<Begin Segment 1>

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

MN: Today is December 6, 2010, we are at the Centenary Methodist Church, we'll be interviewing Dr. Art Hansen. Tani Ikeda is on the video, James Gatewood and Martha Nakagawa will be co-interviewing. So last time, Art, when we left off, we were talking about Rosalie Hankey Wax. And I don't know if you have any more comments about your experience with her, or if you could talk about the four other social scientists who were part of the Evacuation and Resettlement Study?

AH: I'll talk about those and then since Rosalie was towards the end of that interviewing experience, I'll finish up by mentioning some things about my interview with her. And if there's some overlap, so be it, because I can't remember exactly what we had covered. And it was at the end of our session and we were kind of all a little bit tired at that time.

[Interruption]

MN: Do you want to talk about Charles Kikuchi? You had reviewed the Kikuchi Diary a couple of years before that.

AH: The social scientists who were connected with the UC Berkeley Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study that I dealt with were the following people: Togo Tanaka, who, even though he wasn't a social scientist in a graduate school -- he was a political science major at UCLA and a brilliant guy -- I interviewed him first. And then I actually interviewed him twice. And the main way he got into the JERS project was through the resettlement stage of it. And he did some historical writing after he was forced out of Manzanar, when he was in protective custody in Death Valley, where he wrote up some reports for the JERS project about the Manzanar Riot. But then when he went to Chicago, he became heavily involved with the resettlement stage of that project because the people who were in that project by and large were at Tule Lake, and they were unwelcome at Tule Lake because they had said "yes-yes" on the "loyalty questionnaire" when Tule Lake was a relocation center. And as it was it was moving towards a segregation center there, they were persona non grata and they were quaking in their boots and hiding in their barracks for fear that their notes were all going to be destroyed, and beyond their notes, that they might be done in. So Frank Miyamoto and Tom Shibutani, or Tamotsu Shibutani, they went back to Chicago. And they went to the University of Chicago where they had their office, and their office was actually the office that had been occupied by one of the leading sociologists of that period, Robert Park. And they used that office because he was off on sabbatical somewhere else, and they used that as their project. And then all the other people who were leaving JERS came there. And so Tami Tsuchiyama, who had left Poston, ended up in Chicago, and then Charles Kikuchi left Gila and he was in Chicago. So they had a critical mass of people, and then Louise Suski, who had been a prewar editor, English-language editor, first by herself and then with Togo Tanaka for the Rafu Shimpo, she was back there at the University of Chicago in that office, too. And so it was a pretty formidable group. I got very interested in that group per se. So the more I read of the dissertations and master's theses they were writing, what I wanted to do was to study the social science community. Because I saw it as a group that was involved during a key juncture, not only in their lives and their communities' lives, but also the transformation of, I thought, American social science. It was moving in a different kind of way, that objects were becoming subjects, in a sense, because here you had a lot of racial-ethnic people involved in this development, and so I wanted to look at that.

But I got a hold of people to interview, for instance, as opportunity afforded itself. And so the first JERS social scientist I interviewed was Togo Tanaka. The first interview I did with Togo, in August 1973, was strictly on the Manzanar Riot. He had written this report on the riot, and I had been studying it, so what I wanted to do was to test what his analysis was against what my analysis was. I just had a fantastic interview with Togo. I couldn't have been better prepared for it, because I'd just got done spending the bulk of my recent life studying the Manzanar Riot and writing it up and interviewing other people about it. Togo was the second interview I ever did; the first interview I ever did was with Sue Kunitomi Embrey. Sue had been the managing editor for a while of the Manzanar Free Press, and she was a person who at the time of our interview was becoming public at that point with the Manzanar Pilgrimage, and so she had had a public existence. Sue was able to tell me a lot more than just about the riot, but she was able to give me, for instance, an account of the riot from somebody who was not central to it but somebody who was a key spectator of this situation and knew the personalities and issues that were involved. Then within a week after I did the interview with Sue, I did this interview with Togo Tanaka. But with Togo, two at the Japanese American Project that I was running at Cal State Fullerton, Betty Mitson and David Hacker got together and did an interview with Togo before I did, and they did a life history review. So what I could do was a directed interview just on the subject, on the riot. I did that interview and I found out something about JERS, and then my readings, of course, alerted me to a lot more about that project.

