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

JG: It's interesting, earlier in today's interview you were talking about... I'm thinking here, just leading off your last response about styles and approaches to the work that we do as scholars; I mean, you've made oral history your life's focus and it's kind of at the center of your intellectual project. There's been a lot of different approaches in Asian American Studies, and you've mentioned a couple of individuals. You mentioned Gary Okihiro, you've mentioned Yuji Ichioka, pioneers in the field of Asian American Studies, and I'd certainly put you in that category as well. And it'd be interesting, I think, to get your take -- here you got your doctorate in European history at UC Santa Barbara in the early '70s...

AH: British and American.

JG: British and American. And then you transition into this field, Asian American Studies, that's just beginning to emerge. And I'd just be curious to get, perhaps you didn't really see yourself as part of that field, but you certainly have seen the evolution of Asian American Studies, and I think it'd be really interesting to hear your perspective on how you understood it, its trajectory, and where you see it now. Because from my perspective, you represent the community aspect of Asian American Studies, the origins, the nexus, now it's kind of become more professionalized over time. And I'd just be curious to get your sense of how things have unfolded, where you think they're going, and some of these players that you talk about like Yuji and Okihiro.

AH: Because I started out in history the way I did, I never quite think of myself as just an oral historian. If I see somebody refer to me in print as Oral Historian Art Hansen, inside, I don't like it that much. Because I've written a lot, too, and the "Arizona and the West" article I wrote on cultural politics in the Gila River concentration camp during 1942-43 didn't have one interview involved in it. Theory is important to me and method's important also, and the way you approach scholarship and everything, and I value it, and I read just about everything that comes leastwise in Japanese American studies. So I know what has been going on in the field, and I can read something like Eiichiro Azuma's scholarship and think it's brilliant. I love transnational history. Then just this morning I was reading a 2009 book by Charlotte Brooks before I came here, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing and the Transformation of Urban California. Charlotte Brooks deals with housing as it affects Asian Americans, and she makes a comparison between the experience of Chinese in San Francisco and Japanese in Los Angeles. And she does it during World War II and after the war in the Cold War period. I find it absolutely fascinating. When she relates to Eiichiro's work, she'll say, "Eiichiro wrote this brilliant book, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America, and he has about one a half paragraphs devoted to housing." This is because Asian Americanists have been looking at things like immigration to the exclusion of something like housing. But the housing was a very important thing, to think how housing relates to the opportunities that you have: your identity, what your family can do, what cultural things are available to you. So it's a real interesting book. And I had been familiar with Charlotte Brooks a little bit because she wrote a really interesting article a few years ago, in 2000, in the Journal of American History on resettlement in "In the Twilight Zone Between Black and White: Resettlement and Community in Chicago, 1942-1945." And, Jim, when you and I were both working on resettlement, that article came out right about that time. I found it very, very interesting. In fact, she even cites a couple of your interviews, Charlotte Brooks does, in this new book on housing that she did. So it's come around to that.

Well, as for Yuji Ichioka, he had very special kinds of abilities, and quite apart from personal style and everything, you can find this and that offputting, but when you look at a person's scholarship, you say, "What's the quality and what's it like?" His scholarship was very traditional. I had to evaluate him a couple of times for promotions at UCLA, and I would write, "Well, there's nothing particularly earthshaking in his sense of theory or his sense of method." It really was a conventional type of historical writing he produced, but it was beautifully done. And he could do it, and it was a point of pride with him because he had to learn. He had to really learn. He didn't, as a kid, have a real good grasp of Japanese language, and so he worked on that. And he threw off the academic route. I mean, he dropped out of a doctoral program at Columbia, and he was sort of like a person who was at the university, UCLA, but didn't have all the preferments of tenure-track faculty. And so he had a separate category for himself: research associate. And in some ways, it worked out great for everybody, because he didn't have to bother as much, presumably, with teaching classes and going to committee meetings.. He was a research associate, and he did a lot of research, he could make use of all those archives right out the door from his office over in the Special Collections Department of the University Research Library, which he did, and that 1988 book on the Issei, entitled The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrant, 1885-1924, is so fantastic. And recently, in the last year or so, I read the book that Eiichiro Azuma and Gordon Chang edited into an anthology of his unpublished articles in 2006, Before Internment: Essays in Prewar Japanese American History. It's another remarkable book.

And then I start looking at the students that Yuji had over there at UCLA, and he had a tremendous influence on a number of key people that are in the field right now. I was a student of his in the sense that I learned from the things that I read that he wrote, and I benefitted greatly from those. I don't think I could have been a personal student of Yuji's. I would have liked to have played basketball against him, because I understand he liked to throw elbows around, and then we could have had a good time doing that. I think he made a tremendous difference. People say, "Well, he's the one who came up with the term 'Asian American.'" I don't know if that's necessarily true, but now you see the director for this Asian American Studies Center at UCLA is David Yoo. And David Yoo, in many ways, even though he never officially studied under Yuji, is really a product of Yuji. And Brian Hayashi is another one. I have some minor differences with his work, but then Lon Kurashige's brother Scott Kurashige, a UCLA product who came out in that sort of, again, Yuji tradition, very thoroughly bilingual, etcetera, and very exacting on the work that he does. I really like Scott's 2007 book on Los Angeles, The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.