Densho Digital Archive - Art Hansen Interview

<Begin Segment 1>

JG: Okay. We're here with Art Hansen. This is Jim Gatewood interviewing for Densho; the secondary interviewer is Martha Nakagawa, and behind the camera is Dana Hoshide. Thank you, Art, for agreeing to be with us today.

AH: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

JG: So we're going to start at the very beginning by asking you about your childhood. So when and where were you born?

AH: I was born on October 10, 1938. So my next birthday will actually fall on 10/10/10, and I'll be then seventy-two-years old. I was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, in St. Mary's Hospital. And I lived in Hoboken until I was five years old, and then I moved to a little town called Little Ferry in New Jersey, and that is in Bergen County. Hoboken is in Hudson County. And I essentially moved from the city where my maternal side was living to the town where my paternal grandparents were living.

JG: What do you know about your last name, "Hansen"?

AH: Well, it's Norwegian, and the rule of thumb is if it's "E-N," it's usually Norwegian or Danish, if it's "O-N," it's usually Swedish. But that rule has been broken. I've met people who were "O-Ns" who are Norwegian and the opposite, too.

JG: Who were the first Hansens to come to the United States?

AH: I have no idea. I know that one person who was president of the so-called "United States" really before it was a nation, that was kind of like considered the presidential figure, was a man whose last name was Hansen, so they were there at least in the, you know, in the eighteenth century, but I don't know when the first one came. Some people will say, well, Leif Ericson came very early and he's, of course, Norwegian, too.

JG: What is your father's name?

AH: My father's name is Haakon, H-A-A-K-O-N. And he was named after the king of Norway. And he was the king of Norway after Norway broke away from Sweden and achieved its independence. That was in 1905; my dad was born in 1911. My grandmother and grandfather were very proud of the independence of Norway and very beholden to the king of Norway. And so my father carried, for them, really, the badge of Norway. It's interesting because when they came over and settled in the United States in 1911, my grandmother was pregnant with my father. And he was the first of nine kids. And the remaining eight kids did not carry Norwegian names, nor did they, like my father, know how to speak and write in Norwegian. He was the only person of the siblings that could do that. The rest were very quickly plunged into, you know, the bath of Americanization, and so they didn't have that kind of residual Old World aspect to their lives. Of course, they heard their parents speaking in Norwegian and ate Norwegian foods and went to visit Norwegian relatives and things like that. But my father was really kind of like a special child in that way, because he's the only one that could write a letter to my grandparents in Norwegian.

JG: What do you know about your father's early years?

AH: I know quite a bit about it. He talked a lot about it to me. My grandparents came to Ellis Island, and they had no sense of the geography of the United States. And they took a job . . . their first job was a job that they thought was going to be on Staten Island, and it turned out that it was in New Mexico. And here they couldn't speak a word of English, and they certainly couldn't speak Spanish, and my grandfather, who had a background as a sea captain, was put in charge of a Mexican work crew out in Las Cruces, New Mexico. And that was in 1911 -- and, of course, New Mexico didn't even became a state of the United States until 1912 -- so my dad was born in a territory of the United States. So that's quite interesting.

JG: Wow.

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

JG: Well, and at what point did your family return to the East Coast?

AH: Well, they stayed out west for a long time. They lived in Montana; then, of course, like a lot of Scandinavians, they went to the Dakotas. In particular, they went to the area in North Dakota near the town of Williston. They were on a farm, and my dad was educated in a one-room schoolhouse. And they left for the New York area when he was eleven, so it would have been 1922. And then Brooklyn had a very large Norwegian ghetto, and they moved to Brooklyn. And my father had just about read every book that they had in this little school library in North Dakota, and it wasn't very many books, probably. But he had skipped a grade and everything, and then he came to Brooklyn, and here he is surrounded by these very bright Jewish kids that were there in Brooklyn, too. Because the intellectual class of the United States, I mean, Brooklyn was like the crucible for that, New York and Brooklyn. And Brooklyn was a major city. If it had stayed a city instead of becoming a borough of New York, it would have for a long time been the fourth or fifth largest city in the United States. And you had to take competitive exams then to get into high schools that were really good. And my dad had gone to Dewey Junior High School, and then after that he took the tests and he got accepted in Brooklyn Tech, Brooklyn Technical High School, which at the high-school level is equivalent to being accepted in Cal Tech, California Institute of Technology. My dad was completely out of his element. He couldn't handle it at all. He didn't know what the hell was going on. So, in a sense, at a very early age, he took off from home. And he came back and forth to New Jersey, but essentially from the time he was about thirteen, fourteen years old, he was riding the rails all over the United States. He was hoboing, so he was kind of a working-class intellectual; he went to all these different places, got thrown in jail on Indian reservations, and things like that. He came out to San Francisco, slept on the steps of the public library of San Francisco, and was enthralled with writers like Herbert Spencer, so read all these things about Social Darwinism and such.

And so anyway, he had this sense about California, what a wonderful place it was, and that stayed with him. He came back to New Jersey, he met my mother. Ironically, my mother's family had lived in a house in Little Ferry before they moved to Hoboken, and then my father's family moved into that same house. My grandparents on the Hansen side were cousins. Both had the surname of Hansen, and they were like second cousins. So this explains some of my limited gene pool here. [Laughs] But my father and mother also came from the same part of the built environment, the same house on 66 Grand Street in Little Ferry, New Jersey. So it was a house where my maternal grandmother died, and it was also a house where, when my paternal grandparents were living there, I went to Thanksgivings and Christmases and everything for years. And so when I think of New Jersey, that is the family home. My dad got married to my mother in 1933, October 5, 1933, and my father got a job working for the railroad. But the railroad controlled boats, barges, that would go from the Brooklyn navy yard up to Buffalo, where one time, Jim, you and I went to an oral history conference, and I remember that after that conference we had real buffalo wings to eat, the legitimate sort.

But in any event, for about the first year and a half of my life, I lived on a boat. My brother was two years older than me -- my brother's name is Roy Allen Hansen -- and my brother was born in 1936 and I was born in 1938. So we have these photographs where there's a rope tied around both my brother and my waists because they, our parents, didn't want us falling into the Hudson River. So that continued until my mother didn't like that any longer, and so what happened, my dad continued living on the boat and working on the boat. And then my brother and I first lived in Hoboken and then we moved to Little Ferry. And we used to visit my dad on the boat. My dad was an autodidact in the sense that he was a very bright guy who was good at self-learning. And so he would teach himself all kinds of different things. And one of the things he taught himself was sign painting. He practiced this sort of thing, so when he came off the boat, he got a job as a sign painter. And we lived in a town, Little Ferry, which was a used car capital. And they had, all along the highway, which happened to be Route 6, on both sides, automobile lots, used car lots. And they all had these gigantic, garish, lurid signs that were put up there, and my dad would be painting those signs. And then he branched out a little bit when they started to develop these miniature golf courses. My dad designed these things, but then he also painted all of the signs for them. So this was how we made our living. But my dad started to drink quite a bit. He claimed that he needed to go where the customers were for the sign painting business, but he ended up spending quite a bit of time in the local bars. I would be sent to fish him out of the bar and then he'd bribe me, keep me there for a while by giving me Cokes and things like that. My mom desperately wanted him out of there. Also, my dad was working on these signs, and he was high up on these scaffolds, and it would be in the dead of winter, and it was really, really difficult to be painting signs. So he was amenable to moving. And then he had this image in his mind of what California was all about.

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

AH: And by that time, I had gotten to the fifth grade at Wilson Grammar School in Little Ferry, New Jersey, and my brother had finished the seventh grade there. So I was ten and he was twelve, and my dad was starting to think about college. And even though he was a high school dropout -- my mom finished high school, but my father never did finish high school -- he wanted desperately to have my brother and I, you know, go to the university. He knew about the University of California and about how inexpensive higher education was in California. So one evening, my dad called the family into the living room, and he spread out a map of the United States on the living room rug. And he circled Little Ferry on the East Coast, and then circled San Luis Obispo on the West Coast. And he said, "We're going to move from here to there." My grandparents, at that particular time, were on a visit to relatives out in North Dakota. My dad never would have been able to leave the East Coast, being the oldest son in the family. And so he took the opportunity presented to him of my grandparents being absent, to make the move. We sold the house and we went around and visited all of my parents' siblings and their families, and got packed in the family car. The only thing we took in the car was a new set of Encyclopedia Brittanicas, and my brother and I sat on those Britannicas. We had our dog Lucky with us in the backseat, while my mother and my father were in the front seat, and we never stopped at a motel the whole way across the United States. My dad drove furiously across the United States, you know, for four days, and most of it was on Route 66. This was before I heard the Bobby Troup song about "getting your kicks on Route 66." But we would sleep out under the stars in different sorts of places.

And the first place we got to in California, where we actually stayed at a motel, was Needles. Now, Needles was not my idea of California. When we told people in New Jersey that we were going to move to California, they were so envious, they just kept talking about that. And so then here going across the country we went through places like Texas and New Mexico and Arizona. I don't know if this was what my idea of the West was, but it really was majestic and different from the East Coast. I mean, I learned how to swim in Coney Island, where when you went to the beach, you had, like, a couple of square feet to be able to just sit down. I mean, it really was crowded. And then we go across these spacious sorts of places, and we went past Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff; we drove on Route 66 right past that college. And then we also had gone, before that, through Albuquerque. We stopped in Albuquerque, and my dad said, "You know, I like Albuquerque." And he said, "If it doesn't work out in San Luis Obispo, we're going to come back and live in Albuquerque." Well, we didn't have to come back.

