<Begin Segment 6>

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

JG: I'm just curious, when you talk about your career in oral history, I imagine the Baker interview was probably a memorable one in terms of just your own politics and your views and things. It's a challenge when you're interviewing somebody and you find that you may not like that person. I'm just curious if you might talk about other interviews that stand out for you as memorable, either because...

AH: I didn't like the interviewee?

JG: Yeah. You may not have liked the interviewee or there was something about the interview that struck you, that stayed with you. Maybe because, conversely, you really did feel drawn into that particular individual.

AH: Well, the ones I've talked about so far, for instance, the Charlie Kikuchi one disappointing me a little bit because he was too self-effacing and so I needed to draw him out a little bit more. But that can be nettlesome, too. And I remember after the first tape-recording session I did with him, Debbie and I went out to get lunch, and I said, "We just wasted our time and money coming here to Block Island because Charlie's is just not really forthcoming on anything." But then when I went back and did a second interview, a third interview, he got progressively more forthcoming. You're just challenged then to build a climate in which an interviewee will speak. James Sakoda was so fussy about things that when I was interviewing him, I remember feeling, not a person I would have necessarily chosen for a friend. But he was a wonderful source. When he was in camp, first at Tule Lake and then at Minidoka, he kept four different diaries. He even kept one which he called his "sex diary." I never saw it. [Laughs] That was his private diary. And his "sex diary" entries might have been, for instance, about kissing somebody, I don't know. He seemed a little bit prudish, but maybe he wasn't. But he kept multiple records. He kept a diary and a journal for JERS, but then he kept his own personal diary and then he kept this "sex diary." So it's sort of like these Dante's circles or something like this; as a researcher you descend into those. So I liked him as a person within the context of that interview, but I didn't feel as warmly disposed towards him as a person outside of the interview setting. And Togo Tanaka and Bob Spencer I felt maybe close to them just because they were more like academics that I had liked over the years. I mean, there are a lot of academics I can't stand, but Togo and Bob reminded me of academics that I had really liked. With Rosalie Hankey, again, I had these reservations because I thought she might be setting me up, playacting or something. And then some of the stuff that she was accused of in camp, of course, thing was that she was nice to your face, but then she's turning evidence over to somebody else to be used for one or another reasons. So I felt challenged in that sort of way with her.

One of the very last interviews I did was with Fred Tayama's niece, and I had to interview her out in Orange County. And I got there... and Fred Tayama, here he was a superpatriot, and that's the thing that got him in so much trouble at Manzanar. Even the cafes he ran in pre-World War II Los Angeles, the U.S. Cafes, had a patriotic name. And then he headed up the Anti-Axis Committee for the Southwest District of the JACL, and he's what I referred to in my article with Dave Hacker on the Manzanar Riot as exhibiting "muscular Americanism," where it's like these Tea Party types now. And of course he goes to camp and he's braying this sort of stuff, and the only person in camp who was more obnoxious in that regard was Tokie Slocum. But Fred Tayama sort of wore the American flag. And so here, years later, I'm interviewing -- this is for the Manzanar National Historic Site Oral History Project -- and I'm interviewing Fred Tayama's niece and she lives in a nice place in Anaheim Hills in Orange County, and I go there and before I get a chance to even start the interview, she takes me on a tour of her house. And she's showing me all these things that are patriotic, all these American-themed kinds of things. And then I noticed she's wearing a red white and blue outfit and she's got American flags on her lapels. And I'm thinking, gee whiz. You talk about the generational experience coming down the family line. And I think I was challenged, actually, to ask her the hardest questions possible.

[Interruption]

JG: So you were just talking about some of your memorable experiences in a career of oral history interviewing. I'm not sure if you had a little bit more to add to that.

AH: Well, I was talking about interviewing Fred Tayama's niece, and I thought -- as it turned out, and this was a horrible thing -- when I got home, half of the interview wasn't recorded. The battery on my microphone was going in and out and so I'd only get some of our conversation recorded.. And I offered to do a new interview but she wasn't willing to do it anymore after that experience so I really lost a great opportunity to document a genealogy almost of superpatriotism. But it's her socialization. And the Tayamas were foregrounded at Manzanar for a very good reason. I think when there's a concerted effort, really, to not just incarcerate people but in a sense to banish them from America at almost any sort of cost, this has to do with a certain type of genocide, not literally through death, but doing everything, and the government did, too, to accommodate by the public law that they passed to allow people in time of war to renounce their citizenship. They were trying to accommodate as much as possible to get Japanese Americans completely out of the United States. And if you look at all the other legislation that built up to it, it all went in the same direction. California and other states kept tightening up their alien land laws to the point that it became very hard for Nikkei to make a living. So there's all kinds of things that were done and the calculus just works out in this particular way. Well, when you're in a camp like Manzanar, how foolhardy. I mean, maybe it was foolhardy for me at the time of the Asian American movement to be involved with a book that has a prospective title of "Jap Camp." It was certainly foolhardy of Tayama, for instance, to take the chauvinistic line he did at Manzanar. Plus, he really was an inu. And I published all of these actions taken by Tayama at Manzanar, which were documented in confidential reports that he sent to the FBI about what was happening at particular meetings in camp. So he was working in the shadows constantly. In any event, when we had a break just now, Martha brought something up, so Martha, if you want to talk a little bit about that now on tape I'll comment on it.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.