<Begin Segment 1>

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

MN: Today is December 6, 2010, we are at the Centenary Methodist Church, we'll be interviewing Dr. Art Hansen. Tani Ikeda is on the video, James Gatewood and Martha Nakagawa will be co-interviewing. So last time, Art, when we left off, we were talking about Rosalie Hankey Wax. And I don't know if you have any more comments about your experience with her, or if you could talk about the four other social scientists who were part of the Evacuation and Resettlement Study?

AH: I'll talk about those and then since Rosalie was towards the end of that interviewing experience, I'll finish up by mentioning some things about my interview with her. And if there's some overlap, so be it, because I can't remember exactly what we had covered. And it was at the end of our session and we were kind of all a little bit tired at that time.

[Interruption]

MN: Do you want to talk about Charles Kikuchi? You had reviewed the Kikuchi Diary a couple of years before that.

AH: The social scientists who were connected with the UC Berkeley Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study that I dealt with were the following people: Togo Tanaka, who, even though he wasn't a social scientist in a graduate school -- he was a political science major at UCLA and a brilliant guy -- I interviewed him first. And then I actually interviewed him twice. And the main way he got into the JERS project was through the resettlement stage of it. And he did some historical writing after he was forced out of Manzanar, when he was in protective custody in Death Valley, where he wrote up some reports for the JERS project about the Manzanar Riot. But then when he went to Chicago, he became heavily involved with the resettlement stage of that project because the people who were in that project by and large were at Tule Lake, and they were unwelcome at Tule Lake because they had said "yes-yes" on the "loyalty questionnaire" when Tule Lake was a relocation center. And as it was it was moving towards a segregation center there, they were persona non grata and they were quaking in their boots and hiding in their barracks for fear that their notes were all going to be destroyed, and beyond their notes, that they might be done in. So Frank Miyamoto and Tom Shibutani, or Tamotsu Shibutani, they went back to Chicago. And they went to the University of Chicago where they had their office, and their office was actually the office that had been occupied by one of the leading sociologists of that period, Robert Park. And they used that office because he was off on sabbatical somewhere else, and they used that as their project. And then all the other people who were leaving JERS came there. And so Tami Tsuchiyama, who had left Poston, ended up in Chicago, and then Charles Kikuchi left Gila and he was in Chicago. So they had a critical mass of people, and then Louise Suski, who had been a prewar editor, English-language editor, first by herself and then with Togo Tanaka for the Rafu Shimpo, she was back there at the University of Chicago in that office, too. And so it was a pretty formidable group. I got very interested in that group per se. So the more I read of the dissertations and master's theses they were writing, what I wanted to do was to study the social science community. Because I saw it as a group that was involved during a key juncture, not only in their lives and their communities' lives, but also the transformation of, I thought, American social science. It was moving in a different kind of way, that objects were becoming subjects, in a sense, because here you had a lot of racial-ethnic people involved in this development, and so I wanted to look at that.

But I got a hold of people to interview, for instance, as opportunity afforded itself. And so the first JERS social scientist I interviewed was Togo Tanaka. The first interview I did with Togo, in August 1973, was strictly on the Manzanar Riot. He had written this report on the riot, and I had been studying it, so what I wanted to do was to test what his analysis was against what my analysis was. I just had a fantastic interview with Togo. I couldn't have been better prepared for it, because I'd just got done spending the bulk of my recent life studying the Manzanar Riot and writing it up and interviewing other people about it. Togo was the second interview I ever did; the first interview I ever did was with Sue Kunitomi Embrey. Sue had been the managing editor for a while of the Manzanar Free Press, and she was a person who at the time of our interview was becoming public at that point with the Manzanar Pilgrimage, and so she had had a public existence. Sue was able to tell me a lot more than just about the riot, but she was able to give me, for instance, an account of the riot from somebody who was not central to it but somebody who was a key spectator of this situation and knew the personalities and issues that were involved. Then within a week after I did the interview with Sue, I did this interview with Togo Tanaka. But with Togo, two at the Japanese American Project that I was running at Cal State Fullerton, Betty Mitson and David Hacker got together and did an interview with Togo before I did, and they did a life history review. So what I could do was a directed interview just on the subject, on the riot. I did that interview and I found out something about JERS, and then my readings, of course, alerted me to a lot more about that project.

But the first JERS social scientist I interviewed after that was Robert Spencer, in July 1987. And Robert Spencer was a marvelous person for me to interview. I mean, there are a lot of people who are very critical of Spencer, see him as misogynist and ethnocentric and a lot of things, but I thought he was a brilliant person and he was just the right person for me to talk to. He was extremely young at the time he was connected to JERS, he was then studying under two of the leading anthropologists in the world, Robert Lowie and Alfred Kroeber at UC Berkeley. Spencer hadn't finished his dissertation, but he did know some Japanese. So when they set up the people who were gonna represent UC Berkeley, at these different WRA camps, one of the things that they turned to was this linguistic proficiency in Japanese, which a lot of the Nisei didn't have, even as good as Robert Spencer's. But Spencer had a warehouse mind. I mean, when he ended up teaching at the University of Minnesota, he was involved with seven different departments. And they were all over the disciplinary map. If you're at a small college and you're involved with seven departments, that comes with the territory. You're at a big place, research center like the University of Minnesota, that is something special.