Now, when we got to Needles, we went to see Riverside. And this was, you know, in 1949. Smog started to hit southern California during World War II. So 1943, 1944 is when smog starts to come in. But the air was still pretty clear in 1949. Now, Riverside is the smog capital, but at that time, I thought it was beautiful. If you drive through Riverside now, on a clear day, you can see that they have these stylized mountains. It really looks like the picture that you have in your mind of, you know, California, the ideal sort of place. And we went and stayed at a motel there, went to a park at night, and took a rowboat ride and everything. I just thought I'd died and gone to heaven instead of Riverside. Now if I go to Riverside, I think I'm going to the other side of heaven. But at that particular time, I thought it was absolutely beautiful. And then we got in the car and we just drove through Los Angeles. The 5 Freeway wasn't there yet, because that didn't come through Los Angeles 'til 1955. But we came through Los Angeles and we kept going, and we got to Santa Barbara. And my goodness, all four of us, my mother and my father and my brother Roy and I just fell in love with Santa Barbara. It was so spectacularly gorgeous. Palm trees, the ocean, the mountains, and everything, it was really incredible. Now, my dad had been a sign painter, so what we did to check out an area was we drove all around the town and looked at the signs, and looked at the little signature on them to see how many sign painters he would have for competition. Because if there were too many sign painters, he said, we weren't going to stay there no matter how beautiful it was. Well, we drove out to Goleta, which was not then the home of the University of California, Santa Barbara, but in a few years it would be. We drove out to Goleta and we stayed in an old motor court, and that's what they called them then instead of motels. That place is still there. It was called the Camel Motor Court; it's since changed its name, but it's the same as it was: these little tiny cabins that are sitting there in the middle of Goleta. And Goleta was largely a Mexican community, and we got to Goleta and we stayed at the Camel Motor Court, and my dad started talking to somebody in the court there. And he said, "Well, you know, I'm coming out here 'cause I want my kids to go up to San Luis Obispo because I want them to enroll in Cal Tech. I want them to be scientists and engineers." And the person says, "That's not Cal Tech up at San Luis Obispo, that's Cal Poly, that's a school for agriculture." And a lot of Japanese Americans had gone there over the years because the Nisei were going to learn scientific agriculture and come back and take over the family farms.

So anyway, my dad said, "We're not going to go up to San Luis Obispo, then," and so we didn't go to San Luis Obispo. We got a house right down the street from the motel and we lived in Goleta. And that's where I enrolled in school, at Goleta Union School, in the sixth grade, and I only stayed there for one year, and after that, I started going to schools in Santa Barbara because they would bus you in there. I went to La Cumbre Junior High School for three years through the ninth grade and then I went to Santa Barbara High School through the twelfth grade and I graduated in 1956.

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

AH: And then, growing up, so I can bring this closer to the Japanese American experience, this represents the first time I had any kind of encounter with people of Japanese ancestry. The only encounter I had before was through the films. Talk about a movie-made America; my consciousness was movie-made. Because I'm born in 1938, so when I first started going to the movies, it was during World War II. So the movies I'm seeing, for instance, are where the Japanese are the evil foes of the Americans. Almost all of my uncles and some of my aunts were in the military. So both of my grandparents' houses had, you know, the insignia of the different branches of the services. And I had all of my relatives coming by to kiss my brother and I goodbye as they were going off to war and then coming back from war. So it was very patriotic. But what I'm seeing is Japanese, mostly pilots, during World War II films, and the kids there at the movie theaters are on the edge of their seats, cheering every time the quote/unquote "Japs" were getting killed by the Americans. I mean, that was my introduction to people of Japanese ancestry. Now, when I get out to California, the schools that I'm going to and the clubs that I'm in, whether it's the Boy Scouts or the Boys Club or anything else, there are people of Japanese ancestry, Japanese Americans, and they are kids who had been in camp, had been young in camp, they were my age or a little bit older, and some of them were Nisei and others of them were Sansei. If they were Nisei, they would have been, of course, young Nisei, if they were Sansei, they would have been the older part of that generation.

So Santa Barbara never had a large Japanese American population. In fact, most of the Japanese Americans in the Santa Barbara area were there because they worked on the estates. Santa Barbara has two millionaire colonies flanking it. To the south is Montecito, which a lot of people have heard about because Montecito has these wealthy families that have lived there from time immemorial really, and then Hope Ranch, to the north. The most famous person in Hope Ranch that most people have heard of in recent years was Julia Child, who had lived there at the end of her life. But the kind of Japanese Americans that were living there then were like Frank Chuman's parents. Frank Chuman, the celebrated Nisei lawyer and legal historian, was born in Montecito, and his parents worked on an estate in Montecito. So when the Japanese Americans got excluded from the West Coast and incarcerated in the camps, this was very hard for the labor flow for the wealthy people. So when the war was over, unlike a lot of other areas that did not want the Japanese back, the Santa Barbarans very readily welcomed them and campaigned to get them to come back to Santa Barbara. So they had sort of an open door policy.

Of the two Japanese Americans I knew very well when I was growing up who I would consider close friends, the first one was a guy named Masayoshi "Mas" Riusaki. He was two years older than me, and he was in the Goleta Boy Scout troop, also. He was an exemplary Boy Scout in a troop that didn't have too many exemplary Boy Scouts. I could tell you stories about the Boy Scouts; it's where I learned just about every vice possible. But he was not a person that modeled this vice-like behavior. He was also a very good athlete and he played first string on the Santa Barbara High School varsity basketball team. There was another Japanese American named Alan Asakura, whose dad was a big shot at the Gila River camp during World War II. Alan Asakura, who I did not know personally, played third base on the Santa Barbara High School varsity baseball team. My other close Nikkei friend was Norman Nakaji, who graduated from Santa Barbara High School in 1956, like me. Norm's dad was a dentist. That turns out to be important because later on he would be my dentist. I didn't have him as a dentist then . . . my mouth was going bad, really bad. I came from a lower-middle-class family, and most of the dentistry that I had was really bad. The best dentist I ever had probably in the range of people I had through going to clinics and the like was Dr. Campbell's. Dr. Campbell's was an outfit known for its affordable dentistry. But it was almost like the scenario where the patient's legs are up in the air and the dentist is yanking the teeth out of his head. But I did go to these clinics where there was charity done by the dentists; they would go to the local junior highs and do that. But here I finally got to go to Dr. Nakaji when I was a senior in college.

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

AH: Now, just to backtrack a little bit, my first semester of college I went to Santa Barbara Junior College. My grades weren't as good as they should have been in high school. I was a really good and serious student up through the ninth grade, and after that, I got into a lot of other things. Not anything criminal, but I cut a lot of classes. I was cruising the drag and everything, playing a lot of sports, basketball and baseball, and things like that. But, you know, I took nothing but the college type of classes. I never had a study hall, I always went to summer school, I always took solid classes, I took all the sciences, all the maths. But, at that particular point in your life, you just can't get by without studying very much. So I didn't have the grades to get into the University of California. But I went to junior college and I buckled down, and I virtually got all A's and transferred after the first semester to UC Berkeley. And I went up to Berkeley, and I ended up living in a cooperative. The cooperative was a big type of living situation up there, and it was very affordable. You only had to pay about five dollars a week. The rest of your board and room was earned through your work in this cooperative. You each had a job, and as a freshman, when I went up there, what I basically did was to bus tables and wash dishes and do other things in the cafeteria. But it was an interesting cooperative. It was called Cloyne Court. It's still there, on Ridge Road in Berkeley. And I was just overwhelmed by being at Berkeley. I wasn't at Berkeley because I knew that they had a lot of Nobel Prize winners or anything; I was at Berkeley because they were in the Rose Bowl for a couple of years when I was a kid, and I was a fanatical sports fan. And I got to Cloyne Court, not because I knew anything about who lived at Cloyne Court, which was almost all Japanese Americans and Jewish Americans who were in the engineering school, because Cloyne Court was right next to the engineering building. I was in Cloyne Court really because I found out who had the best teams in intramural sports, and it turned out that Cloyne Court had won the UC Berkeley all-sports championship the year before. So I chose Cloyne Court for that particular reason.

Now, once I got there, it's like anything else. You get your head screwed on. Then I started to realize that the whole network of cooperatives was heavily dominated by Japanese Americans. And Berkeley itself was a co-op sort of community. And remember the camps during World War II had a big presence of the co-ops. And so a co-op for Japanese Americans was nothing new. That was rooted in their past. So I only stayed there for a half a year, but it was an extremely important half a year. Because the Japanese Americans that I had known in Santa Barbara, of those, two of them were living in cooperatives, one of them in my own cooperative. Now, this guy Mas Riusaki, who was studying botany up at Berkeley, was in another cooperative and I talked to him a few times. But in my cooperative there was a guy named David Yamada. And David Yamada was one year ahead of me in Santa Barbara High School, but he was the student body president. Now, if you think about that, this was in 1955 that he was the student body president. And see, 1954-1955, that is just about a decade removed from camp. So already, Japanese Americans were starting their movement toward different kinds of activities. David Yamada, I've never seen him since Berkeley, since 1957, but he has apparently written a history of Japanese Americans in Monterey that was sponsored by the Monterey Bay chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League, and I own a copy of the book. So he was a bright guy, and I know he studied political science up at Berkeley. But he ended up doing this historical study, and I don't know anything else of what's happened to him. But I did get a chance to see him at Cloyne Court.

