John Ohashi: Interview
Pacific Ties did an interview with John Ohashi, one of the founding members of Pacific Ties, for its fall issue. Below is the full transcript. For the entire issue, read the online version here or email pacties@media.ucla.edu for a copy.
PACIFIC TIES: I heard we were a group founded on advocacy.
JOHN OHASHI: I don’t know about advocacy, but at the time there was really nothing. So, the first issue was pretty political. I wrote this article [points to an article in the first issue, which he is flipping through]. This was back in the late 70s. It was this case called Bakke versus Regents. This was one of the first affirmative action cases. This is the one where UC Davis Medical School saved 16 slots for minority students, and Allan Bakke couldn’t get into UC Davis Medical School, and he alleges that the reason he didn’t get in was because he was white and that the minorities who weren’t [as] qualified as he was [were] given the slots. So he couldn’t get in and sued. And so. It was a big issue. And the point I was raising here in all those discussions back in those days about Asians [was that] it was always Asians and it wasn’t broken out into Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese. Asian was just one big clump. So I was just trying to make that point that if you wanted to talk about the Asian experience you had to break it out into different groups.
