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

MN: You know, in 1973, one of your students, David Hacker, did a paper on the Manzanar Riot.

AH: Right. He did that for an undergraduate class of mine.

MN: Now, is this the time that you got in touch with Harry Ueno? Because everybody knows you two had a very close relationship.

AH: No. Sue Embrey and other people had told me they thought Harry Ueno, who was a Kibei, either went back to Japan or he had died. So we had no inkling that he was alive. The two people that I wanted to interview for that published 1974 Manzanar Riot article I did with Dave Hacker, but who unfortunately I did not get to interview, was, one, Fred Tayama, because he had died a couple of years before that, and, two, Harry Ueno. And then, out of the blue one time, around 1975, 1976 -- because we interviewed Harry in 1976 -- Don Hata, a historian at Cal State Dominguez Hills, had been contacted by Harry Ueno, because Don Hata was doing some oral histories. And so Harry Ueno said to Hata, "Would you interview me?" He said, "I would like to tell my story." And he was living in San Jose at the time and had been there for quite a while, but people didn't know that. I mean, he just sort of went underground after the war, and nobody asked, or nobody tried to find out his whereabouts. So then Don Hata -- I met Don Hata when he lectured in my series -- contacted Sue, who by that time I knew really well, because I did a lot of things in connection with the Manzanar Pilgrimage and things like that. And then Sue said, "Well, I'm not an oral historian, but I'll get Art Hansen involved." So Sue and I drove up to San Jose together and we did that interview with Harry and it was a fantastic experience. But I felt really fortunate that here was this sort of thing presented to us. That was a fortuitous sort of thing just presented to us. Then I stayed in touch with Harry -- and this is the difference, too. I like to be friends with people, and cold research has not meant as much to me as being involved in research where there's social interaction. I like privacy, too, and I like to think about things by myself, and I even enjoy long moments of being isolated and reflecting on things. But I need a kinesthetic aspect to my life, like oral history provides. I would have loved being a cultural anthropologist doing ethnographies. So that interview with Harry Ueno was one of the more interesting interviews, because I knew how important it was, really.

MN: A lot of people know that Harry gave you a sealed envelope that you could not open until he died. When did he give you this sealed envelope, and what was in it? And after he passed away, what was revealed in that envelope?

AH: Well, Harry had been accused of being involved in the beating of Fred Tayama on December 5, 1942. And he was arrested for that and he was later taken off the premises of Manzanar, and then he was returned, and a lot of people wanted to free Harry, and this was on the night of December 6. That was one of the precipitating factors for the riot and two people being shot by the MPs, actually killed, murdered, and other people, eight or nine, being wounded. But in the interview, I ask Harry, and it's in the interview and in the book, Manzanar Martyr: An Interview with Harry U. Ueno, if he had been involved in Tayama's beating or, if not, what he knew about the beating. And then he says, "There are some things you don't want to discuss." And then I turned the tape recorder off and I said to him, "Harry, at some point in time, people will want to know, and you need to think about this, and then when you're prepared to provide an answer, it would be much appreciated." Now, I got to be a close friend of Harry's, so I saw him often after the interview. When his book, Manzanar Martyr, came out, we had a book signing at the Amerasia Bookstore in Los Angeles's Little Tokyo district. I don't know, Martha, whether you were there or not. Anyway, this was in 1986. And we had a book signing there, and then again, by that time he hadn't done anything about my question. But a number of years later, I wrote him on another basis, and then I said, "You know, you said something yesterday when we were talking about Manzanar and Tayama, so are you now ready to talk about this?" So then he wrote me the letter that he sent to me, and it wasn't sealed when he sent it, because it was addressed to me. We had it sealed and put in the archives at the Cal State Fullerton Oral History Program. But what he did in that letter was to explain the situation surrounding himself and the beating of Fred Tayama. I then asked him if he wanted to be able to have the information released immediately upon his death, ten years after, or twenty-five years after or something. I can't remember the details, so it might have been twenty-five or fifty years. I gave him a lot of room. And he just said immediately after his death, which occurred some years later, in 2004.

So I have chosen to share Harry's letter with a few people -- Martha, you being one of them -- who I trust. Martha, you didn't particularly want it to be released. Sue Embrey, who was the most important person, did not want it released. So down the line I may possibly release it. I'm writing a book, tentatively titled "Barbed Voices: Oral History, Resistance, and the World War II Japanese American Experience," and this will be a two-volume anthology. One volume is a compilation of articles that I've written over the years, some of which appeared in fugitive sorts of publications, but I think they need to be out to a wider audience. The other volume is a compilation of what I consider to be my most important interviews, ones that deal with resisters of one sort or another. I'm providing a very latitudinarian sense of what a resister is, not a narrowly prescribed sense, but Harry is certainly one of the interviewees. And I've never felt it's been particularly important as to whether he was involved in the Tayama beating or not, because I am not an out-and-out pacifist when it comes to war. I think war is something that should come about only when other means short of war have been tried and exhausted. And as I read the situation at Manzanar, every attempt had been made, and Harry and other people had been pushed and pushed and pushed to the point, that there was no way to right a wrong unless you committed violence. So how Harry was culpable in that situation, I'm not prepared to talk about here. But whatever was the case, I never would be able to accept what he told me as necessarily true anyway. When Joe Kurihara, who was one of the main dissident figures at the time of the Manzanar Riot, had decided, while he was in the Tule Lake Segregation Center, to renounce his U.S. citizenship and go to Japan, he was interviewed by Ralph Merritt, the director of Manzanar who was then visiting Tule Lake. When Merritt asked him about the Manzanar Riot, Joe said, "I was solely responsible for the Manzanar Riot." I know damn well, based upon my research, he wasn't solely responsible. But Harry -- at the time of our interview said that he was maybe or maybe not involved in the beating of Fred Tayama -- cannot really be trusted to give the truth about the Tayama beating because he can be covering for people who were still alive, just like Joe Kurihara was covering for people who were still left after the war in the States. Maybe Harry is covering for people who are not in the hereafter but are in the here and now. So I don't know. It's been a really difficult moral dilemma that I have found myself in over this whole situation.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.