So I was up there at U.C. Berkeley for that half a year, but I never talked, either before I got through Berkeley or after I transferred from Berkeley to UC Santa Barbara in my sophomore year, to any Japanese American about camp. I didn't know anything about it until I was a senior in college. Now, think of this, I took a sociology course at UCSB. Two of the sociologists there had been affiliated during World War II with the UC Berkeley-sponsored Evacuation and Resettlement Study. One was Tamotsu Shibutani, or as he was known there, Tom Shibutani, and the other person was Bob Billigmeier. And both of them were in the UCSB Department of Sociology, but I didn't know anything about that, and I never took a course from either of them. But I took this sociology course, which was called "Minority Group Relations." They didn't have anything like Asian American studies courses then. This was as close as you got to it: "Minority Group Relations."

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[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.

<Begin Segment 7>

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AH: So what happened was that I did stop graduate school for a year and got a job teaching American literature at Tustin Union High School in Orange County, California, for a year. I got fired from that job. Well, actually, by the end of the year, I had a choice. I could either resign, or if I didn't resign, I could be fired, and I chose to resign and go back to graduate school in history at UC Santa Barbara. And the reason I was fired was not because I did a bad job as a teacher. I was actually an extremely popular teacher, probably too popular. I mean, as recently as a month ago I had a letter from out of the blue from a student I had back in 1962-1963, in an English class at Tustin High, who's now become a writer. She wrote to tell me about what she's accomplished and to thank me for everything I had done to inspire her, and we've had a nice correspondence since then. But I was rambunctious even as a teacher. I had the administration quite upset about the kinds of word games that I created and the different stories I told. But then, I guess the thing that got me fired was an assignment that I made, and it was an assignment to prove that censorship was a bad idea. In the newspaper, back in the Midwest, I believe in Iowa, Michigan, or someplace, there appeared an article saying that a teacher had lost his job because he had assigned the following books: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, 1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell, and Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger. And so I followed the newspaper story, and then what happened was when people were aware of this teacher's rationale for assigning these books, and the nature of the books, he got reinstated. So I wanted to show that censorship is stupid. But the thing is, I discovered that people will only read the first stories of those kinds of things. So all they remembered was that this guy got fired because he taught something that was controversial.

So I got hauled into the principal's office. The principal was a guy, a former football coach, who probably hadn't read very much. He told me, "The only thing I've read in literature recently is a serialized version of a novel by Herman Wouk called Youngblood Hawke." He said, "That's all I've read." Well, I'd read a lot of Herman Wouk; Caine Mutiny was the first one I read, but lots of other novels by him, too. So while we were talking, he went up to the blackboard in his office, and he drew a square, and said, "You know, we've got a rule for new teachers. This box represents 'controversial.'" He said, "What you need to do is to avoid finding yourself in this particular box. Unfortunately, you've found yourself in this box because although a lot of parents have contacted us and said that they like Mr. Hansen because he gets their kids to be excited about reading and writing." On the other hand, he said, "You're a person that because of your assignments, among other things, has come to our attention." You've got to understand, Tustin was the heart of right-wing country. It was the home of the John Birch Society. Practically the whole school board consisted of John Birch Society members. But even the John Birchers should have been in favor of assigning 1984. It's anti-big government, anti-authority, and everything else, but they didn't read. It's really just a question of, you know the business about -- the principal was right. As stupid as his box was, his box theory was correct.

John Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for Literature that year, 1962. And it was really for The Grapes of Wrath, but they gave it to him for another book that he had written at that particular time, Winter of Our Discontent. But it was for the whole body of his work, but mostly, if it hadn't been for The Grapes of Wrath, he would never have won the Nobel Prize. Well, all of a sudden I'm hauled in to the principal's office again because what I had everybody in my classes do was to read The Grapes of Wrath plus three of the short novels or novelettes by Steinbeck. And kids loved Steinbeck; I mean, they were just eating it up. Whether it's Tortilla Flats or whatever it was, The Pearl, whatever those stories were, they loved reading those. And so I got hauled in again. Well, of course, Steinbeck, in addition to writing The Grapes of Wrath, which disallowed him for many, many years to ever go back to Salinas and everything -- they desecrated the family graves, they didn't want him back there. "Can't go home again" doesn't just apply to Thomas Wolfe in Asheville, North Carolina, but applies to Steinbeck, too. Now, of course, Steinbeck is an icon, he's dead. He's a hero, he's a tourist attraction. So you set up libraries and schools in his name and do everything else to honor him. But the main thing that they in Tustin were against was the fact that Steinbeck had hit the Orange County citrus growers pretty hard. Because what Steinbeck had been doing was writing these proletarian novels, and the proletarian novels, like In Dubious Battle, were pitting the workers, who were largely a multicultural working force, against the growers, who were largely white. And Orange County was a big citrus county and everything. And what Steinbeck had accused the Orange County growers of, which was absolutely true, was that in order to keep the price of oranges and lemons up, what they did was, instead of giving the surplus fruit to people who were starving in Orange County, people who needed the food desperately, what they did was to spray 'em all, put 'em all into these irrigation ditches and then spray 'em with poison so that they couldn't be eaten. And so that's what they didn't like about Steinbeck. It was that sort of -- anyway, it didn't matter too much.

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I wanted to go back to graduate school. I'd already applied at the University of Wisconsin, which was then a hot graduate history program, leftists largely, whether William Appleman Williams, who came by way of going to the naval academy at Annapolis and from a little town on the coast of Oregon, or the Jewish intellectuals from New York who came out to Wisconsin, Herbert Gutman and all these progressive historians that were there at that particular time. Well, Wisconsin history was a byword. So I wanted to go to Wisconsin. Or the other place I applied to was the University of California, Berkeley. I got accepted at both of them, but I got no money to go to either one of them. I went up to Berkeley, and the only affordable housing that I could find in Berkeley was essentially in a black ghetto. So the choice was pretty easy for me, as I wasn't going to leave my wife home alone in a ghetto during the day while I went off to graduate school seminars. And these were the days when wives weren't automatically thought to have to go out to work. I mean, she did go out to work after that, but not in Berkeley. So I went to the University of California, Santa Barbara. And I didn't have any money there, but I had contacts, and I knew I could get some financial assistance there, and I did.

I got a teaching assistantship right away, and I finished two years there at UC Santa Barbara, took my doctoral exams, and then I was off to England. My field of specialization was Anglo-American intellectual history. My mentor, Robert Kelley, had written a wonderful book called The Transatlantic Persuasion, which had to do with liberalism in the English-speaking world, and it covered Canada, Australia, the United States, and Great Britain. Kelley wanted me to write a dissertation on an important Fabian socialist named Graham Wallas, who wrote a book called The Great Society, and he was the mentor at Harvard for an American student who became a leading liberal thinker, Walter Lippmann. And right then, when I was in graduate school, President John Kennedy was shot and killed, and then Lyndon Johnson became president and brought in the so-called "Great Society," and he took that name from Graham Wallas's book. That would have been a great choice for a dissertation, but I didn't do that. My mentor was way more into political things, I was way more into literary things, cultural things like that, and so I didn't really want to do a strictly political dissertation. But I probably should have. In any event, I decided I was going to go teach in England, and then I would find a dissertation topic. I was originally going to assess the impact of the American public school on Britain. Because while the American public school was introduced in 1830, it wasn't until 1870 that Britain introduced free, mandatory public education. The British really did borrow directly from what Horace Mann had developed in the United States. There was a guy named W. E. Forster who spearheaded the Forster Bill of Education in 1870. So I was going to study that topic. But once I got to England, I wasn't really that interested in that topic either.

<Begin Segment 9>

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JG: Well, let me ask you . . . It's so rich, this conversation. 'Cause one of the things, you know, if you look at the arc of your life as you describe it up to this point, one of the things that's really kind of evident is the emergence of this kind of consciousness. And I'm trying to get a sense of how that unfolded over time. I mean, because here you are, I guess people would call you a provocateur, an intellectual provocateur. I mean, let's face it, it takes a little bit of nerve to teach Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, and Orwell's dystopian novels, in an Orange County school in the early '60s. You've just graduated from UC Santa Barbara, you've had this kind of turning point in your intellectual development, you've begun this real serious interest in looking at the history, the lives of people of color, and I'm just trying to get a sense of where that comes from. I mean, is it rooted in your family's experiences? You talk about World War II, your being a child seeing Japanese faces on the movie screen, these individuals were demonized, and if you could kind of map out a bit, where does Art Hansen become, like, politically activated?

AH: Well, it starts with the family. Of course, as you know, Norwegian Americans are fairly well represented in Japanese American studies -- people like Douglas Nelson, Gwenn Jensen, Andy Russell, and even Lane Hirabayashi, who is of Norwegian descent on his maternal side -- and Norwegian Americans have also been very much involved in the socialist movement in this country, especially the agrarian socialist movement, because they were largely farmers, and they were protest-oriented. I didn't know much about that at the time I was coming of age, so that wasn't such a profound influence on me, but it might have been on my dad. But it was really my father more than anything else. My dad was very much against authoritarianism. For example, he did not want my brother Roy and I to call him "Dad" or "Father" or "Pop" or anything like that. He thought that was an unearned increment of authority and power. He wanted to be loved and respected on the basis of who he was rather than on what title he was wearing. So he had us call him Haakon, or we just called him "Haak." So my dad was always "Haak." And my brother, who loved my dad terribly, named one of his two sons Haakon. So that name persists right now in the family. But our father not only had us call him Haak, but he had us do another thing. Now, keep in mind, this is a guy that wasn't afraid of taking a shot at us or kicking us in the ass or whatever else he thought was necessary. It wasn't like he was a milquetoast, but he did have a fierce sort of philosophical bent towards this anti-authoritarian idea. He had us play a game with him that he called the "light touch." And this was to disabuse us of thinking of him being an authority figure. What we had to do was take our hand and hit him across the top of the head, like this, just so we would do a light touch like that. And he said, "Now, go ahead and do it," and both my brother and I were scared to do it, afraid we were going to miss and then hit him really hard. You remember, Jim, the famous Beat story of the shooting of the apple off the head, right?

