Yoshino, William (12/6/2022)

Mary Doi:

All right. Well, let's start. I have a little script to read to you today. So today is December 6th, 2022. This is an oral history being recorded at the JACL Chicago office, located at 5415 North Clark Street in Chicago. The interviewer is Mary Doi. The interviewee is Bill Yoshino.

This interview is being recorded by the JASC Legacy Center in order to document the Japanese American Redress movement in Chicago and the Midwest.

This interview will differ from a normal conversation in that I won't be using verbal cues and responses. Instead, I'll use facial expressions to communicate my interest in what you're saying. This makes for a clearer transcript.

You can decline to answer any question without giving a reason. You can take breaks whenever you need them, and you can end the interview at any point. So if 00:01:00everything's okay let's begin.

William Yoshino:

Okay. Did you want me looking at Mary?

Ty Yamamoto:

Thank you for asking. You can look at Mary.

William Yoshino:

Okay.

Mary Doi:

Yeah. Bill, thank you so much for doing this interview. I've known you as the, well, now retired, Midwest District person for JACL. And also I remember seeing you in San Francisco when you were the acting, I think you were the acting national person at JACL. Were you?

William Yoshino:

Yeah. I did serve in that capacity several times. I did a stint actually as the National Director of JACL in the late 1980s, early 1990s.

Mary Doi:

Okay. So that must be when I remember seeing you in Japantown and just passing in the night.

Well, I think what's interesting about talking with you is that you bring a really unique perspective to the Redress Movement because you know this story both regionally, Chicago and the Midwest, and you have this national 00:02:00perspective. So, I think you're somebody who can zoom in and zoom out on the redress story.

Let's see. This is a JACS grant-funded project that will use oral history videos, archival documents, and other objects to develop a fictional narrative film and a K-12 curriculum that tells the redress history through an innovative healing and justice framework.

Full Spectrum Features is going to be working with educators at Harvard to develop this pedagogical model.

I know you've talked to Kat before, for The Reckoning digital exhibit that the JASC curated. So, I'm going to try not to ask you the same sorts of questions, but let me just give you an overview of what I'm interested in.

I'm interested in opposing viewpoints in and outside of the Japanese American community about redress.

I'm interested in, in hindsight, redress strategies that you think could've gone a little bit better.

And I'm also interested in how you look back at the Redress Movement from roughly the eighties to the nineties, from the perspective of 2022.

You have this great long view of history and your interpretations of it may have changed over the intervening decades. So, that's a little bit about the explanation.

I was saying to Ty that I've known you, I know of you, but I really don't know anything about you.

I know that your family moved from someplace in Washington state in the early 1960s. It was a small town. You moved to Chicago in the early 1960s. And you moved to the South Side. How did that happen? What was the reason?

William Yoshino:

Well, let me start at the beginning. Just, I think in a very general way, my 00:04:00mother was born in Seattle. Her family lived on the south side of Seattle in the community basically where most of the Japanese resided at that time, the Beacon Hill area of Seattle.

My father was an immigrant to Japan. He came in 1924. He was a teenager. His father had preceded him to the United States. So, my father actually came in June of 1924.

If you recall historically, the end of June actually was the date on which the Immigration Act of 1924 became actionable.

It precluded any further immigration for purposes of permanent residency to the United States by people coming from Japan or basically the eastern hemisphere 00:05:00nations. So my dad just made it under the wire as it were.

As I said, he had been preceded by his father who was in the military in Japan. He actually was part of the Imperial Guard under the Meiji emperor. Then when the Meiji emperor died, he kind of became like displaced in some ways.

I think that that and perhaps, and I don't really know the entire history of it, but he decided that his future was not in Japan any longer. It was elsewhere. So, he came to the United States.

My father, coming when he was in his teens still, then started school in 00:06:00Seattle. He docked at the port. His entry point was the Port of Seattle. So he was there. And he actually had to start high school all over again, go through all of that because of the language and so forth.

But he was working, I think, in the produce industry at the time that he met my mother, whose family owned or ran, I should say, a very, very small grocery store. I think it was in the Capitol Hill area of Seattle.

It turned out that my father met my mother because he delivered produce. Her family store was one of the stores that he delivered to.

Anyway, they met, got married. This was pre-war, just before the start of World 00:07:00War II. My father, at the outbreak, or I should say prior to the outbreak of the war, really he had heard, I think some of the rumors about an impending so-called evacuation.

He thought, well, I don't want to get caught up in this. So he had some relatives who lived in central Washington, south central Washington I should say, the area of Kennewick, which is on the Columbia River, which separated Oregon from Washington. So he moved out there.

He was kind of out of the restricted zone, the zone one. He thought that, well, he could just start forward with his life, but what happened was, was they 00:08:00extended the zone to central Washington. So, he got caught up in what would become the removal of Japanese from the west coast of Seattle.

As a result, he didn't go to the Puyallup Assembly Center, which was the main point where folks from Seattle went. He went instead to the Portland Assembly Center.

That may have changed where he eventually wound up. I think, had he been removed from Seattle to Puyallup, he may have gone to, or my folks may have gone to Minidoka. As a result of being removed out of the Portland Assembly Center, they ended up at Heart Mountain.

And then from there, the first chance my father got to get out of the camp, he 00:09:00did so by finding employment here in Chicago.

I don't know exactly what the date was, but it was at some point where there was the situation where folks could leave the camp if they were able to find employment or sponsorship in points outside of the West Coast.

So he found a job working as a bartender at the Edgewater Beach Hotel, which I think employed not a lot, but it employed, it was open to employing Japanese Americans, those who had been in the camp and then were moving into the Midwest, out east and so forth.

So my folks then remained here in Chicago. They actually lived on Kenmore Avenue, which is not too far from where the Japanese American Citizens League 00:10:00and Service Committee are located even today.

After that, after the end of the war, my folks moved back to Seattle and then decided to join some of my other relatives who were in a town called Moses Lake, which is in central Washington, an agricultural area.

They grew sugar beets, potatoes, that sort of thing. So my father decided that that's what he wanted to do.

He had his education disrupted, didn't have the funds to... he had been attending the University of Washington pre-war, didn't have the funds to go back for a variety of different reasons. So, he decided that he would try to do some farming and did so for about 10 years in the Moses Lake area. And then decided 00:11:00because he wasn't doing that well in agriculture, decided to join some relatives that we had here in Chicago.

We moved to Chicago, I believe it was in 1961, moved to the South Side of Chicago. And that's how I arrived in this town.

Mary Doi:

About how old were you at that time?

William Yoshino:

I was 14.

