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

AH: So, those were the JERS people who I did interview, and I did get to know them all really quite well. I had a history with them that went well beyond their interviews. I mean, the fact that Yuriko came and stayed with me, while Bob Spencer's wife, Marietta, put me on the phone with Bob when he was dying of cancer, because she wanted me to talk to him, and he was dead shortly after that. I have have a close relationship with these people, and some of it was because I was like twenty years younger than them, and they had done this work for JERS years ago and now somebody had finally shown some interest in it. University presses had published none of their theses, none of their dissertations. None of them. So in a sense they had done all this work, put themselves on the line, and had actually been treated as if they were traitors, inu types, and almost nobody showed any interest in their work. That work for JERS wasn't the thing that got them their academic promotions and scholarly reputations.. I mean, Bob Spencer became an emeritus professor at Minnesota, and James Sakoda became an emeritus professor at Brown, and Togo Tanaka got appointed to the Federal Reserve board. I mean, these were eminent people. But the fact that I was younger and that I wanted to hear what they had to say, and had done a lot of research to be able to ask him the kind of questions that forced them into thinking about it, I think that was an important thing. I think I felt sort of a familial connection to them.

And maybe somebody who looks at my interviews will say, "Art was too kind to them." I don't know if that's true. I think I was able to ask hard questions because I had rapport with them, and because I didn't come across as an antagonist to them. I could actually get them to open up, and I think they did. But I know Lane Hirabayashi, for instance, he's an anthropologist and an endowed chair in Asian American Studies at UCLA, and he cannot abide the interview that I did with Spencer -- not because of my questions so much as Bob Spencer's answers. Lots of people revile Rosalie Hankey Wax, so that's nothing new, and lots of people think that Togo Tanaka was an informer. And Charlie Kikuchi, for instance, when he was younger, in his diary and other writings, he'd always use the word "Japs." So people just saw him as a "banana." I think you've got to look a little deeper; you've got to look quite a bit deeper. I found myself having a tremendous admiration for every one of them. I mean, Rosalie Hankey, a twenty-seven-year-old woman doing field work in the hottest spot in of all the camps, at Tule Lake during the time it was a segregation center. I mean, amazing to have had to do that at the time. Bob Spencer, a young white boy, walking into Gila and doing interviews there. Charlie, a young Nikkei who wasn't brought up among Japanese Americans going in to Gila River to do participant-observation fieldwork. Sakoda, on the other hand, he had been around Japanese Americans enough; he was brought up here in L.A. and he had spent time in Japan. He hated it when I called him a Kibei because he thought of himself as a "conservative Nisei." But those people did do the hard work, got into the crucible and came out of it with something of enduring significance. That they wrote something important and not enough people have recognized its worth is a tragedy of sorts.

Lane Hirabayashi and I had talked for years about putting together a whole series of books which would be essentially all of the major works of the JERS social scientists, the ones that weren't published. It was planned to be done in concert with the Japanese American National Museum. Lane had some issues with certain personnel, who I won't name, at that museum, so that sort of killed the project. Now I notice that it's being revived, and Setsuko Nishi copied me on an e-mail she sent to Lane. They're talking again about getting younger scholars to each take responsibility for one of the books in the series, and not necessarily do the whole book, but pull something out so that that whole collective JERS group voice gets some airing. But I think that my work with JERS was probably one of the most passionate things that I was involved in. So thanks for asking a question about it. I'm sorry I went on so passionately and so long about it, however.

MN: No problem. You know, you also mentioned Peter Suzuki, and you mentioned this panel on which you were sort of a peacemaker. Is that the one on the book -- I'm going to mispronounce his last name -- Morton Grodzins's Americans Betrayed: Politics and the Japanese Evacuation.

AH: No, it wasn't the panel about Grodzin's book.

MN: That wasn't the panel?

AH: No. The panel was on the book that substituted for Grodzin's 1949 book. I can't remember the title.

JG: The lead author was tenBroek.

AH: Yes, Jacobus tenBroek, and his coauthors were Edward Barnhart and Floyd Matson. was the guy who was there at the panel, and it got really... I mean, that's the fiercest I've ever seen people going after each other on a panel. It was unbelievable.

JG: The title of the book was Prejudice, War and the Constitution: Causes and Consequences of the Japanese Americans in World War II.

AH: Good, thanks, that's it.

JG: It's amazing what you file away.

AH: No, I'm glad you did. I'm glad you did. But that's who it is, it was Floyd Matson. At the time that the book was written in 1958. He was a doctoral student in political science at Berkeley, and the other two authors were professors at Berkeley. But Matson was a big guy, and he was there, and he was steaming, boy. Partly I became a peacemaker in order to prevent mayhem from occurring. It was really a rough sort of session. And then Yuji Ichioka later on criticized me, saying, "You just let Floyd Matson go on and on and on and dis Peter Suzuki." I don't think I did. But in any event, that was Yujii's reading of it. And then later on Peter Suzuki got totally mad at Yuji because when Yuji edited the book Views from Within: The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study published in 1989 by UCLA's Asian American Studies Program, and it was based upon this conference in 1987 that we had of the same name, Views from Within, Yuji basically came out and said that to just criticize everybody in JERS across the board the way Peter did was irresponsible. That they may not have said what you wanted them to say, but they made contributions and we needed to hear about those contributions. But at that point, Yuji then was Peter's nemesis. Well, that happens a lot. Raymond Okamura was very mad at me for some things, and Michi Weglyn, through Jack and Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, got us together. And this was at that same UC Berkeley conference on JERS in 1987. Jack and Aiko said: "I want you two to get together," and so the four of us went out and had lunch. And when we were walking away from lunch, my new best friend Raymond Okamoto confided to me: "I told Yuji that this conference shouldn't have required a charge to get people in, it shouldn't have been a closed session, it should have been open to the whole public. And I was insistent about it and he said, 'I'm gonna beat the hell out of you.'" [Laughs] So there was that confrontation at that particular time. I haven't seen Raymond Okamura since that time in 1987. I did see Yuji and Yuji and I got to be fairly good friends. We were at the same conference on Heart Mountain in 1995 at Powell, Wyoming, and we were both making presentations there. Then, too, some years earlier, in 1989, I gave a presentation at San Francisco at the American Historical Association annual meeting that Yuji and Emma Gee, his wife, came to, and we talked amicably on that occasion. And even before that conference, when the book Views from Within came out, I wrote Yuji a nice note telling him how much I valued the book. But that was pretty much it.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.