JG: Yes, William Burroughs.

AH: Right, where William Burroughs attempts to shoot the apple off the head of his wife, but instead hits her in the head and kills her. Okay, but my brother and I were having the feeling like this was Burroughs's wife, okay? But my dad never did get mad at us about that. But those kinds of things were what he wanted us to do. Now then, my dad was probably an atheist, even though he marketed himself as an agnostic. But he had my brother and I go to church because he didn't want to make up our minds as to how we felt about religion. And so he forced us to go to church. I mean, we had to go to church, and here's a guy who never went to church. He's home and we're going to church. Or, when we'd have a town parade in Goleta, California, he would paint signs for the church float and do all these things, because he wanted to give us the best shot at religion. His parents were religious, but he wasn't. But he wanted us to figure this out for ourselves. So it's those kinds of things. My dad had one suit. He hardly ever dressed up. Most of the time at nights he would just be working on things. He worked 'til three or four in the morning on different things. He always had different problems he was solving, trying to square a circle, a veritable mathematical impossibility. He would work on these kinds of things. When he was young, he used to write novels, and they were gloomy, and he kept getting rejections. But my dad was a person . . . I studied him a lot, just watched him. But he's somebody that I not only loved, but I really admired, not because of his achievements financially, not because he commanded all of these paternal titles, but just because of the worth of him as a human being. Now, my mother was not an intellectual. My mother was dyslexic, and she frequently mispronounced words.

JG: What's her name, Art?

AH: Anna.

JG: Anna.

AH: It was Anna, and her maiden name was Stover. She was brought up, not by her parents, but by her grandparents, my great-grandparents. I never met my grandparents on my mother's side. My maternal grandmother was an alcoholic; she died at age thirty-nine, and she had crippling arthritis as a young woman, and apparently was in tremendous pain most of the time. But when my mother was in high school, her mother would come to the high school to bring my mother her lunch or something, and she was staggering through the halls, and my mother was absolutely embarrassed. She would hide anywhere she could so that she wouldn't have to be seen with her mom. Her mom tried to kill her once. When my mother was born, her mother put her in a foundling home, up in the Troy, New York area, the city of Watervliet, and so she was effectively an orphan. Her father was just the guy that happened to be in bed with her mother at that particular time. I have a photograph of him, he was a World War I veteran, and I have a postcard he sent to his wife and he wrote, "You won't have this old puss to haunt you any longer," or words to that effect. That's all it says on it. And that's it. My mother once visited him, and he was living up in Vermont, outside of Rutland, on a farm. She went up there, and her grandmother dressed her up in these frills, and she went to her father's house and all his kids were barefoot and they were all like hillbillies, and she was so mortified to have to be there. But that's the only time she ever saw her dad. So she was brought up by a generation that goes way, way back into the 19th century. And her grandmother's attitude towards medicine was that you should never want to go to the hospital. Her family on her side was Irish, and they said, "If you go to the hospital, they'll slip you the black bottle," which meant, "They're going to put you to death." Or, her grandfather would pull tricks on her and say, "Now, I want you to go pick up our clothes from the Chinese laundry, but you watch it because they'll take kids and they'll put 'em into this cauldron full of boiling stew and they'll start mixing you around in it. Or my mother would be a little late going to school and her grandfather would pay a black kid to chase after her and say, "I want to kiss you." I mean, it's the kind of thing she was dealing with then.

So my mother was an educated -- high school graduate -- but not an enlightened person, and my father was largely self-taught but was very enlightened. But both of them were extremely kind and generous people. If people came over to our house, if they expressed a liking for something, my parents just said, "Take it," just like that. It's the way that they were. And so people who have had a bad experience with their parents, it's hard for me to comprehend. My experience at the most elemental level with my parents was just unqualified love and support, but not fawning over us. I mean, my mother would scream at us and my dad would get fire in his eyes when he got angry at us. It's not that we didn't face that kind of thing, because we did, and especially when we worked for my dad. He made an object lesson out of us, which was unbelievable. My brother once was working for him in construction and he just stormed off of the job. He basically said, "F you," and got out of there. He said, "I'm not going to work for somebody who's such a lunatic." My brother loved him. So we have histrionics and everything else, but underneath all this stuff was really, really, love. So anyway, that's basically kind of where my values came from. And the bottom line for me was to pursue a course that was ethical, to pursue a course that I think challenged authority, and was, you know, to be just a people-oriented person. So I think I got that from my dad, and my brother's the same way. And I think my dad was a strong example in that particular sense.

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JG: So Art, before we took a quick break, we were talking about your social, cultural, political, and intellectual development, and you were telling us about the role your parents had in imparting certain values to you. I was wondering if you could talk more about that.

AH: Well, I think I've exhausted that part of it. What I think I would like to talk about now is something that has not been talked about very much by historians until recent years, and that is the whole idea of the body and the way that the body affects one's ideas, values, and behavior. And I think people need to come to grips with that situation.

I was born with some physical defects that I think have had an impact on the way I feel towards, you know, people who are afflicted in one or another way with special problems or challenges like race or religion or whatever. One foot of mine is two and a half shoe sizes bigger than the other one. My right foot is shorter than my left foot. Also, I don't have separate toes, except for my large toe, on my right foot. I have a right foot with my four small toes fused. There aren't enough bones to break the fused toes into four normal toes. There's no webbing there, just a fusion. And as you both know, when you're a kid, you can easily be ridiculed by other kids if there's anything out of the way with you. You know, if somebody's too thin or too fat or too whatever. I didn't feel different most of the time because most of the time I had shoes on. But when I would go to the public swimming pool, of course, even though people weren't pointing or something, I'm hearing them say some hurtful things. So I think it's made me quite sensitive to and empathetic to the "deformity" or "abnormality" or "differences" of other people.

And then, you know, when I was in the sixth grade, my teacher started noticing that when I was running out to recess, that I was limping quite a bit, so she got in touch with my mother and she said, "You know, I noticed that Artie, when he runs, is limping more and more." So then they found that my left leg had grown away from my right leg so that it was three inches longer. So the thought was that at some point down the line, I was going to have to get a shoe lift. I've always felt a special kinship with a friend of mine at the Japanese American National Museum, the documentary filmmaker John Esaki, because he told me that his father did have a shoe lift. He was considerably older than me, so he wasn't the beneficiary of what I was lucky to be the beneficiary of and that is going to this woman doctor in Goleta who said, "You need to go to see Dr. Walter Graham, an orthopedic surgeon in Santa Barbara. He's developed some new way of being able to correct this situation. So I was just starting my growing spurt, and so Dr. Graham put staples in my left leg so that its growth was retarded for three years, so that my right leg could catch up with my left leg. And it almost did. There's still a difference, and I still limp and people say, especially when I am tired and limp more: "You know, I noticed you're limping. Did you hurt your leg or something?" Of course I played sports, and so that condition didn't stop me from strenuous activities, but I have had multiple operations on my left knee, and some of them were operations I had before they had arthroscopic surgery, so I have gigantic scars on my left leg.

I suppose another thing that sensitized me to others regarded as "different" was being a bit overweight. My mom was overweight, my brother was overweight. I always think of those kinds of things to be both a disadvantage and an advantage. The disadvantage is in the way that ideals are defined, but in another sense, it's what can be called the "saving remnant." I remember reading a novel when I was in high school that was really important to me, about a club-footed person: Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham. That novel was important because I realized that these so-called "defects" are the things that make you idiosyncratically different so that you're not living life on automatic pilot, but that you have to reflect on things and consider other people's situation. And so I think that's been an important thing for me, too, that I was blessed in that way with this alleged liability. It is something that has paid dividends in providing me with certain insights and certain compassions. So I think that situation is something that I wanted to make part of the record, too.

JG: Oh, well, thank you for sharing that. That's very important. Was there anything specific that occurred around your childhood struggles with your body? I mean, you mentioned kids noticing, but did anyone ever, you know, was there any --

AH: No, I didn't have any outrageous situation. I just sensed its possibility and then I just didn't go to the beach as I got older. Even now, to these days, I mean, I dread certain situations. What if I am wearing sandals and I go to a Japanese American house and they say. "Please take off your shoes." I don't want to be walking around in public with that foot, I really don't. So that's always on my mind when I go to the airport. I'll forget I have moccasins or footwear without socks and then all of a sudden I'm requested to take my shoes off for a security check. I mean, it's always there to be revealed. And people are polite enough about it, it's just my own feeling about it. I mean, why did Japanese Americans after camp feel self-hatred? They often say they wanted to be somebody else, or they didn't want to be Japanese Americans. I mean, nowadays nobody's going to say that. Now Japanese Americans have got a higher standard of living, higher education rate, live in good houses, have good jobs, and so on, so they're not going to say that. But at that particular point in time and everything, they did, and for me, I wanted to be "normal," especially when I was a kid. However, when you're poor, it's hard to hide abnormalities. For example, I played a lot of baseball, and I really needed split-sized shoes. But we couldn't afford to be buying me two pairs of shoes. So I had the shoe that was too large stuffed with cotton. But then with spikes on the bottom of the shoes, what do you think the large shoe does? It curls. It's easy for me to be called "Twinkle Toes" because my toes are pointing up. And people are wondering why the hell I am wearing that large shoe. I didn't go into an explanation of it. And it's that kind of thing. So it's not so much an actual problem, it's just that you're always jockeying to position yourself towards normality, or at least to give the appearance of normality. And so I don't go through these tortured explanations like I'm doing for you guys on this interview, but I mean, that's essentially what is going on in my mind. So I say, well, I'm lucky, but you don't know that when you are a kid; instead, you think you're terribly handicapped.

