<Begin Segment 6>

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

JG: Were you still at Berkeley at the time?

AH: No. I transferred, at the end of 1957, my freshman year, to UC Santa Barbara. So I was there from 1957 through 1960, when I graduated. So this is the senior year at UC Santa Barbara. And there was a visiting professor from Harvard, and I believe her name was Charlotte Zimmerman. And I took her for this sociology course, "Minority Group Relations," and she said everybody in the class had to write something about minority group relations for their term paper. Now, at that point is when I started going to the dentist, Dr. Yoshio Nakaji. And so he's talking to me while I'm being a patient of his, and it comes out that during the war, he had spent some time in a camp. We didn't go into what camp it was, and I didn't even have the facility to be able to ask him questions about it, so it's just like a yada, yada, yada type of thing. But he's talking to me, and as I say in one of the documents I gave to you, between fillings and drilling. What he told me basically was that he had gotten a degree from Cal Tech, you know, the school that my dad wanted my brother and I to go to -- and my brother could have gotten into, but I certainly never could have done so. But here, he told me he graduated from Cal Tech but he couldn't get a job. Now then, you've heard these stories many, many times of Nisei who graduated from these colleges and didn't get jobs except on fruit stands in Little Tokyo. So this is what he did. But then he didn't give up on that, he went to the University of Southern California and got a degree in dentistry. Now, you can imagine how incredible this is that somebody gets a degree from Cal Tech, and then gets a degree from USC in dentistry. Well, when the war came along he got sent to Manzanar. And he was there for just the shortest amount of time before he went to Cincinnati as a resettler; and then after the war, he came to Santa Barbara and Santa Barbara welcomed him. I've read the final resettlement report that was written by the War Relocation Authority resettlement office for the tri-counties of Ventura, Santa Barbara, and San Luis Obispo, and it devotes a couple of paragraphs to Dr. Nakaji, saying how important he was, because he was like a poster boy because here he had medical ability, and all of these communities were lacking in doctors, because the military had sucked up all of the doctors. So here he was in Santa Barbara, and by the time I'm going to him as a dentist, this is fifteen years after the war, and he belongs to the Montecito Country Club. His son Norm is on the Santa Barbara High School golf team, and where they play their matches is the Montecito Country Club. My family, for instance, was always behind on their payments to Dr. Nkaji, which embarrassed the hell out of me, since my classmate, Norm, is going to know about this sort of thing. So that was always sort of a problem.

But I got so interested in what Dr. Nakaji was telling me that I went back to Dr. Zimmerman and asked her if I could write my paper on what happened to Japanese Americans during World War II. And so that's what I ended up writing my paper on. And in order to help my paper, I turned to oral history, even though I didn't know what oral history was. I just had found a lot out from talking to an oral surgeon about his past. And so what I did was to ask him if I could possibly talk to him sometime away from the office, and he basically shunted me off to his wife. Now, he would have been an interesting person to talk to, because as I found out, he was a big muckety-muck in JACL, and he was part of the contingent of Nisei that went up to Sacramento after Pearl Harbor to talk to Governor Culbert Olson, who happened to be a Norwegian American, as was his successor, Earl Warren. Both of them were Norwegian Americans. Well, this Japanese American cohort group of JACLers went up to Sacramento and talked to Olson, but Dr. Nakaji didn't mention anything to me about that or the JACL. He sent me out to Montecito to their home to talk to his wife Lillian. And Lillian, you know, was a wonderful person, and she talked very kindly to me about her experience. Her husband had first left Manzanar and got set up in Cincinnati, and then she took the two boys and joined him. And she went on the train out there during the war, and she said, "I was really frightened about going on that train, but," you know, she said, "there was a soldier on the train and the soldier was very, very nice, and wasn't really guarding the train, but the soldier was there and he was very, very nice," to the kids and to her and things like that. But, you know, I didn't know at that point, like, am I being fed, for instance, an Americanization story? Am I being, 'cause I've got a white face and I'm a classmate of her son and everything, am I just being told a sugar-coated version of what occurred or not, or is it the truth?

JG: Well, how did you feel? I mean, because you talked about this in the materials you sent over to us, you talk about having these Japanese American friends growing up and not knowing about the wartime incarceration. And this sounds like it was kind of a turning point in your understanding of, kind of a deeper dimension of your friends, collectively, of their experience. I'm just wondering, how did you feel when you were working on this project?

AH: Well, you know, there was a soft porn film in the late 1960s called I Am Curious Yellow. And I appropriated that title to give a talk to a JACL chapter in Orange County when I first got into the subject. I said, "How did I come about being curious?" Because everybody, the first question they ask you -- and you probably, too, Jim -- "You've got a white face, why are you studying Japanese Americans?" And when ethnic studies was first starting, it was really ethnic-specific oriented. Blacks were studying blacks, Asian were studying Asians, and Hispanics studying Hispanics, and so they said, "Well, why are doing this? Why are you studying Japanese Americans? What is your bent?" So how did I feel at the time? Actually, the thing about it was I didn't feel any different about the Japanese Americans I knew. They were just classmates at the time because I didn't have the baggage of their wartime experience or their prewar, sort of, you know, anti-Japanese sentiment and action and stuff like -- I didn't know about those things. I knew, for instance, they had the same face as the enemy, and I knew who the "enemy" was, because I saw those war films and heard about that, obviously. You can't not know that. But I didn't know about Japanese Americans as such. But I put it all together later on because I knew what their family was doing, and like the Riusaki family in Goleta, they were farming on land that's now very valuable out near the ocean. But their farm was considered sub-marginal at the time, it wasn't considered to be good land. It's choice land right now. But they lived in a little shack in Goleta next to a Protestant church that I went to, and they didn't seem to have any money, and I saw them in the full throes of resettlement. Now, here, on the other hand, Norm Nakaji's living in Montecito in a really nice house that I could never dream of having, or of being in a country club like him. So I had sort of a mixed thing. But later on, once I found out about it and I started writing this paper, I was still "curious yellow" in that sense. What happened is that it changed my life. Now, it didn't automatically do that, because I wrote that paper and it was such an abomination that I was ashamed of it.