So I had been doing some research up at UC Berkeley at the Bancroft Library, and I came across a lot of interesting JERS data. I was looking at resistance activity in all of the camps. But then I started to find out all these interesting reports that Spencer had written at Gila River Relocation Center in Arizona about all the activities that were going on there. And so after writing up the Manzanar Riot with David Hacker I ended up writing a paper on this "incident," as they called it, that occurred at Gila right between the Poston strike of November of 1942 and the Manzanar Riot of December 1942. Happening at the same time for very similar reasons, the dynamics were very much the same. The incident at Gila never became a full-fledged strike or riot, but it was probably more volatile in a lot of ways than both of those other experiences. So I was working on something else at that time, but when you run across data when you're researching, you say, this thing just demands to be analyzed.

And so I got myself into a conference up at the University of Washington and I presented this paper there on what had occurred at Gila. When I finished that paper, I wondered if this guy Spencer who'd been writing all these reports as a gawky twenty-six, twenty-seven-year-old guy was still around somewhere. And I discovered that he was still at the University of Minnesota, at the very tail end of his career there. And I sent off a copy of my paper and he wrote me back saying, "I just got back from a long trip to Europe, and I had a lot of mail, but by far the most interesting piece of mail I had was your letter." I had told him how valuable all this information was to me, and I said, "And the friendship that you had with the person you were working with, Charlie Kikuchi, was amazing." And so I told him, "I'd love to interview. Would that be a possibility?" And he replied, "Sure, come on out."

So in the summer of 1987 -- I remember this because the Major League All Star baseball game was on that July my wife Debbie and I went to the motel in Minneapolis, and I wanted to see the All Star game on television. Mark McGuire was then a rookie, you know, and he was on the All Star team. But my wife and I went back there and then I went over to interview Bob at the Spencer's faculty home in St. Paul. Just such an eye-popping experience in talking to him, and he was extremely frank. A lot of people don't have the stomach for such frankness or they have such thin skin that they can't hear what other people have to say because they let all of the appearances of things get in the way of the reality of things. And so nowadays we have so many bogus kinds of things where we're showing people to the door because they've had a slip of the tongue rather than a slip of the mind or slip of the heart. Bob wasn't like that. He was really good to interview, and I just caught him at the right time. He had suppressed the whole experience that he had back there at Gila during World War II, and this was true of almost all the social scientists I interviewed. To them, their work in the camps was an unseemly thing, it was a dirty kind of thing. And then in the late 1980s there were starting to be charges coming out from the anthropologist Peter Suzuki that the social scientists who had studied the camps were virtually all sellouts, just rank opportunists, people looking for jobs or advancements and things like that. It didn't matter if they had a yellow face or a white face, they were blackguards. I didn't think that way. I had worked enough as a field worker myself to know that there's not a lot of big bucks in this activity. You don't find too many millionaires that own mansions in different parts of the world because they're anthropologists or sociologists, or oral historians for that matter. So I listened to Spencer, and he hadn't seen Charlie Kikuchi for years and he was so interested in the situation he had experienced at Gila during the war with Charlie.

So Yuji Ichioka was putting on a conference about JERS in that same year, in 1987, and he was putting the conference on up at UC Berkeley. And so Charlie Kikuchi was involved in that conference, and that's where I first met Charlie. Now, Bob didn't want to be around Peter Suzuki at that conference. He said, "I thought this was a young man, and it turns out he's fifty-some years old." He said, "If some sort of epater le bourgeoisie type of youngster would have made these kind of comments, it wouldn't have been too shocking to me. But to have a mature person raising these issues was ridiculous." So he didn't want to go back to the conference at U.C. Berkeley. He also felt kind of distanced towards Yuji. He said that Yuji was so cavalier in the way that he sent letters to him, that he wasn't quite interested in going back to the conference. So he missed an opportunity to see Charlie Kikuchi. But I got a chance to meet Charlie. And we hit it off fantastically. I said, "Charlie, this is where it all began for you. You were a student here, you were a social work school student, and it was here when December 7, 1941, occurred, it was here you got recruited by Dorothy Swaine Thomas to be on the Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study." And it just so happened that during the conference over at the special collections section of the Bancroft Library they were having an exhibit on the Japanese American World War II experience..