JG: That's interesting. Interesting.

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JG: Well, let's talk about your academic career. You were talking earlier about why you ended up at UC Santa Barbara. It's interesting, I mean, I knew you hadn't studied Japanese American history per se, or you didn't write a dissertation along those lines, but maybe I'd like a little more information about how you ended up eventually doing Japanese American history after starting out in British and American history and then going to England.

AH: When I first went to college I started out as a psychology major, and I thought that I was going to be a shrink of some sort. I loved that because you have these juvenile indulgences in reading other people's character, and a lot of people seem to be oblivious to those things, and you think you're really clever at being able to isolate the reason for this and that and the other thing. Then you start taking psychology courses, and after Psych 1-A, the first course, which is a wonderful general introduction to psychology, then you move into -- I went to Berkeley -- taking psychological statistics, scientific method, and then I hated psychology. I never wanted to be into that again. So I got out of that major and became an English major. And that one semester I spent at Berkeley, my grades consisted of a D in psychological statistics, a C in French, a C in scientific method, and a B in English. So I became an English major. I was waiting to get these postcards from Berkeley to see if I flunked out, but I didn't. So when I transferred to UC Santa Barbara I became an English major. I would have stayed an English major. I liked it. I really enjoyed being an English major, but then what happened was that you had to take four semesters of a foreign language, preferably French, to be able to stay as an English major. And I told you my mother was dyslexic, and foreign languages, my brother and I were both terrible at them. You two are both really good at foreign languages, so you probably can't share this feeling that we have, but my brother was terrible and I was terrible. And so the French 3 teacher said, "I will give you a C in French 3 if you promise me that you won't show up for French 4." So anyway, that ended my English major.

So I was looking for something that would salvage what I liked about literature, and that's why I was interested in things like American studies or intellectual history. And the old intellectual history wasn't tied so much to culture in the sense of anthropological culture; it was tied to culture in the sense of belletristic culture, so it was literature. And so I was going to take intellectual history because I would be able to read a lot of novels and be able to keep that activity alive, and I liked that. I really enjoyed intellectual history. But even intellectual history started to shift a lot, too, in that intellectual history started to become a rigorous analysis of the history of certain kinds of ideas, and there was a school of intellectual history started by Arthur Lovejoy at the University of Chicago where they would take, say, the idea of unity, and then you would trace, for instance, the development of that particular idea. I didn't care about that. I really liked the social and intellectual aspects of ideas. How did ideas manifest themselves in society and into culture, and that was the thing that I really enjoyed. When I got my job at Cal State Fullerton, I quickly changed my course title from "Intellectual History" into "Cultural History." I renamed it so there'd be no question about what it was that we were going to do. I was involved in hiring most of the people that taught in the American Studies Department over at Fullerton because I was a cultural historian and most of them got their degrees in U.S. Cultural History or American Civilization at the University of Pennsylvania or Brown University. So I felt very comfortable with cultural history.

I should just back up a little to the point where we left off. What happened was that I finished my doctoral orals, and then what I did was to get a job over in England, because I was going to write my dissertation there. And when I got over there, my job consisted of coaching rugby at a secondary modern school and teaching seminars in U.S. history at a redbrick school called Reading University. It was then reputed because a prominent writer named John Wain, a so-called "Angry Young Man," had taught there a few years earlier. So anyway, I was at Reading for only three or four months. I was supposed to stay in England for two years and try to write my dissertation, and then my dad died at age fifty-three. So I had to come back to Santa Barbara and help my mom out, and so this is what happened. I came back to California, it was in the middle of the academic year, and it was December 1965. I'd taken my doctoral exams in June 1965. And this John Bircher from Orange County by the name of John Schmitz, who you might have heard of -- he later ran for president of the United States with General Curtis LeMay as his running mate. He was a Bircher, but he taught at Santa Ana College. And he got elected to the state assembly of California and so there was a job open in the middle of the year, and when I applied for it they hired me. And so here I am replacing a Bircher, and I used his office, I had his telephone, and I got all these calls from women's groups saying, "Would you come to speak to our group?" And I said, "I think you've got the wrong person for this particular thing. I'm not even a Republican."

So, in any event, I taught there at Santa Ana College for just a little while, and then somebody from Cal State Fullerton who taught intellectual history classes decided he was going to accept a job at the University of Hawaii, a guy by the name of Idus Newby, who wrote on the history of the South, and was really a very talented historian. He ended up retiring at the University of Hawaii. But, so what happened is I got the job at Fullerton, and I was there for forty-two years teaching at Cal State Fullerton. There was one year, in 1979-1980, I taught at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. Of course, I had my regular sabbaticals and leaves, but generally I was there all forty-two years. I had a tough time finishing my dissertation. I really had a tough time doing it because I wasn't able to concentrate on just writing that, because in the Cal State system, you teach four classes a semester. But I was hired as a guy that was an ABD, "All But Dissertation," and almost everybody in my department then was that way. And we were all about the same age. I was twenty-seven-years old when I started at Cal State Fullerton, and we were like grown up college kids, but not that grown up. A lot of the time was spent avoiding doing our dissertations. Going to bars, for instance, talking about this, that, and the other thing.

Eventually what happened was that it finally came down to time running out on me. I had to finish my dissertation by the end of the summer of 1971 or else I was going to lose my job. And I thought I had it made, but I didn't finish it. So the department had to have a vote, and so they voted to strip me of my professorship. They agreed to keep me teaching there for that particular semester. I had exactly the same classes, but I only got paid two-thirds of my salary. And boy, I'll tell you, I finished my dissertation within about a month and a half or two after that happened, and so they restored my job. They had to have a vote to restore my job, and one person voted against me. So it was like thirty-two to one. Of course, I always thought, "Who was that person?" You know how it's like one person in the class doesn't like your class? The rest of the people like it, but you're more bothered by that one person who doesn't like it than the people who like it. So, it wasn't too long after that that I started to change my attitude toward things. I always was dedicated as a teacher, I never had problems, I got nominated for teaching awards and received glowing student evaluations for my teaching when I was younger, but I just wasn't finishing my research projects in a timely fashion.

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AH: And then, when I got my doctorate, I just thought to myself, this dissertation, I didn't mind doing it in a way, but you know, it's on British intellectuals, and I come from a lower-middle-class family, so how often am I going to have discretionary money? I thought I'd never be able to go to England and do all of this research. And I said to myself, "Who am I kidding? I'm working on these upper-class, upper-middle-class people, John Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, all these people, how could Artie Hansen from Hoboken possibly fathom that, or do I want to?" And here, what's happening on campus at that time is a cultural revolution. The school and the society are going up in smoke, and there are many demonstrations. It was way more interesting to me to experience the demonstrations on campus. I wanted to get involved in campus politics, and here I was then having to trudge home and do work on my dissertation. So I said, "I want to get something to study that's closer to who I am, for instance, and what I care about. And it's at that point that creeping into my mind was that monstrosity of a paper that I wrote back there in 1960, in which I didn't think I did justice to the topic. And I really wanted to do something on Japanese Americans, because by that time, somebody had come into the History Department at Fullerton named Kinji Yada who had been at Manzanar as a teenager, and Kinji was my drinking buddy and boon companion and everything else, and I talked to him quite a bit about Manzanar. And so that had rekindled my interest in the Japanese American World War II experience and I wanted to do something with it.

So I taught this course on historical research, historiography, every semester, and I usually taught two sections of it and everybody who was a history major had to take it. I loved teaching it. It was like intellectual history. And then I just decided, okay, here's what I'm going to do. Everybody had to do a research paper, an original research paper. I'm going to have everybody in the class write on the World War II Japanese American experience. I had two sections, with twenty-five people in each class, so at the end of the semester I had fifty people that had written on this subject. And then, as I've told you in some of the stuff I sent you, by the next year I started taking my students up to Manzanar every year on a field trip. So when I'd have the class they'd be writing their research paper, but before they made a decision about their research paper topic, we would go up to Manzanar. We'd stay in a motel that had been constructed of Manzanar barracks, the Willow Motel in Lone Pine, and then we usually took people with us like the head of the Manzanar Committee, Sue Embrey, who as Sue Kunitomi had been in camp and been the managing editor of the Manzanar Free Press. Sometimes she would bring Wilbur Sato, who as a youth had been incarcerated at Manzanar. Sometimes our class would go up to Manzanar with Shi and Mary Nomura. Mary Kageyama Nomura was the "Songbird of Manzanar," famous for singing at camp, and Shi Nomura, who Kinji Yada used to tell me so much about, was the advisor for a Nisei group called the Manza-Knights. Bruce Kaji was in that -- he later started the Japanese American National Museum -- and so too was Gordon Sato, Wilbur's older brother -- who afterwards created the Manzanar Project to combat world poverty and hunger. I used to take the class to the Eastern California Museum in the nearby town of Independence because Shi Nomura put an exhibit on Manzanar there, and it was like the precursor to the museum they now have up there at the Manzanar National Historic Site. Shi was really important on that exhibit. So I was in touch with two of the people who, I think, put Manzanar on the map. Between Sue and Shi, I mean, I think they really did, in very different ways, and with differing philosophies. Shi was accommodating, Sue, although she could be accommodating when she had to, could also be very resisting, and she could emphasize the dark hues as well as the light ones. Whereas Shi was a sunnily-disposed sort of guy. But taking my class up to the Manzanar area was a really fantastic experience.

