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MA: So also during that time, Hayakawa, Professor Hayakawa was appointed president of the college.

JH: Yeah, he, because of all this turmoil, I think the president resigned. And there was a faculty group that was supposed to be looking for another president to substitute. And if you're on the committee to select a president, you aren't supposed to run yourself. And somehow or another, I guess Hayakawa got to talking to the Board of Trustees, and they got him to become the president.

MA: What was your relationship with him like before the strike, when you two were just professors and faculty?

JH: He also lived, lived in Mill Valley, and so, you know, he, well, as a matter of fact, his kids would commute with me sometimes. And there was a niece of his that came to live with him from Japan, and she commuted with me. So, you know, we had sort of a casual relationship. He invited me to the theater one time, and we went to see "Rhinoceros" or something like that. And he always invited me to his New Year's Day cocktail party. You know, he would have all these hoity-toity people there, so that I used to end up in the kitchen talking to his maid and eating his Japanese pickles that he used to make himself. [Laughs] And the year of the strike, I didn't get my invitation. When he -- he was involved in the ruckus during the early period. He jumped onto the, you know, there's the famous event there, and things like that happened. And then after the strike -- well, it was even before the strike was over, I had occasion of having to debate him in the Japanese American community. And the Japanese American community, particularly the JACL, the leadership of the JACL is fairly conservative. And I never joined the JACL formally, I would do things with them and things like that, but I never joined them because they hassled Gordon during Gordon's trial and all of that.

MA: What did they, how did they hassle him?

JH: Well, they thought Gordon was rocking the boat. What the JACL wanted to do is to cooperate with the government and go meekly off to camps to show how loyal they were to the United States and all that kind of stuff. So it was the leadership of the JACL who took that position. And so my other brother and I, Ed, in between Gordon and me, we never joined the JACL. And then during the strike, however, the JACL, the San Francisco JACL had a subcommittee, the Civil Rights Committee. And in that group were all the liberals, and they supported the students. But the leadership of the JACL were on Hayakawa's side. And that year, at the annual dinner, they invited Hayakawa as a keynote, and the students went over there and picketed. So we had things like that, but on the Civil Rights Committee, there was people like Edison Uno, and he's a very interesting character in and of himself. But there were, you know, the various liberals, including people like Kathy Reyes, who was, who was sort of accused of being a cohort of Tokyo Rose, because she was in Japan at that time, married a Filipino guy and was working in the radio business there. But anyway, there are people like that that really supported the students. And eventually, that Civil Rights Committee split off and formed the Golden Gate chapter of the JACL in San Francisco.

MA: Did they split off because they were maybe frustrated with the politics?

JH: Whatever, yeah. And I became a charter member of that group, but I never went to any of the meetings. [Laughs]

MA: So you talked about a debate that you had with Hayakawa. What was the topic?

JH: Yeah, well, the JACL wanted to, you know, wanted to find out what was going on, and so they asked Hayakawa to a meeting, and they asked me to be... and people from the Civil Rights Committee, and also including a fellow named (Reverend) Lloyd Wake. Lloyd Wake is the minister of the Methodist church, and they had a Japanese American congregation in San Francisco. And he was a liberal and supportive of the liberal causes and that kind of stuff. And so it's, we had a general discussion about what the strike was all about and why we were striking. And Hayakawa giving, he's always been sort of an assimilationist. And I was kind of, well, surprised because initially I thought of him as being a lot more liberal, because his wife was on the board of the Berkeley Co-op and stuff like that. And so, and the wife was related to Frank Lloyd Wright, I think she was a niece or something. And her brother eventually inherited Frank Lloyd Wright's school in Arizona, that kind of stuff. So I thought, you know, but Hayakawa was continuing to shift more towards the right, and after being president of San Francisco State, he then became a senator representing the Republican party. And 'til the day -- I used to see him every once in a while -- he always was, pushed the assimilationist kind of theme, and his writing was all in that area.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.