<Begin Segment 11>

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

AH: So that was in 1984, and ten years later Jimmie died, in 1994. We had had correspondence all the while through this interval, getting back transcripts and stuff like this. He was heavily involved and I was heavily involved in everything that was happening then in the Japanese American community. We had some common friends, the main one being Michi Weglyn. Michi Weglyn was kind of setting this relationship up because she was worried that Jimmie Omura would not finish his book manuscript before he died. And as it turned out, he pretty much did finish it. But she was trying to set up somebody who would finish the project for her, if and when Jimmie died. I was then working on what was going to be a full-length biography of Nisei war hero Ben Kuroki, because I'd written a lengthy article on him. But I was working on that and then the call came that Jimmie had died. There was about a year that went by before it was finally decided who would prepare Jimmie's memoir for publication by an appropriate academic or commercial press. There was a list of people who were prospects to do editorial work and then I got named to do this. I've been at it pretty much ever since to tell you the truth. This has been really, really the most time-consuming thing I've ever taken on in my life. But it's almost there right now. So in any event, I had to go out to Colorado and pick up the archival materials that were at the house of his oldest son, Dr. Greg Omura, in Grand Junction. And I went there and I picked them all up, there were about fifty boxes, and I brought them back to southern California. My wife teaches library and information science at San Jose State, and that program had a branch campus at Cal State Fullerton then and she taught an archival course both at San Jose and at Fullerton. And we took four years of her classes to organize all of Jimmie's papers. So we have organized all of Jimmie's papers. It has been arranged for all of these papers to go to Stanford University to the Green Library. A preliminary finding aid for these papers has already been prepared by one of the archival students who worked on organizing the material. It's an amazing treasure trove of material. I found out from interviewing a lot of Japanese Americans that, because they went through an obviously epochal historical event, they have become very much archivists of their own histories. We all keep photograph books and some valuable papers, but Nikkei kept everything in a lot of cases. And the museums like JANM have capitalized on this situation, and historians have capitalized on it. So, because I had done this long interview with him, I developed a close personal relationship with him. The last time I saw Jimmie was at Michi Weglyn's event at Cal Poly Pomona. Bob Suzuki was then the president of that university and they set up an endowed chair in multicultural to honor Michi and her husband Walter, and they also gave Michi an honorary doctorate in humane letters. And almost all the resister community was there for this event. Were you there, Martha? You weren't probably involved as much at that point.

MN: I was still in school.

AH: Okay, so you were still up at Stanford at that time. In any event, those in the resisters community were virtually all there at that time. It was an incredible event, but Jimmie was looking bad, as you can tell if you look at photograph from that event. I wasn't surprised. In fact, when he came to my house, he brought a suitcase with his clothes in it and another suitcase of about the same size, and he opened it up and it was all full of medicine. The whole thing had medicine in it. I mean, it was unbelievable. And we didn't have air conditioning in our house at that time. I thought to myself, "This man is going to die in my house." But he didn't, he lasted past that occasion by a decade, and so anyway, he left this document, his memoir. His memoir wasn't completely done, for there were big gaps in it and the documentation is the kind of documentation that you do when you're writing a draft of something. You'll just say for a reference something like, "Weglyn book," or something like this, but there's no pagination or anything. Only Jimmie did that with primary documents, too. So finding all the documents and getting the provenance for them has been a large part of my job as editor for Jimmie's memoir. Also, I have had to build up a separate chapter out of his disparate writings, since he didn't do much on covering his wartime years in Denver. And because I've written a lot about the Japanese American experience in Denver, I know that subject matter fairly well.

And then I've been cannibalizing my own interview with Jimmie, and then I've used everybody else's interviews, also. Emiko Omori did an interview with him, and Rita Takahashi did an interview with him, and of course Frank Chin did an interview with Jimmie. It's interesting when you're an interviewer to compare other people's interviews with your own. My interviews are fairly well organized and I strategically try to cover things. I go about it like a typical historical scholar. Frank Chin goes about it like a writer of fiction. During some of Frank's interviews, he and Lawson are shouting in the background, they're passing around beers, and who knows what else they're passing around. There's about twelve people in the room, it's a wild sort of thing. But Frank gets into all kinds of things that I would never think about getting into. You just know how brilliant he is at being able to penetrate into these interiors of a person. So his interview has been extremely helpful to me. In fact, I really value Frank Chin. Frank Chin has written one of the prefaces for Jimmie's memoir, which I have tentatively titled "Nisei Naysayer." Another preface for the book has been written by Yosh Kuromiya, who I regard as the most articulate... and the most rational of all the Nisei draft resisters -- and I don't mean rational in a clinical way, but rational in combining reason and emotion together. I always value hearing Yosh give talks at memorial services or reading whatever he writes. He's this very poetic sort of guy. But then the other person writing a preface for Jimmie's memoir is a guy who wrote his senior honors thesis on Omura at Stanford, Steve Yoda. He's now a lawyer. But Steve worked with on the Omura memoir for two summers, and he read through Jimmie's entire manuscript and made a lot of editorial suggestions and corrections.