But the first JERS social scientist I interviewed after that was Robert Spencer, in July 1987. And Robert Spencer was a marvelous person for me to interview. I mean, there are a lot of people who are very critical of Spencer, see him as misogynist and ethnocentric and a lot of things, but I thought he was a brilliant person and he was just the right person for me to talk to. He was extremely young at the time he was connected to JERS, he was then studying under two of the leading anthropologists in the world, Robert Lowie and Alfred Kroeber at UC Berkeley. Spencer hadn't finished his dissertation, but he did know some Japanese. So when they set up the people who were gonna represent UC Berkeley, at these different WRA camps, one of the things that they turned to was this linguistic proficiency in Japanese, which a lot of the Nisei didn't have, even as good as Robert Spencer's. But Spencer had a warehouse mind. I mean, when he ended up teaching at the University of Minnesota, he was involved with seven different departments. And they were all over the disciplinary map. If you're at a small college and you're involved with seven departments, that comes with the territory. You're at a big place, research center like the University of Minnesota, that is something special.

So I had been doing some research up at UC Berkeley at the Bancroft Library, and I came across a lot of interesting JERS data. I was looking at resistance activity in all of the camps. But then I started to find out all these interesting reports that Spencer had written at Gila River Relocation Center in Arizona about all the activities that were going on there. And so after writing up the Manzanar Riot with David Hacker I ended up writing a paper on this "incident," as they called it, that occurred at Gila right between the Poston strike of November of 1942 and the Manzanar Riot of December 1942. Happening at the same time for very similar reasons, the dynamics were very much the same. The incident at Gila never became a full-fledged strike or riot, but it was probably more volatile in a lot of ways than both of those other experiences. So I was working on something else at that time, but when you run across data when you're researching, you say, this thing just demands to be analyzed.

And so I got myself into a conference up at the University of Washington and I presented this paper there on what had occurred at Gila. When I finished that paper, I wondered if this guy Spencer who'd been writing all these reports as a gawky twenty-six, twenty-seven-year-old guy was still around somewhere. And I discovered that he was still at the University of Minnesota, at the very tail end of his career there. And I sent off a copy of my paper and he wrote me back saying, "I just got back from a long trip to Europe, and I had a lot of mail, but by far the most interesting piece of mail I had was your letter." I had told him how valuable all this information was to me, and I said, "And the friendship that you had with the person you were working with, Charlie Kikuchi, was amazing." And so I told him, "I'd love to interview. Would that be a possibility?" And he replied, "Sure, come on out."

So in the summer of 1987 -- I remember this because the Major League All Star baseball game was on that July my wife Debbie and I went to the motel in Minneapolis, and I wanted to see the All Star game on television. Mark McGuire was then a rookie, you know, and he was on the All Star team. But my wife and I went back there and then I went over to interview Bob at the Spencer's faculty home in St. Paul. Just such an eye-popping experience in talking to him, and he was extremely frank. A lot of people don't have the stomach for such frankness or they have such thin skin that they can't hear what other people have to say because they let all of the appearances of things get in the way of the reality of things. And so nowadays we have so many bogus kinds of things where we're showing people to the door because they've had a slip of the tongue rather than a slip of the mind or slip of the heart. Bob wasn't like that. He was really good to interview, and I just caught him at the right time. He had suppressed the whole experience that he had back there at Gila during World War II, and this was true of almost all the social scientists I interviewed. To them, their work in the camps was an unseemly thing, it was a dirty kind of thing. And then in the late 1980s there were starting to be charges coming out from the anthropologist Peter Suzuki that the social scientists who had studied the camps were virtually all sellouts, just rank opportunists, people looking for jobs or advancements and things like that. It didn't matter if they had a yellow face or a white face, they were blackguards. I didn't think that way. I had worked enough as a field worker myself to know that there's not a lot of big bucks in this activity. You don't find too many millionaires that own mansions in different parts of the world because they're anthropologists or sociologists, or oral historians for that matter. So I listened to Spencer, and he hadn't seen Charlie Kikuchi for years and he was so interested in the situation he had experienced at Gila during the war with Charlie.

