<Begin Segment 53>

AI: I wanted to ask you, also, about your own response to the diary writing of your grandmother. As the translations came to you and you started reading through these, if there's anything that stands out in your mind that you recall of your own reaction of seeing your grandmother's words translated for you?

RS: Well, the question that, that always came to mind was whether or not she intended these to be read and translated. And I think I've come to the conclusion that she did not, because the diaries were so personal in terms of writing down things that were of absolutely no interest to anyone but herself. And I really think that knowing my grandmother pretty well, that she would have wanted herself sort of officially represented to be a far more observant, insightful person than, "Today Obasan came over and I gave her this or she gave me that," and that kind of chit-chatty stuff, and preceding every day with what her blood pressure was and what the weather was like. There were a few times that she went into these forays in considerable depth about how she felt about something, but interestingly enough, the various people that have come to read the diaries, for various reasons, find them to be extremely valuable for that very reason, the fact that maybe she didn't think that other people were going to read this.

And I'm digressing here, but there's a woman in Edmonton, Canada, that teaches up there, that's writing a book on Japanese American midwives, and she heard about my grandmother and flew down to Lawrence and Xeroxed all of the diaries from 1913 to 1937 or '38 and brought them back, had them translated, and the translator told her, "There's nothing in here that's going to interest you." And so this woman, Susan Smith, wrote back to me and says, "I'm sorry to say that there's nothing in there that's going to be of value to me," and she was very polite and so on and so forth. And then, about three years later, she sent me this article that she had written about my grandmother. And she said, "I was entirely wrong." And she said in her studies she came across another woman that had written diaries that -- where scholars, upon looking at it said that there was no value to it, until they recognized the value of this sort of non-information. And she said she just sort of changed her attitude, re-read the translations, and found them to be incredibly important. So she ended up writing this major paper and presenting it at this midwifery convention. And it's expanding and it's becoming a major part of this book that she's writing right now. So, that was sort of typical of other people that have looked at the diaries and certainly, the Japanese scholar, what's his name? The...

AI: Oh yes. The professor who was --

RS: At Columbia. Yeah.

AI: I'm sorry.

RS: Anyway, he came from Japan to see, read the diaries, because he was writing a week-long article for the Japan Times on Japanese immigrant women that maintained diaries. And came to the conclusion that my grandmother's was one of the most interesting ones, to the point that he wrote this book called Modern Japanese Diaries, and wrote a whole chapter on my grandmother's diaries.

AI: Was it Donald Keene?

RS: Donald Keene.

AI: Keene.

RS: Right, right. So, you know, my impression was that there was nothing there. And then when I sort of flipped that switch and saw it as they saw it, then suddenly you became sensitive to the various nuances and starting to feel like you were really there next to her and just sort of drifting from, from day to day, in camp, and they felt quite different at that point.

AI: Well, now, at the same period of this, this first diary series, I think it was 1981 that the Commission, U.S. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians was established, and in '81 they had their hearings where so many Japanese Americans came forward and told their stories of what had happened during World War II and in the camps. And then it was shortly after that, 1982 and '83 when the Commission made their findings public and published their official report, for one thing, establishing that there had been no military necessity after all, during World War II, to take these actions against Japanese Americans. And I was wondering, when some of that news started coming out, did you have a response yourself or did that affect you?

RS: No, I don't think that, I don't think that information was new to most Japanese Americans. I mean, that's what they expected. I remember the sort of anxieties I had about the hearings that, if my mother and father were typical of Japanese Americans, no one would speak out. And that's what I was afraid of. And then when I started getting these reports that these incredible stories were coming out, and these horror stories and so on, you know, I was just so glad. I was so grateful. Then for the first time it, my parents seemed to have permission to suddenly talk about it for the first time. So I remember coming up here and asking them questions and they would answer me. I mean, it was just, this, this, so, such a luxury that they would talk about it so I started picking their brains about our family and things that I had never heard of before. And, and, to hear my dad tell some of these stories, was just amazing. But he still had a certain reticence about allowing other people to know these stories. I think he still felt that some of these were just for the family to know, which told me how sort of deeply embarrassed he was about that whole episode.

<End Segment 53> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.