And there was Charlie's book, The Kikuchi Diary, which had been published some years ago, you know, in 1973. And the editor for it was a guy named John Modell who had worked for the Japanese American Research Project, JARP at UCLA for many years, and then he was back at the University of Minnesota where Bob Spencer was based. In fact, Bob Spencer got very upset by the fact that John Modell had never contacted him and asked him anything at the time he was writing The Kikuchi Diary. He said here John Modell's wife -- who's no longer his wife but was at the time, Judith Modell -- was doing her doctorate in the anthropology department. And here John Modell had been doing this book on Charlie Kikuchi, and neither one of the Modells treated him to the information that this project was going on and got him involved with it. So he was a little upset at that. But in any event, Charlie and I just bonded so strongly, and I liked him a lot.

And then we had our panel session at the UC Berkeley conference on JERS organized by Yuji Ichioka, and Peter Suzuki trashed Charlie Kikuchi and then trashed me as a poor defender of Charlie. "If I wanted to be defended, I wouldn't want Art Hansen to do the defense." And I was acrimonious initially towards Suzuki. I said, "Well, you know, your paper is based upon data that you haven't even consulted. I mean, you're just operating in a vacuum, and you're condemning people without even reading the material." Now, he did read some of the material, because he wrote two papers close to one another. One of them dealt with the community analysts who were in all of the camps, and they worked under the aegis of the War Relocation Authority. He had read their documentation, and I agreed with a lot of his assessments of this situation. But he then tarred, the JERS project with the same brush that he had used to condemn the social scientists involved with the WRA. And I said, "This is a different situation, and you are basing your assessment of JERS without having read the relevant documentation."

So anyway, as soon as I got through with this session with Kikuchi and Suzuki, I had to go chair a session in which Suzuki was also a presenter, where he was attacking a co-author, Floyd Matson, of one of the eminent books, Prejudice, War, and the Constitution, that was in the series of publications spearheaded by JERS director Dorothy Swaine Thomas. And I ended up being a peacemaker there and I said, "Well, Peter has made a lot of contributions to bringing this issue out, and if we disagree, what we need to so so prudently." My whole mode of operation is not really to make enemies, it's to make friends and to build some kind of consensus. I think that's one of the reasons that I've worked fairly well within the Japanese American community, that instead of trying to throw flammable things into the mix, what I've tried to do is to temper my criticism through constructive compromise. And then oral history, too. I mean when you do an oral history, you need to be able not to be a side-taker, at least not explicitly. I mean, I had to interview the very contentious Lillian Baker, the bete noir of the Japanese American community Lillian Baker, and people in my oral history project at Fullerton, none of them would deign to go over to her home in Gardena, in the heart of the Los Angeles's Nikkei community, and interview her. They said, "She's a racist. Why would we want to interview her?" They said, "Our job as oral historians is to get a full plate of data. That's what we're supposed to do. We've got to access and make available different perspectives. We're trying to get interviewees', we're not trying to tell them our story or sell them on our politics. We can ask hard questions that are generated from where we're at and the way we're looking at the world, but our basic job is to get their stories. And this is so other people can use this information in making up their mind with a complex set of data and not just have a lot of people that agree with them, so that it's more than just preaching to the choir.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

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

AH: Okay, so I then, after I had interviewed Bob Spencer and met Charlie Kikuchi, I made arrangements to go back and interview Charlie. And since there was another person who had been on the project who I met at the conference and didn't have the same warm feelings toward... you'd have to know Charlie, he was an amazing guy, very personable. The other person was James Sakoda. And James Sakoda had been a sociology professor at Brown University, and he lived in Barrington, Rhode Island, which is a town that's not too far from Providence. Jim Gatewood will know this from having spent his doctoral program back at Brown. Charlie had a summer place that was on Block Island, which is off the coast of Rhode Island. So my wife and I went back there and first what I did was to go out to Block Island and interview Charlie, and then when I was through with that interview, I went to Barrington and I did a two-part interview with James Sakoda. The first session was at the Brown campus, because Sakoda had just retired, was just a new emeritus, and so I kind of caught him at a good time, he had a lot to say still. And then we went to his house in Barrington for the second session. And it was a really propitious time. Actually, that occurred in 1988, a year after I did the interview with Bob Spencer. And what made it so propitious was while I was back there with Sakoda, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act. And at the same time, they had something which just got him so mad. They still celebrated VJ Day, September 2, and it was the only state in the United States, Rhode Island, that then celebrated it. So we had these two events that were occurring when I was back there. But James Sakoda is a very testy guy, and he's very persnickety about things and very precise, and he was just the opposite of Charlie Kikuchi in this regard.

