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MA: So today is July 4, 2008, we're here with Professor James Hirabayashi. I'm Megan Asaka, the interviewer, and on the camera is Dana Hoshide. And we're actually in Denver, Colorado, at the Japanese American National Museum conference. So thank you so much for doing this interview with us.

JH: You're very welcome.

MA: So we actually already have an interview with you that goes more into your prewar experiences. So I thought that for this interview today we could talk more about your postwar academic career. So I wanted to start with your time at the University of Washington as an undergrad, and how you became interested in anthropology, and if you could talk about that.

JH: Well, it was about a month after the end of the war, and I had just graduated from high school in Spokane, John Rogers High School. And so got on a bus and returned to Seattle about a month before school opened. And I stayed with the director of the YMCA where my brother stayed before the war. And he took me in, he got me job. Let's see, I was working on flower gardens as a way of getting a little money before school started. And, you know, I was raised on a farm so I knew what things were like. So I was working in the garden one day, and the lady comes by, the lady of the house comes by and says, "Oh, you're planting those bulbs upside down." They were flower bulbs, I didn't know anything about flowers. And she says, "Oh, well, you're Japanese, I guess, so you know what you're doing." [Laughs] So anyway, that's how I started out. Got enough money to enroll at the University of Washington. And I went there. At first I was going to go take something like pre-med, because that's what all parents want you to do. And, but I wasn't sure I wanted to do that, and I was talking to a friend of my brother Gordon's who was going there, and she sort of looked out for me like an older sister. And she said, "Well, why don't you just take pre-major, and take a series of different kinds of courses?" And she says, "Well, why don't you try anthropology?" And I says, "What's that?" And so that's how I took anthropology the first term. But I just took pre-major until I was about a junior, and then people says, "Well, you can't graduate unless you have a major." And so around that time, I went on an archeological dig to Eastern Washington, Moses Lake area. And I liked the companionship and everything else, but I didn't like archeology because it was too much like farm work, and I went to college to get off the farm. And so I went into social and cultural anthropology. And it was around junior year that I went there, I mean, switched majors. And finally got my BA in anthropology, and I started my M.A. program there.

MA: At the University of Washington?

JH: At the University of Washington.

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