Outro
Just two months after the bombing at Pearl Harbor, President Franklin DuBose about
sent executive order 9066.
This order gave the power to the military to evacuate all persons of Japanese descent
from designated areas in the west coast.
Of 120,000 US citizens and residents were evacuated into the relocation camps.
The evacuation was done so swiftly that some of the internees temporarily housed in assembly
centers, which were merely converted race tracks or fairgrounds.
Many people who were relocated lost most of their belongings.
Farms, houses, cars, trucks, and businesses were practically given away or lost altogether.
The conditions at the camp generally ranged from Spartan to harsh.
The US government also took the responsibility to help these internees to reestablish them
from camps to cities and towns in the United States outside the restricted area.
To carry out this responsibility, on March 18, 1942, a civilian agency known as the
War Relocation Authority was created.
The WRA relocation officers and relocation supervisors worked closely with local voluntary
committees of interested citizens and with the United States Employment Service.
To attract Japanese Americans to resettle in Cleveland, the WRA included Cleveland
in camp booklets and pamphlets.
The large number of people who went on to make Cleveland their home is a significant
part of the story of resettlement.
As youth chairman of the Japanese American Citizens League, Cleveland Chapter, I began
to have an interest in the story of the Japanese Americans who were interned during World War
II, mainly because both of my grandparents were interned at Manzanar.
Hi, I'm Steve Yano.
While little documentation of our cities, Issei and Issei, exists, we are very grateful
to those who have come forward to participate in this project.
It is important for future generations to understand our past and the struggles of our
ancestors.
It is difficult to imagine how a family, after leaving everything behind, could reestablish
themselves in a new unfamiliar territory.
Many chose Cleveland based on what they read in Flyers.
Others came here to rejoin family members, while some came directly to the city without
ever having been in a camp.
Cleveland's WRA supervisor, Robert Coulomb, was very supportive in helping families of
Japanese ancestry resettle in Cleveland.
He promoted and sought coverage for the cause of local Japanese Americans to be acknowledged
through news articles, radio, and television.
The J.C.L.
Cleveland Chapter's president, whom being selected by Cleveland Magazine as one of the most
interesting persons in Cleveland for their January 2000 issue, had interviewed Mr. Coulomb
a few years ago.
Well, it was a responsibility that he took as the area supervisor, and he actually was
in charge of the New York area, and he reversed his role with a person by the name of Mr.
Stear.
And so Stear went to New York, and Mr. Coulomb came to Cleveland.
And one of the things that his task was to try to get the Japanese Americans to assimilate
as quickly as possible into mainstream society in Cleveland.
His challenge that he had initially was that every thing that he might try to do always
came up with a government getting involved, either through the FBI or some sort of wanting
to find out what the Japanese Americans were going to do.
From what you can remember while interviewing Mr. Coulomb, were there any anti-Japanese
problems in Cleveland while relocating the families?
He only recalled a couple incidents.
One was a worker at that time that was called Cleveland Steel, a worker by one of the other
fellow workers called him a name that was very derogatory and calling him a Jap, that
it seemed to create a problem.
But through the Mr. Coulomb's efforts under WA, they were able to defuse that.
There was another incident where a person wanted to matriculate and get back into school
at Western Reserve University, which today is Case Western Reserve.
And through Mr. Coulomb's efforts, he was able to get that person back into the colleges.
At that time, there were several colleges throughout the state that would not allow
Japanese Americans entry into the universities.
And Ohio State was another one that there was a problem at one time, but they got involved
with the governor at that time, and they were able to get the people into school.
The story of our forebears cannot be told by a simple program such as this, but for
the few that we've interviewed, Harry Takeda, the Akiba's, Saida Yamane, and Masumi Hayashi,
can we begin to understand the challenges of our families and loved ones?
Mr. Harry Takeda was interned at the age of 17.
As most Japanese Americans who didn't take it seriously until it happened, his whole
family was relocated.
His family didn't give him much of an explanation.
The worst fear of my dad was the family was going to get split, you know, because mom
and dad were not citizens, and he definitely told me, you know, what my sisters and brothers
said, they can't not take you, you're an American citizen, you know.
And that's one thing I always remember, you know, I said, yeah, you're right, dad.
What was gone through your mind when you left home?
I was real happy because my dad told me, you know, hey, you're going to be the head
of the family, you know, you're going to have to keep the kids together, you know, and long
deal, they took us all, and dad himself was very happy, you know, that they didn't split
the family, and I couldn't even think of, you know, being 17-year-old and taking care
of, you know, family of five and us kids.