Eventually I started teaching classes specifically on the Japanese American confinement, but before that I started a lecture series at the University of California, Irvine. And there must have been probably 150-200 people, almost all Japanese Americans, enrolled. They were so hungry to talk about this by that time; this was in, like, 1973. And I had to line up all the people for the lecturers. That's how I met Sue Embrey. I was talking to Sansei, because I wanted the Sansei take on what was the impact on the Sansei of the World War II experience of Japanese Americans, and they said, "Well, we can't recommend any Sansei, but there's a person who thinks like a Sansei, so get Sue. I had gone to the Amerasia Bookstore in Los Angeles's Little Tokyo, and this guy Johnny Mori was working there. Johnny Mori ended up with the band Hiroshima. He was somebody that our Japanese American Project later interviewed. The first person that I ever interviewed was in 1973 and it was Sue Embrey. She was the first person, and the second person was Togo Tanaka. Those interviews were done within a week or so of one another. Within a short time, I'd interviewed two people that were really very good people to interview. I mean, they had narrative skills, and they had the authority to be able to speak from a grounded perspective. I was living the subject at that time. And I had students that started living it. We started a Japanese American Project. We hung out together all the time, and these students were among my very best friends. They weren't that much younger than me, and at Fullerton, we had reentry students. And there were only two Japanese restaurants in all of Orange County at that time. They were both in Garden Grove, and both were right up the street from where Shi Nomura had a fish market in Garden Grove. And so we would go over there to these restaurants, and then we had UCLA quite close, in Westwood, with this great big Japanese American collection. And then we had Little Tokyo, and so I started coming in to Little Tokyo at all hours. I mean, I was really, really living this thing. And then one summer, in 1974, my graduate student Dave Hacker and I came in virtually every day to UCLA to do research in the archives, and all we did was to talk about that Manzanar Riot, coming and going on the freeway. We were just into it. We were really into it. I mean, it was unbelievable the amount of data we studied, and I never before felt that kind of enthusiasm about research. It was just such an easy thing for me to do.

And then within a year, my graduate assistant Betty Mitson and I put this book together, Voices Long Silent: An Oral Inquiry into the Japanese American Evacuation. You know, we put together a lot of books in those early days. When I moved out of intellectual history, it really was a hot field. By contrast, Japanese American history was nothing, oral history was nothing. I mean, these things were disreputable in the eyes of the academics in history departments. The main thing that would commend a research topic to them, most historians, is that it had a political side to it and it had a military side to it. That was the way that they liked it. But I just decided this was what was important, and if we had to do self-publishing book, I didn't care. I wasn't concerned about that. What I was concerned about was working in this particular field. You know, when you really find something -- and I've talked to you about this, Jim -- when you find something that you really love, you don't have to think about it. You are impelled. You don't have to be compelled, you're impelled to do that sort of thing, and that's your life. And I never wanted to get out of it. I never wanted to get out of it. I didn't want to just do a book on Japanese Americans and move on to another topic. I mean, I felt that the subject I was studying had a constitutional dimension, a political dimension, a psychological dimension, and everything else, and it was virtually an unmapped field. Now, lots of people have written on it. Lots of people worked on it; we're sitting here today doing an oral history, for the best oral history program in the United States on Japanese Americans, and you're working on that. But at that time I got involved, it was nothing and everything. Carrying around these big reel-to-reel tape recorders, etcetera, but it was so exciting. I was talking to people, who some could say were grass-roots folks, but actually, the people I would interview were really elites. I mean, it just depends on your frame of reference. They were elites within their community. Togo Tanaka was a Phi Beta Kappa at UCLA who became at a very young age the editor of the Rafu Shimpo English-language section. The people I had access then to interview, it was just a wonderful sort of thing. Well, it just took off from there. That was it.

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MN: You know, back in the 1970s when you started, Japanese Americans weren't even talking about camps to their children. How did you break into the Japanese American community? Was it through Dr. Yada?

AH: No. I didn't really need too much in the way of a go-between. I mean, some of it was through the association of those people I had in the lecture series. Sue opened up doors for me. But a lot of it had to do with just, I think, how much I was wanting to know about the subject, and how much I was investing in the way of time and energy and interest in it, and that was communicated, I think, to the people I dealt with. Because then what the Nisei I interviewed used to say is, "You Sansei are always telling us Nisei that we've never told you anything about our wartime experiences. We don't recall you asking too much." And in a sense, they had a perceptual readiness to talk about it, too, if somebody would only ask. And that's what an oral historian like me was doing: asking questions. If you ask good questions, you get some good responses. And then once I had students involved, they got infected with that same kind of feeling. But it was just the center of my universe. I'm sure it had a lot to do, actually, with my first marriage ending. I just think I was so possessed with this subject that I didn't have as much room as I should have had for my emotional life.

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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.

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JG: How was that piece received when you and David Hacker wrote it for the Amerasia Journal?

AH: Oh, "The Manzanar Riot" article was received very well. I mean, now I probably wouldn't even be able to get it published because there's so much in there about people's names and everything else. I mean, it really just spoke, probably more than to anything else, the comparative powerlessness of the Japanese American community at that time. Because now likely we would be faced with huge lawsuits, as I wrote very revealing footnotes. I just went through all these documents and quoted all sorts of things and outed people who were secret informers. It just wouldn't have been published today, I don't think. But by scholars it was received well. It was the first thing I wrote dealing with this subject, and probably the best thing I have ever written. But I was able to do this. I mean, I was so intoxicated with the topic and I was so full of information. But I was able to do this. After you get socialized into the historical profession, you become a lot more tentative. It's not an accident that the work of young writers is so good. It's not just guts, it's just the, "I don't give a crap about whose feelings are hurt or what if I do this." You just plow ahead to go after the truth. And when you do that, you hurt people, you know. I mean, I have had people come and talk to me about the article. The Tayama family came to Cal State Fullerton and talked to me. And some people apparently did get sued by them, but not me. But today the article just wouldn't be published.

Now, the Manzanar Martyr is another story. When I published that it did get reviewed by quite a few people, and a guy named Bill Moss who was in the Oral History Association wrote a review, in the International Journal of Oral History or the Oral History Review, and he said: "This is an incomplete book because it doesn't say whether Harry Ueno was involved in this beating of Tayama. He claims he was framed, because had blown the whistle on people in the camp administration for stealing sugar and selling it on the black market. So it's incomplete." But when I think about that charge, every book is incomplete. I mean, there's always a point at which you can't say certain kinds of things. There's some barrier and if you don't impose it, your publisher will. So all historical writing is a work in progress, and the same thing is true for any sort of book. That's just a part of the journey of discovery that you're involved in while you're here. And even as people open up that envelope containing Harry Ueno's letter to me and read it, they still will be on a journey of discovery, too. So, yeah, the Manzanar Martyr is an incomplete book. I thought it was a stupid statement for Bill Moss to make, I really did, a philosophically dumb thing for a smart person to say, actually.

But that book, when Raymond Okamura reviewed it, he said, "Give 'em hell, Harry," and then he said, "This is a book whose footnotes are as good as the text." At that time, Okamura was trying to get me dissed by the Japanese American community for different things that he felt I was flagrant about, and he wanted a community board to review anything that I wrote before it was published. In his review he implied that he thought the other two authors connected with the book, Sue Embrey and Betty Mitson, had written the footnotes. But actually I wrote every one of those footnotes.

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MN: You know another, I thought, really unique thing, was that you had undergraduate students . . . is it David Bertagnoli.

AH: Yeah.

MN: And Sherry Turner, they were interviewing townspeople who had lived around the Manzanar and Tule Lake camps. Did they pick that subject because they were Caucasians and they had better access to the townspeople? And also, how did you fund interviews in Tule Lake, which was so far from Cal State Fullerton?

AH: Well, that's kind of interesting. See, one of the things that I did a lot was to scratch and do everything I could to get money for the students. There were very modest grants at Cal State Fullerton that you as a faculty member could apply for on behalf of student research projects. And most faculty members didn't waste their time doing it, so I could get those grants all the time. It would be like three or four hundred dollars, but it was enough to get the students transportation and lodging at some motel in, say, Tulelake, California, for a week, which is what Sherry Turner did as part of a summer course I taught in the early 1970s. And these two people, Sherry Turner and David Bertagnoli, got so turned on by this class that they wanted to do more than just one interview. They were only required to do one interview, but they'd say, "I want to do more." Bertagnoli said, "I'd like to go up to Manzanar and interview," because the Manzanar Committee was claiming this and that about other things. He said, "I want to go find out for myself." So he went up, and then the next year, I went to the Owens Valley with him, and I also started doing interviews about Manzanar. I didn't do that in Tulelake until years later. Sherry Turner went up there by herself, and did all those interviews. She really showed a lot more courage than I could imagine, because the people were so racist in the Tulelake area, and she did a pretty good job on those interviews.