Mary Doi:

Okay. I grew up on the South Side too. I was born in Hyde Park, and then I lived at 72nd and Stony. Were you anywhere near 72nd and Stony?

William Yoshino:

No, I wasn't. I was in kind of a mixed neighborhood. It was an old Irish-Italian neighborhood around 80th and what is now the Dan Ryan Expressway.

That's what I remember in fact, was that when we moved to Chicago, they were 00:12:00just building the Dan Ryan Expressway. We were living, actually, with some relatives who were just off of the expressway. We used to run down there because at that time it was just a big hole in the ground.

So, that was one of my first memories of the city, was just the construction that was going on there at that time.

As I mentioned, it was an ethnically mixed area. It was partially Black. It was kind of Greek, Italian and Irish.

Then I ended up, after a year or so, going to high school, Calumet High School on the South Side of Chicago.

As I mentioned, the makeup of the school was fairly mixed. So, there was a 00:13:00certain amount of ethnic tension that was created as a result of that equal mixture of different ethnics at the same time.

Mary Doi:

Well, I really had no idea that there were Japanese American families living where you lived. I think more of them lived in what I think of as South Shore.

I don't know what the neighborhood was that I lived at, at 72nd and Stony, but I lived around my relatives and other Japanese Americans. So, I didn't realize that we lived in sort of an ethnic neighborhood.

For example, Asayo Horibe was the big girl that walked me to kindergarten. I had cousins. I had people like the Hayashis. Miyo Hayashi and her family lived down there. The Shigehiros, did you know them? They were all in the drum and bugle corps.

William Yoshino:

Well, I know of them. I know who they are now. Yes.

Mary Doi:

So kind of a nice extended family and other Japanese American kids in my class, but I see that you're further south and further west from me.

William Yoshino:

Yeah. Yeah. I don't ever remember seeing an Asian in that area or in my neighborhood at that time. In fact, I think at the high school that I attended, I think there was probably... I remember one Chinese American girl and then my brother, my younger brother. We were the only Asians in the entire school.

So, it was a situation where I didn't really then become even aware of what the Asian or the Japanese American community was until much later.

Mary Doi:

Yeah. Because I remember about that same time going to picnics at Rainbow Beach. 00:15:00I don't know if this was a Kenjinkai thing or just a big family thing, but those to me were the memories that conjure up the ethnic community.

William Yoshino:

Yeah.

Mary Doi:

Well, that's really interesting. I had no idea that you had this long series of migrations and ended up here in Chicago.

So starting in 1978, I believe you became the JACL Midwest Director. Is that right?

William Yoshino:

That's correct. Yes.

Mary Doi:

Okay. Where did you work before you started at the JACL?

William Yoshino:

I was teaching. I was teaching for the Chicago Public Schools. I taught at a school called Washington High School, which is on the far southeast side of Chicago in a community called Hegewisch.

It was a community that formed out of the steel plants that were prevalent on 00:16:00the very, very far South Side of the city at that time.

Then after that, I had taught at Fenger High School, which was... Fenger High School, which was on, what was it, about 111th Street and around Halsted, just Wallace Avenue basically, but just east of Halsted. That was my employment prior to working for the JACL.

The story of that is kind of interesting, I think in some ways. I mean, it was my brother Ron, my older brother, had been somewhat active with the Chicago JACL. That's kind of how I started some activity. I worked on the scholarship 00:17:00committee at that time because of my teaching background.

During that period of time, the so-called governor of the Midwest District of JACL was Lillian Kimura.

In '78, or I should say '77 I think or somewhere around there, the position of Midwest Director had become... or it was vacated. So, the national organization was looking for somebody to fill that spot.

I kind of knew Lillian through my association with my volunteer work with the Chicago chapter. She started talking to me about it and finally pretty much twisted my arm and convinced me that it was an opportunity that I ought to take 00:18:00advantage of because I think she knew some of my interest having to do with being involved in public issues, specifically issues having to do with social justice. Excuse me.

After a point, I just thought, well, that sounds like a good opportunity. And that's how I became involved with... or I should say, that's how I became employed by the JACL. So really, I think it was Lillian Kimura who was the one who was responsible for that, good or bad.

Mary Doi:

It was great, great that she twisted your arm. So thinking back to your early years at JACL, I know that this is the beginning of the Redress Movement in a way, 1978. Maybe the JACL had decided on going the commission route. I don't 00:19:00exactly remember when that decision was made.

But I'm interested in, before the Redress Movement, what were some of the major issues that the national JACL was dealing with in the mid-seventies, late seventies? Also, what was the Midwest district and Chicago, what were our issues? Do you remember?

William Yoshino:

Yeah. I mean, I think there were certain public policy issues that were out there. I mean, I think that the way that the JACL would become involved in issues is that things would happen out there in the environment and JACL would become involved in it.

I think JACL, at least the way that I described it, was kind of a reactive organization in many ways. The Chicago JACL, I remember during the 1970s, became 00:20:00involved in the grape boycott issue that was taking place in California at that time.

At that time, the grape growers had been organizing into a union through Cesar Chavez on the West Coast. It created a tension within JACL because you had many Nisei farmers in the Central Valley of California who would be affected by any type of grape strike, for example.

So the Chicago JACL, kind of viewing it as a social justice issue, decided that they were going to take a stand supporting the right of the farm workers.

That did cause quite a controversy within the JACL. It kind of evidenced, I 00:21:00think a sense that the Chicago JACL was very progressive in the way that it viewed social issues.

I think too, at that time, that there had been discussion at the Chicago chapter level of opposing the war in Vietnam as well. You're talking here about the early 1970s.

So the chapter here was comprised of folks who were fairly progressive in their attitudes with regard to what could be viewed as civil liberties, social justice issues.

I think though that the national JACL when I first became involved, I'm not sure 00:22:00that programmatically there was a whole lot on the table in my recollection.

I think that part of what I did when I first came on board was to really assist the various JACL chapters in the Midwest to communicate with them, to try to keep them informed of what national JACL was doing, and then to provide assistance, as much assistance as I could at least, in the programs or activities that they would be engaged in.

That's why I was fairly active with a number of the various programs or issues, for example, that the Chicago JACL would be involved in.

So that my role was really, at least from a national level, was to be involved 00:23:00in whatever grassroots efforts that the organization was involved in through its various chapters throughout the country.

In the Midwest, there were nine chapters, Chicago being the largest. Then there were chapters in places like St. Louis, in Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Dayton, Cleveland, Detroit and so forth.

Mary Doi:

Okay. Well, that's really fascinating that you came in and that you're characterizing Chicago even in the mid to late seventies as the very progressive chapter in the country.

William Yoshino:

Right. Yeah.

