<Begin Segment 34>

DG: Tell me about your work with the Issei and the abuse in the Issei.

BU: Oh. One, number one, I had a lot of, lot of people I knew that are Issei and they're more likely to say okay to come to see them, but Sue Tomita, who is the head social worker at Harborview Hospital, was making a study on domestic abuse. So she came to me and said, "Ben, you know a lot of Isseis." "Yeah, that's right." "Would you help me do this study?" I says, "Fine. We'll work on it." So within, within an hour after, she told me we were interviewing patients and then by this, this was around November, December, and by May she had her Ph.D. paper written.

DG: 19' what?

BU: This is couple years ago, 1996 or '7.

DG: But give me some examples of some of the abuse that you found.

BU: There was one Nisei that used to call me up usually on a weekend Friday or Saturday at two o'clock in the morning. He'd come back and he was drunk and he want sex or something, and his wife wouldn't do any of it, wouldn't have any part of it. So he'd get mad and beat her up and after he'd beat her up at one or two o'clock in the morning, she'd call me and say, "Come up and see me because I'm hurting." But the thing is that she wanted me to write down details exactly what happened and where the bruises were and so forth. Well, so that, I'd take that back home and file it away in a secret place, and I had a whole bunch of them that call me about that. Some of the Isseis used to call me, too. So we picked out those people that I knew that had experience, and we filed those things away. But she used that in her Ph.D. paper so it worked out.

DG: Well, how much of it do you think there was in the community?

BU: Quite a bit. A lot of Isseis beat up their wives. There are some Niseis and we did two studies, actually, with Sue, Sue Tomita, one that we selected among the Isseis and Niseis, and then we picked out, picked out some that would be surprising.

DG: How much extramarital affairs and things do you think there were in the Issei community?

BU: There were some, but there is more beating up than extramarital.

DG: Was there... in way back, was there a lot of prostitution, do you think?

BU: Not necessarily prostitution. It would be...

DG: This is probably when the men were single, clear back in the teens and things, but I have haven't heard it so much lately.

BU: Lately because of HIV and the rest of it, I think it's turned it down. But there's a lot of, lot of activity. We're talking about twenty or thirty years ago or more.

<End Segment 34> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.