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

MN: Did you ask Togo Tanaka a question about how he felt when people thought he was an informant?

AT: Who?

MN: Togo Tanaka. How did he take that? Did you ask him that question?

[Interruption]

AH: I didn't really ask him very much about his alleged informing because the way I met Togo initially was that I had set up -- and I talked about it, I think, in the last interview -- a course that was over at UC Irvine, and it was a lecture series. And it was the first time they had a lecture series that dealt with the wartime experience, and it was held over the course of a semester. And I lined up all of these people as speakers, and that's how I first met Sue Embrey. Because when I talked to people at the Amerasia Bookstore, they told me, "If you're looking for a Sansei perspective, you'd be better off getting a Nisei to give it, and that Nisei is Sue Embrey. She knows the way we think about these things." So I got Sue to lecture, and she brought along Edison Uno's sister, Amy Uno Ishii, to the lecture. But then Togo got involved because I had heard that he would be a good person to be able to speak at this lecture series, but he was out of the country at the time. And so I talked to his daughter. She says this in the book that Betty Mitson and I put out called Voices Long Silent. Togo's talk is there along with the Q&A that went on after his presentation. And what Togo says is that, "While I was out of the country, my daughter volunteered me for this lecture." He was very gracious about it, but in the Q&A portion of it, a lot of the people in there were asking him very hard questions. Asian American activists were asking very hard questions about his involvement. And so I knew that situation pretty well. So when I did the interview with him, I focused on his account of the Manzanar Riot. Now, of course, in the interview, when you're talking about that event, the reason Togo was so high up on the death list is because he was considered by many imprisoned at Manzanar to be an inu who was giving incriminating information to government agencies like the WRA and the FBI.

Well, part of that allegation may be true, but you know, the thing I discovered about, and maybe it's because he a journalist -- and you can relate to this, Martha -- and that he was trained as a journalist. And as a journalist, even though he had his own opinions, he had an ability to be able to objectify things, and he also wasn't afraid really to speak frankly about things. And when I was writing the article on the Manzanar Riot, about the best information I got about the role of JACL leaders -- Togo was supposedly a national officer in that group and on the same page with the JACL leadership -- the stuff about Fred Tayama and other people, I actually got from Togo because Togo was a reporter. And he observed these things, and when somebody asked him a question, he gave them an answer.

Now, the other thing is that when Togo was at Manzanar, he had a job that got him in trouble. Because he and Joe Grant Masaoka -- the brother of Mike Masaoka who was viewed as the "number one inu" in the entire Japanese American community -- had this job where they were the historical documentarians. They worked for the historical documentation unit at the camp. And they went around every day to the different parts of the camps, and they asked people questions, and other people just saw them as snoops, figured that they were government snoops. But Togo didn't make any bones about it. And when there were debates and everything in camp with Joe Kurihara'-- and he knew Joe Kurihara because Kurihara had written things for the Los Angeles Japanese American press. And so Togo would just say right -- and Kurihara really admired Tanaka because he didn't do things behind a screen somewhere -- he came out in the open and spoke about it. He believed the things that he said, he believed them and he wasn't afraid to say them. Well, in that kind of environment, whether you're snooping or you're giving a frank truth, you're gonna find yourself in trouble, and he did. And he had to hide on the night of the riot, he had to wear a peacoat like everybody else, and he hid in the crowd as they went to his barracks looking for him and intending to kill him. But he kept within his peacoat a weapon that he would be able to use, a knife, in case they attacked him. So I actually had a really high regard for Togo. I mean, I was so lucky that the first two people I interviewed were Sue Embrey and Togo. Both of them had newspaper backgrounds, both of them were willing to be able to stand behind their opinions; they didn't pussyfoot around, and I really, really liked that.