Mary Doi:

I had no idea. I graduated high school at Santa Maria High School in Santa Maria, California. I'd gone to lab school up until then. So, it was this huge dislocation from an urban school to this school with future farmers.

I remember the lettuce growers strike. I remember that was a town that was big, had a Japanese American agricultural history. So, strawberries and lettuce were the things that Santa Maria really produced a lot of. So, it's really interesting.

And I applaud the JACL Chicago for taking the sides of the workers and pitting yourself against the Japanese American farmers.

William Yoshino:

Right. Yeah.

Mary Doi:

That's cool.

William Yoshino:

I think part of that is due to the fact that in Chicago or at least with the Chicago JACL, I think that the Nisei generation at that particular time wanted to transition the chapter generationally, from the older generation to a younger 00:25:00generation. So, they were very welcoming of young participation on their board of directors.

This is beginning in the late 1960s and then 1970s. So unlike many, many chapters, JACL chapters throughout the country, you had that transition from Nisei leadership to Sansei leadership occurring much earlier than their fellow chapters throughout the country.

I think that's part of the reason that you had this kind of progressive mindset, was because you had young folks who were coming out of an era of activism, the sixties and the seventies.

Mary Doi:

Yeah. I was talking to Katherine about this a little bit. I said, "People like 00:26:00you and me, we do have the Civil Rights Movement as part of our background, the anti-Vietnam protests and even the rise of ethnic studies."

This is sort of the zeitgeist under which we grew up. I think it really influences how we see the world, how we see justice, starting with certainly the internment, resettlement and redress.

I think that we're a little cohort of people who luckily had mentors like Lillian Kimura, other leaders of the JACL Chicago, to welcome our input and our vitality and our interests. I think that's great.

You mentioned that the Midwest District has nine chapters. You enumerated some of them. Did you enumerate all of them? You said, let's see, St. Louis, Minneapolis. Dayton, Cincinnati, Cleveland.

William Yoshino:

Detroit, Indianapolis.

Mary Doi:

Oh, Detroit? Okay, Detroit.

William Yoshino:

St. Louis.

Mary Doi:

Oh, Detroit. Okay. Detroit.

William Yoshino:

St. Louis.

Mary Doi:

Indianapolis. And was there any in Milwaukee?

William Yoshino:

In Milwaukee, yeah.

Mary Doi:

Okay. So when you started, were these nine chapters what comprised the Midwest?

William Yoshino:

That's what comprised the Midwest when I became the Midwest director.

Mary Doi:

Okay.

William Yoshino:

Yes.

Mary Doi:

So there were no chapters added in order to help spread the word about redress.

William Yoshino:

That's correct.

Mary Doi:

Okay.

William Yoshino:

Eventually, and I don't recall the date, I think it's somewhere in the 1990s, the Midwest district merged with what was called the Mountain Plains district. And so the Mountain Plains district was split so that chapters like Denver, for example, went to what was called the Inner Mountain district. And then chapters like Omaha and Houston became aligned with the Midwest district. So the Midwest 00:28:00district actually increased in size from, I think, nine to 11 chapters.

Mary Doi:

Okay. Yeah. I just had no sense of the distribution, the geographic distribution, or the timeline for the creation of chapters. And Eric Langowski thought that perhaps the Hoosier chapter might have been formed in order to help get the word out about redress, but I'm glad to hear that maybe that's not quite the case. So how big was the JACL back in the late 1970s?

William Yoshino:

Late 1970s, I believe that the National JACL had a membership of about 20,000, thereabouts. Yeah. For some reason, the number 23,000 sticks in my head, but I don't know at what date. That might have been sometime during the mid 1970s, but 00:29:00by the late 1970s, I think it was still probably right around 20,000.

Mary Doi:

Okay. And then how big was the Chicago chapter when you started?

William Yoshino:

Chicago chapter at that time was probably about 1800 to 2000.

Mary Doi:

And what is it today? Do you have any idea?

William Yoshino:

I don't know.

Mary Doi:

Okay.

William Yoshino:

Yeah, I'd only be guessing.

Mary Doi:

Yeah. I can probably ask somebody about that. I want to ask a little bit about the broad brush strokes of redress. How did it become a national issue for the Japanese American Citizens League?

William Yoshino:

Well, I think it started in, I don't know, I think you can probably attach certain starting days to all of this. There would be some that would say that the move for redress or reparations, depending on what form it would take, could have started during the war, during World War II, with people in the resistance, 00:30:00that type of thing. For JACL, I think if you look at it on a formal basis, it started at the 1970 convention when an individual named Edison Uno from San Francisco first introduced a resolution saying that the JACL ought to pursue the wartime camp issue in some form. It was discussed... the JACL would meet at a national convention every two years. And so in the interim, in '72, '74, '76, 00:31:00they would, you know, kind of, the issue of redress would kind of evolve until 1978, when the organization actually formulated a concrete position saying that the issue ought to be clearly recognized as one where constitutional rights were violated, and that that violation should come with compensation.

And they put a number out there of $25,000 per individual. I don't know whether they said interned or affected by, and we can talk about that later because there is clearly a difference in terms of the actual legislation that was 00:32:00finally adopted. And that there ought to be an apology associated with that. And so that came out of the convention in Salt Lake City in 1978, and that was in the summer of that year. And I was hired as the Midwest director, interestingly, in October of that same year, 1978. And so that was, I think, part of my motivation, in some ways, for wanting to become involved. Because you see an issue like this redress issue, and it's how could you not? If you have any sense of community and any sense of social justice, to not be involved in something like that would be a missed opportunity, to say the least.

Mary Doi:

That's really fascinating, just to hear the chronology of '70, '72, '74, '76, '78, you have a more concrete plan. And two main strategies seem to come to the forefront, maybe around that time. And one would be this direct appropriation, monetary redress for internees. And so who were the leading proponents for that? And then who were the leading opponents?

William Yoshino:

Yeah, I think when JACL first adopted the resolution at the Salt Lake City Convention, the idea was actually to go after monetary redress in a direct way, meaning get legislation in Congress that said $25,000, an apology, so forth. And 00:34:00what happened... and I think that was kind of the approach that the community looked to, because there had been people even outside of JACL, or even on the fringes of JACL, that had been talking about this whole notion of finding remedies for what happened during World War II. And so JACL gets itself tracked to begin implementing that 1978 resolution. And some of the leadership of JACL, specifically those who were involved in the redress issue, went out to Washington, DC, to meet with the members, the Japanese American members of Congress to really get a better handle on how all of this was going to get 00:35:00structured and what would take place.

