Interviews

1. Where did the Name Gidra Originate

2. Struggle and Activism

3. Gidra's Editorial Process

4. Gidra - Community Newspaper

5. Gidra Collaborations

6. Common Cause

7. Gidra's Contributors

8. Gidra's Content

9. Content Conflict

10. Camp Experiences

11. Cincip

12. Staff and Struggles

Mike Murase

Community activist

Gidra Collaborations

The relationships that we built with other newspapers, I mean, we had exchange with a number of papers, including the Black Panther paper, the Puerto Rican Young Lords Paper, there was a group of white working class youth, revolutionary youth in Chicago who put out a paper called Rising Up Angry which was a very good paper, and Native Americans and of course with a lot of the other Asian American newspapers that came to be over those five years we had exchanges.

And someone was asking me the other day about, you know like a, some graphics that appear in Gidra. Some of them we got from publications from China, Vietnam, other Southeast Asian countries, and we had exchanges with them too. And so I think, you know, movement newspapers supported each other.

identity newspapers

Date: September 29, 2011

Location: California, US

Interviewer: Kris Kuromitsu, John Esaki

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

Interviewee Bio

Mike Murase--attorney, activist, administrator, writer and photographer--has been involved in human services, social change, education, government and politics for over 40 years. As an undergraduate at University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), he was a co-founder of the Asian American Studies Center and later taught ethnic studies at UCLA, University of Southern California and California State University at Long Beach.

Mike’s roots in the Asian American communities are deep. He was a part of the core group who founded Little Tokyo Service Center (LTSC), a social service and community economic development agency serving Little Tokyo and greater Japanese American community throughout Los Angeles. Mike served as the board president for first 5 years. He also advocated for members of Japanese Welfare Rights Organization, Little Tokyo People’s Rights Organization and National Coalition for Redress & Reparations (NCRR), and authored Little Tokyo: One Hundred Year History.

In 2006, Mike returned to LTSC to join its management team and currently is Director of Service Programs. (August 2012)