The Japanese families are actually very strict, you know, and what dad said was law, you know,
and then actually when we went to camp, I always used to say, I was like a dog, I was
chained up all day long, and then I'm chained at night, and that's exactly what we used
to do with our dog, and that dog would run crazy, you know.
What was your daily life like?
Well, as soon as I went into camp, the older, you know, men in the group, you know, would
tell us, you know, you're not going to get much to eat, so try to work where there's
our food, you see.
Well, the very first job I had, it was, you know, eight to four, you know, was preparing
vegetables and fruit, and we put so many fruits and vegetables for each mess office, so that
was my first job in the camp.
A lot of fun, because we, you know, a lot of Japanese, my age, which before we didn't
have, even though the world was, you know, not the best thing in the world, but being
at my age, the parents had no control over what we did during the day, so we had a ball
at the beginning, and that's the fun part of the whole thing, but the rest is not good.
And I got 18, I was not told to register for the draft, so they gave me a 1A, and maybe
three, four months later, they sent me another card, a draft card, it's 4C, and 4C is enemy
alien, okay, oh, it was 43, 1943, and then in the latter part of 43 or 44, early 44, they
said they're going to start drafting us, so then I get a 1A again, and in order to
be drafted, well, we had to answer two questions, a loyalty question, you know, and that was
such a turmoil, you know, that parents, especially parents, says, hey, you cannot draft our sons
out of the concentration camp, and anyway, these two questions, if you sign no to the
first one, I don't actually know the wording of it, but the second one says, okay, would
you serve on the United States, you know, armed forces, and I was told by all the people,
our parents, you know, the East states, hey, you guys sign no, no, you don't need to, you
know, fight for this country, and that was my feeling too, but then they said, if we
sign no, no, then they were going to ship us to Japan, you threw away your citizenship,
because on the second question, it says, you know, will you serve in the United States,
you know, armed forces, and you're refusing, and another thing they asked us, will you,
I don't know exactly the wording, but anyway, actually, will you serve, and if you sign
no to that, well, you threw away your citizenship, and that was, to me, the hardest thing I ever
did in my life, how was your family selected to leave the camp? Oh, they just said, we're
closing heart mountain down, we'll give you $25 in a train ticket to wherever you want
to go, one way train ticket, well, there's no selection, I mean, there's just, you better
leave, you know, what were the destinations that you were allowed to choose between?
The destination, well, see, I say our family was lucky, because one of the, my oldest sister
was already here in Cleveland, she took a leave, they could go to a city too, later
on in 1940, 1945, this is 45 now, and that's all, her and two of her friends came to Cleveland,
she was working, and then she called me and says, you got to get the family out, so come
to Cleveland and see how you like it. All the seven, only three of us were left in
Cabin, my mother, my sister, and I, and my sister didn't want to go back to California
because all the thing was going on, so she said, I could go east, so you saw on the bulletin
board that Seabrook Farm, New Jersey had openings for people to come, and they would feed you
and house you for a month or two months, what it takes, so my sister said, well, let's
go try Seabrook, and that's how I end up in Seabrook, New Jersey, and I stayed there
till 49, it was October of 45 when I entered Seabrook, and then I left in 49, which is
about March, I came to Cleveland then, for that, we had to leave Cleveland because, I
mean, we had to leave Seabrook because there was, the only person left was my mother and
I, and my brother and them, they left, so they said that you have to leave Seabrook,
so we did leave it in 1949, and came here, since my sister were here already, and they
would come down here, so we came here, and then I went to school at East Techno High
School for the next two years, and then I graduated, and that's part of schooling, there's more
to it, but that's up to there, you know.
So while I was in Seabrook, Cleveland was a good city to live, and it was all really
nice, and it was your east, if you were a west, they called you a job, you know.
Well, I worked in Salt Lake, and I met Yutaka Hashimoto, and we fell in love, and we just
got married, and after we got married, then we had, you know, he went to the Army, and
he was in 442nd Infantry at the beginning, and then I was going to have a baby, so he
decided to go to Fort Snelling in Minnesota, St. Paul's, and luckily he passed, he graduated,
so he went to Japan, and he served four years, and one year overseas in Japan, and then after
he came out, he worked in Salt Lake City in a hotel Yutaka, and it wasn't enough money
to keep us going, so he, at the time, he had three years of pre-med, so he could have gone
to school, but it was too hard to make ends meet, and he wasn't sure how he was going
to be treated.