And years later, another student of mine, Reagan Bell, did interviews about the military police at Tule Lake. I went up to Tulelake with him, and both of us were doing interviews while we were up there. But he'd already gone up there by himself and ran down MPs who had married locals and interviewed them. But Reagan was a perfect example of the kind of student you get at a place like Cal State Fullerton. When I taught at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, in both 1979-1980 and in 2008-2009, I found that the age of the overwhelming number of students there ranged from seventeen to twenty-two, and they would all pretty much go through college in four years. At Fullerton, my student Betty Mitson taught me how to interview and got me interested in oral history. She was older than me by ten or twelve years, and I learned a lot from her. She pushed me into starting the Japanese American Project. She said, "Let's get this project going." And she recorded all these lectures when we had the lecture series. She was really dedicated. I'd come to work in the morning and she had slept in the chair in our office. She was working all night transcribing and editing and indexing and proofing interviews. She was really turned on to this stuff. But you know, these students that I had, they were a mixed bag of ages and everything, and so their life experiences were really kind of interesting. I think that's what I was able to take advantage of. And Reagan Bell was a classic example. He graduated from high school in 1944, from Tustin Union High School, the very same high school that, in effect, fired me in 1963. [Laughs] But Reagan Bell, when he was in high school, a lot of the Japanese Americans, ones who lived in the Irvine area and whose families worked on the Irvine Ranch, went to Tustin High School. He showed me his high school yearbook, and he said: "Look at this yearbook. All these Japanese American faces are in there, and the next year, none of them are there." So he saw his school friends going off to camp. But then when he later got into the military service, one of his first jobs was in the military police. So when he was a graduate student, I said, "This is a natural thesis topic for you. You can see both perspectives. So that's what he ended up doing for his master's thesis, the interaction between the military police and the confined Japanese American population at the Tule Lake Relocation/Segregation Center. He only lived about three or four years after he wrote his thesis and then he died. But he'd gotten this piece of historical work accomplished, which was a nice thing.

So it was students writing these class research papers and then sometimes converting them into master's theses . . . well, that's how the Twice Orphaned book came into existence. Lisa Nobe did her class project on the Children's Village orphanage at Manzanar. Then I got her a job as a consultant with the National Park Service. But later, after getting divorced, she moved on to other things. She dropped out of graduate school and then, first, got into the Los Angeles Police Department and then went over to Japan to learn Japanese and be a minister. Although she did write a great article for the Journal of the West about the Children's Village, the book she and I were to do on the same topic never materialized. So, after many years had passed, I found this other person, Dr. Cathy Irwin, who in 2008 produced a fine book, Twice Orphaned, on this topic by building on the work that Lisa had earlier done. But it was just one of those things. We didn't have anything at Cal State Fullerton, not until quite recently, like and Asian American studies program or anything else like that. It was just a handful of people doing related research projects.

JG: But you had this collection of individuals working together for a common cause.

AH: Yeah. A lot of it had to do with my involvement. I was the advisor for the History Department's honor society and then also was head of the Oral History Program and its Japanese American Project, so I had access to little kinds of funds and I had office space where the students could congregate. Also, I was separated from my first wife for three years, and so I was free to be able to go on field trips and things like this. It just was one of those things. You have a research grant or something, then pretty soon you have different people that are academic groupies in the sense that they're working on these sorts of things, and then they find their own field, and you can get them into graduate schools because you know their work real well and you can write good letters of recommendation for them. Lots of them went on to other things of importance.

<Begin Segment 17>

[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.

<Begin Segment 18>

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

JG: What I'm wondering is, if you could spin it out a bit, because I think it's really important -- is this kind of relationship you have and have had to oral history. It sounds, at least in the way you describe it in the early years, as if there was a lot of trial and error trying to figure out what this field is, and what it does. You have certainly raised the visibility of oral history here in southern California. I'm just wondering if you could talk a little about, you know, Betty Mitson, and the origins of the Cal State Fullerton Oral History Program.

AH: Well, Fullerton had one of the earliest oral history programs in the United States, and it grew very quickly because it was a different type of oral history program. It certainly was very influential on me. It was different in several ways. One, instead of just using professionals or graduate students for its interviewers, the Fullerton program used students, mostly undergraduate students, who were taking the oral history classes. They certainly didn't distinguish, actually, whether they were graduate or undergraduate students. They felt that a student was capable of doing important work. It was felt that, if they learned the method of doing oral history, and they learned the subject matter of their interviews, they could put those two things together and produce something that would be valuable. And so Fullerton was seen as kind of dangerous by other oral history operations. I got into Japanese American studies and oral history in 1972. Gary Shumway, the founding director of the CSUF Oral History Program, got me money to go back to an oral history conference held in West Point, at the U.S. Military Academy, in 1973. That was the National Colloquium of Oral History, and I had to give a talk there about the relationship of oral history and social history. At that time, I felt I knew almost nothing about social history and even less about oral history. But I worked really hard on my topic and I made this presentation. It went pretty well. And then I also went to all the sessions at the colloquium, so I really did learn a lot about oral history. Now, Betty Mitson, when she took my class on historical methodology, she had just the previous semester taken an oral history class from Gary Shumway. So she knew about oral history and she was already doing oral histories for the different projects in the Oral History Program. What she asked me in the class was whether, instead of writing a paper, she could do more interviews. I said, "No, I'm not sure I believe in oral history. I want you to write a research paper. "Listen," she said," Dr. Shumway had me write a paper on the Japanese American experience during World War II, so I'm beyond that. I'm ready to do some more oral histories, or I'll start a collection of Japanese American documents over in the university library's department of special collections, or I'll do something like that." I said, "Well, why don't we see what we can work out?" And she said, "Let's do it this way: I will bring into class some interviews that are in the Oral History Program's collection that have to do with Japanese Americans." And that's when she brought into our class the tapes of the interviews that were done with Orange County Nisei which started: "Where were you on December 7, 1941?" She put this big reel-to-reel tape recorder right in the middle of the seminar table we were seated around and played these tapes. I became so hooked on oral history by the end of the time I was listening to these tapes, that I said, "This is so powerful." And this really was for me one of those ah-ha experiences. It really was. The light bulb went on. I was converted to oral history as both a methodology and a way of understanding past experience.

Now, Gary Shumway, a Mormon from southeastern Utah, was a very religious person, and used to talk about oral history almost as though it involved a religious conversion. I never felt that way. I felt it entailed an intellectual and emotional conversion, but I didn't think oral history was a religion. This was not a faith-based activity for me, but instead a research-based activity that I wanted to do. And the thing that I would always emphasize after my "conversion" is how much the interviewer has to do prior to the interview to make an interview work. If you don't do that, interviews become gab sessions based upon superficial rapport developed between interviewers and interviewees. An oral history interview is a conversation, and somebody else looking at it thinks they're seeing two people just talking. But it's a conversation with a difference, for it is informed, on the part of the person doing the interview, by research, and then on the part of the person being interviewed, by lived experience.

Now, in 1997 when I went up to Seattle to do some workshops and other things for Densho, I communicated that point very strongly to its staff. And Tom Ikeda, Densho's director, was very appreciative of that, and thanked me for raising the bar for Densho on what they were doing. This is really important. But I really pushed the idea, when I taught a course on the Japanese American experience, that before the students did their interviews, they read about eight to ten pertinent books in that class and wrote reports on them. The students would read books by Roger Daniels, Richard Drinnon, Michi Weglyn, Gary Okihiro, and other scholars. I didn't want the students winging their interviews. So I had them take a test before they even were released to go out and do their interviews. Because I didn't want the students relying upon their charm; I wanted them to know about the subject matter.

<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.

<Begin Segment 20>

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

JG: Looking back on your career, one of the reasons I asked the question about how many interviews you had done was because, given the number of interviews you've done over the years, I'm wondering, for good or for bad, which ones have stuck with you over the years? For example, you and I have both interviewed --

AH: Togo Tanaka.

JG: Well, we've both interviewed Togo, we've both done Harry Ueno, and we've also both done Lillian Baker, which certainly has its own interesting "reward." But I'm just curious, of the different interviews you've done over the years, which ones have stuck with you and why?

AH: Some stick with you because people ask you about them. I mean, it becomes a sticking point because somebody will ask about Lillian Baker or about Harry Ueno because they're controversial interviewees. But for me, one of the reasons that I don't do as many interviews right now as before, aside from the reasons that I've already given to you, is that I don't think I do as well in the interviews any longer because the people aren't as important to me as they were when I first was doing interviewing. I mean, every person was important to me back then. It really was a rich kind of democracy, where it didn't matter who the person was I interviewed. What I was doing was accessing their life with their blessing, to explore the recesses of their personality that they themselves had never explored because they didn't want to go there. They told themselves, "Don't go there," and they hid some things. But insofar as "important interviews," I suppose the interviews that I've enjoyed the most doing, those that have meant the most to me, are the ones that brought together all aspects of my interests and my life, and they're the ones I've done with social scientists who had been involved during World War II with the Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study, JERS, and/or the War Relocation Authority's Community Analysis Section. When I was working on those interviews, I wanted to write something that was very important -- unfortunately, it's never been written by me -- something like what the professor at UCLA did in writing about . . . what's the name of his book? You know, Jim, the Canadian Chinese scholar who used to be at UCLA?

JG: The historian?

AH: Yeah, from the History Department there. He was at UCLA, but he's since gone to the University of British Columbia.

JG: Henry Yu.

AH: Henry Yu. What was the title of his first book?

JG: Thinking Orientals.

