<Begin Segment 9>

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

AH: I'm really excited about a lot of the things that have gone on, and I read more in Japanese American studies than I do in Asian American studies generally. I read books in Asian American studies, but I can't really do it all in the way needed because it's proliferated to the point that -- it was possible at one time to read a corpus of works because the corpus was small. But now, it's just ramifying. But the Japanese American studies corpus one is, too. There's a lot of interesting kinds of studies, and they make the local and global connected, and they deal with things in a multicultural way; they're not dealing with things in isolation. So you've got interethnic, interracial things going on. I like the work that is being done. I find sometimes when I go to the Japanese American National Museum a degree of sterility because it seems like they haven't really partaken sufficiently of all of the energy that's gone on in Asian American studies. And that institution should be a hothouse of that sort of stuff and it's not. It was at one time. I think when they first got going, back in 1992, I think the impetus of it was very strong at that time, but I just think that in recent years it's become desiccated. You can tell the difference when a person like Diane Fujino comes to our meetings for JANM's regional scholars advisory board. She's been doing the kind of work on Yuri Kochiyama that just crackles with a kind of power and a compassion that you don't find in a lot of things going on at JANM. Some of the public programs at the museum are really good, but then others, I think, are titillating more than they are consequential. And I think they need to get back on track, and I think it's going to be hard, because once they became corporate, they didn't take very many chances any longer. And they're appealing to donors, and they're appealing to community people, they've got their ears attuned too much to those kinds of things and not what's happening in scholarship and the world at large. Museums can't be Avant-garde institutions because they can leave the public behind and that would be like committing suicide to do that. But you've got to be just a little bit behind the curve. You can't be ahead of the curve, but you have to be close to where the curve is. You can't fall back and then only accept stale approaches and interpretations.

A good example relates to Frank Emi, who just died. He was a remarkable person. I did just about whatever I could -- and you know about this kind of stuff, Jim, because you were involved in collections development at the museum before I started to work there -- I did about everything I could to try to get Frank Emi's papers over to the museum. We courted him, but he was smart enough to be able to see that they were coming to him too late. They needed to come to him when there was some danger to come to him and to say, "We want your stuff." And probably JANM wouldn't have gotten William Hohri's papers if he wasn't already somewhat down the road towards dementia when he gave his papers over to the museum. JANM has done nice things and feted Hohri at an annual banquet, but those people, community dissenters like Emi and Hohri, their image wasn't around the museum, their story wasn't really in the museum's foreground. Actions were taken, seemingly, always as a political motive afterthought. And you've got to be right there on top of exciting developments and new interpretations. That lack has concerned me a lot about JANM.

And the scholarship that we're getting now in Asian American studies, some of it is getting so far detached from the community that it's much like what the British mean in their expression that "people are too clever by half." Some of the academics working in Asian American studies have their ego so attached to academic promotion and academic fashion that they're leaving behind the community. They're flying above the community. The charge against Asian American studies before was that it flew under the academic community. Now what they've done is overcompensated and tried to fly above it; it gets so theoretically driven that it's very hard for community people to read. One of the nice things was when there was this dynamic equilibrium in Asian American studies between the community energy and the energy of the scholars. And a few people had that quality in their scholarship and it really worked well. But then some of that situation has dissipated. But maybe it was a natural thing to happen; if it's an academic community, that's where you're getting your research leaves, that's where you're getting your fellowships, that's where you're getting your promotions. And so what you do is to please that master. Whereas before, maybe Asian Americanists didn't have that much concern because they didn't have as many vested interests, so they were more community-based. So when many Asian Americans now say they're community-based scholars, I question it. I wonder, what community they are talking about? Is that just something where you use the language of community rather than the actuality of community, real people with real issues. That's a concern of mine.

But generally there's been a healthy number of Asian Americanists and Japanese Americanists who have continued to operate as community-based scholars, and Eiichiro Azuma is one of them, actually. I think he has some very pressing concerns about the way in which the Japanese American community is defined. Who's not included in what people call the Japanese American community? What do we ever say in our work about the Japanese war brides? What do we say about Japanese Americans in the Midwest? What do we say about the Shin Issei? The rest of the Japanese American community's not even growing. Scholars haven't even said that much about Japanese Americans in Hawaii, and there are more people of Japanese ancestry in Hawaii than there are on the mainland. It's crazy. But those doing Japanese American studies have a definite group of people in mind that represent Japanese America. And it's sort of like when JANM has exhibits, those exhibits tend to pander to that stylized notion of what the Japanese American community is rather than the rowdy, multifaceted entity that it actually is. It's not as satisfying to study that. It used to be said that one had workaday shoes and also Sunday-go-to-meeting shoes. And it seems like the Japanese American community is being fashioned into this Sunday go-to-meeting community and that some of the institutions that work with the community are also taking a Sunday-go-to-meeting way of representing the community. There's a big difference, I think, between the Japanese American National Museum and the National Japanese American Historical Society in northern California in San Francisco. If NJAHS is captive of anything, they tend to be captive of the left wing, and a lot of their programming has to do with persuasion and perspective. But NJAHS is based less on a building than it is upon real experience and real history and real people. So there is that difference between JANM and NJAHS. Please wait a few years before you get this interview out to the public, okay? [Laughs]

