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

MN: Well, you mentioned Lillian Baker also, and I wanted to ask you, was it very difficult to get an interview with her?

AH: No, not for me. Because some people, most especially Raymond Okamura, were upset with me about this book that the Japanese American Project of the Oral History Program at Cal State Fullerton put out in 1977, Camp and Community: Manzanar and the Owens Valley, because of its originally advertised title, which was "Jap Camp," and we were dragged into a board meeting here in Little Tokyo of a JACL Ethnic Concerns Committee. The people who were the co-authors and myself as the director of the project were there to talk about the book and particularly its proposed "racist" title. And there's not a single racist thing in that entire book, apart from some of the commentary of the Owens Valley interviewees in it. We had such discussions about using that title, and we chose the title very advisedly. There were books coming out then called Chink, Nigger, etcetera, and the point of such titles was the idea to come to grips with the reality of such racial slurs. And if you ever look at any documentation you'll see that old-timers in the area around Manzanar regularly -- they still do, if they're alive -- refer to it as "Jap camp." That book wasn't focused on the Japanese Americans, it was focused on the people in the Owens Valley. And there was a mixed kind of response there to Manzanar. Some of the people were very liberal and very helpful to the Japanese Americans and then others of them were talking about that because they had Japanese Americans there, they were going to poison the water supply for Los Angeles, and now had to sleep at night with a shotgun under their bed and things like this. The thing is, when the book was published under the revised title of Camp and Community, I wrote a publisher's preface to it and I expressed my umbrage at the fact of what was going on, and that's when Raymond Okamura said, "Art Hansen's unreliable, we need to have a community review of everything he does and he needs to submit everything for community approval." And Togo Tanaka wrote a statement, saying, "I think that Art Hansen's more on the right page than any of you on the Ethnic Concerns Committee are." And then that was basically it. It just blew over. I went on with my life and other people went on with their life. But it was kind of awkward at that Ethnic Concerns Committee meeting because Sue Embrey was then involved with the Ethnic Concerns Committee. I had already forged a really close relationship with Sue. She didn't say anything at the meeting at all. And shortly thereafter they had an honorary dinner for a person, George Roth, who was a Caucasian who had been a very close friend of the Japanese Americans during the World War II days. And Sue made a pointed gesture of inviting me to it and sitting at the same table with me. One of the things I always liked about Sue was the fact that she had the courage to be able to do that. She didn't have that much love lost for the JACL either, so this JACL Ethnic Concerns Committee, some it was, I thought, amounted to showboating on their part. It was clear that they didn't read the book, they didn't even read the editors' introduction explaining the title's rationale, and so I think that you don't want to find yourself in that position. Probably a little stupid on my part, naive, in the sense of endorsing a controversial title like that. But we changed the title before the book came out, changed it to Camp and Community. There was somebody present at the Ethnic Concerns Committee meeting who was not a member of the committee, a Japanese American Nisei man whose daughter didn't know what the term "Jap" meant and hadn't ever experienced that racist word. Moreover, he did not want her to experience it. He did not threaten us or anything else, but prevailed upon us to please change the name of the book. And that kind of logic worked really well. But when we went to that particular talk in front of that committee, they were going to "close down Cal State Fullerton," run me out of business as a history professor at a state university. It was nothing but a series of empty vitriolic attacks. So that was what that flap was all about. Anyway, it was embarrassing and it was not pleasant, and I was glad to get through that and move on to other things. The Voices Long Silent had become all of a sudden not so silent. [Laughs]

MN: So you were getting all these criticisms from the Japanese American community. Now, from people like Lillian Baker, were you ever criticized as being a "Jap lover"?

AH: Well, Baker, because of this flap over Camp and Community -- and this gets back to your original question -- Baker sort of thought that we were on the same page. And then she used to come to Cal State Fullerton a lot because she had all of these jewelry collections. And she used to bring them to the Fullerton campus and there was a woman named Veronica Chang who was the curator of exhibits at the library. And so every time Baker would come there, and then she told Veronica that she wanted to meet with me. So finally we did, we went to lunch. She could see that I wasn't in agreement with any of her perspective on the Japanese American World War II experience. But then she reasoned that if she didn't have somebody who was an ally, maybe she had in me a potential convert. So when she would come to campus, we would have lunch. Finally, I said to her, "I'd like to do an interview with you." So here she was living in -- as I think I told you last time -- in Gardena, right in the heart of JA country. So I thought, my goodness, probably her Nikkei neighbors will think, this is the guy who brought you "Jap Camp," and now here he is coming to Gardena to interview Lillian Baker. Anyway, she never would sign off on her interview because we did have these differences. So that was it. I did have her over for this debate at Cal State Fullerton between her group, Americans for Historical Accuracy, and the Manzanar Committee, and Warren Furutani was involved in that debate for the Manzanar Committee as well as Amy Uno Ishii and Judge Robert Takasugi. It was a wild and wooly scene. Our Japanese American Project also did an interview with Shonin Yamashita, the Issei that was down in San Diego who was the one Japanese American that Baker could round up as a Americans for Historical Accuracy membership. He had been a Communist in the 1930s and then he became very right-wing, and he sort of aligned himself with Lillian Baker. I think part of the problem is being an oral historian. I think other people think that when you're collecting information from an informant, that's where you're coming from. And so they attribute your interviewee's perspective to you. You're collecting information, you're listening, you're supportive because you want to get people -- it's not artifice, it's really historical integrity -- to get your interviewees' positions out in the open. So when you do this, people ask, "Why would you ever interview Lillian Baker?" Or, "Why would you go interview Charlie Kikuchi?" Well, you've just got to do that, that's it. And the business about "if you don't like the heat, get out of the kitchen," well, oral history is the kitchen and that's what you have to get in the way of heat. I'm sure Densho has dealt with that situation over the years, too.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.