<Begin Segment 22>

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

JG: Being mindful of the time and feeling like we've covered a lot of ground today, is the anything you want to add, Art, before we end this session? Or Martha, do you have any questions you want to ask?

MN: I do, but . . .

AH: Ask me a couple of questions, Martha, go ahead.

MN: Since you brought up Rosalie Hankey Wax, of all the field anthropologists that you interviewed, she is the most controversial. And you also mentioned that you interviewed Violet de Cristoforo.

AH: I didn't interview her.

MN: Oh, okay. But did your interview with Rosalie Hankey Wax lead Violet to publish her indictment of the field work that Rosalie did for JERS at the Tule Lake Segregation Center?

AH: No, I think Violet was doing that on her own. Violet was one of the informants Rosalie used at Tule Lake, and Violet thought that Rosalie had misinterpreted her, misquoted her, and misused her. Both of them are now dead, of course. But Violet accused Rosalie of violating all the canons of anthropology by divulging her sources to the camp authorities and, in the process of so doing, causing Violet's relatives and others at Tule Lake to be sent to Japan and lose their chance to remain in the United States as American citizens. At about this same time, Rosalie had gotten in touch with me. I don't know if you know who she is, so just for the tape record, let me tell you about Rosalie, who during World War II was known by her maiden name of Rosalie Hankey while affiliated with the Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study. She was a graduate student in anthropology at UC Berkeley during World War II. Then, when Robert Spencer, another UC Berkeley anthropology graduate student, who was doing field work for JERS at the Gila River Relocation Center in Arizona, was recruited by Alfred Kroeber, one of his anthropological mentors at Berkeley, to come and teach in an Asian language program at UC Berkeley, he had to be replaced by somebody at Gila. And the person Spencer's two mentors, Robert Lowie and Kroeber, riveted upon as a replacement was Rosalie Hankey. She was originally from Illinois. She came out and lived with her family in East Los Angeles in a largely Mexican American neighborhood. She was about 6'2" tall, a great big-boned woman who spoke like a stevedore. She was about twenty-six or twenty-seven when she went up to Berkeley. And within a year of graduate studies -- she had no command of the Japanese language -- went out to Gila. She's written a book called Doing Fieldwork in which she goes into great detail about her dreadful experience when she first got to Gila. She was so sad that she ate herself . . . gained about forty, fifty pounds. She eventually got taken from Gila by JERS and sent to Tule Lake Segregation Center. This became important because at Tule Lake she became the field worker who, in the absence of Nisei field workers -- Frank Miyamoto had been there and so was Tom Shibutani, but both left after the "loyalty oath" of February 1943, when they declared "yes-yes" on questions 27 and 28, because they were going to be murdered by dissidents if they had stayed there, or at least they felt they were going to be murdered, and moved to Chicago as part of the JERS resettlement contingent based at the University of Chicago -- was the one at Tule Lake who had to penetrate the most radical camp groups, the Hoshidan and the others, which she did. Joe Kurihara, who was then at Tule Lake, by that time had decided he was not going to get himself into trouble by being involved in radical activity. He just wanted to study the Japanese language because he wanted to leave the United States and go to Japan. As he had said at Manzanar, "If you think I'm a Jap, I'm going to be a two hundred percent Jap, and I want to go live in Japan." But people in the Hoshidan group thought he was an inu and a traitor to their cause and they were going to kill him. That's when Rosalie allegedly violated her ethics as an anthropologist and divulged the information to the camp leadership that she had received from her informants about the projected killing of Kurihara. The question for Rosalie revolved around sparing the life of a close friend, which is how she regarded Kurihara. I have a feeling that she fell in love with him, which is not to say that she had a sexual relationship with Kurihara. He was quite a bit older than Rosalie, being a man of forty-something, but he was not so old that he couldn't cut the muster. But I know that she was very enthralled with him, because when I interviewed her, she begged me to give her a copy of this letter that I have in my possession in which Joe Kurihara fondly mentions Rosalie. She really wanted that letter.

