Discover Nikkei

https://www.discovernikkei.org/en/interviews/clips/980/

The unheralded help from beyond the community

I remember there’s a fellow by the name of Ferdinand Galvaz, a Filipino fellow. He used to be the president of the Filipino Association, and as you know, in Stockton, there’s a large Filipino community. He heard that the Filipinos in Stockton had passed a resolution opposing the redress for Japanese Americans. When he read that, he went directly to Stockton, right away, and said, do you know what you people really just did? Do you really understand what’s happening? They told him, the Filipinos all said how they fought against the Japanese in the Philippines and he said, yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. He said you people don’t even know what you’re doing. He said, these are not the people you fought against in the Philippines; these were the people that fought on your side in the Philippines. And so he talked to them, you know, and they changed their mind, and so he didn’t have to do it.

But I think this is very typical of so many non-Japanese who really went all out to help us, and I think we tend to sort of ignore them. There were lot of others, white people who have done a great deal, and yet we don’t even talk about it. I think the Japanese Americans did not do this all by themselves. I think we had a lot of help from the others.


Filipino Community of Sacramento and Vicinity (organization) governments politics Redress movement

Date: July 1-2, 1998

Location: California, US

Interviewer: Mitchell Maki, Darcie Iki

Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum

Interviewee Bio

Clifford Uyeda was born on January 14, 1917, into a family of oyster farmers in Olympia, Washington. Uyeda studied at the University of Wisconsin and from 1941 to 1945 attended Tulane University Medical School in New Orleans, LA. Uyeda went on to become a medical doctor in San Francisco, CA.

Uyeda became involved in the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) in 1960 when he served as San Francisco Chapter chair of the Issei Oral History Project. He helped in establishing the School of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University and played an important role in restoring the U.S. citizenship and presidential pardon of Iva Toguri, also known as “Tokyo Rose.”

After retiring from medicine in 1975, Uyeda became a full-time activist. In 1977, Uyeda served as National JACL chair of the Japanese American Incarceration for Redress committee. He was elected to serve as president of National JACL from 1978 to 1980. Uyeda continued to serve the community in various roles until his death from cancer in 2004 at the age of 87. (April 11, 2008)

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