<Begin Segment 60>

MT: So, we should talk about your collecting mania and the World War II items and then get to the Civil Liberties.

RS: I think, I mean, as you know, I've been collecting all my life, from the time I was a child. And the focus of the collection has changed periodically. Again, if I could interject one story because this is really funny. And this goes way back to when I first started painting I was telling you earlier today. And I was doing these, these really horrible abstract paintings. And at the time, of course, I thought they were pretty good. And my Aunt Sayo Kumasaka wanted to buy one of the paintings, and I gladly sold it to her for a hundred dollars. It was a lotta money and she took this painting and put it up in her living room. But it wasn't more than two years or a year and a half after that, that I realized that was really a dog and I didn't want my name on it, I didn't want to be associated with that painting, but she loved it. She was proud of it. And I offered to buy the painting back at three times what she paid for it. But it wasn't an issue of money, of course. This was her nephew and she thought it was great and she'd show it off and people would tell me, "Oh, I saw your painting." And I thought oh, and I'd roll my eyes, it was such an awful painting. And I didn't even have the nerve to look at that painting any longer 'cause I knew it was so bad. I didn't want anything to do with it.

Well, fast-forward now to thirty years, thirty-five years, right, and she has this painting up. One of my painting students, who happened to be from Japan, comes into my office one day with a photograph of that painting. And I looked at that and I said, "Mamiko, where did you find that?" And I'm dying. I see myself losing all my credibility as, not just a teacher but as an artist and everything else. And she's grinning from ear to ear. And she says, "Well, you know your Aunt Sayo and her husband have the biggest private Noritake china collection in the world." And I said, "I knew it was big, but that big?" And she says, "Yes." And she said, "You know, they had the big Noritake convention in Seattle and one of the workshops was to go to your aunt's house to see this collection." And she says, "My husband and I are interested in Noritake china because my husband worked for them in Japan, and we have a little modest collection." So she said, "I went there not knowing that that was your aunt." And she said, she said, "As everyone was looking at the collection, of course, I saw this abstract painting on the wall and I looked forward to see who did it and I saw your name in big letters on it." And I thought, "Oh my God. I'm, my worst nightmare come true." And for all those years I was able to sublimate that whole experience and there it came and slapped me right in the face, okay. And so, that's the first incident.

The second incident was eBay, since we're talking about collecting. And this is when I first started going on eBay and everything. And I was buying, I was looking for a lot of internment camp stuff, especially those yearbooks from high schools in camp. And so all of a sudden someone is selling one of the Granada, Camp Granada newspapers, you know, the newsletter that was printed in camp. And so I bid on it, and I got it. But along with it I got a photograph of that painting, at Sayo's house. And in front of the painting, sitting on the sofa is my Aunt Sayo and this hakujin guy. And the hakujin guy is the guy that sold me the Granada newsletter. And of course he was just waiting for my e-mail, which I zapped off immediately, you know, "What, where did you get this, what's going on?" And he wrote back and he said, "Your Aunt Sayo and Uncle Sheldon are good friends of ours, and every Christmas we go there to celebrate Christmas with them." And he says, "I knew I recognized your name when you sent me a check for the Granada newsletter." And he says, "Sure as heck," he said, "we called your Aunt Sayo and she says, 'Yes, that's my nephew,' and then we connected you with this painting, so we had our picture taken because we thought you'd enjoy that." So there it was, chapter two of that painting coming back to haunt you.

Anyway, so, I mean, there are millions of stories about eBay, but that one always floors me.

<End Segment 60> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.