political leader. You don't have to be a prominent person in the community. You don't have to even belong to an organization. You can as an individual, you can do something. You can be the person who doesn't go to the back of the bus. Right. You can be the person who, that the school children, school child in Afghanistan, is pushing for women and girls to go to school. And you can be a young girl to promote steps to prevent climate change. Right. And we've seen that happen in the last several years. You can be an individual, and it doesn't sometimes it doesn't take much. And sometimes the efforts that you put in have a big effect and you don't realize it at the time. So even when I was in my twenties, there was a situation where, you know, as I said, I wasn't really active because when you're in your twenties, you are looking at dating, you know, you got your career, you want to indulge in some of your activities that you personally like to do. Right. So there's not a whole lot of time for other things like being working in a community. But there was this episode where I was just driving and I was listening to a radio station. I like rock, and it was a station here in San Jose, KSJO, I don't know if it's still around. KSJO And they had I couldn't believe it.

This radio host of the same group there were there was a lot of racist language. There was homophobic statements. There were very misogynist statements. And it was really appalling to me. And it was a really popular radio station. So I just did a simple thing, just wrote a letter to the San Jose Mercury thinking they would just go into letters to the editor section saying, Hey, this is in your backyard. This person who's going against particular people, particular communities, and inflaming with outrageous language and so that's what I thought it was going to be. And so the reporter called me up and he wanted to know more. So I just start talking to him about all these issues, and and it turned out to be and eventually became a front page article in the San Jose Mercury News. And it caught on so strongly that TV stations started coming in, coming into the radio station, trying to get interviews from that shock jock. Organizations formed. Groups from San Francisco were upset at all the homophobic statements, they came down. So a coalition was formed and I was part of that too. Again, I kind of a passive participant, but I was going, I guess I was the person who started that. So you got all these people who were making statements. They were protests against this shock jock, and I can't remember most likely NOC was part of it, but there was someone who, you know, so many years ago and I don't know if it was NOC, but it was someone from the Asian American community speaking out against this shock jock. Didn't get rid of him, but eventually there was a momentum where he got thrown out of the radio station for other things. But I think it was this build up, this negative vibe that he created in the community that propelled organizations to have the station change. And I even went with a group of people to confront that, the producer and that shock jock, to try to engage in discussion of how they're hurting the community. So it's a small example, but that's something that happened when I was in my twenties and I could see that one sole voice can affect change, can create organizations and just get the ball moving forward on that.

So that was one thing that I realized we do have power. Every voice counts. That you as an individual could act on something. You don't have to be a leader. You don't have to be part of an organization. And even when you get the ball moving, you don't have to be the leader of that movement. Other people will take the ball from you and move forward and you can be, you know, still passive after that, but you can actually do things like that and that there's so, so many issues today if you're interested in politics we're a divided country and that's where an every vote does count as we've seen in these elections where people are winning with hundreds, hundreds of votes. Right. And you can go off and try to do something about that. And even though, you know, this is also going my way was when I was older, but I would go off to swing states and try to canvas and register people. I would volunteer to drive people to the polling places, just simple stuff like that. You don't have to be a leader. You can just say, okay, what can I do to help? I'm concerned about this issue. And there's many. And as I said, I think I said this before, I'll repeat it again. This story that I'm trying to communicate, ask each of us, all of us about what will you do? What will you do when you see your neighbors, your friends, classmates, be the target of discrimination? Will you do something about it?

And discrimination takes many forms, right? Discrimination against I said your race, your sex, your religion. And we are at the beginning of some of these moments, we're right there. When you think about, let's say, the discrimination against women and the MeToo movement. Right. And we know that a lot of people were silent in the past or they dismissed it. But now you hear voices. People feel empowered to bring their voice out. And I don't blame, you know, the targets of discrimination, like some women who wouldn't speak up because it's such a traumatic experience. I, I, you know, I'm not talking about them, but everybody else who has seen this or really cares about, can do something about. And I have seen this being a Silicon Valley engineer, what goes on in some of these companies and how they talk about women sometimes. I have a woman engineer friend. She was, you know, back in the old days, there were cable network computers throughout the building. And she tried to apply it to a job and she was sad. She was told, I don't believe a woman can do this job. And she told me that. And I just said, we got to do something; that's not right. And, you know, she said no. And I you know, I had to respect what she says. She says, no, no, I don't, she doesn't want to poke her head out. And I can totally understand that the repercussions of something like that to be blackballed like that. So I understood. So, but, but I've seen it and exists in Silicon Valley and that's where we have to say, oh, you know, no, to some of these things, no to something that is locker room talk that demeans women. Some people just say, dismiss all that's just locker room talk, right? But we can't have that. And so some people will and I'll speak up and then some people will say, Oh, well, we can't say that because Will's here. Yes, I know. He's kind of offended by that. He's a snowflake or whatever it is. But we have to speak out because people have to be told that. You know, you are this is creating an unhealthy work environment for people. So we have to we have to do something. So it's around us. It's all around us. Right. And then the treatment, as I said, treatment of LGBTQ people, Muslim American community.

