<Begin Segment 31>

AI: When you look back on it now, what do you think were some of the significant changes in yourself during that period at UW?

RS: Well, I became more socially conscious. I mean, to put it simply, I sort of went from right-wing to left-wing and started to have some sense of awareness that the world was sort of divided up with a tendency that seemed to lean to the left or lean to the right, and that the world that I was living in was clearly on the left side. And that, that felt more comfortable to me. And that a lot of the baggage that I was carrying from that right side had to do with the kinds of schools that I went to.

MT: I would just like to ask about your family or your parents' reaction to this major change, because obviously they had had some influence in your going to the military and so on.

RS: Yeah, I think, I think when I was in the military I was further to the right than my parents were. And I think that, like most Japanese American families, they wanted something sort of, a little bit more moderate. Anything extreme they were against. And when I was in the military, came out of the military, I mean, the kinds of things that were coming out of my mouth about what I believed in and values that I had and all that were really too extreme for them, even to the right of them. And then when I started changing, and somehow bypassed them, went through what they thought was the ideal, and the pendulum started swinging to the left, they clearly had problems with that, too. And then, but there was a point of no return and I went past them to the left and never came back. So yeah, there were a lot of very interesting moments when it was clear that my opinions had changed radically and I think they recognized that.

AI: And also, did they have a reaction to your decision to shift from the commercial art field into graduate school --

RS: Yeah. My dad in particular was the one that was most vocal about that because he was against me going into commercial art from the beginning. He thought it was a waste of money for me to go to a university when all my uncles, all the Tanagi brothers were all graduates of Burnley art school. And so he sort of saw, well, if you wanna be a commercial artist, you go to a two-year art school. You don't go to a university and, which tied in with what he wanted. He wanted me to be this doctor, some... so, yeah, there was great reluctance on his part to admit that his son went to a four-year university to become a commercial artist. And then, I went through this other change when I decided to go into painting and that became a real abstraction for him as to what a painter did. And so, it wasn't really until I became a professor that he, I think he really felt comfortable in telling people what his son did, hoping that people wouldn't ask him what he professed.

<End Segment 31> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.