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

JG: It's interesting, because given the political climate of Orange County, I'm curious how people at large, whether we're talking about your colleagues in the CSUF History Department or administrators or those living in the surrounding community, what they thought about your work.

AH: Well, I think they actually welcomed it. Mostly, of course, the academics are different from those in the general Orange County community, because they're coming from all over the United States, indeed all over the world. And when I started at Fullerton, there were less than ten thousand students. Now, with the enrollment over thirty-five thousand students, it's the largest school in the California State University system. The ideology of Orange County, oddly enough, was good towards the Japanese Americans because the Orange County Register, which during World War II was called the Santa Ana Register, likes to claim this -- and it's true -- that it was one of the few newspapers in the United States that took a stance against the mass removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans. This was because of its libertarian philosophy. Libertarians are against the intrusion of government, and that is a hell of an intrusion of government. And so the Register supported the Japanese Americans. In fact, one of my graduate students from the Communications Department wrote a thesis about how the Register dealt with not only the Japanese Americans having to leave Orange County, but also allowing Japanese Americans to come back to the county after the war. The Register worked real hard at making the reception to Japanese Americans a good one. And so, no, that was not a problem at all. The real problem was my doing ethnic history. This was the case, not just in Orange County, but almost anywhere, until things really exploded. I mean, Long Beach State started ethnic studies in 1969 at the same time ethnic studies were just starting up at San Francisco State, replete with riots and strikes and everything else. As my friend Lloyd Inui was just telling me yesterday, "Oh, we had students, graduate students at Long Beach State who were teaching the classes. Actually, anybody from the community that we could get to teach those classes would teach them." And so that's why it was looked down on to teach your classes. Critics of ethnic studies said: "You're not getting people who have a Ph.D., who have been mentored through a graduate program, to teach your classes." And so they were very jaundiced about that. My situation, however, was that I did have a Ph.D. and I was doing this, so people were inclined to say, "More power to you."

And then the CSUF Oral History Program was very unique because we got started in 1966, and so the first big projects there had to do with Mexican American repatriation during the 1930, and then the development of Watts as an African American community, the Japanese American WWII experience, Indian urbanization in Los Angeles, and Navajo stock reduction. So all of our projects, then, were 1960s kinds of projects. And so in a way, the Japanese American thing was of a piece with these other things, not something unusual. I started the Japanese American Project as a project, but there were interviews already in the Oral History Program that I was allowed to enfold into the project to give it a foundation. And they were mostly done with Orange County Nisei who had been in camp, and their interviews started with the first question being, "Where were you on December 7, 1941?" I swear to God. And so when we started to learn oral history, we realized that you had to use a little more subtle approach than that, which was like an interrogation. But I listened to those interviews and that was really important, because I initially didn't think I believed in oral history. I listened to those interviews that were done with Japanese Americans, and that was super powerful. And then Cal State Fullerton had a lot of Japanese Americans who were part of the university community. They could be secretaries in different departments, they could be photography instructors, they could be in a field such as philosophy, like Craig Ihara, who eventually became the first head of the university's Asian American Studies Program. Craig Ihara was born in the Rohwer, Arkansas, concentration camp. He came to teach philosophy at Cal State, and we interviewed him early on in our Japanese American Project. I mean now he's retired as a professor, but we interviewed him during his first year at Fullerton. George Fukasawa was a photography teacher at Fullerton, but he had been in the internee police force at Manzanar, and was the only policeman who showed up for duty on the night of the riot, and people thought he was stupid. The other internee police would not show up because they knew they were going to be murdered. And so they didn't show up. But Fukasawa did. He had been the prewar president of the JACL chapter in Santa Monica. So he showed up at the riot, and then he had to be taken to Death Valley afterwards and put in this abandoned CCC camp there for protective custody because the dissidents at Manzanar would have murdered him as a result of showing up at the scene of the riot.

So Fullerton was honeycombed with people that had some firsthand knowledge of Manzanar and the other World War II camps for Japanese Americans. One such person I mentioned in the stuff I sent you was a woman named Hazel Jones. When I came to Fullerton in 1966, she was the chair of the English Department, and then later she became the dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. Then when I went up to Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, in 1979 as a visiting professor, she had switched up there because she became the vice president of academic affairs at Cal Poly. When I walked through the line as a new faculty member at her reception, she said, "Art, what are you doing here?" I responded, "What are you doing here?" But at Fullerton she came to my class and talked about her going to teach at Manzanar in 1942. When the Greyhound bus brought her to the camp, the bus driver threw her suitcase down on Highway 395, off the side of the road, and called her a "Jap-lover." And she wasn't in camp very long before they had the riot. So they had to move her and the other teachers out of camp, to the Winnemucca Hotel in Independence, and that's where she stayed during the time of the riot for about two weeks, and then they brought them back into camp. But, see, she came to my class, and she talked about that experience. That was really exciting. And it was quite a fortuitous thing that I had somebody like Kinji Yada to talk to me as a peer and tell me and my students all these behind-the-scene things about the kids his age and what was going on at Manzanar, and also having people like George Fukusawa and Hazel Jones share their Manzanar experiences.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.