There's all these communities that are are being questioned or assaulted. And now our community, AAPI community is being targeted too. So there's a moment where we have to decide how we're going to be silent or are we going to do something? And doing something sometimes is a great cost to that. Right? I think it was maybe five, six years ago on a Portland train, a young Muslim African American woman was being basically harassed on a train. Three men came out to try to defend her. Two were killed. Two were killed. One was badly hospitalized. So there can be a great cost to doing something about it. I know we should be thoughtful today about what you can do, and so our community has brought forward de-escalation programs, what to do in that type of environment. Right. I don't know what I'm going to do. My answer reaction is to beat that guy, to go in there and fight. That's the wrong thing to do, right? You have to de-escalate the situation and make sure that that person who is being attacked isn't the attention that she should be the focus of attention, not that guy. You're trying to protect her. You want her to get to safety. So those are the techniques that I can intellectualize. But I know me now. I can be a hothead and there's a sometimes I stand my ground and that could be disastrous. And our Day of Remembrance ceremony several years ago, you know, we had this candlelight procession through Japantown, and this guy was just so livid. He was angry. He was a driver. And his car was right in front of me. He could just run me over. He kept inching, inching, inching into my knees. And I said, No, you cannot cross. You cannot go. And I was kind of stupid to do it because he could have it could have been Charlottesville, right. Mowing people down on the street. I'm aggravating him. So the right thing to do there was get everybody away. We have police officers… that the funny thing is that the the chief of police of San Jose was right there. I could have gotten him. I when I was firm I was not going to move and so he got so pissed and backed up and his wheel starts turning and he went around the corner, and he could have killed somebody. So training, it could be important. I should have done if I had that training, I would have tried to de-escalate, get people to safe safety first. Right. Not just try to stand up to this person and get killed and other people get killed. That's that's the wrong thing to do. But I know that's how I am. I'm going to it's the wrong thing to do. Fight back. And I have to be careful for myself. My wife thinks I'm going to get kill someday because of some of these incidences. But anyways, again, off topic again, but doing something about it. But hopefully you do not put yourself in a bad situation when you're trying to act on something. You have some knowledge about de-escalation and all that kind of thing.

Timeframe 1:19:17 >> 1:21:26

(Interviewer) Did you ever have any mentors coming through?

No. But I would say incidences propelled me to where I'm at, same things. I mean, growing up in the 1960s, you watch television, I was exposed to the death count in Vietnam. I saw the the violence. I remember when Bobby Kennedy got assassinated, then going through Watergate and having, Watergate was brought in to our schoolrooms and that had an effect on me. And I liked film and watched films and the thing I was talking about, that shock jock, you know, people were calling me up at my home. I had a listed phone number, they're calling me. And I got nervous, that I had a baseball I put a baseball bat in my car in case something happened because these were, they didn't step the line overtly threatening. But I could tell that they were angry. They knew where I lived, what's going to happen. So I had a baseball bat right in my court, but I was thinking, is this even worth it? What am I doing? You know, should I even continue speaking out about these particular things? And I was really affected by one film, which was “Eyes on the Prize.” I don't know if you've seen it, that beautiful documentary, beautiful stories there of courage, especially when you get to the section on the Freedom Riders where, you know, they're in a bus and there's an angry mob up and they step to walk out in this crowd, an angry mob where they've got pipes and they get sent into prison and parchment I think in Mississippi. And this famous place where all the activists gathered, talking about stories, about beatings, and there they would, sorry, I'll conclude. But anyways, I would I would watch that and say these people could withstand that, that I can take this little thing that I'm involved with. So yeah, so not so much mentors, but inspirations that I would see in society.