<Begin Segment 11>

TI: So, I'm wondering, when you, when you, sort of start talking about your father in the context of sort of, you know, of wife-husband relationship, are you sort of likening yourself to your father in some ways? In how he looked at things?

GH: Well, I like to be able to say that, but he was, he was really a rock of ages, stable, and when he made up his mind, he's, doing it and saying it were identical to him. So far as he could, he did what he said or what he believed in. So belief and practice were overlapped as far as he's concerned, and farming gave the best opportunity for that in his view.

TI: But many people would say the same thing about Gordon Hirabayashi -- what he said, he did.

GH: Well, so he was a model in one sense. So I followed -- I had that kind of a model where, where other people would say, "Well, now we live in the real world, let's get practical about this. You can't go bucking the government," and all that sort of thing. That was just a, just a side line obstacle. The main line was going through the principles and finding ways to maintain it. And so I followed him in many ways, more than I thought. I'm discovering that. I thought I lost Dad, unfortunately by the circumstances that made me become English-speaking. And increasingly as I grew up, maturing meant maturing in English, intellectually, and even spiritually I'm expressing those things in English. I don't know the Japanese words for faith. I know the words like shinko and so on, that's deep faith, you know. But I don't know the usual thing. So I thought, "Gee, I'm, really lost a real inspiration here." But then attending a conference in Japan I found, I found them talking about early Christian leaders, including his, Uchimura Kanzo, his system, and his part. And I found out I know what he's talking about. I could even give him certain kinds of perspectives as to how, how that sort of thing transformed into a system in a branch of that movement in America. This was different, 'cause one of the things that he was trying to develop indigenously into Japanese was a Christian principle that fits into the Japanese living system, I mean cultural system, Japanese familial group orientation over individuals, that sort of thing. Not to take the missionaries that bring in the message from several denominations and get it translated and things, and having them absorb that and adopt it. Uchimura wanted to get the principles, the spirit as it could naturally flourish in Japan, in the context of Japanese culture and existing values. And this is, this is one picture of that, to Dad.

TI: And I've heard you before --

GH: But he did this, not in Japan, but in, and using Uchimura's, that shows Uchimura's greater than just Japanizing Christianity. It's just making it practical in some other context, 'cause it's being, not Japanized, per se, but indigenized for the Issei community here in America. So they resisted joining other churches and so on, because it just wouldn't meet the ball so far as Uchimura was preaching.

TI: And I've heard you say, recently you've realized that some of the teachings of Uchimura, that there are similarities with some of the things that you saw in the Quakers...

GH: Yeah.

TI: ...in that there was this link. And it's almost like, when you went back to this conference, it was through your father that this link was made, that in some way...

GH: Uh-huh.

TI: ...you had been influenced by the way your father had lived. And so it's almost brought to a circle.

GH: Yeah, well, that's right.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.