<Begin Segment 5>

LB: How would you describe your father as you look back on him as a father?

EY: That's a very good question. Because for the first nineteen years -- well, my first nine months, he was in Chicago, I didn't know him. So when he came back, I was already almost one year old and I got to know him for the first time. But as we grew up, because he was gone a lot, finishing his PhD dissertation, teaching in Japan, and because we never earned much, he never earned much money, life was tough. And I grew up feeling like he was very insensitive. And I didn't understand the pressures that he was going through just normally, being a professor and that whole thing, getting tenure, getting promoted. But also the setting of being one of the very early people to break the color barrier at the university. I didn't understand all those pressures. And then I think as an Asian American, Japanese American male, he didn't have a lot of communicative ability in terms of personal things and personal struggles, so he kept that in. So I always felt a lot of tension growing up, and I thought he was very, not very sensitive to our family needs, needs of my mom, needs of the kids. And so I had a lot of, sort of, resentment towards him.

Now, the one thing that really helped us bond, though, was that he was a sports fanatic when he was younger, and he followed Major League Baseball and whatnot. So the thing that we would do when I was young was play baseball, I'd throw baseball to him all the time. And he would take me to the Japanese American League in Hawaii, and it was all the Asian, Japanese Americans had formed this really wonderful league, and it was very high profile. And so we'd go on Sundays and we'd watch the games and I'd eat peanuts as a little kids, and he'd explain the game to me. So I really developed a love for it early on. The other thing we did is he took me fishing, and so we used to fish. But otherwise, he was very busy and preoccupied. 'Cause I mentioned he procrastinated everything, so it was always kind of a crisis and trying to get things done. But baseball and sports, he came to all my games, he supported me. Turns out I was a good baseball player, and so... and a lot of the things I learned, things he had taught me or got me to think about, books I had read, I didn't read anything except baseball books until I was about seventh grade. So we had that bonding.

But it wasn't until I was in college that I came to really appreciate him in a different kind of way. Because I went to a small high school, University Lab School, we were experimented on with curriculum. It was very small, very sheltered, and my friends went away to universities, colleges elsewhere. And I kind of wanted to, we didn't have much money in the family, but I didn't want to go to the regular University of Hawaii. And so there was an experimental college called New College that was being sponsored by the university but was separate. Separate faculty, different kind of student body, no tests, very intense interaction with teachers, and so I wanted to go to this school -- and no grades. And my mom said, "No, you can't go there. How are you going to get into graduate school?" No grades, this hippie thing, right? But I said I really want to go. There are some great teachers there and it was a real chance to learn about the world. And I asked my dad and he said, "If you're serious about it, then go do it," which was a really wonderful thing. And I was. And it was there, as I began to feel... all of a sudden I went from a school which was mostly Asian American to a school which was mostly white, the people had come from all over the country to be part of this program, and it was a real culture shock for me, and it was a real learning shock, 'cause these people were so verbally articulate. And so I really had to take stock of myself. And because there wasn't too much structure, I had to figure out what I could be here. It wasn't the classic Asian American everything's set and you know what your goals are and you work really hard and you do well, it was wide open, and you do well, it was wide open, and there's no grades to measure how well you're going to do.

But I realized that this was really an exciting place to be, and I realized that my discomfort with being, now, one of the minority for the first time, was more than just that. It was because Hawaii was changing rapidly at that time. It was the time where there was a great influx of in-migration people from the mainland moving in, and Japanese money was coming in great amounts to Hawaii, buying up a lot of the previously Hawaii-owned lands and developing it. And the Native Hawaiian Movement was just starting as an outgrowth of the African American Civil Rights Movement. So there was a lot of turmoil. Ethnic studies was becoming important in Hawaii. And I realized that there are so many changes, and the communities I had grown up in, and the sense of belonging and what it meant to have a local culture, things were breaking down. And so my discomfort at the New College program was emblematic of this larger discomfort I was feeling in Hawaii, and so I decided I needed to learn about that. And so the school gave me the perfect opportunity. 'Cause upper division, first years are very structured, upper division was independent work. And so I structured a program which was about the sociology of community, the breakdown of community in Hawaii, and it was also one of the first programs called Contemporary Hawaiian Studies about Hawaiian history connected to present-day ethnic relations. And as I structured this and I... it was based on sort of the Oxford graduate school model, I set up tutorials, I get to choose whatever teachers across the university I wanted to, and I did research. And I realized, "Oh, my gosh, this is the stuff my father has been struggling through his whole life." I had cut myself off from that. And so all of a sudden, he was just this, he never pushed me, but all the things he told me and all the things he could point me to were so rich and enriching.

And it was at that time I realized that my dad really wanted us to love him. That he had so much to give, but he just didn't know how to ask for it. And he had so many struggles in his life, and he had kind of put up these barriers, and so we just reacted to that. So when I was nineteen, I just decided I'm going to reach out to him, and I did. And everything changed. It just changed. And our relationship became wonderful after that. And I saw my sister's relationships with him, Jodie and Lori, change, too, and everyone became close to my dad. He really opened up. And so that was a really wonderful and nice thing, he really softened up. He still was himself, and he had his struggles, but I think it really changed the way that our whole family related to him.

And so for me, it was very significant because it enabled me to really get into the heart of Hawaii. Not just the lovely hula hands and the tourist images of the "melting pot," but really understand the racial ethnic tensions. And more important, the sources of where they came from, starting with the overthrow of the Hawaiian nation, the coming of the ethnic groups, and the struggles among the groups in light of how the plantation owners treated the groups. And then to move forward with the rise of the labor union and joining forces with the 442nd, people who had come out and gone to law school, using the democratic process, the vote, to overthrow the republican white oligarchy in 1954. Opening up the society, the creation of new social justice laws which were the first in the country in many respects. But then also seeing how some of those who fought for social justice as part of the Democratic Revolution, continued that work, but others decided, "We need to, this is time to make some money, too." And so seeing kind of a split, and me coming right in the middle of that, saying, "Hey, wait a minute. Some of the people who did so much good might become part of the, might be becoming part of the problem or establishment. So what do we do as a younger generation?" So that's exactly where I emerged in this New College program which gave me the opportunity to take ethnic studies programs, to research about Hawaiian studies, and there was no Hawaiian studies program, there were no Hawaiian studies courses, even. To research, go into communities, to work with the communities there, to see the breakdown, to see the effects of the mass migration of people, and huge development, expansion of tourism, the rise of native Hawaiian consciousness, to really begin to kind of put things together in a very significant way. And then I realized that to do the work I wanted to do in Hawaii, to make Hawaii better, to help everyone understand the dynamics of the racial forces in Hawaii, I needed something more than what I had. So it was there that I decided, "I'll go to law school."

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.