<Begin Segment 19>

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

JG: Have you kept count over the years how many interviews you've done?

AH: No, I haven't, but I would guess it's in the several hundred maybe. I've slowed down in recent years a lot as far as the number of interviews I do because I don't think I'm quite as effective anymore. The reason I'm not quite as effective is several-fold. One, I can't take as much time as before to do interviews, because I've become very mindful of how much time I have left in my lifetime. I think when we have an acute sense of our mortality, we start really prioritizing things and carefully scheduling our activities. I think I deferred a lot of my academic career in order to do oral histories. I not only did all these interviews, I saw them through. I mean, the kind of interviews that I was involved in were ones that weren't just like those done by a lot of scholars. When they say they do interviews for a book, they often only talk to a person for a few minutes on the telephone. They, thus, list in their publications that they have done 350 interviews. In contrast, sometimes my interviews have extended over multiple days. These interviews are far more thoroughly researched than most interviews. I have made sure that when I asked questions I wasn't asking questions that just had a quick utility value for me so that I could jazz up my writing by putting in a pithy quote from one of my interviews. But my idea was that I was producing a research document that would go into an archive so that other people who had different interests than I did could come and use that interview to their advantage. So it was like "historians do it for posterity." Well, that's the thing, right? To do your interview for posterity so that other people can use the information. See, a lot of researchers don't ever see the interviews that many oral historians do. You don't know what the people they interviewed actually said. How do you test it? Their interviews are not archived. A lot of interviews get put in a shoebox and then the shoebox is lost or is tossed out when the interviewer dies. So we don't have these interviews for posterity. But the idea of putting an interview in an archive means it will be preserved for future use. You've got the original tape, you've got the original transcript, and you've got the edited version. If a scholar goes to the archives, they can check the material in it. What did the interviewee delete from the interview? You can see that years later and say, "Why did Harry Ueno take this out? Why did he leave this in?" You can ask those kinds of questions. So that's an important sort of thing. But, see, I was a historian first before I was an oral historian. When people call me an oral historian, I'm sort of insulted. It is as though the method is greater than the madness. The madness is that the historian is trying to find out truth. One way you do get truth claims is through doing oral histories. But I want to be thought of as a person who first and foremost is an historian. So you become one-dimensional in people's minds when they call you an oral historian. It's easy to dismiss such a person. Being an oral historian is like some specious version of being a historian.

I want to talk a little bit more about this topic because there are some really brilliant people that are involved in oral history. One of them I think you might have heard of is Michael Frisch. He wrote a wonderful book called A Shared Authority. I reviewed it in a plenary session of a conference sponsored by the Oral History Association. Even Michael Frisch, who was in attendance, didn't know where I was going with my review when I started talking about my father and telling the audience about this business of calling him "Haak" and giving him the "light touch" and everything else. Well, where it was going was explaining how my dad was sharing authority with me and my brother. In other words, he wasn't arrogating all of the authority because of his paternal role. So it was even a democracy within the family. We talk a lot these days about family rights and children's rights, but my father really took these rights to a radical perspective. Now then, an oral history is a species of shared authority. An unshared oral history is when the interviewer has a schedule of questions and sticks religiously to these questions and does not give the person being interviewed any leeway, with the hope that this arrangement makes for a holistic representation of what it is that the person being interviewed is about.

And public historians share authority, too, because they work with porous enough kinds of things like exhibits that allow people to enter into and interpret them, and they welcome that. They want that. Right now it's become a buzzword to say, "let's have an interactive exhibit." But interactive, the whole idea of that is about sharing. When Carl Becker wrote his book many years ago, Every Man His Own Historian, the chief point that he made was that every person really has to come to grips with the spin or the interpretation that they put on things. You don't just passively accept the established interpretation of the past. Why do high school kids hate history? Because they're asked to remember something as though it were necessary for them to remember all those dates and places and things, and then spew them out on an examination. When really, the fun about history is its participatory aspect. It's why the 1960s were so exciting for me. What people like to emphasize is where the 1960s train went off the track, and now people are saying "Obama is off the track." But where is he on the track? I mean, he's the first president, really, that I have felt close to, the way in which he moves and grooves. I mean, he's somebody that I really feel a sense of kinship with. I'd like to talk to him, whether it was about basketball or whether it's about politics or whatever it happens to be. But this business about being able to participate in the crafting of knowledge and everything like that is at the heart of it.

When I was in England -- I was only there for that half year in 1965 when I was teaching -- but two of my students at Reading University said, "You've got to come out with us to see the progressive educator A. S. Neill in Summerhill. This was an experimental school on the east coast of England in Suffolk, and Neill wrote this book called Summerhill. I was so happy to go out there, and we drove out there in my car, the three of us, we went out there, and I just watched the way in which Neill taught his class, and how the class opened up to envelop everybody in it. And I saw this as important. And that's what oral history can do. But what they emphasize when they give oral history workshops are the mechanics of it. I mean, the steps that you take in an interview, or how you film an interview, or how you transcribe an interview. It's all on method and mechanics and very little on the whole temper of oral history and the character of it and things like that. And those are the things that are essential.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.