When I was at Charlie's place out in Block Island it was such a fun thing. I mean, the first night I was there we went fishing together, and he was a real fisherman, while I was not. But the real fisherman in his family was his wife, and she was a famous person. Yuriko Amemiya Kikuchi was this famous dancer, and she was working for the Martha Graham troupe. In fact, when we were at the Kikuchi's Block Island vacation home, they were getting telephone calls all the time from a guy named Jerry who turned out to be Jerome Robbins. And while we were there, their kids came out, they have a son, Lawrence, they have a daughter, Susan, and their daughter was now doing all of the dance parts that her mother had done years before that. And we just had a family gathering there in Block Island, and I interviewed Charlie while Debbie, my wife, went out fishing with Yuriko. And Yuriko, Debbie said, was super. She's just hauling in these fish, and then she'd cook them up at night and we'd just have these great times. And that was really an important thing. That was the last time the Kikuchi family was together as a family. Because Charlie was then taking walks to get himself in shape to go on a peace walk in the then Soviet Union, and he needed to get into shape for that. So he left Block Island right after we did, and then he went off to Russia, and when he got to Kiev, he got so sick that he had to be hospitalized, and when he was hospitalized, they opened up his stomach and it turned out that he had terminal cancer. And so he died not too long after that, but in the meantime, Yuriko had gone all the way to Russia, and it was super expensive, and then Charlie wanted to die in the United States. If you ever think about a testimony of patriotism... here he was trying to put the Soviet Union and the United States on the same page, but he wanted to die in the United States, so he came back to the Kikuchis' home in New York.

In any event, my interview with Charlie wasn't as satisfying as my interview with Bob Spencer, just because Charlie was more self-effacing. And the thing that scared him a little bit was being around academics. He was a very bright guy, extremely bright guy, and he was a great field worker. Here is one of the things I learned from him. People say to me: "Well, you know, you're one of the first people that's done oral history here with the Japanese Americans." Charlie was doing it during World War II, and the difference was he wasn't using a tape recorder. And so I got really curious about how field workers operated before they had tape recorders. And you know, the thing that Charlie told me is, "Well, I just listened real carefully. And then when I went home, I played the tape that was in my mind, and I transcribed it." And what we discovered, of course, is that what really happenened was that once tape records came along, field workers didn't listen as attentively as they had before because they knew that they had an aid that would be able to record their interviews. But in Charlie's day, they had to listen because they didn't have the tape recorder. So he went out and did all of these interviews with these Nisei resettlers in Chicago.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 3>

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

MN: Did you ask Togo Tanaka a question about how he felt when people thought he was an informant?

AT: Who?

MN: Togo Tanaka. How did he take that? Did you ask him that question?

[Interruption]

AH: I didn't really ask him very much about his alleged informing because the way I met Togo initially was that I had set up -- and I talked about it, I think, in the last interview -- a course that was over at UC Irvine, and it was a lecture series. And it was the first time they had a lecture series that dealt with the wartime experience, and it was held over the course of a semester. And I lined up all of these people as speakers, and that's how I first met Sue Embrey. Because when I talked to people at the Amerasia Bookstore, they told me, "If you're looking for a Sansei perspective, you'd be better off getting a Nisei to give it, and that Nisei is Sue Embrey. She knows the way we think about these things." So I got Sue to lecture, and she brought along Edison Uno's sister, Amy Uno Ishii, to the lecture. But then Togo got involved because I had heard that he would be a good person to be able to speak at this lecture series, but he was out of the country at the time. And so I talked to his daughter. She says this in the book that Betty Mitson and I put out called Voices Long Silent. Togo's talk is there along with the Q&A that went on after his presentation. And what Togo says is that, "While I was out of the country, my daughter volunteered me for this lecture." He was very gracious about it, but in the Q&A portion of it, a lot of the people in there were asking him very hard questions. Asian American activists were asking very hard questions about his involvement. And so I knew that situation pretty well. So when I did the interview with him, I focused on his account of the Manzanar Riot. Now, of course, in the interview, when you're talking about that event, the reason Togo was so high up on the death list is because he was considered by many imprisoned at Manzanar to be an inu who was giving incriminating information to government agencies like the WRA and the FBI.

Well, part of that allegation may be true, but you know, the thing I discovered about, and maybe it's because he a journalist -- and you can relate to this, Martha -- and that he was trained as a journalist. And as a journalist, even though he had his own opinions, he had an ability to be able to objectify things, and he also wasn't afraid really to speak frankly about things. And when I was writing the article on the Manzanar Riot, about the best information I got about the role of JACL leaders -- Togo was supposedly a national officer in that group and on the same page with the JACL leadership -- the stuff about Fred Tayama and other people, I actually got from Togo because Togo was a reporter. And he observed these things, and when somebody asked him a question, he gave them an answer.

