Jim Matsuoka

Haruyuki Matsuoka was born on July 27, 1935, in Los Angeles and was the youngest of three children born to Issei parents Toichi and Hatsuyo (Sawada) Matsuoka. The family lived in a bustling neighborhood on Towne Avenue that was considered to be part of Little Tokyo at the time. He attended 9th St. School, while his sisters—both of whom were significantly older—attended Maryknoll School, a private Catholic school. Like many Nisei, he took on a Western name, "Jim," while in elementary school. Toichi worked at a drug store. ^[1]

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Jim remembers his father burning Japanese things in the house like many other Nisei. The Matsuokas were removed to Manzanar in March 1942 and remained nearly for the duration, living in Block 11. Jim attended elementary school at Manzanar, though he remembers ditching school and roaming the camp with his friends, and fighting with kids from Terminal Island who lived in adjacent blocks. He also contracted both measles and chicken pox in camp. He and his parents left Manzanar on November 11, 1945, just ten days before the camp closed. ^[2]

Upon leaving Manzanar, the family lived in the Los Cerritos trailer camp in Long Beach, which Matsuoka described as "barely fit for human habitation." He attended Edison Elementary School and Thomas Jefferson Junior High School. The family later moved to the Jefferson Park neighborhood west of downtown Los Angeles, where Matsuoka attended Foshay Junior High School and Dorsey High School. The family moved again to the J-Flats neighborhood northwest of downtown, and Matsuoka eventually graduated from Belmont High School. While he did well academically and sang on the glee club and played B football at Belmont, he also got into trouble and became part of a club/gang called the Black Juans. Through this period, Toichi struggled to find work—he is listed as a dishwasher in the 1950 Census—and the family was largely supported by Jim's sisters, who worked as nurse's aids. ^[3]

While taking classes at Los Angeles City College—mainly for the parties as he later wrote—he also became increasingly involved with the Black Juans, which grew in influence and clashed with other largely Sansei gangs from other parts of the city. As other members got drafted, he took on a leadership role and became known as "The General." But as the violence escalated—including a highly publicized shooting involving members of the Baby Black Juans—Matsuoka decided he had had enough. "All the public dances are gone, all the parties are gone, now we're in a continual state of warfare, and that's no fun, you know. I just want out of this thing," he told Martha Nakagawa in a 2010 oral history. He ended up serving in the army from 1958 to 1960, stationed at at Fort Huachuca, Arizona and Fort MacArthur in San Pedro, California. He was honorably discharged. ^[4]

Upon leaving the army, he worked in the aerospace industry and became involved in union activity, eventually serving as a shop steward for Local 887 of the United Aerospace Workers for a decade. He also continued his education, eventually graduating from California State University Long Beach with bachelor's and master's degrees. He married Faye Tazawa in 1970 and they had a son. ^[5]

In the late 1960s, Matsuoka began to get involved in the Japanese American/Asian American community as one of the many Sansei and other young Asian Americans who began to question the status quo. His first involvement came when he saw destitute Issei in and around Little Tokyo and worked with the West Los Angeles chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) and others to start what became the Pioneer Project, an organization that helped Issei gain access to county and state services and that also took Issei on flower viewing trips and other outings. ^[6]

While a student, he was part of the Organization of Southland Asian American Organizations (OSAAO) and was their representative at the first Manzanar Pilgrimage in December 1969. At the pilgrimage, Matsuoka made an oft quoted speech that criticized Japanese American passivity and silence after the war. "The only people who ever came out of this camp were people without souls, the 'Quiet Americans'... When people ask me, how many people are buried in the cemetery? I say, 'A whole generation is buried here.'" He later became a member of the Manzanar Committee , which planned subsequent pilgrimages, and, along with Rex Takahashi, drafted the wording on a plaque put up at the Manzanar site that called it a "concentration camp" and that attributed the incarceration of Japanese Americans to "war hysteria, racism, and economic exploitation." Though controversial at the time, that text was eventually adopted over the objections of the California Historical Landmarks Advisory Committee and remains intact to this day. ^[7]

After finishing his master's degree, he began working for the Little Tokyo office of the Community Redevelopment Agency (LTCRA) as a liaison, essentially a public relations officer. The LTCRA was a Los Angeles city agency charged with managing the redevelopment of Little Tokyo, balancing the interests of residents, Japanese American community members, and business interests, particularly the growing number of Japanese companies that were moving into the neighborhood. Disturbed by the eviction of indigent Issei residents of old buildings that were to be torn down to make room for new development, Matsuoka quit the CRA after just six months and became active with community groups including the Little Tokyo Anti-Eviction Task Force and Little Tokyo People's Rights Organization that opposed the evictions and alliances with Japanese businesses that he felt did not have the best interests of the Japanese American community at heart. ^[8]

Like many other Los Angeles redevelopment activists, Matsuoka became a supporter of monetary reparations for the mass removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, becoming one of the founders of the National Coalition for Redress/Reparations (NCRR). His support for redress stemmed in part from anger over his family's lost savings stemming from the incarceration. He testified before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) in the summer of 1981, his fist-pounding admonition to the committee not to rush him becoming one of the enduring moments of the hearings. He was also a team captain on the NCRR's lobbying trip in 1987 just prior to the House of Representatives passing the redress bill H.R. 442 that ultimately became the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 . ^[9]

Throughout this period, Matsuoka worked at Cal State Long Beach as the associate director of their Educational Opportunity Program, in charge of student retention, retiring after twenty-three years. He remained active in NCRR and spoke often about his incarceration experience, including teaching a class on that topic to Los Angeles Unified School District teachers for some thirty years. He was also a regular presenter at Tuesday Night Café programs in Little Tokyo. Among his honors are the Fighting Spirit Award from NCRR in 1993 and Sue Kunitomi Embrey Legacy Award in 2019 from the Manzanar Committee. He passed away at age eighty-seven in 2022. ^[10]

Jim Matsuoka Will Not Be Rushed . Documentary film by Robert M. Shoji for Visual Communications Productions, 2024. 5 minutes.

Matsuoka, Jim H. "Little Tokyo, Searching the Past and Analyzing the Future." In Tachiki, Amy et al., eds. Roots: An Asian American Reader . Los Angeles: Asian American Studies Center, University of California, 1971. 322-34.

Nikkei for Civil Rights and Redress. NCRR: The Grassroots Struggle for Japanese American Redress and Reparations . Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press, 2018.