Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: William Hohri Interview
Narrator: William Hohri
Interviewers: Tom Ikeda (primary); Gary Kawaguchi (secondary)
Location: Los Angeles, California
Date: September 12, 1997
Densho ID: denshovh-hwilliam-01-0006

WH: We had, in our meeting, we had meetings every month and we spent about half the time just talking. Somebody would talk about this or that and the other things, and we never shut them up. We just said okay, you want to talk about... because that was part of redress movement. It wasn't just organizing this and organizing that. People tried to do that and I don't think that was... you know, that might have been a model for something else, but it wasn't a good model for the redress movement, not as far as Nisei were concerned, and I don't know about Sansei, because we didn't have Sansei in our movement. We had a couple who drifted in and drifted out. But as far as Nisei were concerned, they had to get things off their chest. There were things they had to talk about and some of them were really, you know, really feeling. I'd just sort of sit there and say, "Oh, wow." Like one woman said when she left camp, she basically separated herself from her parents for a while because she was ashamed to be Japanese. And she was able to admit that to herself, and that's terrible thing to have to admit to yourself. And of course she reconciled that, but the first part of going, leaving camp, that was part of her experience. And so that's a hell of a thing to have to live through, and a hell of a thing to admit. But those are the kinds of things that happened to people. And my sense was that there was a lot of that kind of stuff in the guts of Nisei that we worked with in our movement.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.