So we finally went, he took up chick-sexing in the meantime, because that paid the most,
and it was good money-maker at that time, and so he went as a chick-sexer for a long
time, and then he got sick with pneumonia and stuff, and they were working him too long
of an hour, so he was laid up for two years, so I started working after that.
I worked at Cornell University in the Bacteriality Lab for twenty-nine years, and so after I
went sixty-two, I retired, and I met Yutaka, I mean, I met Jay Akiba through a mutual friend,
and so we got married, and I retired after working so long, that's when I came to Cleveland
to live, and I've been here sixteen years now, and there's no comments about it, I enjoyed
it, and Jay's been a good husband.
What were your feelings when you came to Cleveland?
Like what was it like those first few days?
Well, when I came to Cleveland, this couple, a funny incident happened, I was living in
a boarding house, and finally got a job, and I used to take a streetcar to the first
job I had, well, I was living in 19th and Chester, and I drove the streetcar from Chester
all the way to 200th St. Clair, and it was about, oh, I would say, two months before,
you know, I told my sister, you know, we should move the family out here, I was a person that
really hated that racist, you know, and anybody that called me a japper, I was ready to fight,
the first time I was called a man, I was in the streetcar, and the guy is ready to get
others off the streetcar, and he's eyeing me up, he says, hey, you damn jack, you know,
I mean, Puerto Rican, he called me a Puerto Rican, and I started laughing to myself, and
I said, hey, this city is pretty good, a person doesn't know a Puerto Rican from a
jet, you know, so that night I went to see my sister, I said, you know, I got called
a name, and I was called a Puerto Rican, so it's been two weeks, or three weeks, I had
been in Cleveland, and I think this is a place to bring the parents out, you know, and another
thing, I noticed, I mean, a lot of people that came to Cleveland never noticed it, but
I happened to travel superior road, and St. Clair, and Euclid, that's a three main street,
and I'm on the streetcar, this is the honest guy, too, I thought I was the only American
on the streetcar, I was hearing people talking, and none of them were speaking English, you
know, very few English who had spoken in the streetcars, then I glanced at their newspaper,
I was not the plane dealer, and some foreign paper, you know, so I thought, hey, this is
a city of a lot of foreigners, you know, and my mom and dad are foreigners, so they should
trade in, you know, and that's how it came to Cleveland, and I told my sister, this is
a city of foreigners, and people that lived here in 1940s, and 50s, and 60s, you know,
what do you say, that it definitely was.
My father saw this slogan, and it was Cleveland, the best location in the nation, and decided
he would come here to Cleveland, and my sister at that time had received, she had won a scholarship
to the University of Illinois, so she stayed in Chicago with my aunt and cousins, and my
mother and I came here to Cleveland with my father, so, and we settled in what is now
the, or it was called the Huff area, and there was like a little conclave of Japanese, and
it was the first time since I left camp that I had Japanese friends, because when we were
in Chicago, my father located way, way out on the northwest side of Chicago, which was
actually like a very strong Swedish American, and so my sister and I, you know, stuck out
like sore thumbs, and all these blonde, blue-eyed children at school.
Did you encounter any racism, or do you remember your parents discussing any problems that
they had?
Well, when we got to camp, you know, we split up, and there was no such thing as talking
about racism during that time, until we got out of camp, but being so young, you know,
we had our own problem, I had to handle my own, I never had any parents to guide me,
so, I had a brother and sister, but you know, there was different stories in parents, so
I really did run into too much prejudice.
I understand that, because I've been working for about 16 years, and I work for some plastic
company about 3 years, then, I don't know, but there isn't much of, they don't say no
at all, my religion, my religion, my position, so I'm going to come back and, you know, quibble
and that's about it, I guess.
I have no quibbles to make either, I'm happy that I'm here and quibble, and I guess somebody
above watching me, so I'm, and I have a good life, I can't complain.
When people would ask, you know, what are you, my father, you know, would always, you
know, say, well, tell them you're Chinese, because how would you even tell the difference,
you know, between Japanese and Chinese, and even when we were in California, he always
worried about us, and, but he thought, you know, we were cute little girls and nothing
will happen, you know, and, but then when, you know, we came home beaten up, and he would,
he got very upset, and I know he went and got us those buttons, the Chinese kids were
getting beat up by mistake, and, and so they used to wear these little buttons that said
I am Chinese, so they wouldn't get, you know, beaten up.