Now, the other thing is that when Togo was at Manzanar, he had a job that got him in trouble. Because he and Joe Grant Masaoka -- the brother of Mike Masaoka who was viewed as the "number one inu" in the entire Japanese American community -- had this job where they were the historical documentarians. They worked for the historical documentation unit at the camp. And they went around every day to the different parts of the camps, and they asked people questions, and other people just saw them as snoops, figured that they were government snoops. But Togo didn't make any bones about it. And when there were debates and everything in camp with Joe Kurihara'-- and he knew Joe Kurihara because Kurihara had written things for the Los Angeles Japanese American press. And so Togo would just say right -- and Kurihara really admired Tanaka because he didn't do things behind a screen somewhere -- he came out in the open and spoke about it. He believed the things that he said, he believed them and he wasn't afraid to say them. Well, in that kind of environment, whether you're snooping or you're giving a frank truth, you're gonna find yourself in trouble, and he did. And he had to hide on the night of the riot, he had to wear a peacoat like everybody else, and he hid in the crowd as they went to his barracks looking for him and intending to kill him. But he kept within his peacoat a weapon that he would be able to use, a knife, in case they attacked him. So I actually had a really high regard for Togo. I mean, I was so lucky that the first two people I interviewed were Sue Embrey and Togo. Both of them had newspaper backgrounds, both of them were willing to be able to stand behind their opinions; they didn't pussyfoot around, and I really, really liked that.

Anyway, Charlie Kikuchi's closest friend over the years since the war was Togo Tanaka. So when I went up to the Drake Hotel in Berkeley for the night of the conference, Yuji said, "I'd like you to meet some people." And he said, "Oh, Peter Suzuki's not here yet," and I didn't know how I was going to handle meeting Peter at that particular time. But he said that, "Togo and Charlie are in the bar over there." Now, Togo had something to drink, but Charlie was incapable of holding his liquor. When he was younger, he got so soused that he became obnoxious and silly, and so he was just drinking a Coke or something like that. But you know, we had a nice time right at that bar table. And within a month or so after that, in that very room, a person up at Berkeley came into that bar and shot four or five people. Some guy was completely upset about something and he came in and he just started shooting at people, and I'm thinking, wow. But this occurred after that. Nobody shot at us that night, and Charlie didn't have any shots, and Togo and I restricted ourselves to beers, but we had a great conversation. And so in any event, when I went back then to Block Island, I was already friends with Charlie. And then later on, after Charlie died, Yuriko came out and stayed at our Orange County house in Yorba Linda. And Charlie had a brother, Tom, who lived in Los Angeles, and Yuriko didn't get along with Charlie's sisters and Charlie's mother, and the mother was still alive. She lived to be about ninety-five or ninety-six. But she stayed with us in Yorba Linda, and then the last day that she was there, I did an interview with her, too, so that we had that for our Japanese American Project at Cal State Fullerton's Oral History Program. And Yuriko didn't talk that much about the Charlie situation because that was happening a little part from her on the JERS project. But the center of attention was her career in ballet, which is what I asked her about. And then Charlie had, for maybe twenty years, become her assistant, and she toured all over the world, and Charlie made arrangements and dealt with these dancers who had different problems; he was just a fantastic guy. And he did social work in New York up to the Vietnam War, and then he quit because he said he didn't like the Freudian bullshit that the social workers were putting out, and he said it especially was offensive to the way he dealt with blacks. And all of this stuff is going to come out in a wonderful book that a guy named Matthew Briones is writing, Matt got his PhD at Harvard; he's a Filipino American, and he teaches, oddly enough, at the University of Chicago. His dissertation came out about three or four years ago, and he's got a year's leave right now to finish the dissertation, I know sho is going to publish it, Princeton University Press. So that book on Charlie Kikuchi, which is entitled Jim and Jap Crow: A Cultural History of 1940s Interracial America. And Briones is mostly focusing on Kikuchi's relationships with blacks. I had to convince him of how Charlie, who was raised in an orphanage apart from Japanese Americans, had to be socialized into dealing with people in his own social group by birth, that he needed to understand racial ethnics generally before he understood blacks in particular, and Kikuchi largely did precisely that when he was at Tanforan and then even more so when he was at Gila. So anyway, then I did the interview with Charlie, and as I was saying I wasn't as pleased with it as I was with Spencer's interview because Charlie was too self-effacing. But I was happy to have it. That interview has never been published, the one with Charlie Kikuchi, nor has the one I did two years later with Rosalie Wax.

Okay, so after I did those two interviews with those two people, Spencer and Kikuchi, and then Kikuchi, and then with Sakoda -- I'd already done Tanaka -- I did two more interviews with JERS social scientists. In 1990, I went back to give a talk at Cornell University when Gary Okihiro was there on leave from Santa Clara University for a year before he decided to leave Santa Clara and take a position at Cornell. And I spoke back in one of Gary's classes and then I also went to New York and I spent a lot of time with Michi Weglyn and her husband Walter when I was back there at their Park Avenue apartment. I did not interview, Michi, as she did not want to be interviewed. But I did interview Setsuko Matsunaga Nishi who was then teaching in the City University of New York graduate program. And I did a long interview with her. She was much younger than the other people in JERS, and her involvement in JERS was less. She had gone to Washington University in St. Louis during World War II, and she did a project on resettlement in St. Louis, and then she did her doctoral dissertation on Japanese American resettlement in Chicago. Her father was one of the leaders of the Resettlers Committee. And so she was really well-informed on that subject and she got her PhD at the University of Chicago and she even had some classes when she was there from Tom Shibutani. She thought Shibutani was a fantastic teacher, and he was not that much older than Setsuko, because he was the youngest of the other people who were involved in JERS.

