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JH: But anyway, after I finished the research, and I came back to the University of Washington, I worked a year as kind of a researcher. And then I applied to Harvard, and there were a couple of professors that knew my professors in Japan and all that kind of stuff. So that through those kinds of connections, I got into the, what's called the social... well, I got into the anthropology program.

MA: At Harvard, the PhD program.

JH: Yes. And, however, I get into a program that was much more oriented to social sciences, so that I had to take some sociology and psychology as well.

MA: Is that compared with the program at the University of Washington?

JH: Yeah. It's quite a drastic change for me, because going to the University of Washington during, right after the war, and then going back to Harvard, even though I had a PhD, I mean, a Master's degree, my peers over there at Harvard, you know, they're educated at those small liberal arts colleges, Swarthmore and Haverford, Bryn Mawr and places like that. And I found out that I wasn't really educated in a general sense. You know, I didn't have a good literature background in English, any of that kind of stuff. And so, but I managed to hang in there, and I wrote my dissertation on the research that we did in Japan. I had to shift it around quite a bit because the orientation at Harvard is quite different from the University of Washington.

MA: Were there other Asian Americans at the, especially in the humanities at that point?

JH: No. I think when I got my PhD in anthropology, there were something like a half a dozen other Japanese Americans who had gotten their PhDs in anthropology in the whole country. And then I was hired at San Francisco State. I wanted to, well, as I say, my family's in Seattle and all that, and I didn't want to go back to the University of Washington because when you're a student, it's hard to come in as a peer, you know. And so I was just looking hopefully to get somewhere in the west, and then this opening came out at San Francisco State. And I was only the second Asian American on the faculty at San Francisco State.

MA: Who was the first one? Was that Hayakawa?

JH: The first one was S.I. Hayakawa. And, of course, he had an international reputation as a semanticist. And then after... well, I was hired in 1959, and I was busy just trying to fit into the program. Anthropology's an interesting field, and I was focusing on ethnic groups in San Francisco as a source of field material for students, you know, and all that.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.