And it was at that meeting in Washington that Senator Daniel Inouye came up with a proposal or a suggestion at that point, that perhaps it might be more productive and better to form a federal commission first. Because his reasoning was that there were very few people within the American public, much less those members of Congress, who really knew anything about what had happened to Japanese Americans during World War II. So his thinking was that there needed to be an educational effort to take place before you could go to the next step. And 00:36:00so he proposed to this group of JACL leaders that they pursue the establishment of a federal commission to look into and investigate what had transpired during World War II, with respect to the Japanese American community. And so that became a dilemma for some who were on that committee, because they were thinking, going into all of this, that we were going to just go with legislation, a direct approach to redress.

And so this kind of threw a little bit of a curveball into all of it. And so it actually did cause some controversy, even within the JACL because there were many within the organization who felt it was important just to pursue a pure 00:37:00form of redress. That's what we're here for. The discussion had always been that we were going to go after a direct compensation bill. Why should we bother with doing this so-called commission approach? Is this a deflection? What is all of this? So there were those who felt that it was really important, that there was good reasoning behind the whole notion of having a commission because how are you going to convince an ignorant public and certainly legislators who have no clue about this?

That's one part of it. The other part of it is that Inouye knew that federal 00:38:00commissions also come up with a set of recommendations. And these recommendations, if they're the right recommendations, can carry a great deal of weight with legislators. And so I think there was that aspect of it too. So that kind of got thrown into the whole mix of this discussion on direct appropriations, and so it became a controversy that the community, and even the JACL, had to somehow reckon with.

Mary Doi:

So were the other Congress people, Spark Matsunaga, Mineta, and Matsui on board with the reasoning and the approach that Inouye is proposing?

William Yoshino:

I don't know firsthand. From what I've read or with people I've talked to over the years, there may have been some hesitation among some of the members, but 00:39:00they fairly quickly came on board. After all, it's Dan Inouye who is doing this, he is a senior Japanese American legislator at the time. He is the one who has, I guess, the friendships in Congress. And if you're going to oppose Inouye, you've got to probably have a pretty good reason for doing so. But he obviously is the one who has the experience. He knows better than most how Congress works. He knew what the tenor, the temperament of his colleagues were, especially surrounding an issue like this. But I think in the end, he also felt that it would be advantageous for the community, just in terms of the educational effort involved.

Mary Doi:

Right.

William Yoshino:

But as I said, I think this came into direct opposition with those who were very bent on moving forward with legislation as speedily as possible. It's kind of like one of these ideas, I think, of striking while the iron is hot. And so, as I mentioned, it did cause some controversy within the organization to the point, and I should say that there were factions within the JACL that were very, very strong, in terms of wanting to go the direct approach. There was a group out of the Seattle chapter who felt very strongly that direct compensation ought to be 00:41:00pursued, that it was more clearly in line with the resolution that had been passed out of the Salt Lake City Convention.

And to the point, in fact, of getting a newly elected Congressman, Michael Lowry, to agree to introduce legislation in Congress almost immediately. So that was the dilemma that the organization was in at that time. And the way they resolved it was to take it to the chapters for a vote. That's what it came down to. And the chapters did vote on it and narrowly agreed to go with the 00:42:00commission approach to redress.

Mary Doi:

So thinking back to Chicago, how did Chicago come to its decision and what was the decision?

William Yoshino:

I would need to look that up. I don't totally recall. The reason I say that is because, number one, I don't recall. But there was very str- ... Chicago, I think, was kind of a microcosm of what was taking place in the larger discussion across the Japanese American community in the country. As I mentioned, at that time, the chapter was fairly progressive, and you had some very outspoken, 00:43:00progressive individuals who were involved with the Chicago JACL at that time. You had Mike Yasutake, who was part of the board. You had people who were very, very outspoken in the community, like Bill Hohri was part of it. Quieter ones who nevertheless were not reluctant to make their feelings felt, like Nelson Kitsuse. And he was very, very, very progressive in his thinking. So it did cause quite a bit of discussion and controversy here in Chicago. I think I know which way the chapter went, but I don't want to say it here on the record because I don't know. I don't recall for sure. But I think it was a fairly, it 00:44:00was closely decided, because I think that there were elements on both sides who were engaged in the discussion at the time.

Mary Doi:

Well, you mentioned Bill Hohri and Nelson Kitsuse. When I think about a different approach to redress, I think about NCJAR, National Coalition on Japanese American Redress, that I think of as Bill Hohri was the nominal leader in Chicago, but had been sort of schooled by the more progressive JACL in Seattle. And so in Chicago, we've got the JACL approach and we've got the NCJAR approach. And I don't know whether JACL, by its history, by its national standing, sort of overshadowed Bill Hohri's group, NCJAR, or whether through the 00:45:00force of personality and for the approach that he wanted to take, which was then, I guess, the legal approach, the class action lawsuit approach, whether Chicago felt like a place where there were two routes to go, and you could choose either to be one or the other, or people like a Sam Ozaki: both. And what are your thoughts on that?

William Yoshino:

Yeah, I don't think that the JACL, the chapter here in Chicago had any, I don't think that they were conflicted at all in terms of what directions they would go in. I think that the JACL chapter here knew that in the end it would pursue a 00:46:00legislative approach. I don't think that the whole notion of pursuing this thing through the courts was one that had been defined at all in terms of the resolution that was passed at the Salt Lake City Convention. And I think that also too, I think in a practical sense, practical meaning where I think the thinking was that you would get a clear, a good result. I think that that was going to be had legislatively rather than through the court, judicially. So I don't think that that was ever, you know there was never any controversy within 00:47:00the JACL about that at all.

I think it was always clearly going to be legislative. I think, though, that, as you state, I think that there were some folks who were kind of open-minded on it, and who felt that if you're going to find a remedy, that perhaps it would be good to look at all possible remedies. And so that's why Bill Hohri's approach on it became viable to many. And I think that even within JACL, there were those who felt that this was an approach too, because it showed the seriousness by a community to pursue this issue, that it wasn't going to be one avenue when you could have multiple approaches to it. And so I think that, as much as the 00:48:00judicial approach that Hohri took, it didn't last a long time because it did find its way through the courts, and the courts generally work very slowly, but this issue moved within a few years.

But what it succeeded in doing, I think, was to bring attention even more so to the issue. And I think, for a time, that there was a sense that perhaps this would be successful in a way, because the facts surrounding the approach were certainly there. Even though as we find out later on through the various court- as we knew through the various court cases, and Korematsu, Hirabayashi, and 00:49:00Yasui, all those cases had been lost, but in the end, the Endo case had affirmed the rights of citizenship and that without due process, you couldn't take away those rights. And so certainly I think the facts and the evidence were on the side of Hohri in that case, and were it not for things like sovereign immunity and statute of limitations, perhaps they could have won that thing.