My father had Chinese friends who let him have a couple of the buttons, so my sister
and I used to wear those if we were going out, and, you know, because he didn't, he
didn't want us to get beaten up, but he, he used to always say, now, just tell them you're
Chinese and your name is Suzy Wong or something, don't, don't tell them you're Japanese.
And I think that had an effect on me, because my cousins used to say, no, I always tell
them I'm Japanese, you know, they would get beat up, and they, it was like, you know,
they would get mad at me, because I was denying, you know, my heritage.
After Saturday matinee, we used to always go, you know, to the, see movies on Saturdays,
and Warner Brothers used to have these movies that were really very, oh, you know, those
World War II movies were really bad, because that was difficult getting home, because my
sister and I would always get beaten up, because we were, you know, we looked like, you know,
kids, and that used to, my father used to sometimes meet us when he knew the theater
was, the show was over, but, but by and large, you know, it, it wasn't that difficult.
Every once in a while, we would encounter, you know, something, something like that.
But, but Cleveland has been good, we, and I, I say that we had, you know, we're, now
I think I mentioned that, you know, we always told, say that we're from California, because
we were born there, and it's just recently that I, when people say, you know, where's
your home, and I say, Cleveland, Ohio, but it's taken a long time.
Were there a lot of jobs available in Cleveland?
When I first came out, yes, there were these wartime jobs, you know, when they're making
anything for the war.
So there were jobs, I mentioned that, you know, I thought it was a city of many, many
foreigners, and they didn't know Puerto Rican from a Japanese, you know, the first time
I get called the name, I've been called, I was called the Puerto Rican, and so I thought
it was a people themselves, I thought, you know, it would be nice because they were foreigners
themselves, you know.
Looking back, are you happy that you came to Cleveland?
Yeah, I guess.
I met my wife here, had five children, got to retire, lived long enough to retire, you
know, my 16th year of retirement.
What did you tell your children about the resettlement?
Well, my wife and I did not tell our children too much, I don't know, I don't know, we
felt it was a shame or another lifetime, you know, and they didn't need to know too much
about it.
And then as the children got older, they never questioned us, so we didn't, you know, tell
them, but I took a vacation in 1968, I think, and I said, you know, I want the kids to definitely
see where I was, the concentration camp I was in, you know, by that time, well, they
had all the buildings tore down, except a couple of big missiles they were using then
as a county garage, you know, and that's all there was standing in, they did, but then
I told them, you know, I spent two years of my life behind barbed wire fence here, but
I decided that, but you didn't tell them, then it took grandkids 20 years later to
kill them the same place.
One thing that always amazed me because not until redress when we were, you know, striving
to get redress, and I actually talked to my sister and my mother and my relatives about
camps, and when my sister and I were talking, she was only three years older than I, and
the things that, you know, I had nightmares about, things that really upset me and that
I had flashbacks about, and I talked to her about, she had no recollection of, she didn't
remember, and then she would tell me the things that she remembered, and I had a hard time
remembering that, and so we were laughing and we said, isn't that funny how we were there,
we lived it together, and some things she remembers so strongly, and I don't, and the
vice versa, because I told her about, you know, how thirsty I was, and we had no running
water, and how I still, you know, I still remember all of the water coming across the
desert in the big garbage cans, and that they disinfected it, so it tasted like Clorox,
and we had to wait in line with a tin cup, and we each got, you know, a cup of water
as was our ration for the day, and I was first in line, and my mother, you know, handed
me the cup, and I started to drink it, and then I said, this is not water, and I spilled
it, you know, and so everybody's going, ugh, you know, she doesn't get any more water,
and I cried, and cried, and kept saying, I want water, I want real water, and I remember,
I said to my sister, you took me aside, and told me to stop crying, because I started
this chain reaction, you know, my mother started crying, and then the other mothers all started
crying, and then the kids were crying, the young kids were crying, because before that
it was very quiet, it was very, very quiet, so I remembered the quiet, and my sister
said, I can't remember any of this, I said, you don't remember having to wait in line,
and she said, I kind of remember, and she said, I don't remember taking you aside and
telling you to be quiet, and I said, I thought you were so wise, you know, because mom and
dad can't do anything about it, you know, quit crying for things that you can't have,
and she said, gosh, I don't remember that, and then, you know, she told me the things
that frightened her, you know, the shadows of the searchlights, and the machine guns,