The other person to do editorial work on Jimmie Omura's memoir was a woman named Mary Kimoto Tomita, who passed away last year at age 90. I don't know if you're familiar with her but she authored the book Dear Miya: Letters Home from Japan1939-1946. Bob Lee from Brown University worked with Mary as the book's editor. But she went through Jimmie's manuscript as a copy-editor. Mary was somebody who knew Jimmie; when he used to come out to California, sometimes he stayed with Mary at her home in Oakland or with other people in the Bay Area. I love the book Dear Miya. I thought Mary was a very bright person. And then Steve Yoda was just a fantastic guy to work with, also. That's partially why I decided to put the Omura papers at Stanford. And also Gordon Chang is the editor of Stanford University Press's Asian American Series. And I knew, too, that Jimmie had all of these preferences. I knew him real well, all of his prejudices and everything else. The last place he would like to have his papers archived is JANM. Because JANM, when they came out with The Encyclopedia of Japanese American History that Brian Niiya edited -- I thought it was a fabulous piece of work, that encyclopedia. I thought it was a remarkable piece of work and so hard to do -- when Jimmie reviewed the encyclopedia, he did so very nastily. His review was published in--now what was the name of that JA community paper, the tabloid-sized one?

MN: Tozai Times.

AH: Yeah, Tozai Times. It appeared in the Tozai Times and it was just basically Jimmie dumping on the encyclopedia. And largely it was because of two things. One, because he used to write sports, he didn't feel it had esoteric enough sports entries. The other thing was the entry on the JACL. He felt it was a complete whitewash and wondered, "How could any respectable organization sponsor something that would accept this slop for historical truth?" So JANM be one place he didn't want to have his archives. Another place he would never want to have anything to do with was the University of Colorado, even though both of his kids, Gregg and Wayne, graduated from the University of Colorado. It was because Bill Hosokawa was there in the Denver area, and Min Yasui was there, Roy Takeno was there, and they were all archenemies of his. They were all JACLers who were going to somehow or other pervert any deposit of his papers at the Boulder campus. So he didn't want it at Colorado; he also didn't want his papers at UCLA. He didn't trust certain things at UCLA, for there were people there that he thought might not be predisposed to him and he had some issues with some of them. For example, I remember Yuji saying to me something like, "Omura's a prune face." So he had these issues. The University of Washington, he was afraid of that, too, because even though he was originally from Bainbridge Island and graduated from high school in Seattle. But he had his issues up there because of all the old Jimmy Sakamoto influences and all the people who were up in the Pacific Northwest, they were going to malign his archived material. So it wasn't so much that Stanford won out, it's just that Stanford didn't have any serious competition. And he always praised Stanford because they were the first institution to buy a subscription to Current Life, the magazine he published and edited from 1940 to 1942 in San Francisco. That showed that Stanford was cosmopolitan and that people there had gone ahead and invested in this magazine of arts and letters that he had published and put it in their library.

[Interruption]

MN: Where are you on the Jimmie Omura manuscript, by the way? Everybody's asking about it. You know that, there's been a lot of pressure on you.

AH: It has six chapters, and I've basically edited the whole manuscript. What I'm doing now is all of the footnoting. Each one of those chapters has about three hundred footnotes in it. For his early life, he doesn't have very many footnotes as he just assumes that everybody knows these kinds of things. So what I have done -- and this is what an editor should do -- I write the introductory essay, and then I've taken selected material out of his manuscript. He wrote a laborious first chapter on the history of Japan, a place that he's never been to or anything. He asked both Frank Chin and myself and some other people how should he approach his manuscript. And we didn't say, "You're going to die fairly soon because you're in such bad health," but what we said is, "The thing that you know best is your own life and what it should be is a memoir and not a history." He was going to write a whole history of the entire World War II Japanese American experience, and we just knew he wasn't going to get it done. He sort of then divided his manuscript between being a memoir and a history. And then, somewhat unfortunately, he was around a lot of academics. What rubbed off on through this experience was this horrible sense of the driest, most desiccated form of scholarship. So he went back and wrote this torturously long thing on the history of Japan to bring it up to when his father came over from Japan. So I had to cut out that chapter. Then he had a huge section of one chapter that dealt with the military resisters. And he'd had big arguments with Shirley Castelnuovo who was then working on a manuscript that was later published in 2008 as "Soldiers of Conscience": Japanese American Military Resisters in World War II. Anyway, the two of them were simultaneously researching the topic of World War II military resistance, and Jimmie basically said, "I share data with her, but she's unwilling to share data with me." So they washed their hands of one another.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.