<Begin Segment 7>

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

MN: Well, my understanding is during the 1970s, when a lot of the Sansei activists were coming out and the Rafu Shimpo started to publish what you were talking about Fred Tayama being an informant, allegedly...

AH: Informer.

MN: Informer, right. And so the Tayama family threatened a lawsuit against the Rafu Shimpo and Togo Tanaka was representing Fred Tayama and Michael Yamaki was asked to represent the Rafu, and Dwight Chuman, who was the English editor at the time, and of course Aki Komai was the publisher at the time. And so they went into a meeting, and the conclusion was that they drew up a contract saying that the Tayama family name would not be in the Rafu Shimpo. And you were aware of this ... one question, too, I wanted to ask you --

AH: I wasn't aware of the settlement.

MN: Okay. I'm surprised the Tayama family never filed a lawsuit against you.

AH: Well, I thought they were going to. Tom Tayama, Fred's brother, who was also at Manzanar and who was also sort of reviled there; the whole Tayama group, especially three of the brothers -- Fred, Tom, and Harry -- were. Tom Tayama came to Cal State Fullerton and he wanted to see me, and he brought his daughter. They wanted to look at all the interviews that we did relating to the Manzanar Riot and they did look at them, including Togo's. Then we went out to lunch, and without even bringing up anything about a lawsuit, we enjoyed a very congenial lunch, maybe a disarming sort of lunch. They followed it up, came back to campus a time, and we went out to lunch again. So the people I was going to lunch with were Lillian Baker and Tom Tayama. And if the Tayamas had read the Manzanar Riot article I wrote with David Hacker and looked at Togo's interview with me, they'd realize that Togo is the one who mostly provided the ammunition that I used in that article. Now, here Togo is supporting Fred Tayama. Why did he support him? I think for two reasons. Togo was a very rational person, extremely rational. He did not like, I think, the hullabaloo of Asian American politics during the 1960s and 1970s. Also, the Rafu Shimpo represents a generational thing that Togo had played such a pivotal role in legitimating, and taking the heat for, too. And the Komai family wasn't going to not back Togo Tanaka. They owed him an awful lot for what he had done, and probably somebody like Dwight Chuman, for instance, Togo would have thought as rakish and a guy that was not only rakish, but muckrakish. And then he did have a longtime friendship with the Tayamas. They were part of the same JACL cohort group, and when I asked him what he thought of Fred Tayama in our interview, he said he was a good guy. That's what he said.

Then Togo referenced in his interview thing that Tayama did that probably Togo didn't say directly that he did like turning evidence over to governmental authorities. Togo seemed to not talk about that at all. But he did, and if you look at the interview he'll say that, even if you're not turning things over, you can behave in a way, for instance, that's off putting to other people in the camp community. Like, for example, Dr. James Goto was somebody who was off putting to other people because he, before the war, owned a brand new Buick convertible, which he drove around Little Tokyo just rubbing people's nose into it that he was different from them. So that's the kind of offensive sort of things that provoked community resentment. And, of course, Tokie Slocum just went over the top. He said that's what he did in World War I with Sergeant Alvin York was what he was doing when after Pearl Harbor he went leading this posse of Anti-Axis Committee members out into Little Tokyo to round up the Issei who were so dangerously subversive. So that behavior was pretty obvious. For the other people, their behavior wasn't quite so obvious. The community had to do a little more digging. But to get back to your question, I would say that virtually every interview that I have done, I have gone through some of the same sort of feelings. Like a feeling of disappointment, but also the feeling, I think, of feeling that we're getting somewhere, that things are opening up, new territory is being explored.

One of the most frustrating interviews I did is with a guy that I think Martha knew well, Clarence Nishizu. And Clarence at the time he died a few years ago was the oldest Nisei in Orange County and also in the JACL after Fred Hirasuna died. And I did this interview with Clarence, and Clarence was the sort of person who actually wanted to control the voice of the interview. So if you asked him a question, he would just go back to his previous answer, and then he would start talking about this again, and it got worse as he got semi-dementia ridden, because then he would literally go back to the same thing over and over again. But I was a good friend of his, and we did a lot towards raising money to build this museum, the Orange County Agricultural and Nikkei Heritage Museum, out there in the Fullerton Arboretum on the campus of Cal State Fullerton, and I'm close to the Nishizu family. His financial advisor is one of my closest friends, Kurtis Nakagawa, an Orange County Sansei who was raised in Gardena. But I remember going to an awards banquet of a group that you're involved with, Martha, the Japanese American Historical Society of Southern California. And that organization had publicized something about the interview that I did with Clarence Nishizu, since there had been a substantial article about it being published as a book in the Rafu Shimpo. And Clarence was a guy who would have been on the ear of the editor or the publisher to have a big article on it. So that was in the Rafu. So then when I walked into the banquet, one of my friends who was in attendance, Wilbur Sato, greeted me and then said, "What in the hell are you doing interviewing some scumbag like Clarence Nishizu?" And so it's just those kinds of things. But when I was interviewing Clarence, we never were able to finish the interview in multiple sessions. So finally what he did was he just wrote a first-person narrative -- it was a long document -- and then I had to insert questions. In the preface to the published interview volume I explained what the situation was, that half of it was an interview and the other half was actually Clarence's own autobiographical narrative, and that was it. But that procedure was dissatisfying for me.

Sometimes an interview was dissatisfying because the interviewee wanted to talk about things that were so unrelated, or else he or she wanted to be able to demonstrate their courage or their patriotism or whatever agenda they had. And so it was kind of difficult to be able to do that type of interviewing. When is an interview really satisfying? When does it really become satisfying? It's kind of when the interviewer and the interviewee are on the same page and they feel like they're co-creating something that's different from what is already well known. They're probing this situation together, and they have trust in one another enough to be able to do this. And when they come out of the interview experience,, the document that's produced really contributes in a very innovative way towards the knowledge of that particular subject. When you read that interview transcript, you think about the topic a little bit differently, and that just doesn't always happen. Not everybody's a good interviewer, and not everybody's a good interviewee. And if someone is a bad interviewee, you've got to work really hard as an interviewer.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.