So I did that interview with Setsuko, and then I doubled back to the Midwest to do an interview in St. Louis with Rosalie Hankey, and that's something we talked about last time. And the thing that was really depressing was Rosalie Hankey's state of mind and the state of her house and seemingly virtually everything else in her life. She had been attacked by numerous people, not just Peter Suzuki But also Violet de Cristoforo, one of her WWII informants at the Tule Lake Segregation Center, and so I think she was really feeling gun shy, and here came another person, me, and was I gonna blast her again? I didn't. I did an interview with her, and it wasn't as satisfying as the other JERS ones because she wasn't as willing to do the interview at that point and she didn't have her wits about her to the same degree. I wasn't sure if she was faking it a little bit or if her state of mind was real, and so my own skepticism maybe got in the way a little bit of the interview, but that was it.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 4>

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

AH: So, those were the JERS people who I did interview, and I did get to know them all really quite well. I had a history with them that went well beyond their interviews. I mean, the fact that Yuriko came and stayed with me, while Bob Spencer's wife, Marietta, put me on the phone with Bob when he was dying of cancer, because she wanted me to talk to him, and he was dead shortly after that. I have have a close relationship with these people, and some of it was because I was like twenty years younger than them, and they had done this work for JERS years ago and now somebody had finally shown some interest in it. University presses had published none of their theses, none of their dissertations. None of them. So in a sense they had done all this work, put themselves on the line, and had actually been treated as if they were traitors, inu types, and almost nobody showed any interest in their work. That work for JERS wasn't the thing that got them their academic promotions and scholarly reputations.. I mean, Bob Spencer became an emeritus professor at Minnesota, and James Sakoda became an emeritus professor at Brown, and Togo Tanaka got appointed to the Federal Reserve board. I mean, these were eminent people. But the fact that I was younger and that I wanted to hear what they had to say, and had done a lot of research to be able to ask him the kind of questions that forced them into thinking about it, I think that was an important thing. I think I felt sort of a familial connection to them.

And maybe somebody who looks at my interviews will say, "Art was too kind to them." I don't know if that's true. I think I was able to ask hard questions because I had rapport with them, and because I didn't come across as an antagonist to them. I could actually get them to open up, and I think they did. But I know Lane Hirabayashi, for instance, he's an anthropologist and an endowed chair in Asian American Studies at UCLA, and he cannot abide the interview that I did with Spencer -- not because of my questions so much as Bob Spencer's answers. Lots of people revile Rosalie Hankey Wax, so that's nothing new, and lots of people think that Togo Tanaka was an informer. And Charlie Kikuchi, for instance, when he was younger, in his diary and other writings, he'd always use the word "Japs." So people just saw him as a "banana." I think you've got to look a little deeper; you've got to look quite a bit deeper. I found myself having a tremendous admiration for every one of them. I mean, Rosalie Hankey, a twenty-seven-year-old woman doing field work in the hottest spot in of all the camps, at Tule Lake during the time it was a segregation center. I mean, amazing to have had to do that at the time. Bob Spencer, a young white boy, walking into Gila and doing interviews there. Charlie, a young Nikkei who wasn't brought up among Japanese Americans going in to Gila River to do participant-observation fieldwork. Sakoda, on the other hand, he had been around Japanese Americans enough; he was brought up here in L.A. and he had spent time in Japan. He hated it when I called him a Kibei because he thought of himself as a "conservative Nisei." But those people did do the hard work, got into the crucible and came out of it with something of enduring significance. That they wrote something important and not enough people have recognized its worth is a tragedy of sorts.

Lane Hirabayashi and I had talked for years about putting together a whole series of books which would be essentially all of the major works of the JERS social scientists, the ones that weren't published. It was planned to be done in concert with the Japanese American National Museum. Lane had some issues with certain personnel, who I won't name, at that museum, so that sort of killed the project. Now I notice that it's being revived, and Setsuko Nishi copied me on an e-mail she sent to Lane. They're talking again about getting younger scholars to each take responsibility for one of the books in the series, and not necessarily do the whole book, but pull something out so that that whole collective JERS group voice gets some airing. But I think that my work with JERS was probably one of the most passionate things that I was involved in. So thanks for asking a question about it. I'm sorry I went on so passionately and so long about it, however.

