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

MN: I want to ask a little bit about you personally in the sense that I know whenever I talk to you, you're always helping a student. And I don't know how you find the time, and your students have won a lot of awards, and you've won a lot of awards. How does it feel, now you have a scholarship and a lecture series named after you at Cal State Fullerton? How does that feel and how did that come about?

AH: [Laughs] Just being older than dirt. Being involved in things like oral history and Japanese American studies for a long time and sticking with it. Other people move on to different topics and varied research methods, and that's their career. And their career is a lot more illustrious a lot of times because they get grants to do different things. I got started in topics that had no status. Japanese American studies had no status and neither did oral history. But they did give you one thing, they gave you a lot of freedom to do what you want, a lot of opportunity. So I kind of dedicated myself to that, and the whole business of partnering, it's intrinsic to oral history. You partner to get knowledge. So the idea of sharing and helping comes with the territory. But the awards probably don't mean as much to me because I have also the egoistic kinds of concerns of a scholar who wants to get major publications out there. Because I can write a good article, and somebody never even sees it. I can read, for instance, a real fatuous book, and yet everybody knows it, the book is out there and stuff like that. So there's some things, necessary prices you have to pay. And that legacy is that -- I'm not religious and so I don't believe in immortality in that sense -- but I am somebody who believes in the concept of intellectual immortality, that once things have been made a record of, especially now that Google is republishing every damn thing that ever existed, there is an afterlife, there is a continuing life for things that are written and are down there. And I drove in today and I heard on the news that Don Meredith, the former football star and sports broadcaster, had just died, and Don Meredith is exactly my age, seventy-two. And every time I hear about a person who dies that's younger than me or my age I know that my mortality is at risk. And these are a lot of times athletes who are in good shape, and then there they are, they're gone. And probably Meredith did a lot of elbow as well as skirt chasing, so there's probably some other things at work there, too.

So as you look to those things, you want to be able to have that type of achievement. Especially when you've spent all the time that you've had, not just your time but other people's time, collecting usable information from them, getting invaluable help from archivists, the whole apparatus of knowledge construction you have been a user of, there is a moral obligation to return something tangible to posterity? And you can return it in different ways. And I think I have returned it in a lot of ways, but I think there's another way that I have to return it that I have not. So the Omura memoir is the first thing, and even that is Jimmie's book and I will make that clear. A lot of editors of other people's work are not very self-effacing about it and deceive themselves into thinking that they themselves wrote it. And the person who actually wrote it becomes for such editors an afterthought. But Jimmie Omura's the one who's got to be in the big lights, not Art Hansen.

I just want to say one other thing and then we can probably wrap this interview up unless you have more questions. It's the thing about doing oral history, why I did it in the first place. Instead of writing a book, for instance, on the Manzanar Riot from just reading the articles, instead of going out interviewing all of these people. And a lot of time I even transcribed the interviews I tape-recorded. So there was a lot of work involved in it and an incredible amount of time to do that. Which is enriching, too, and you learn a lot of things. I do come from a working-class background, and I am not above doing that sort of work, and transcribing can be mental ditch digging, too.

But the thing is that I was not Japanese American, and during the time that ethnic studies was getting going, there was a strong emphasis on that kind of essentialism. The idea that somehow or other, essence is more important than anything else. It's more important than social construction. And I didn't even know the words essence and construction in that kind of binary that now exists. But I did know by looking in the mirror what I was and what I wasn't in terms of racial-ethnic ancestry. I think that what was important was first-person testimony, and so I thought that one of the contributions I could make was by actually talking to other people about their own history and letting them bespeak it. And that acts as kind of a prophylactic against your own agency as a writer in a sense because now you're always feeling a little funny when you're giving voice to yourself rather than acting as a conduit through which other voices are speaking. I don't know that it's not, for instance, a question of what's right and what's wrong, it's a question of what you feel and how it translates within your own system. I think I mentioned the last time, the first time I met Jim, the first question he asked me, he said, "Art, I want to talk to you a little bit about a question that's been nagging at me: How does a white guy get along in Japanese American history?" And Jim has more claim to not being a white guy than I do in the sense that his middle name gives an index to the fact that he has a Hispanic background, too. But Jim is perceived as white, and then he goes to UCLA and majors in Asian American Studies, and then there are some other whites have done the same thing, and Chris Friday, who is now a historian at Western Washington State University, immediately comes to mind. There's a whole group of people who have gone through graduate programs in ethnic studies. It was typically hard to get jobs in ethnic studies if you didn't have the face of that group, or a damn near closely related face. David Yoo could do Japanese American scholarship even though he's Korean American, although there was some hesitation there, too. But the thing is, that one's racial-ethnic makeup does play a guiding role in ethnic studies. So I think that my being a white scholar studying Japanse American history pushed me more into oral history than I might otherwise have been.

JG: Wow, it's just interesting to hear you talk about that. Yeah, it's very interesting. I'm not sure I even have a question, but I get what you're saying. I think the reason I'm sitting here now, not with a tenure track job in Asian American history is because I believe that it's never good enough to be doing that work in the first place. Because I let people get inside my head and let me know that even though working with someone like Yuji, for example, that gave me a certain imprimatur, but I was never Eiichiro. I mean, it's interesting, because I certainly, when I got to Brown, I made the conscious decision, I said, "Screw this, I've put up with this for long enough," changed my entire career around because of that idea, and it's interesting to hear you say that at this stage of your career. I don't know. Not that there's anything to say about it, but I do get where you're coming from.

AH: Well, I'm sure, for example, if I did the same amount of work early on when the field of Asian American studies and, in particular, Japanese American studies hadn't been settled, I wouldn't have been at Cal State Fullerton my whole career either. Because other people who were not doing much more were able to move out of the California State University system. Lane Hirabayashi was initially at San Francisco State, but he couldn't get a substantial scholarship done with such a heavy teaching load demanded within the CSU system. He tried really hard, but he knew that the big books were going to elude him. And so he went to the University of Colorado at Boulder and very soon thereafter put out two books. Gary Okihiro was at Humboldt State University in the CSU system, he had a spike in his scholarly productivity, just moving to Santa Clara University and within a few years going to Cornell University. These were very, very talented and hard-working scholars, ones who even managed a productive scholarly career when their positions permitted them little in the way of discretionary time and institutional support for travel and research.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.