AH: Thinking Orientals. That book is about pan-Asian social scientists, particularly sociologists, not just Japanese American ones, but I wanted to work on a book about the Nisei and hakujin social scientists who were affiliated with Professor Dorothy Swaine Thomas in JERS. I wanted to use that project as an expressive moment within the development of American social science. That's what I wanted to do. So those interviews with the JERS social scientists were super important for me. They connected with all of the things that I did in intellectual history; all of my interest in sociology, anthropology, history, and everything all came to bear on them. So whether done with hakujin social scientists like Bob Spencer and Rosalie Hankey Wax, or Japanese Americans like Charlie Kikuchi, James Sakoda, Togo Tanaka, and Setsuko Matsunaga Nishi, those interviews really engaged me. All of those interviews, except in the case of Rosalie Hankey Wax, because of her health condition and other things, were multi-day interviews. Those were really important interviews to me just because in doing them I didn't have to leave intellectual history. I was still doing intellectual history, but I was also doing Japanese American history at the same time. Those were the interviews that were most important to me.

As far as the personal relationships with the people I interviewed, I had such a close relationship with Harry Ueno. When my wife Debbie was teaching classes at San Jose State, I would go up to San Jose with her, and while she would be teaching, I'd go see Harry or some of the draft resisters, usually Mits Koshiyama. I would go and pick up Mits at his house in San Jose and then Mits and I would go over and pick up Harry and we would go out to a restaurant somewhere. And I watched the whole arc of Harry's life, to the point where he lost his car once and was losing his memory. But mostly I saw him when he was razor sharp, when he could remember everything. But when I'd come up to see him at his mobile home in Sunnyvale, even when he was in a bad state, he would make two meals for me. This is the guy who was a cook at Manzanar in Block 22. He would make two meals for me: one a Japanese meal, and the other a so-called "American meal." And then I told him, "Geez, I'm fat enough, I don't need two meals." But anyway, Harry was a super important person to me.

Another interesting interviewing experience was with Clarence Nishizu, a Nisei in Orange County. Clarence and I had such a long experience together; we worked on getting the money together to get this museum built on the Cal State Fullerton campus, the Orange County Agricultural and Nikkei Heritage Museum. Clarence was an important person for me because he was in my life for a long time. He had dimensions to his personality that were a little different from the way in which he tried to represent himself. I mean, there were some things that were fetching about him that I really liked, some courageous things and some offbeat things. And I remember you, Martha, telling me that one time at a community event that you went to, you noticed Clarence sitting all by himself, and so you went over and talked to him for a long, long time. Now if somebody had just looked at this scene, they might wonder, "What does Martha Nakagawa, a journalist who writes stories about draft resisters, have in common with an Old Guard JACLer like Clarence Nishizu?" This situation reminded me of the time Clarence Nishizu called me on the phone and said, "You know, I want to go back to New York and meet Michi Weglyn." I thought to myself, "What do you have in common with Michi Weglyn?" And, you know, I think he was a bit interested in her romantically. His wife Helen had died and Michi had this lovely photo of herself on the dust jacket of her book, Years of Infamy, and he had heard that she was living alone in New York. Then Michi Weglyn calls me up and she says, "This guy Clarence Nishizu wants to come back here and talk to me. What do I have to talk to Clarence Nishizu about?" So I'm a go-between between Clarence and Michi. And then Michi said, "When Clarence called me up, he said, "I want to stay back there in New York, so get me a place." Then she said, "What am I supposed to do? If I get him a place that's expensive, he'll complain about that. If I don't get him an expensive place, he'll think that somehow or other I don't think he has enough money to afford a good place." Well, Clarence went back to New York and he and Michi got along famously. And what the basis was upon which they got along was that he was really into faith healing. He told Michi how he had taken his late wife Helen to the Philippines to have her cancer treated by a faith healer, and that he had also recommended a lot of his friends to do the same thing. And then Michi, who was then afflicted with cancer, got interested in the same treatment. She later went to the Philippines and was cared for by a faith healer. She even sent me a videotape of her going through the faith healing process. So she and Clarence did have a basis for being able to have some kind of a relationship. Isn't that weird? I mean, two people that would seem to be so far apart -- one's a political right-winger, the other's a political left-winger. They were so different.

<Begin Segment 21>

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

JG: You've had a very full research life given the work you've done in oral history at Fullerton, but you've mentioned about having to defer your own research agenda in part. So I'm wondering, what is it that you've been working on over the years, or what are you working on now?

AH: Well, of the first two things I published, one was an article that dealt with the famous Bloomsbury group of intellectuals in England: Virginia and Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster, Clive and Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and still others, mostly writers and artists. It was really a pretty good piece, and I should have tried to get it published in the American Historical Review. Instead I had it published in a campus-based interdisciplinary journal. And one of my History Department colleagues said, "What in the hell did you do that for?" Well, probably it involved fear. It's hard to imagine yourself, somebody from a lower-middle-class family, being an intellectual, to imagine yourself having a Ph.D., and having an academic career. I used to love the title of the movie, My Brilliant Career. "What's so damned brilliant about it?" "Is it even a career?"

Anyway, the first article I wrote was about Bloomsbury and the next article I wrote, also published in the same campus-based interdisciplinary journal, was about the artists, writers, and bohemians of New York's Greenwich Village: John Reed, Max and Crystal Eastman, Floyd Dell, Mabel Dodge, Walter Lippmann, John and Dolly Sloan, Randolph Bourne, and others. And both articles dealt with the period around World War I. I was very interested in cultural radicalism. That was my focus in terms of the Anglo-American world. And so that's why I was attracted to doing these interviews with social scientists like those connected with the UC Berkeley-based Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study during World War II. As for oral history, I was at least as interested in the theoretical aspects of oral history as I was in the practice of it. I mean, I would go to oral history conference sessions dealing with such matters as "What is an oral history interview?" What constitutes it?" If it's a story, what kind of story?" And I would have liked to have had a career where I wrote books and was a bigger player in scholarship than I was. Not writing a lot of books so much, but writing ones that went through the rigorous kind of refereeing that goes into being published by academic presses. Somehow or other I skirted that sort of thing. So while I have had a lot of articles published along those lines, when it comes to books, I have had a thin career. So I think that would be my regret, I guess, though not a deep regret. I've now been retired for two years and I basically spend probably six to eight hours per day just working on my research and writing. I pretty much work on it all the time. I golf once a week, and I do take walks, go to lunch occasionally with friends, and do some historical consulting and volunteer work, but essentially my retirement life consists mainly of reading, researching, and writing. I mean, that's it. That's what I like, that's what I care about.

I have three book projects that I'm working on right now. The first is editing this memoir written by James Omura. When I inherited the manuscript from the family of Omura, after his death in 1994, it was in very rough shape. It had a lot of problems. I've spent so much time and so much money preparing it for publication. Hopefully, Stanford University Press will publish it within the next year or so. That's the first thing. And the second book project is this two-part publication I was telling you about. It's tentatively titled "Barbed Voices: Oral History, Resistance, and the Japanese American World War II Experience." And that manuscript is pretty much in good order. But right now I have to devote my primary attention to the Omura manuscript, which is now titled "Nisei Naysayer: The Memoir of Miltant Japanese American Journalist Jimmie Omura." And then the third book I'm doing -- I've always been interested in sports, and I've always been interested in cultural history, and I've always loved southern California -- is that I'm writing a history of the transformation of southern California in the early Cold War period, but I'm doing it through the lens of a particular high school football game that was played in 1956 at the Los Angeles Coliseum. It was a California Interscholastic Federation, CIF, championship game, and it drew some 41,000 fans, the largest crowd ever to view a high school football game in California. The game was between Anaheim High School and Downey High School. It was a tie game and the two star players were named the co-CIF players of the year. They had great Disneyland-like names, Mickey Flynn, of Anaheim, and Randy Meadows, of Downey. But the manuscript, "The Golden Kingdom: Prep Football and Early Cold War Society and Culture in Southern California," really gets into everything about the transformation of southern California during that era. And this was the period where southern Californian people, and many people elsewhere, thought that the area was the wave of the future, the golden age, that the good life was right here. Of course, the good life was white. One side of the coin was just being racist, the other side was being politically conservative. But the car culture, the music, and all kinds of other things in southern California were viewed as the cutting edge of the country. So I've been collating all of this stuff. It's kind of an American Studies type of project, but it's centered on southern California, and I've done a lot of interviewing with this project because I've interviewed the people from the two high schools who were on the teams, as well as those who weren't on the teams, and am trying to get a fix on the situation. It's an important book to me because it again involves another thing that I left out of my life for a long time, which was sports. Somehow or other, sports was something I came to be ashamed of a little bit, feeling that somehow you are not an intellectual if you're too involved with sports; and yet I never would have been a historian if it wasn't for sports. The first thing I was doing history on was really sports. When I was about six years old I knew virtually every baseball player in the major leagues. I mean, I was a walking encyclopedia of sports, and a lot of kids were then and still are today. You talk to them, and they know all these things about sports. But you give those things up as you age, because you think that somehow or other, "When I was a child, I spoke as a child, and when I became an adult, I put away childish things." So sports became a childish thing to put away. But now the last thing I read before I go to bed every night is some book or other to do with sports. Right now I' m reading about the Philippine professional basketball league, Pacific Rims, written by a twenty-five-year old writer, Rafe Bartholomew. It's fascinating. But I read books about a mother's perspective of her son's experience as a high school football player. I've also read books about women's basketball teams and women's basketball coaches. I read all these kinds of things because I'm really trying to understand how sports books are approached by authors. What I want to write is not a sports book per se, and I don't want to write a history book. What I want to write is a society-in-sports/sports-in-society kind of history. So many sports writers have moved in that direction in recent years, and the quality of sports writing is so much better than I had realized. I thought I could come in and really write some gangbusters kind of study, but no. I'm fighting for air, I really am. It's tough. It's tough. I mean, they're really good writers in this field, but I'm enjoying myself working on this project. So that keeps me going. But the last thing at night I always do is to read sports books.

<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.