<Begin Segment 46>

AI: So we're continuing our interview with Roger Shimomura. And Roger, when left off at the end of the last discussion before our break, you had just been talking about your first year in Kansas, and how the campus had been just, just erupted in activity, and how you were involved in some of that activity.

RS: Yeah, I didn't do any physical destruction, but I was involved in some of the protest marches and the, and the film that I told you that I shot. And they were very tumultuous times, and I, I felt very much a part of that. As part of that -- as I've been calling it -- a movement to the left. And I think, in some ways, that that probably sensitized that, sensitized me to a lot of the incidents that began to happen, moving to the Midwest at a time when there were very, very few Asian Americans living there. There were far more Asians, because University of Kansas has always had a very large foreign student population, due to the fact that they had a English-as-a-second-language program there, so a lot of students kind of gravitated to that area for that reason. But there were very few. I believe there were about four, maybe five, Nikkei on the faculty. And very, very few students. So it was --

MT: Could you say how big that university is? How many students there were?

RS: Well, at the time -- and currently it's about 28,000. But at the time, it was probably around 14-, 12- to 14-, something like that.

AI: And maybe if you could give us a picture about the ethnic composition generally, of the faculty and the students at that time.

RS: To be truthful, I don't think the, the ethnic mix has changed that much over the years. It's been redistributed. The number of Asian students have just multiplied by maybe ten or twenty, whereas the amount of African American students probably has fallen some, maybe Hispanic students as well. At one point, the largest foreign student group was Malaysians, amazingly. But, as I say, that has changed quite a bit. University of Kansas is still a white university. There's no doubt about that. And they're having a very hard time turning that around. And they're making some real sort of sincere movements, incentives and all of that. But it's, they're having a hard time. Very hard time.

AI: So into this, into this neighborhood and this campus, you and your wife moved and you had your first child, your son Mark.

RS: Right.

AI: And then after that you had two more children.

RS: Right. Spaced about two years apart. Had a second child, a girl, Joby, and then after that, another girl, Yoko. And it was probably within a few years of that that my wife and I ended up getting a divorce, and she moved up here. And one of the first things, I think, after she came up here was she became the artistic director of the Northwest Asian American Theatre, and did that for, I think, eighteen years.

AI: And the children also moved back with her to Seattle?

RS: Right, right.

<End Segment 46> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.