Anyway, Charlie Kikuchi's closest friend over the years since the war was Togo Tanaka. So when I went up to the Drake Hotel in Berkeley for the night of the conference, Yuji said, "I'd like you to meet some people." And he said, "Oh, Peter Suzuki's not here yet," and I didn't know how I was going to handle meeting Peter at that particular time. But he said that, "Togo and Charlie are in the bar over there." Now, Togo had something to drink, but Charlie was incapable of holding his liquor. When he was younger, he got so soused that he became obnoxious and silly, and so he was just drinking a Coke or something like that. But you know, we had a nice time right at that bar table. And within a month or so after that, in that very room, a person up at Berkeley came into that bar and shot four or five people. Some guy was completely upset about something and he came in and he just started shooting at people, and I'm thinking, wow. But this occurred after that. Nobody shot at us that night, and Charlie didn't have any shots, and Togo and I restricted ourselves to beers, but we had a great conversation. And so in any event, when I went back then to Block Island, I was already friends with Charlie. And then later on, after Charlie died, Yuriko came out and stayed at our Orange County house in Yorba Linda. And Charlie had a brother, Tom, who lived in Los Angeles, and Yuriko didn't get along with Charlie's sisters and Charlie's mother, and the mother was still alive. She lived to be about ninety-five or ninety-six. But she stayed with us in Yorba Linda, and then the last day that she was there, I did an interview with her, too, so that we had that for our Japanese American Project at Cal State Fullerton's Oral History Program. And Yuriko didn't talk that much about the Charlie situation because that was happening a little part from her on the JERS project. But the center of attention was her career in ballet, which is what I asked her about. And then Charlie had, for maybe twenty years, become her assistant, and she toured all over the world, and Charlie made arrangements and dealt with these dancers who had different problems; he was just a fantastic guy. And he did social work in New York up to the Vietnam War, and then he quit because he said he didn't like the Freudian bullshit that the social workers were putting out, and he said it especially was offensive to the way he dealt with blacks. And all of this stuff is going to come out in a wonderful book that a guy named Matthew Briones is writing, Matt got his PhD at Harvard; he's a Filipino American, and he teaches, oddly enough, at the University of Chicago. His dissertation came out about three or four years ago, and he's got a year's leave right now to finish the dissertation, I know sho is going to publish it, Princeton University Press. So that book on Charlie Kikuchi, which is entitled Jim and Jap Crow: A Cultural History of 1940s Interracial America. And Briones is mostly focusing on Kikuchi's relationships with blacks. I had to convince him of how Charlie, who was raised in an orphanage apart from Japanese Americans, had to be socialized into dealing with people in his own social group by birth, that he needed to understand racial ethnics generally before he understood blacks in particular, and Kikuchi largely did precisely that when he was at Tanforan and then even more so when he was at Gila. So anyway, then I did the interview with Charlie, and as I was saying I wasn't as pleased with it as I was with Spencer's interview because Charlie was too self-effacing. But I was happy to have it. That interview has never been published, the one with Charlie Kikuchi, nor has the one I did two years later with Rosalie Wax.

Okay, so after I did those two interviews with those two people, Spencer and Kikuchi, and then Kikuchi, and then with Sakoda -- I'd already done Tanaka -- I did two more interviews with JERS social scientists. In 1990, I went back to give a talk at Cornell University when Gary Okihiro was there on leave from Santa Clara University for a year before he decided to leave Santa Clara and take a position at Cornell. And I spoke back in one of Gary's classes and then I also went to New York and I spent a lot of time with Michi Weglyn and her husband Walter when I was back there at their Park Avenue apartment. I did not interview, Michi, as she did not want to be interviewed. But I did interview Setsuko Matsunaga Nishi who was then teaching in the City University of New York graduate program. And I did a long interview with her. She was much younger than the other people in JERS, and her involvement in JERS was less. She had gone to Washington University in St. Louis during World War II, and she did a project on resettlement in St. Louis, and then she did her doctoral dissertation on Japanese American resettlement in Chicago. Her father was one of the leaders of the Resettlers Committee. And so she was really well-informed on that subject and she got her PhD at the University of Chicago and she even had some classes when she was there from Tom Shibutani. She thought Shibutani was a fantastic teacher, and he was not that much older than Setsuko, because he was the youngest of the other people who were involved in JERS.

So I did that interview with Setsuko, and then I doubled back to the Midwest to do an interview in St. Louis with Rosalie Hankey, and that's something we talked about last time. And the thing that was really depressing was Rosalie Hankey's state of mind and the state of her house and seemingly virtually everything else in her life. She had been attacked by numerous people, not just Peter Suzuki But also Violet de Cristoforo, one of her WWII informants at the Tule Lake Segregation Center, and so I think she was really feeling gun shy, and here came another person, me, and was I gonna blast her again? I didn't. I did an interview with her, and it wasn't as satisfying as the other JERS ones because she wasn't as willing to do the interview at that point and she didn't have her wits about her to the same degree. I wasn't sure if she was faking it a little bit or if her state of mind was real, and so my own skepticism maybe got in the way a little bit of the interview, but that was it.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.