MN: No problem. You know, you also mentioned Peter Suzuki, and you mentioned this panel on which you were sort of a peacemaker. Is that the one on the book -- I'm going to mispronounce his last name -- Morton Grodzins's Americans Betrayed: Politics and the Japanese Evacuation.

AH: No, it wasn't the panel about Grodzin's book.

MN: That wasn't the panel?

AH: No. The panel was on the book that substituted for Grodzin's 1949 book. I can't remember the title.

JG: The lead author was tenBroek.

AH: Yes, Jacobus tenBroek, and his coauthors were Edward Barnhart and Floyd Matson. was the guy who was there at the panel, and it got really... I mean, that's the fiercest I've ever seen people going after each other on a panel. It was unbelievable.

JG: The title of the book was Prejudice, War and the Constitution: Causes and Consequences of the Japanese Americans in World War II.

AH: Good, thanks, that's it.

JG: It's amazing what you file away.

AH: No, I'm glad you did. I'm glad you did. But that's who it is, it was Floyd Matson. At the time that the book was written in 1958. He was a doctoral student in political science at Berkeley, and the other two authors were professors at Berkeley. But Matson was a big guy, and he was there, and he was steaming, boy. Partly I became a peacemaker in order to prevent mayhem from occurring. It was really a rough sort of session. And then Yuji Ichioka later on criticized me, saying, "You just let Floyd Matson go on and on and on and dis Peter Suzuki." I don't think I did. But in any event, that was Yujii's reading of it. And then later on Peter Suzuki got totally mad at Yuji because when Yuji edited the book Views from Within: The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study published in 1989 by UCLA's Asian American Studies Program, and it was based upon this conference in 1987 that we had of the same name, Views from Within, Yuji basically came out and said that to just criticize everybody in JERS across the board the way Peter did was irresponsible. That they may not have said what you wanted them to say, but they made contributions and we needed to hear about those contributions. But at that point, Yuji then was Peter's nemesis. Well, that happens a lot. Raymond Okamura was very mad at me for some things, and Michi Weglyn, through Jack and Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, got us together. And this was at that same UC Berkeley conference on JERS in 1987. Jack and Aiko said: "I want you two to get together," and so the four of us went out and had lunch. And when we were walking away from lunch, my new best friend Raymond Okamoto confided to me: "I told Yuji that this conference shouldn't have required a charge to get people in, it shouldn't have been a closed session, it should have been open to the whole public. And I was insistent about it and he said, 'I'm gonna beat the hell out of you.'" [Laughs] So there was that confrontation at that particular time. I haven't seen Raymond Okamura since that time in 1987. I did see Yuji and Yuji and I got to be fairly good friends. We were at the same conference on Heart Mountain in 1995 at Powell, Wyoming, and we were both making presentations there. Then, too, some years earlier, in 1989, I gave a presentation at San Francisco at the American Historical Association annual meeting that Yuji and Emma Gee, his wife, came to, and we talked amicably on that occasion. And even before that conference, when the book Views from Within came out, I wrote Yuji a nice note telling him how much I valued the book. But that was pretty much it.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 5>

[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.

<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.

<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.

<Begin Segment 8>

[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.

<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.

<Begin Segment 10>

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

MN: We have to talk about Jimmie Omura. When did you first get to know him?

AH: Well, let me go back just a little bit before then, because I'm still on Jimmie and I can finish with that. I think that one of the things that I made the major contribution to was the idea of looking at the Japanese American community as not just a community of consensus but one that had contestation in it. I was always interested in radicalism of one sort or another. I wasn't a radical myself, I wasn't a heavy participant in demonstrations, but I always admired radical action. I admired people who had the guts to stand up and say what they thought rather than to just go along with the crowd in order to sustain their popularity and their preferments. So the fact that I first did my work on the Manzanar Riot deepened this proclivity because I right away jumped into the heart of contestation. This was a roiling, disputatious, murderous kind of atmosphere in Manzanar during the time of the riot. So to get multiple perspectives on that event gave me a much better sense of the community. So rather than seeing the imprisoned population en bloc, I could see them in terms of issues, too. And so after Sue Embrey and I did the interview with Harry Ueno, the central figure in the Manzanar Riot, in 1976, I gravitated towards doing interviews with people who were at odds in one way or another. One of the people who I naturally came into contact with when I started reading up on the Heart Mountain experience was Douglas Nelson -- and just two days ago, Doug Nelson was over at a conference here in Little Tokyo at the Japanese American National Museum. And he said to me, "Gee, Art, I haven't seen you since we were both kids together." That was in 1973. He and Gary Okihiro and I were on a panel about resistance in Albuquerque for an Asian Studies conference and it was back when Asian American Studies took the position at conferences in the back of the bus. We had the last session of the entire three-day conference on a Sunday morning. Asian American Studies were looked at as so rank that without any warning they turned the light off in the room and deadened our mikes, and we couldn't even finish the session that we had. But Douglas Nelson had just submitted his manuscript on Heart Mountain for publication consideration. You know, it's interesting.

