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

AH: Okay, so I then, after I had interviewed Bob Spencer and met Charlie Kikuchi, I made arrangements to go back and interview Charlie. And since there was another person who had been on the project who I met at the conference and didn't have the same warm feelings toward... you'd have to know Charlie, he was an amazing guy, very personable. The other person was James Sakoda. And James Sakoda had been a sociology professor at Brown University, and he lived in Barrington, Rhode Island, which is a town that's not too far from Providence. Jim Gatewood will know this from having spent his doctoral program back at Brown. Charlie had a summer place that was on Block Island, which is off the coast of Rhode Island. So my wife and I went back there and first what I did was to go out to Block Island and interview Charlie, and then when I was through with that interview, I went to Barrington and I did a two-part interview with James Sakoda. The first session was at the Brown campus, because Sakoda had just retired, was just a new emeritus, and so I kind of caught him at a good time, he had a lot to say still. And then we went to his house in Barrington for the second session. And it was a really propitious time. Actually, that occurred in 1988, a year after I did the interview with Bob Spencer. And what made it so propitious was while I was back there with Sakoda, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act. And at the same time, they had something which just got him so mad. They still celebrated VJ Day, September 2, and it was the only state in the United States, Rhode Island, that then celebrated it. So we had these two events that were occurring when I was back there. But James Sakoda is a very testy guy, and he's very persnickety about things and very precise, and he was just the opposite of Charlie Kikuchi in this regard.

When I was at Charlie's place out in Block Island it was such a fun thing. I mean, the first night I was there we went fishing together, and he was a real fisherman, while I was not. But the real fisherman in his family was his wife, and she was a famous person. Yuriko Amemiya Kikuchi was this famous dancer, and she was working for the Martha Graham troupe. In fact, when we were at the Kikuchi's Block Island vacation home, they were getting telephone calls all the time from a guy named Jerry who turned out to be Jerome Robbins. And while we were there, their kids came out, they have a son, Lawrence, they have a daughter, Susan, and their daughter was now doing all of the dance parts that her mother had done years before that. And we just had a family gathering there in Block Island, and I interviewed Charlie while Debbie, my wife, went out fishing with Yuriko. And Yuriko, Debbie said, was super. She's just hauling in these fish, and then she'd cook them up at night and we'd just have these great times. And that was really an important thing. That was the last time the Kikuchi family was together as a family. Because Charlie was then taking walks to get himself in shape to go on a peace walk in the then Soviet Union, and he needed to get into shape for that. So he left Block Island right after we did, and then he went off to Russia, and when he got to Kiev, he got so sick that he had to be hospitalized, and when he was hospitalized, they opened up his stomach and it turned out that he had terminal cancer. And so he died not too long after that, but in the meantime, Yuriko had gone all the way to Russia, and it was super expensive, and then Charlie wanted to die in the United States. If you ever think about a testimony of patriotism... here he was trying to put the Soviet Union and the United States on the same page, but he wanted to die in the United States, so he came back to the Kikuchis' home in New York.

In any event, my interview with Charlie wasn't as satisfying as my interview with Bob Spencer, just because Charlie was more self-effacing. And the thing that scared him a little bit was being around academics. He was a very bright guy, extremely bright guy, and he was a great field worker. Here is one of the things I learned from him. People say to me: "Well, you know, you're one of the first people that's done oral history here with the Japanese Americans." Charlie was doing it during World War II, and the difference was he wasn't using a tape recorder. And so I got really curious about how field workers operated before they had tape recorders. And you know, the thing that Charlie told me is, "Well, I just listened real carefully. And then when I went home, I played the tape that was in my mind, and I transcribed it." And what we discovered, of course, is that what really happenened was that once tape records came along, field workers didn't listen as attentively as they had before because they knew that they had an aid that would be able to record their interviews. But in Charlie's day, they had to listen because they didn't have the tape recorder. So he went out and did all of these interviews with these Nisei resettlers in Chicago.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.