MN: In that line, a lot of the Japanese American scholarship has been focused on World War II. Now, once the Nisei generation disappears, is Japanese American scholarship disappearing? For example, the Japanese American Oral History Program at Fullerton, will that ever become obsolete?

AH: The Japanese American Project in Fullerton's Center for Oral and Public History is no longer functioning as a project. In fact, it wasn't functioning as a project in the last fifteen years that I was there except for the fact that I was there. There was a point in the 1970s-1980s in which we had six or seven people all working on research topics, but then later it became only an occasional graduate student or two doing a Japanese American thesis or something, and we might have used the name of the Japanese American Project, but it was more of a name than a reality. It wasn't any longer a vibrant institution or anything like that. But no, I think that one of the things that Japanese American studies has to go through is that it has to build a little more proportionality into the kind of effort that they're doing. For a long time, the World War II experience just ate up almost every study that was done. There is a life after that war. Now, because there's a life after the war doesn't mean that the war is not part of that life, because it always will be. That will always be there. But to have a fetishistic relationship to it, which is what it's become, that becomes jaded and almost a little sick. I think what you have to look at is what's happening right now. There are new issues, and there needs to be some sensitivity to that. More books, articles, films, et cetera are starting to come out that deal with those kinds of topics. And I think it will go on from there.

It was hard for us -- and Jim remembers this from our doing interviews in the REgenerations project on Japanese American resettlement from 1942 to 1965 for JANM, I liked working on resettlement issues. But when you started talking to an interviewee about resettlement, they wanted to discuss the war right away. We knew that the war was going to be important in that project because that's what Nikkei were, so-called, "resettling" from. But at the same time, we tried to alert those involved with the project to the fact that its center of gravity was resettlement. Even when we brought in project advisors like Kats Kunitsugu and Harry Honda to mine them for ideas about people we should interview, they start coming up with things about the war instead of resettlement. Harry wasn't even in camp, but we kept camp topics and informant leads from him -- because that became really the be-all and end-all for a lot of people. I think we have to move on to a lot of other things, even before the war. That's why Yuji's book on the Issei was so important. Because Yuji dealt with the Issei period, and gosh, a scholar like Jim Gatewood who knows some Japanese, he's in a fortuitous place. UCLA is crammed with documents, novels, and nonfiction sources that the Issei produced, and a lot of these Issei were extremely bright. These research materials are there, and they're waiting to be consulted and used. And now when such works come out, it's so fabulous to get and read them. The Issei writers apparently didn't have as guarded an attitude as a lot of the Nisei writers did. So a lot of the earlier period of Japanese American history needs to be written about, as Yuji Ichioka did in writing about the period before internment in his second major book.

But one of the things we haven't done very much work on is the Issei experience during the war. It is just said that the average age of Issei men was fifty-five, and they played go in camp, and they were the power behind the throne. But those are just heavy-handed generalizations. Somebody really needs to go in and understand what was really happening with the Issei generation during the war? If I'd have been able to have the Japanese language under control, instead of interviewing Togo and the people we've talked about before, I would have been interviewing Issei. The only interviews I did with Issei were in Cal State Fullerton's Orange County project. I found it quite fascinating to do such interviews, but I had to go through a translator. And going through a translator is not quite as satisfying an experience as interviewing someone directly. And the interviews take a long time, but also, you, the interviewer, doesn't quite know what's going on. Something gets lost in translation as they say, and it gets lost when you have a translator. For example, when I had a translator for Orange County project, and the translator would translate what the Issei had to say. So I asked one Issei man, "When you came to Seattle, did you go to whorehouses?" And the female translator tells him I've said something else so that he comes back and says something totally different from what I asked. And then the translator tells me in English: "He didn't do things like that." I don't know what the Issei man said. But that's kind of a problem.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.