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  Michael Yoshii   MICHAEL YOSHII
Pastor at Buena Vista Methodist Church in Alameda
He testified at the redress and reparations hearings in the 1980's.
  

 
 
  And I think the film points out, you know, that there's a great deal of diversity in the Japanese American community, for one, that there are many different voices. And we haven't heard those voices before.

The images that we grew up with, that we didn't have those pictures of, of those who resisted and those who called the constitutionality of the internment order, they're there in our history and that has not been prominently shared with people before.

I think that they were young people who were studying the issue, trying to understand it for their own lives in a very real way and basically were studying their constitutional rights. And there was a certain amount of moral and spiritual undergirding to decisions that were made. And I think that speaks to me very much, that both in terms of my vocation as a pastor and a clergy person where justice is often about what is the right thing to do.

It's not about what's the politically feasible thing to do. It's not about what's going to be easy or what are we going to win here. It's just about what's right.

 

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