<Begin Segment 23>

AI: Well, at, at the very end of 1944, you made a comment in your Frying Pan column, "The evacuation has opened new vistas of opportunity for the Nisei. It has accomplished in a sudden, revolutionary, and oftentimes cruel manner something that would have come to pass in a generation or two. And the Nisei and their offspring will profit when the pain of being wrenched from their homes is forgotten." In the same column, you go on to say that the prewar Japanese American communities were isolated, surrounded by prejudice, but that now, due to the evacuation, the Nisei had lost their provincial, narrow outlook and discovered the real America. What, what was it that you believed had been accomplished, even though at a painful price?

BH: Well, back in 1941, the, I would say 95, maybe even a larger percentage of the Japanese Americans lived on the West Coast. And they were concentrated mostly in the Los Angeles area, San Francisco area, and Seattle area. Today you find Japanese Americans in every state of the union. There are hundreds of them in places like Florida, for example, or Boston, in Massachusetts. And back then we were hemmed in, partly or largely by pressure from the outside which resisted our going out, and partly because we were afraid to go out.

Well, we were torn out of that kind of situation and scattered all over the country, so that today you have what, 12,000 in Chicago doing almost everything from practicing law to manufacturing contact lenses to whatever. In Colorado, we have the president of the State Senate is a Sansei. And a few years ago, the mayor of the third largest city in Colorado was a Nisei. And we have members of Congress who are Japanese Americans. We have the chief of staff of the U.S. Army is a Sansei or Yonsei from, from Hawaii. And so fields of opportunity were opened to Japanese Americans who had the talent, the education, and the background to succeed, whatever success means.

But back before the war, a Japanese American could go to the University of Washington and get a degree in pharmacy. And what he could do was open up a little drugstore in Japantown. He wasn't going to be hired by a big pharmaceutical company to do research. And that was true in most other fields. We have Japanese Americans who are officers in very large corporations, business firms, because the door was opened and these people were given an opportunity to exercise their talents and their abilities, their education, their skills. And that sort of opportunity did not exist in 1940. It used to be said that there were more Nisei wearing Phi Beta Kap-, Kappa keys piling oranges and polishing apples in the markets of Los Angeles. Well, you don't find that now. These guys with the Phi Beta Kappa keys are taking the kind of role in the American system that they are entitled to by their education, by their intelligence, by the drive and whatever. Economic success. We have politicians elected in areas where there are not an overwhelming number of Asian votes.

And so out of the terrible experience of the evacuation, we were blasted loose, blasted free from the confines of the Little Tokyos, where we were confined partly because we didn't have the courage to go out, but more by the pressures from the outside keeping us in there.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 2001 Densho. All Rights Reserved.