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[Ed. note: This transcript has been extensively edited by the narrator]

AH: And then, when I got my doctorate, I just thought to myself, this dissertation, I didn't mind doing it in a way, but you know, it's on British intellectuals, and I come from a lower-middle-class family, so how often am I going to have discretionary money? I thought I'd never be able to go to England and do all of this research. And I said to myself, "Who am I kidding? I'm working on these upper-class, upper-middle-class people, John Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, all these people, how could Artie Hansen from Hoboken possibly fathom that, or do I want to?" And here, what's happening on campus at that time is a cultural revolution. The school and the society are going up in smoke, and there are many demonstrations. It was way more interesting to me to experience the demonstrations on campus. I wanted to get involved in campus politics, and here I was then having to trudge home and do work on my dissertation. So I said, "I want to get something to study that's closer to who I am, for instance, and what I care about. And it's at that point that creeping into my mind was that monstrosity of a paper that I wrote back there in 1960, in which I didn't think I did justice to the topic. And I really wanted to do something on Japanese Americans, because by that time, somebody had come into the History Department at Fullerton named Kinji Yada who had been at Manzanar as a teenager, and Kinji was my drinking buddy and boon companion and everything else, and I talked to him quite a bit about Manzanar. And so that had rekindled my interest in the Japanese American World War II experience and I wanted to do something with it.

So I taught this course on historical research, historiography, every semester, and I usually taught two sections of it and everybody who was a history major had to take it. I loved teaching it. It was like intellectual history. And then I just decided, okay, here's what I'm going to do. Everybody had to do a research paper, an original research paper. I'm going to have everybody in the class write on the World War II Japanese American experience. I had two sections, with twenty-five people in each class, so at the end of the semester I had fifty people that had written on this subject. And then, as I've told you in some of the stuff I sent you, by the next year I started taking my students up to Manzanar every year on a field trip. So when I'd have the class they'd be writing their research paper, but before they made a decision about their research paper topic, we would go up to Manzanar. We'd stay in a motel that had been constructed of Manzanar barracks, the Willow Motel in Lone Pine, and then we usually took people with us like the head of the Manzanar Committee, Sue Embrey, who as Sue Kunitomi had been in camp and been the managing editor of the Manzanar Free Press. Sometimes she would bring Wilbur Sato, who as a youth had been incarcerated at Manzanar. Sometimes our class would go up to Manzanar with Shi and Mary Nomura. Mary Kageyama Nomura was the "Songbird of Manzanar," famous for singing at camp, and Shi Nomura, who Kinji Yada used to tell me so much about, was the advisor for a Nisei group called the Manza-Knights. Bruce Kaji was in that -- he later started the Japanese American National Museum -- and so too was Gordon Sato, Wilbur's older brother -- who afterwards created the Manzanar Project to combat world poverty and hunger. I used to take the class to the Eastern California Museum in the nearby town of Independence because Shi Nomura put an exhibit on Manzanar there, and it was like the precursor to the museum they now have up there at the Manzanar National Historic Site. Shi was really important on that exhibit. So I was in touch with two of the people who, I think, put Manzanar on the map. Between Sue and Shi, I mean, I think they really did, in very different ways, and with differing philosophies. Shi was accommodating, Sue, although she could be accommodating when she had to, could also be very resisting, and she could emphasize the dark hues as well as the light ones. Whereas Shi was a sunnily-disposed sort of guy. But taking my class up to the Manzanar area was a really fantastic experience.

Eventually I started teaching classes specifically on the Japanese American confinement, but before that I started a lecture series at the University of California, Irvine. And there must have been probably 150-200 people, almost all Japanese Americans, enrolled. They were so hungry to talk about this by that time; this was in, like, 1973. And I had to line up all the people for the lecturers. That's how I met Sue Embrey. I was talking to Sansei, because I wanted the Sansei take on what was the impact on the Sansei of the World War II experience of Japanese Americans, and they said, "Well, we can't recommend any Sansei, but there's a person who thinks like a Sansei, so get Sue. I had gone to the Amerasia Bookstore in Los Angeles's Little Tokyo, and this guy Johnny Mori was working there. Johnny Mori ended up with the band Hiroshima. He was somebody that our Japanese American Project later interviewed. The first person that I ever interviewed was in 1973 and it was Sue Embrey. She was the first person, and the second person was Togo Tanaka. Those interviews were done within a week or so of one another. Within a short time, I'd interviewed two people that were really very good people to interview. I mean, they had narrative skills, and they had the authority to be able to speak from a grounded perspective. I was living the subject at that time. And I had students that started living it. We started a Japanese American Project. We hung out together all the time, and these students were among my very best friends. They weren't that much younger than me, and at Fullerton, we had reentry students. And there were only two Japanese restaurants in all of Orange County at that time. They were both in Garden Grove, and both were right up the street from where Shi Nomura had a fish market in Garden Grove. And so we would go over there to these restaurants, and then we had UCLA quite close, in Westwood, with this great big Japanese American collection. And then we had Little Tokyo, and so I started coming in to Little Tokyo at all hours. I mean, I was really, really living this thing. And then one summer, in 1974, my graduate student Dave Hacker and I came in virtually every day to UCLA to do research in the archives, and all we did was to talk about that Manzanar Riot, coming and going on the freeway. We were just into it. We were really into it. I mean, it was unbelievable the amount of data we studied, and I never before felt that kind of enthusiasm about research. It was just such an easy thing for me to do.

And then within a year, my graduate assistant Betty Mitson and I put this book together, Voices Long Silent: An Oral Inquiry into the Japanese American Evacuation. You know, we put together a lot of books in those early days. When I moved out of intellectual history, it really was a hot field. By contrast, Japanese American history was nothing, oral history was nothing. I mean, these things were disreputable in the eyes of the academics in history departments. The main thing that would commend a research topic to them, most historians, is that it had a political side to it and it had a military side to it. That was the way that they liked it. But I just decided this was what was important, and if we had to do self-publishing book, I didn't care. I wasn't concerned about that. What I was concerned about was working in this particular field. You know, when you really find something -- and I've talked to you about this, Jim -- when you find something that you really love, you don't have to think about it. You are impelled. You don't have to be compelled, you're impelled to do that sort of thing, and that's your life. And I never wanted to get out of it. I never wanted to get out of it. I didn't want to just do a book on Japanese Americans and move on to another topic. I mean, I felt that the subject I was studying had a constitutional dimension, a political dimension, a psychological dimension, and everything else, and it was virtually an unmapped field. Now, lots of people have written on it. Lots of people worked on it; we're sitting here today doing an oral history, for the best oral history program in the United States on Japanese Americans, and you're working on that. But at that time I got involved, it was nothing and everything. Carrying around these big reel-to-reel tape recorders, etcetera, but it was so exciting. I was talking to people, who some could say were grass-roots folks, but actually, the people I would interview were really elites. I mean, it just depends on your frame of reference. They were elites within their community. Togo Tanaka was a Phi Beta Kappa at UCLA who became at a very young age the editor of the Rafu Shimpo English-language section. The people I had access then to interview, it was just a wonderful sort of thing. Well, it just took off from there. That was it.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.