So Yuji Ichioka was putting on a conference about JERS in that same year, in 1987, and he was putting the conference on up at UC Berkeley. And so Charlie Kikuchi was involved in that conference, and that's where I first met Charlie. Now, Bob didn't want to be around Peter Suzuki at that conference. He said, "I thought this was a young man, and it turns out he's fifty-some years old." He said, "If some sort of epater le bourgeoisie type of youngster would have made these kind of comments, it wouldn't have been too shocking to me. But to have a mature person raising these issues was ridiculous." So he didn't want to go back to the conference at U.C. Berkeley. He also felt kind of distanced towards Yuji. He said that Yuji was so cavalier in the way that he sent letters to him, that he wasn't quite interested in going back to the conference. So he missed an opportunity to see Charlie Kikuchi. But I got a chance to meet Charlie. And we hit it off fantastically. I said, "Charlie, this is where it all began for you. You were a student here, you were a social work school student, and it was here when December 7, 1941, occurred, it was here you got recruited by Dorothy Swaine Thomas to be on the Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study." And it just so happened that during the conference over at the special collections section of the Bancroft Library they were having an exhibit on the Japanese American World War II experience..

And there was Charlie's book, The Kikuchi Diary, which had been published some years ago, you know, in 1973. And the editor for it was a guy named John Modell who had worked for the Japanese American Research Project, JARP at UCLA for many years, and then he was back at the University of Minnesota where Bob Spencer was based. In fact, Bob Spencer got very upset by the fact that John Modell had never contacted him and asked him anything at the time he was writing The Kikuchi Diary. He said here John Modell's wife -- who's no longer his wife but was at the time, Judith Modell -- was doing her doctorate in the anthropology department. And here John Modell had been doing this book on Charlie Kikuchi, and neither one of the Modells treated him to the information that this project was going on and got him involved with it. So he was a little upset at that. But in any event, Charlie and I just bonded so strongly, and I liked him a lot.

And then we had our panel session at the UC Berkeley conference on JERS organized by Yuji Ichioka, and Peter Suzuki trashed Charlie Kikuchi and then trashed me as a poor defender of Charlie. "If I wanted to be defended, I wouldn't want Art Hansen to do the defense." And I was acrimonious initially towards Suzuki. I said, "Well, you know, your paper is based upon data that you haven't even consulted. I mean, you're just operating in a vacuum, and you're condemning people without even reading the material." Now, he did read some of the material, because he wrote two papers close to one another. One of them dealt with the community analysts who were in all of the camps, and they worked under the aegis of the War Relocation Authority. He had read their documentation, and I agreed with a lot of his assessments of this situation. But he then tarred, the JERS project with the same brush that he had used to condemn the social scientists involved with the WRA. And I said, "This is a different situation, and you are basing your assessment of JERS without having read the relevant documentation."

So anyway, as soon as I got through with this session with Kikuchi and Suzuki, I had to go chair a session in which Suzuki was also a presenter, where he was attacking a co-author, Floyd Matson, of one of the eminent books, Prejudice, War, and the Constitution, that was in the series of publications spearheaded by JERS director Dorothy Swaine Thomas. And I ended up being a peacemaker there and I said, "Well, Peter has made a lot of contributions to bringing this issue out, and if we disagree, what we need to so so prudently." My whole mode of operation is not really to make enemies, it's to make friends and to build some kind of consensus. I think that's one of the reasons that I've worked fairly well within the Japanese American community, that instead of trying to throw flammable things into the mix, what I've tried to do is to temper my criticism through constructive compromise. And then oral history, too. I mean when you do an oral history, you need to be able not to be a side-taker, at least not explicitly. I mean, I had to interview the very contentious Lillian Baker, the bete noir of the Japanese American community Lillian Baker, and people in my oral history project at Fullerton, none of them would deign to go over to her home in Gardena, in the heart of the Los Angeles's Nikkei community, and interview her. They said, "She's a racist. Why would we want to interview her?" They said, "Our job as oral historians is to get a full plate of data. That's what we're supposed to do. We've got to access and make available different perspectives. We're trying to get interviewees', we're not trying to tell them our story or sell them on our politics. We can ask hard questions that are generated from where we're at and the way we're looking at the world, but our basic job is to get their stories. And this is so other people can use this information in making up their mind with a complex set of data and not just have a lot of people that agree with them, so that it's more than just preaching to the choir.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.