But anyhow, Rosalie Wax had contacted me once, out of the blue, because she had gone back in later life to doing interviews. This was in like the 1980s. She tried to be an oral historian, to go back and re-interview the people that she had ethnographically interviewed as her informants during the wartime at Tule Lake. She sent me the transcripts of her oral history interviews, and they were dreadful. She had no idea how to do an oral history interview. Really, she might have been a fine ethnographer -- she thought she was a great one -- and she achieved her biggest fame in writing about how to do ethnography. That's what her Doing Fieldwork book is all about. But she was no oral history field worker. Anyway, she and her then husband, Murray Wax, who was a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis, were going to travel to California and stay at my Orange County home in Yorba Linda, where we were going to talk about oral history, because she needed to improve on what she was doing with her oral histories. Well, she got quite sick and so the Waxes never made it to Yorba Linda, so I never got to talk to her about oral history practice. So by the time I was doing my interviews with all of these JERS social scientists in the late 1980s, early 1990s, Rosalie became embroiled in controversy with Violet de Cristoforo. Just about then I was sent an issue of just about the worst-appearing journal I've ever seen -- a Canadian publication called Rikka -- in which there was an article by Violet accusing Rosalie of a horrific breach in anthropological ethics and also a rejoinder by Rosalie refuting this charge as being baseless. Reading about this controversy made me really want to interview Rosalie Hankey Wax.

So I went back to St. Louis to interview her. People had told me that she was no longer her old self, saying that she had been divorced by her husband Murray Wax and forced to resign from her professorship at the Washington University Department of Sociology, which had recently been disbanded. When I got back to St. Louis, I discovered that she was living in this really nice house, but it was just so messy and dirty inside, and she was just padding around her house in her bathrobe. I thought, "Is this for real or is she playing an act here for me?" But I did do an interview with her, and she said some important things in it. Again, whether they're true is problematical. Violet de Cristoforo then contacted me and wanted to know what I had found out from interviewing Rosalie. I did not send her the interview that I did with Rosalie, but I did send her transcripts of all of Rosalie's interviews, some forty interviews or so in which she re-interviewed all those people that she had originally talked to at Tule Lake. Violet went through Michi Weglyn. She got Michi to ask me if I would send the interviews to her. So I did mail Violet all of the interviews. Violet did have those in her possession. I think she was trying to see what Rosalie was up to. So that's my connection with these two women. Violet sent me copies of her haiku books she had published, and she inscribed them for me. Michi very much wanted me to go up to Salinas and do an interview with Violet, but I didn't feel comfortable doing an interview with her. I really didn't at that time. I felt too torn in regards to this whole philosophical issue involving Joe Kurihara. In a lot of ways, Joe Kurihara was Harry Ueno's closest friend, so this fact also bothered me. Then, given the state I had seen Rosalie in at the time I interviewed her, well, I just didn't feel up to proceeding with an interview with Violet at that point. We shared letters and phone calls, but I did not go up to Salinas and do an interview with her.

MN: Did you ever interview Violet's brother, Tokio Yaname?

AH: No, but I've seen and heard all the interviews that were done with him by the sociologist from Japan, Sachiko Takita-Ishii, who regularly attends and participates in the biannual Tule Lake Pilgrimage and who wrote her UCLA doctoral dissertation about that pilgrimage. In fact, one of her videotaped interviews with Yaname was shown at a Tule Lake Pilgrimage we were both at in 2004, and more recently I provided Sachiko with some help on her dissertation. She teaches at a Japanese university in Yokohama. Is there anything else you want to ask me, Martha?

MN: No, this is great. I have probably about another hundred questions I could ask you, Art, but maybe what we'll do is we'll reschedule for another interview session.

AH: That's fine. I think it's too intense to go on much longer today anyway. And I still have to drive up to San Luis Obispo County today from Los Angeles.

JG: Yeah, you do. This is great. So thank you very much, Art.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.