and those things, you know, frightened her, and I said, no, all I remember was hanging
on to mom's dress, and my mother, you know, saying, please don't hang, because I was pulling
her down, but I remember always clutching on to my mother's dress, and then I remember
crying every night because we were in this desert, and all I wanted was to see the golden
fields of golden poppies, I always remembered, and every night I would have a dream of, because
next to us, when we lived in California, there was a field of golden poppies, and I used
to dream about that every night, you know, golden poppies, and I never went back to California
until, you know, like 30 years later, and we were driving along the highway, and I saw
a patch of golden poppies, and I could not stop crying, and my heart, you know, kept
going, what's wrong, and I was trying to tell them, every night I dreamed about those fields
of golden poppies, and I always wanted to see them, and I said, there they are, you
know, every, and it was like such a flashback, it was, you know, so real, I find it helps
me to remember and recall things that happened, and I have friends who say they, that are
my age, that were the same age I was when I was in camp, and they say they have no memory
of it, they can't remember anything, and I think, gosh, you know, I can draw you a map
of our camp, I can tell you where the mess all was, the laundry, where our barracks were,
you know, where the latrines were, you know, where the, I can, and they say they don't
remember anything, and so everybody is individual, everybody is, because I was six, I turned
seven, you know, when I was in the camp, and left when I was eight, like my husband won't
talk about it, once in a while he'll tell, he'll say something about it, and the things
that you remember, you know, like my sister will remember, she only remembered certain
things, and I only remembered certain things, and so it is an individual, individual thing.
Although discrimination was not a concern from money leaf settlers to Cleveland, Ohio,
the people in the city have very little understanding of the experiences the Japanese Americans
went through during the war. For the past two years, I've organized the Day of Remembrance
luncheon. The event allows for the former internees to share their experiences. Now,
on every February 19th, we're able to laugh, to cry, and to share our experiences together.
For the year 2000, several successful events were planned to educate and showcase the experiences
of the internees. One was the showing of the children of the camps produced by Dr. Satsuki
Ena of Sacramento, California. This event was co-sponsored by the JCL Cleveland chapter
and the JCL Cincinnati chapter held during the Cleveland's Day of Remembrance luncheon
on February 19th, 2000. In addition, the Cleveland State University Art Gallery presented the
Day of Remembrance program on February 17th, 2000. Some of Professor Masumi Hayashi's Japanese
American Interment Camp photographs, audio interviews, and the website were being exhibited.
Professor Masumi Hayashi's photographs and installations have gained attention in the
United States, Europe, and Japan. Her work has been exhibited and represented in many
respected museums and galleries, including the permanent collections of the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art, the Tokyo Museum of Photography, and the Victorian Albert Museum
of Art in London, England.
I was born in the camps at the end of the war, and my family went back to Los Angeles.
They came from LA. I was photographing prisons in 1980, and 1989 is when I started photographing
prisons, and I went on my sabbatical. When I was coming back from Los Angeles, driving
back through the desert of Arizona, I decided to find the camp that I was born in, which
was Hila River's relocation camp. That was going to be just one camp photograph in the
prison series. Then after that, the project just grew to a project in itself. The project
started in 1989, 1990. In 1992, I was asked to do an exhibit and use more of the camp
work. At that point in time, I thought it would be good to include interviews of the
attorneys who had been in the camps because I kept running in contact with these people
who had experiences and were willing to talk. That's how the project started. I did three
camps, three more camps that year for that show, and interviews. The interview, though,
that I did, I interviewed 13 people in California. As I was shooting, which was a pretty intense
project, the interview was an hour long. Now I've edited it down to nine minutes.
The way I photograph, it deals with time and space as well, because there are three, four
rows of film that I use for one photograph. I do a panoramic, a 360-degree span. Each
23, 22-degree element is covered by a negative. That indicates different moments in time.
It takes me about an hour to shoot the three rows, four rows of film. At that time, time
moves, space moves, I'm moving in space. Then again, I visited these sites 50 years after
the closing of the site. It was within a two or three-year time period that I was photographing
these sites. I wanted to record a sense of the past, a sense of history, and to make people
aware of the history of the land. Obviously, 50 years after the fact, you can't tell that
there was a camp there on most of the sites, the 10 relocation campsites that I photographed.