JG: Yeah, talk about that a little bit.

AH: Well, you know, this wasn't a deep research paper like I would do in graduate school or something, this was a term paper for an undergraduate class. And so the kind of research you're doing is you go to the library and then you're looking mainly at mass publications, like the Saturday Evening Post and Collier's and Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report. And so I just looked at, you know, the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, looked up "Japanese Americans" and I started finding these different articles. And it was strange because right at that time in 1960, probably it had to do with Jack Kennedy being elected president or something, but right then -- well, it was probably before Kennedy was elected, like around May of 1960 and he doesn't get elected until November of 1960 -- it was a point at which there was the ramping up to the "model minority" occurring. The media was gearing up to crown the Japanese Americans one of the "good minorities." Because most of the articles I found were pro-Japanese Americans and carried a certain tenor. And the tenor was wonderful. Because they praised the Japanese Americans for their achievement, but at the same time, what they did was to forgive the United States. Instead of the policy during World War II being a dastardly policy, an abdication of civil liberties and human rights and everything, instead these articles called it a blessing in disguise. That this was great for the Japanese, it got them out of their ghettoes, it got them to be cheerleaders and football stars and stuff within their own population that they never had a chance to experience before the war, it put them on the road, really, to success. This was the Horatio Alger story with a yellow face and everything like that, you know. So it was partly the pluck of the Japanese Americans, but it's also the luck of the draw, the "luck" that they got put into camps. "Concentration camps aren't bad, they're good. Look how it came out. The ends justify the means, and the ends were so decidedly good." So anyway, at that time, I was enough of a captive of my sources to swallow this line. I was like Will Rogers who said, "I only know what I read in the newspapers." Only this is why you have to question the sources. Who's generating those sources? What's the purpose of generating those sources, whether conscious or unconscious? And so once I had those sources, it came out that I wasn't even original enough to come up with my own title for my paper. So I used, I think, the very title "Blessing in Disguise" that many of the authors of my sources had employed.

So, in any event, that was the nature of my research, such as it was. However, I did have a really big interest in just ethnics themselves. And partly it was because I moved to Goleta, and Goleta was virtually a Mexican community. I was quite a good baseball player when I was young, and I played shortstop, and I got appropriated when I was really young to play on this all-Mexican team. And we went around and played teams in Guadalupe, which used to be a center before World War II for Japanese people. But when I went to play there in the '50s, there were no Japanese people to speak of. They didn't come back to Guadalupe after the war. It was virtually an all-Mexican community. And Lompoc, in the pre-Vandenberg Air Base, and the pre-Boeing Aircraft days, it was also largely a Mexican town. We would go and play those teams, and I would be the only person on the field that wasn't Mexican. Everybody on my team and everybody on the other team were Mexican Americans. And I never felt uncomfortable about that. It was normal, because most of the kids I went to school with in Goleta were Mexican. When I went to graduate school, what I wanted to do was to study intellectual history, and particularly U.S. intellectual history, and I was really interested in putting together a major in American Studies in graduate school. But when I asked my mentor, Professor Robert Kelley, he said, "Please don't choose American Studies. First of all, we don't have an American Studies program, but if you classify yourself as American Studies," -- and I say this to you, Jim, a person who got a doctorate in American Civilization -- "you're neither fish nor fowl and I'm not going to be able to get you a job" --

JG: Well, that's the absolute truth.

AH: -- "and that's one of my responsibilities." So he said, "You, as a historian, you'll get hired." So I had to put together my own American Studies curriculum. So I would take courses in American art, American music, and things like that when I was in graduate school. So in any event, I went one year to graduate school at UC Santa Barbara, and then I took a high school teaching job down in Orange County as -- I got married, to Roberta Johnson, I should say that. I got married in 1962. I guess I took two years of graduate studies before I took this job, and I did take one year of secondary education classes, 'cause I was thinking that I might want to be an English and history teacher and a coach, and that was kind of my dream at that particular time. I never imagined I would be going on for a Ph.D. I'd never even dreamt of that sort of thing. But then, I did well in those classes, and I enjoyed teaching, and I did student teaching. And then when I got married, my father-in-law, Leif Johnson, kind of looked at me with a jaundiced eye as if to say, "I don't know about this boy. He doesn't have a job and he's marrying my daughter. And my father-in-law was the editor of the Fullerton News-Tribune, and he was a guy who came from a poor background himself and escaped it, and went to college, and then had to drop out of college, never finished that, but I think he wanted better for his daughter. And his daughter, who was of Danish and Norwegian descent, was a popular person, very attractive, runner-up for the Miss Fullerton contest, and a frosh princess at UC Santa Barbara. And her father thought surely she could do better than this dumb Norwegian.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.