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MA: So you sort of switched, then, your focus a little bit, when you went to San Francisco, from more of the Far East Japanese...

JH: Well, to some extent, because there were a lot of different ethnicities, and, you know, if I'm going to train students in field work, well, they're available there. But what happened was that we put in a grant to the U.S. government, National Institute of Mental Health had a grant program, and we focused on the urbanization of American Indians in the Bay Area. There was a program to shift Indians off of the reservations and into the urban areas. Because the reservations weren't in very economically good, places, you know. So they had a special program to shift Indians into urban areas, into jobs and training and all that. And so I got a bunch of students involved in a research project, and we did this study. And it was quite interesting. Some of the, I got students to focus in on different kinds of tribes, and they would go to the reservations to see what conditions there were.

MA: And then they would compare to sort of the more urban conditions?

JH: Yeah, compare, and I traveled in the Southwest at that time, went into Pueblo and Navajo groups. Navajo were quite interesting because they were trained as special linguistic in the army also, interpreters, so some secret codes would be sent out in Navajo language, which Japanese didn't know. And anyway, I would go to some of their ceremonies, and they would have veterans doing ceremonies, and they cleanse themselves from... and sometimes they would have Japanese scalps as part of the ceremony. I said, "Oh, my golly." But anyway, after that project, soon after that project, there was a colleague of mine who happened to be working on a project in Nigeria, Eastern Nigeria. He was training administrators there, and he's a psychologist. And I played on the faculty baseball team with him. All that baseball experience I had in camp came in... well, and I played on the social science team. And the project that he was on had an anthropologist who was moving to another area of Nigeria, and so he wrote and says, "Hey, do you want to come to Africa?" I says, "Heck, yes." Because I hadn't, I'm not an African specialist, so that I hadn't taken any courses. And I figured if I don't go there with an opportunity like this, I'll never get a chance.

So I took leave and I went to eastern Nigeria to work for the Eastern Nigerian government in rural community development. And three months after I got there, Eastern Nigeria seceded and became Biafra. And three months after that, the Biafran civil war started, and it started about fifteen miles from where I was working, so I could hear the artillery and everything. And it was, so I was one step ahead of the army. Oh, by the way, I should say that they were fighting over oil then, in about 1967, and they're still fighting over oil there. And the Biafran civil war, there were a million Nigerians that were killed. International powers jumped in on both sides because of the oil reserves. There's one other large oil reserves at the mouth of the Niger River there, and it's still bad, bad, bad there, after all these years.

Anyway, I was one step ahead of the army coming out of there, and I got back to San Francisco State. As soon as I got there, all this civil rights movements, middle of that, there was the free speech movement at Berkeley, and then the students, the Asian American students, when I got back, they'd gone down to me and they asked me to the faculty adviser for their group called Asian American Political Alliance.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.