Mary Doi:

As part of my background, I decided, oh, I'm going to read the Chicago Shimpo. Only, the digitization of the Shimpo is available through 1984. So I'm reading the Shimpo, every issue from 1980 to 1984. And maybe in '83, the JACL becomes a 00:50:00friend of the court for the Hohri case, the Hohri argument. And I thought, this really is showing cooperation that there are going to be multiple ways that redress can be sought. Which brings me to a third approach, which is the NCRR, the National Coalition of Redress and Reparations.

And when I was in San Francisco, that was the group that I was a little bit attached to. And I did it mainly because a woman there named Satsuki Tashima, I don't know if you knew her, was very active in kimochi. And I became Satsuki's friend. And so I just kind of followed her to the things that she did. Since then, I've often wondered, was there an NCRR presence in Chicago? So I talked to people like John Ota, who I know was very involved, and Kathy Masaoka, who was also very involved in NCRR. And I said, was there a chapter in Chicago? And 00:51:00neither of them can remember anything. Do you know if there was ever any effort, did NCRR try to penetrate Chicago? Or was it a case where, again, the Midwest is skipped over and it's a West Coast thing, a little bit of East Coast presence too, and we are just this non-entity?

William Yoshino:

Yeah, in terms of NCRR, I don't know that there was really ever any attempt to form any type of chapter or movement in Chicago or in any of the other major cities in the Midwest, or for that matter, on the East Coast. So it was, I was aware of NCRR because I would travel out to California quite a bit, and I always saw that as more of a California movement. One that found its roots in the labor 00:52:00movement, basically out of San Francisco, I believe. And then it grew to, went to other cities, specifically to L.A/, but I kind of always, I guess, saw it as a group that was and became a part, more, of the California scene than elsewhere.

Mary Doi:

Okay. Well, you've often talked about the importance of the Midwest district for the JACL legislative approach, and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that. Who were the Congress people in the Midwest that really became strong allies for redress, and then who were the opponents in the Midwest 00:53:00that were equally strong in their positions? Can you talk a little bit about that?

William Yoshino:

Yeah. First of all, the Midwest, I think, became an important area simply because of the geography. The Midwest, although there were only nine chapters, just in terms of geographic area, it probably represented or it probably housed more representation in Congress when you compare it to other JACL districts. Because the other JACL districts were basically the West Coast, so Washington, Oregon, California, so you had representation out of California at that time. It 00:54:00might have been, I don't know, 40 or so, 30, 40 members of Congress. But if you look in the Midwest, if you look at the Midwest states, you'd have quite a few members of Congress who come from the what seven, eight, nine states that are represented by the JACL Midwest chapters. And I think one of the interesting things too is that in some of these smaller towns like... Or I should say smaller cities, like Milwaukee or Dayton, they had ready access to their members of Congress. It's smaller, it's more local, and so they were able to engage more.

Here in Chicago, congressmen like Sid Yates, Sid Yates was always a friend to 00:55:00the JA community. That had come about because when Sid was first elected, and I think that was probably back in 1948, there were Nisei who were involved in his campaign, in his election, and I think he always saw the Japanese American community as one of his allies. Apart from the whole notion that Sid is Jewish, he totally understands the oppression of minority groups, that type of thing.

And I think you had that type of situation in some of these other JACL chapters in the Midwest. That's not to say you didn't have the same thing elsewhere, but 00:56:00you definitely had it here in the Midwest because I know I would talk to our redress representatives in places like Cleveland or in Milwaukee, or some of the other chapters, and they knew who their members of Congress were and they could talk to them and they were supportive. Which is important because what you're asking these members of Congress to do is to prevail on their colleagues to be supportive of issues. In Congress, it's like any place else, you're going to outreach to your allies, to your friends, and you're going to convince them to be supportive of the kinds of things that are of interest to you. That's basically how it works.

And so, of course we would ask Sid Yates and others to outreach to their 00:57:00colleagues. This became especially important in trying to find co-sponsorship to the legislation. What you want to do in the end is once you get a bill introduced you have the major sponsors to the bill, but then you want to add on co-sponsors to the bill so that at some point, in the House at least, if you have 100, if you're approaching 200 co-sponsors to the legislation and you only have 18 more to get, well that's pretty good. And so that's the whole idea behind it.

So you did have that. I think you had members who were close to their representatives, but at the same time ...And one of those in the end was John Glenn, for example, in Ohio. We had people in the various chap-, we had three 00:58:00chapters in Ohio, Dayton, Cincinnati and Cleveland, and so John Glenn was the chair of the General Operations Committee where the Senate bill was housed. And so we would have our JACL chapter members outreach to Glenn, write letters, call the office, try to get a meeting with him, that sort of thing, so that became important. Here in Chicago, it's kind of interesting that at that time Charles Percy was the senator and Tsune Nakagawa was his office manager, and I remember going to Tsune and saying, "Gosh. Can you get us a meeting with the senator?" 00:59:00And of course she did. Even before we even met with Percy she was probably talking to him and saying, "You've got to do this and here's why." That sort of thing. So I remember meetings of that sort.

I remember that Chiye Tomihiro was very, very involved in the whole redress effort here. She was one of the key individuals. And I remember that there was a time where you also had to get Republicans on this thing, so we would try to figure out how are we going to get some of these more moderate Republicans? And I remember John Porter was a congressman up in the 10th District at that time, 01:00:00and we didn't know John Porter, but Chiye found somebody who knew his chief fundraiser, and so I remember going to a meeting. I don't remember what that person's name was, but we figured any avenue that we can find, let's try to do that, and let's get to a person who's influential, who can talk to the member.

And so we talked to the... And I don't know if we had anything to do with it, but Porter eventually voted for the legislation. You had people like John Erlenborn, who was a member of Congress, I think his district was somewhere up in the northwest suburbs or the northern suburbs. And we had found out that I think it was during the war, his family had taken on an individual from Los 01:01:00Angeles as a... had sponsored a person out of camp. And so we had found that out.

And so we located that person in L.A. and asked that individual to talk to John Erlenborn, and Erlenborn eventually supported it. What that tells you is that personal contacts, personal experience that a congressman might have had with somebody from the community, all of these things become important at some point. And so that's how all of this came about. That's how you played this. There was the letter writing where we would have a redress representative out of each of 01:02:00the chapters, they had specific tasks. Number one, they would raise money for the redress effort, but then they would outreach.

