<Begin Segment 14>

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

MN: I'm getting a sense of where you think the state of Japanese America is, but I want you to define it a little more. I always hear where Chin feels the state of Japanese America is, and he's not happy where Japanese America is. Do you think Japanese America is where it should be, or do we still have a ways to go in terms of accepting?

AH: I think Chin would say, "Art, when you and I are no longer serving a function, then Japanese America is on the right road." No, he really would. I wouldn't go quite that far because I think the Japanese American story is larger than just people of Japanese American ancestry. I think it's always to say there's a community story, but there's also an American story and a human story, too, and we've got to recognize that. But I'm happier than I was, just because I got started fairly early field of Japanese American studies and I know where the story was when I began my inquiry in 1972. And I also, as a historian, my situation is different from that of, a dramatist or a novelist in that they do imaginary literature. If you are a dramatist or a novelist you can create in total the reality that you want, and you can make changes rather rapidly. History, however, has all of these countervailing pressures all the time. And if you are in history, you have to be aware, for instance, that change, even incremental change, can be very, very consequential. And the way that history moves is that it moves this way and then comes back, then goes sideways. And it just doesn't have this dramatic sort of turnaround where everybody has an "aha" experience, and now we're going to look at the situation different. People are very resourceful at being able to undercut what progress is being made. You can be real happy that Obama gets elected President, and then people are ready to dump on the guy after six months. But that's the idea. This is a heroic sort of figure, but no, you have to take a look at some of the complexity of historical reality.

And I think that Japanese Americans are way more in control of their own history, way more willing to talk about it right now, way more interested to hear other people talk about it, to explore it, and to bring about some changes in it. So I'm not happy with it, like I say; but when I criticize the Japanese American National Museum, I'm really not feeling that they're just a retrograde organization; rather, I'm saying that they have done a hell of a lot for this progress that I see, but they should do a hell of a lot more. They need to push the envelope a bit more whenever they can. And I think they're going to find that if they don't do it, it's not only bad history, but it's going to be bad actually for their own membership and public involvement in their programs. It's just like Densho. Densho started as a Pacific Northwest kind of thing, and Tom Ikeda, Denho's executive director, knows about these things because I had to write an appraisal for a book proposal that he submitted and I wrote a very strong one. But what I wanted to say is that when I went up there to Seattle in 1997 to work with Densho, I thought it was a bunch of "gee whiz" people who were in love with technology and what they wanted to see done with it. But then that has changed as time has gone on. Densho is way more diverse in the people it's interviewing and the subjects that it's getting into. So that's the kind of evolution that is positive. And I think that Densho's ahead of where the community as a whole is, and partly it's because of this background that Tom has had. On the one hand, he's got a wife whose father was a draft resister and others in his family who were in the military during World War II -- so he can't be polarized into this or that. You can see, for instance, that such a heterogeneous background produces good things. And then having people like the draft-resisting Akutsus, Jim and Gene, for cheek-by-jowl neighbors, showed Tom by their very example how they coped with life's challenges. But I think that there's hope, and I'm happy overall with what's gone on within Japanese America. The very fact that, Martha, when you were working for the Pacific Citizen, that you were able to write the articles that you did. If they were really wanting to whitewash the reportage in the PC, for instance, your tail would have been out of there in no time. And there were enough people who wanted you out of there. But the fact that you wrote those articles directly or indirectly critical of the JACL and the PC, a JACL newspaper, published them means that they recognized need for criticism and diverse opinion. And I think they recognized it on two levels. One, that it's important that these things be said, but also I think they recognized it in a business sense. If these things weren't being said, the rest of the younger group coming up would no longer be interested in a JACL membership or reading the Pacific Citizen. So I think it's important.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.