Some of them you can. There are elements. There are some structures still left. I wanted
to feel like archaeology, like memory, like time passing. It's three-dimensional and two-dimensional
because I'm playing with space. I'm shooting 360 degrees, yet I'm taking those images
and flattening them out on a two-dimensional space. What you actually see in the landscape,
you actually cannot see. It's the front, the back, and sometimes the front again. Within
your peripheral vision, you cannot see that image, but you can't tell that when you just
walk into the site. I think the most difficult part of the project was my very first camp.
I couldn't find it, and that's the one I was born in. AAA didn't have any information
nor the Chamber of Commerce in Phoenix when I was looking for the camps. When I got there,
I was driving through. When I got to Phoenix, I called the Buddhist Church because there
was a lot of misinformation. People just thought they knew where the camp was, but really didn't.
Through the Buddhist Church there in Phoenix, I was able to locate Maas. I forget his last name,
but he gave me specific directions to the camps. It was on an Indian reservation. At that time,
it wasn't easy to get to. It was a very difficult process. Since then, the tribe has made it a
law that you have to have either been born there or lived there for a certain number of years
in order to roam around freely onto their reservation. Since I was born there, it wasn't
that big a problem after that. The purpose of the Day of Remembrance for the year 2000 is to bring
together a different community, a wider community beyond just the Japanese Americans in Cleveland.
I think people who know about my artwork will also be curious about this project because not
only have I done this project, I've worked on different commissions in town and I do a number
of other kinds of photographs that are being collected corporately. I think this would encourage
the university community as well as the rest of the Cleveland community and the art community to
have an opportunity to express empathy for that time period. I've been working on the
Japanese American concentration camp series of photographs for ten years and it's evolved,
especially with the people that I've met, into a concept of a book. I haven't, at this point,
gotten a publisher. I'm very close though. When I got the Civil Liberties Grant a couple years ago,
I had my proposal indicated that I would write about certain people and that I found most
interesting during that camp time. I realized it would take me an enormous amount of time to write
because I'm a photographer and that's my main area of visual and writing just takes a much longer
time for me. I decided to hire major Japanese American writers to write about people I was
interested in from this camp time. There are seven people and seven writers that I hired and most
of the writing is done. Some are still being done. I just talked to Roger Daniels who's one of the
major historians on the internment camps and he's going to finish his writing sort of summing up all
the writing that's been done and the images for the book. We're pretty close. Some of the writers,
Lawson and Nada, who is the dialogue on the children of the camps piece that you'll hear Friday,
is a major poet and he wrote about Toyo. They're contemporaries and they're very close
and he flew in and spent the weekend with her and decided to write a poem. I asked him to write
prose but he wrote a poem about her which was very wonderful. Just a number of a good
other Japanese American writers and a good Canadian writer. When I got that Civil Liberties grant,
I also thought I could do a number of things including create my own website but after six
months I realized creating a website required more talent and time than I had and I hired my son to
design my website. We worked together and the design portion is mainly his. The writing is mine
and he did a really nice job of organizing the website. It's about 20 or so pages. It's a major
website and the concept of organizing it was pretty impressive. After he designed my website,
he got a job designing websites with Prudential. That's what he does now. We're in the process
of updating the website. I'd like to thank him because he's paying for the server and the domain
name and all these things and free consultation. He's been pretty supportive of this project,
of his time and money as well as other people and other grants. I think the year 2000 and beyond
this racial difference that was real obvious in the turn of the century and mid 1900s
that caused a lot of things like the Holocaust concentration camps in Termin and Canada and
here. I don't think that will be issues. I think there'll be other issues that cause
political issues that cause separation or discrimination. I believe that we need to be
careful of the past that we don't repeat the past. We need to be aware of the past
so that we don't repeat the past. If we're not aware of the past, we just can repeat the past.
My personal feeling towards what I believe the goals and missions for us as Asian Americans is
to continue to work towards diversity, continue to work in the areas of fair housing, equal
opportunity and to get a presence of Asian Americans involved in leadership positions.
Of course, one of the things that's been on the forefront for a long time is the
reconformation of Bill Anley. We're making inroads in our community right now with a
number of Japanese organizations, Japanese society, Japan Society, the Japanese Association of
Northeast Ohio. That was an effort that was brought about by the Council General from
Michigan, Mr. Amaki. We'll be seeing some joint programs together with the different
organizations and also working with the other Asian community. I think it's nothing but positive.
Future events will probably see things like Asian festivals involving all of the Asian
community working together. It looks good. Year 2000 is going to be interesting. A lot of networking
continues to go on. Best thing is to stay involved. I live a good life. I can't complain and I'm
happy I'm here.
Thank you.