They would go to their members and they would figure out which of their members were in whose congressional district, and then have them write letters to that particular, their members of Congress, hoping that that representative would listen to that constituent that they had. We also knew that there were people who weren't favorable. There was a guy named Tom Kindness who was a congressman out of the Cincinnati area. I forget, he had been associated with some major company out of the Cincinnati area at the time, but he also counted among his friends Karl Bendetsen, who was one of the individuals who actually was 01:03:00responsible for the drafting of the executive order, the order that Roosevelt signed that caused the implementation of the removal from the West Coast.

And so there were individuals like that that were also within the Midwest district. Now, Tom Kindness is not somebody who eventually voted for the bill, because he was heavily influenced by Karl Bendetsen, but that's the way things go sometimes.

Mary Doi:

I think this is a great example of what does lobbying look like, that there's high level letter writing, fundraising, but it's also that one-to-one touch.

William Yoshino:

I think it always is, in the end that's what it comes down to. Because I think 01:04:00in the end, at a national level that's key. But I think that, you can't substitute, I think, some of the work that was done by the Nikkei members of Congress on this too, because they were the ones in the end who were working with their fellow colleagues. So I know that on the Senate bill without Spark Matsunaga was the, from all that I've heard and all that I've read, and with those who I've talked to have, and even Dan Inouye had said that Spark was the one who really moved this thing in the Senate.

He had, I think, made a decision early on that he was going to talk to each and every one of his colleagues in the Senate on this thing, and so he's the one who 01:05:00I think was most directly responsible for getting the Senate to act on this. He was that committed to it. So, it's much harder in the House. You've got 435 members, so for at that time, for Norm Mineta or for Bob Matsui, it's a much more difficult thing. But people like Mineta had good relationships with folks like Jim Wright, who was the speaker of the house at that time. And so getting Jim Wright to be a co-sponsor of the bill, and the speaker doesn't usually sponsor legislation, unless it's their own thing, but things like that became critical as well.

Mary Doi:

Wow. Well, so thinking back to the significant role that the Midwest played in the Redress Movement, was this the first time that the Midwest had really come 01:06:00to the forefront as a region that was really important to engage in the redress efforts? I don't know if earlier legislation, say in 1952, the Midwest was a powerhouse or not.

William Yoshino:

Yeah, I think that there was a committee called the Anti-Discrimination Committee, which was formed in the late 1940s. And it was the committee that eventually, they were the group through JACL that pushed the Walter McCarran Act of 1952, which provided naturalization rights for the Issei. The Chicago chapter, and I'm pretty sure that the entire Midwest, was very active in that 01:07:00campaign. I've gone through some of the files on that, as well as I've, in talking to people like Shig Wakamatsu, who is kind of an interesting person in his own right, but in many, many conversations I had had with Shig over the years.

And Shig used to come into the office on a regular basis almost during the entire time that I was the Midwest director for a variety of reasons. Number one, he was the chairman, chairperson of the Japanese American Research Project, which produced... Or their goal was to produce a history of the Japanese American experience in the United States. So that became the publishing arm, and 01:08:00they became especially effective when they went into partnership with UCLA on all of that. But aside from that, Shig was also a member of the JACL Legislative Education Committee. He was its treasurer, and that was the group that, in the end, the JACL relied upon as its lobbying arm to move the redress issue through Congress. So Shig had a huge, huge hand in all of that.

Mary Doi:

So is the Midwest district still important in terms of congressional action? Or have we taken up more of a backseat-

William Yoshino:

And, well, just to pick up a little bit more on Shig.

Mary Doi:

Okay.

William Yoshino:

So it was through conversations I had with him where I learned about the work of this Anti-Discrimination Committee in the late 1940s and the 1950s. And they 01:09:00became very crucial, I think, to the effort of getting that legislation passed in 1952. So they became engaged very early on in their life, meaning the chapter's life, because the chapter had been formed here what in 1945 or so, and so almost from the get-go, the JACL chapter was involved in not just the legislative kind of thing, but they were involved in voter registration, that sort of thing, to get the community involved in public policy kinds of issues that affected the community.

So I think that the chapter had that engagement very early on. So by the time 01:10:00redress comes around, you had people who had gone through all of that from an early age, because at that point, what, the Nisei are in their thirties and forties, just after the war. So you did have an experienced group by the time we get to the 1970s. And they had also been through so much, just in terms of being part of a group that had been marginalized, oppressed in many ways when they were on the West Coast, and so they felt all of that. They knew all of that.

And I think that many of them who became active had been on this mission their 01:11:00entire lives. Certainly people like Chiye Tomihiro, or you look at people like Sam Ozaki, who he didn't attach himself to JACL, but he was certainly involved in the issues of the organization, but there were many others, like Shig Wakamatsu who certainly knew of the history of the community and had felt the tinge of racism in their formative years, and who wanted to seek ways to remedy these wrongs in the past.

Mary Doi:

When you mentioned these names, I know some of them, but I only know some of them by name, and I'm just so damn proud of the Nisei, just hearing these stories, hearing what Chiye especially, I knew Chiye, but I didn't really know Shig Wakamatsu, but wow, in their prime, these were such strong movers and shakers.

William Yoshino:

Yeah, they were. And I think the important thing about them too is that they were people who knew that they had to go outside of their community. I think that the Japanese American community had always been an insular community, not because... That was forced upon them in many ways. But you had people, I think, who reached out to other communities and knew that progress wasn't going to be made internally. It had to be done through external contacts and through 01:13:00external persuasion. And you have those people. And-

Mary Doi:

Do you think the Midwest, Chicago really was an exemplar area in terms of Japanese Americans realizing that they had to reach beyond the community? That in order to affect legislation, you have to form coalitions, you have to, whether it's Ross Harano working with the Jewish Committee, this David Roth fellow, I don't remember what committee it is, but it seemed like he had, Ross has allies that are not within the ethnic community, but maybe within other ethnic groups, so he could reach out to the Polish community or the Jewish community.

William Yoshino:

Yeah, no, I think that became inherent within the way in which the JA community, through the JACL, operated from the outset. You had, as I mentioned, folks like 01:14:00Shig, folks like Nobi Honda, for example, some of the early leaders who reached out to the places like the Chicago Commission on Human Relations, for example. An agency that's been there since the 1940s, as far as I know, but who reached out to them.

And then too, reaching out, as I mentioned, to members of Congress, local politicians, that sort of thing. I'm not going to say that they had an easy inroad to everyone, I think it was... But they worked at it, and I think they saw it as being important to reach out as part of a kind of a survival mechanism for the community. I think in the end, there may have been efforts on the part 01:15:00of the government to disperse the community within Chicago, but I think at the same time the community was stubborn enough to know that it had to come together as a community, that it had to create its own institutions, but not to be blinded to the idea that you couldn't interact, but that you had to interact with others.

And so I think that beginning in the fifties with this anti-discrimination committee, and then as issues came up, that these leaders could easily reach out to others. And I think they passed that type of strategy onto to the Sanseis. 01:16:00You mentioned Ross Harano, and I remember that Ross introduced me to this... You mentioned David Roth. I became good friends with David and David, he was part of the American Jewish Committee and had formed this organization called the Illinois Ethnic Coalition. And it was a gathering of as many of the ethnic groups as you could name in the city, and so it formed a broad coalition. And so anytime that an issue came up, whether it was in the Italian American community or the Japanese American community, we would bring the concern to David and to the Illinois Ethnic Coalition, and they would listen and become allies to the cause.

One of the important things in the whole redress effort was to get resolutions of support from various organizations, from government entities, labor unions, churches, you name it, because this became a way in which you show broad-based support for your issues. So we would go to the American Jewish Committee, we would go to David Roth and the Illinois Ethnic Coalition, and get these various organizations to endorse by resolution the whole redress effort, and specifically those bills in Congress. And through inroads that we had made, I remember going to the Chicago City Council and getting the city council to get a 01:18:00resolution passed, get a proclamation from the mayor to support the redress efforts. So all these different ways of outreaching from the outside became very, very important to the entire campaign.

Mary Doi:

Do you think in some ways that Chicago, and the Midwest, was especially adept at reaching out beyond the community? Sometimes I hear, well, "Chicagoans are different, Midwesterners are different." And I'm trying to delineate how those differences might be expressed, and some of the things you're giving as examples, kind of.

William Yoshino:

Yeah. I can only cite the examples. I'm not a sociologist, I don't know how those things work scientifically, but certainly I don't... And I don't know if 01:19:00those who remained in Chicago tended to be more adventurous of spirit or whatever it was in their DNA that caused them to want to stay and to seek out a new beginning in a different place. But certainly those early leaders, I think, evidenced an attitude that wasn't one that was insular in any way. It was one that caused them to reach out in many ways.

And some of them were ones that became successful in business in a larger way. I remember pre-war, a lot of the businesses and the people that were successful 01:20:00were successful in the community and they had their businesses in the community. But here in Chicago, you couldn't totally rely on that. Yeah, you did have restaurants maybe that catered to the community, or you might have had a business or two, like a grocery store that catered to the community, but you had many others whose business caused them to have to reach out if they were going to succeed. And I think they brought that same attitude to the organizations they became involved in within the community.

Mary Doi:

Great. This is wonderful. This is wonderful. I'm going to skip a little bit ahead in my questions because you've just been so eloquent. You know the 01:21:00timeline for the redress hearings and all that. But I'm really interested in what was it like to be in that room when the Chicago hearings are happening. I don't really have any firsthand perspective, not as a testifier, but as someone in the audience. So if you wouldn't mind talking a little bit about that, and I'm going to give you ways to think about it. I know that in September, 1981, the hearings were in Chicago at Northeastern Illinois University. Did you attend?

William Yoshino:

I did attend, yes.

Mary Doi:

Okay. So I'm going to ask you to paint the picture of what it was like for you to be at that hearing. And I'd like to start with something very concrete and move to the more abstract. So for example, what was the meeting space like? How big was it? How many people were there?

William Yoshino:

Yeah. The Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians hearing 01:22:00was held at Northeastern Illinois University. Part of the reason, as I understand it, why it was there was because the commission staff actually had first looked at some venues that were actually smaller. And I think based upon some of the West Coast hearings, they saw what the interest was and the size of the audiences that were interested in attending.

And I think that the commission knew that they had to find a large... they had looked at places like the ceremonial courtroom, federal courtroom down at the, I think it was the Dirksen Federal Building. And so they knew they had to find a larger space. And so it ended up being at Northeastern Illinois University in a large... it was just a large space. In the end, they set up chairs for the 01:23:00audience and you had the tables and the dais and all of that stuff up front.

But it was a space that could probably house easily about several hundred people and they needed all of that room because I think that that's the one thing, that was one of the, I think the first impression I had was just the enormity of the space. Are all these seats going to get filled? That question comes up. And it did. The audiences throughout the entire two days were audiences that filled, I think just about every seat. So it was just, and it was, they were mainly from the community, JAs from the community.

You had others who attended as well, just people who were curious about what this was all about. But you had a huge representation of Japanese Americans attending these hearings, which was the case in all of the, most of the other hearing sites as well. So that's the first impression. And I think the other impression that I'm left with is that the representation of the members of the commission themselves. I think you had all but, I don't know, I want to say one or two present at some point during the hearing. So you had good attendance. You had Edward Brooke, a former senator, you had Arthur Goldberg, a former justice of the Supreme Court, the chair, Joan Bernstein was there. Bill Marutani, the lone Japanese American member of the commission was there. And I think Robert 01:25:00Drinan, Father Robert Drinan, who was a member of Congress at the time, was there.

So you had a representation of the more notable members of the commission. And so I think that was kind of impressive as well, because they didn't all attend at all of the sites. I think they tried to, but it was kind of hit or miss.

Mary Doi:

Do you know why maybe it happened that they tried to make an effort to be in Chicago? Was there anything special, or-

William Yoshino:

It could have been proximity to Washington for one thing. That's a possibility.

Mary Doi:

What kind of media coverage was there?

William Yoshino:

There was good media coverage. I don't remember exactly what the setups were. I think we had set up areas for the media. So you had cameras, I think one of the 01:26:00sides, along the side of the audience. And I think too, just by the amount of media coverage you had, that kind of shows, I think that you had a media that was interested. So back then, you had press, you had newspapers. I don't know, today newspapers are kind of a dying kind of communications vehicle, but back then you had this Tribune, you had the Sun-Times, you had The Daily News out there, and then you had, I think some of these smaller outlets too that showed up. And then you had all of the major television... excuse me, networks at that 01:27:00time who showed up as well, so that there was strong media coverage.

And I think this was also in part because you had had a lot of national coverage prior to that. And so that kind of interested the local media in this as well. But we were sending out press releases and media alerts all during the lead up to this. We, meaning the JACL were fairly active in trying to get that local coverage.

So I think at that time you had even local columnists who were writing columns about it. And I'm sure the Tribune, and I'm sure the Sun-Times had editorialized 01:28:00about it as well. You'd probably have to go back to the file to see what the clippings were, go back during that period to see whether or not, but I'm almost certain that all the newspapers during that time had editorialized, and probably favorably, about the issue.

So this was all part though of going back to what Dan Inouye had talked about -- about using the commission to generate public awareness about the Japanese American experience during World War II, because the senator knew that there would be a series of hearings across the country. He knew there would be hearings in Washington, D.C. and he knew that that was going to generate interest and that it would become the educational vehicle that many of us, we 01:29:00weren't aware of the enormity in terms of the attraction that it would present for the issue. But he knew, so he was right in that respect. And so that became very, very important. And so I think the last element though of the hearings were the testimonies themselves.

And just seeing people you knew or people who you didn't know, who had the courage to go and really tell their stories and pour out their hearts and their feelings about what had happened to them during a very traumatic and dark period 01:30:00of their lives. I think about it now and I still... it's just, you just get wrapped with the emotion of all of that. So I mean, there obviously are testimonies that you remember and if they were compelling to me, they had to be compelling to those people who were sitting up on that dais, who were the members of the commission listening to all of this.

So it's credit to all of those witnesses who testified, because in the end, I think if anyone won redress for the community, they were those folks who told their stories because the stories became the crux of the issue itself. Because 01:31:00the stories, I think, encapsulated every aspect of what had transpired, whether it was Min Yasui talking about the violation of rights to someone like Chiye Tomihiro talking about the shame that she felt when some of her classmates came to visit her at the assembly center in Portland, and that she had to talk to them through the barbed wire. So it was stories like that that I think that won 01:32:00the day and captured the issue for the community. It's really, really kind of hard to talk about a lot of that.

I remember Helen Murao, who was, she was orphaned, her parents died during the 1930s, and then she had an older sister who passed away, I think it was tuberculosis, just at the outset of the war. So she and her... she had two younger sisters, and so they were kind of like orphans. And so they went to camp 01:33:00and Helen, who I think was probably maybe about 15 or 16 years old at that time, became the person in her family who became responsible for her two siblings.

And I mean, I can't imagine just the anxiety and the fear and the stress that she felt as a teenager having to shoulder that type of responsibility. And I remember in her later writings and testimony how she talked about when she was 01:34:00released from the camp, she said that she went to the train station and she said that the very first thing she did was to buy a bottle of Coke, Coca-Cola.

And she said that it wasn't so much the Coke, she said it was the freedom to buy it. So I mean, it's that kind of exhilaration that she felt, despite all that she had been through, she knew or could speak to the importance of her being out of that camp. So that became very, very important to her. One of the things we were able to do that too, in terms of the hearing was we wanted to get other 01:35:00people from the Midwest to also appear as witnesses because we didn't want this just to be a Chicago hearing where there were only Chicago people serving as witnesses. And so one of the things I tried to do was to outreach to all the various chapters, encouraging them to find individuals who would be willing to testify. One of those individuals was someone named Toaru Ishiyama, who was a psychologist from Cleveland.

I think he was actually became the director of mental health for the state of Ohio during his career. Very accomplished man. But I remember Toaru talking 01:36:00about how the record, there was almost no record of the psychological trauma that had occurred to this population that had been incarcerated 40 years prior to that. That he said he had gone through the literature and he saw virtually nothing when he said that the psychiatrist's office should have been filled with these people because of the trauma that they had experienced.

And he talked about the whole notion of abandonment and how these people had been abandoned by their own government. And he said that he tried to deflect all of that when he was in camp himself. He said that one of the ways he did it was 01:37:00that he never went near the barbed wire. He never looked at the barbed wire.

He always stayed far within the camp because he said that "if I don't see the barbed wire, it's not there and I'm not being confined". And he went on to say that "what happens when a child is abandoned"? He says, "the child cries". And he said, that's why during the 1980s, he would say that "at these reunions, these people go back and the first thing they do is they cry and they cry," he says, and the reason for it is because he said they didn't cry in 1942. So I thought that that kind of was just a very eloquent expression of the trauma that those folks had gone through.

Mary Doi:

This is so wonderful, Bill. I've listened to some oral histories. But there might have been some kind of workshop maybe in the late 80s, early 90s where people like Chiye Tomihiro was part of this in giving oral history, and Bill Hohri and his wife and Bill Marutani, the judge. And what struck me about Bill's interview was how he talked about, as someone who can hear this testimony in such a different way than the rest of the commissioners that he said he would have to literally swallow his emotion and at the end of the day, he would have a sore throat.

I don't know if it was a metaphor, but I can just put myself in his position, how it must have been so hard to sit through, I don't how many days the hearings lasted, just swallowing your emotion and hearing your story, hearing your 01:39:00account of what it was like for you. I just got that same sense that you're absorbing it, that you're feeling it. And so you probably were not the only Sansei in the audience who were... whatever. You call yourself a Sansei, or do you call yourself a Nisei or whatever. But you weren't only person that was having this kind of response. So at the end of the day, would you ever get together with other friends from the audience or other people your age and talk about what it was like to be in that room?

William Yoshino:

I never did. Well, I mean, I talked to some individuals. I remember that I would talk to some of my colleagues about the experience of being in that room. I remember John Tateishi, for example, had come out to view the hearings. I think 01:40:00he went to all the hearings, and I'm sure we had conversations after that about what took place. I don't remember or recall specific discussions or conversations that I had. I mean I think that, I suppose it probably would've been easier to talk to some of the Sansei after that. I think it would've been hard talking to some of the Nisei who had given their testimonies because it was kind of walking on eggshells in a lot of different ways.

So I think that most of what I recall was to just do more idle chat with people, and I don't know whether or not that was kind of exhibiting kind of a defense mechanism to not want to face head on some of these things. I know afterwards, I mean, I would talk to people, and this is like years later, I would talk to people like Chiye about her experiences when we were more removed from the emotion of the hearing itself, that kind of thing. So I mean, I don't think that Chiye was ever removed from that emotion, but certainly I could kind of distance myself from it a little bit.

And I would talk to people like Shig Wakamatsu about their experiences of the time. And I remember talking to people like Sam Ozaki, because I used to ask Sam 01:42:00to go out and speak here or speak there. And same thing with Chiye and many others. And they were always very obliged. They felt obliged to do that. But yeah, no, I think the only time, I guess my catharsis to all of this has always been to just go out and speak to groups and to confront it that way. And I think that's probably the way that I've kind of been able to confront all of this stuff. I mean, I think you have to do it in some sort of an expressive way. And for me that's been the way I've expressed it.

Mary Doi:

Well, I really appreciate this interview, this opportunity to talk to you and 01:43:00just hear what it was like both as a staff member and then as an audience member and to hear the arc of how you're able to tell this story. It's going to be such a unique perspective that you're bringing that I just can't thank you enough for talking with us. And I know we could go on forever, but I think it's about time that we wrap up now. So again, I just want to thank you so much, Bill. This has been wonderful.

William Yoshino:

You're welcome. Thank you.