That the two Jewish Americans who have made some really great contributions about Heart Mountain both had the experience of working in Wyoming. Roger Daniels went out there as a Professor of History at the University of Wyoming, and then Eric Muller went out there a few decades later as a professor in the school of law at the University of Wyoming. And they both must have thought, "What kind of place is this Wyoming? We've got to have some place that's a little bit more active and evolving than this." Then they ran across Heart Mountain and the whole business with the draft resistance movement, and they both got involved with researching it. And look at their marvelous contributions. Just think, out of that provincial kind of environment, you get somebody like Roger or Eric who is different, somebody who is smart, and somebody who wants to get at the nub of things rather than the bullshit. And Roger writes his 1972 book, Concentration Camps U.S.A.: Japanese Americans and World War II, and Eric writes his 2001 book, Free to Die for Their Country: The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II. Fantastic titles, and in your face kind of titles, too. Not a lot of people were using "concentration camp" when Roger published his book and stuck this term right on his book's cover. And then Eric's Free to Die for Their Country. It's such a great book. And Gary Okihiro and I both helped to get Doug Nelson's 1976 book Heart Mountain: The History of an American Concentration Camp published. It was a master's thesis that he did under Roger Daniels's direction at the University of Wyoming. Then Doug went to the University of Wisconsin to get his doctorate, and when he was there they encouraged him, "You ought to try to get your master's thesis published." So Doug asked Gary and I to write letters of endorsement for him and it ended up that his thesis was published as a book. This is a fantastic kind of thing. And I read this book and I was so excited about it. And one of the people who figures in Doub's book is Jimmie Omura, because Jimmie Omura is the only editor who is really writing about draft resistance in the camps. And it seems so ironic because here he is being a hero in my eyes for what he's doing for the Japanese American community, when it turns out that he's absolutely a bete noire in the eyes of most of the people in the Japanese American community. So what explains this strange kind of thing? So I always wanted to meet Jimmie somehow or other.

And then in 1983, they had this conference at Salt Lake City. And we stayed at places downtown like the Marriott Hotel, but we had the conference out at the University of Utah campus. So this conference was put together by Roger Daniels with Harry Kitano. Those two had been riding sidesaddle for years, since their time together on the faculty at UCLA. And then Sandra Taylor, who was then a professor at University of Utah, joined up with them, and they put this conference on and it was called "From Relocation to Redress." That's when "relocation" still passed muster as a word, along with "evacuation" and other euphemisms. And so each morning of the conference, what they would do is to drive by all the hotels and pick up the people and then they would take them out to the university site where the conference sessions were held. On the first morning of the conference, I got picked up at the Marriott and then we went and stopped at a couple more hotels and motels. And they picked up this older gentleman at one of them and he was sitting in front of me in this mini bus thing, and then he turned around to shake hands with me and I spotted his name tag, which said, "James Omura." I said, "You're not the Jimmie Omura, are you?" And he said, "Yes." I said, "I thought you were dead." And he said, "I'm very much alive." And this was when he was just getting started on writing his memoir. He had retired from his job and he hadn't done anything on Japanese American stuff for all those many years, from about 1947 when he last edited the Rocky Shimpo in Denver for six months. Then what he did was to go into landscape gardening, and he had a pretty successful business. He lived in Denver and there were people like Larry Tajiri and Bill Hosokawa living in Denver, too, but he didn't have anything really to do with them. But anyway, he was just starting on his memoir. He'd gone out to Seattle for the CWRIC redress hearings, congressional hearings, in 1981. In fact, where he testified was at the high school that he had graduated from in 1933, which is Broadway High School. He made his testimony there -- it was by then a community college -- and there he met Frank Chin and Lawson Inada, and they were so excited to see him, and they had pretty much the same experience as I would two years later, "Thought you were dead." "No, I'm very much alive." Then got introduced to Frank Emi. He'd only known Frank Emi in 1944 at the time of their federal trial in Cheyenne for conspiracy to counsel draft evasion and subversion. He'd only known Frank Emi in 1944 at the time of their trial. And then he and Frank Emi and all these people, mostly World War II Nisei draft resisters, got together, and Frank Chin and Lawson Inada did so much to be able to quicken the historical reconstitution and revitalization of the draft resistance movement in the wartime camps.

So when I came along, it's a couple of years after that in 1983, so I said, "Jimmie," I said, "I'd really like you to come out to Orange County when you're out in the coast," because he'd been then going back and forth between Colorado and California. Sometimes he would just leave his house, not even tell his wife he'd be flying out to California. He was so involved with this whole development. So he said, "Yeah, I'd like to do that." A year later, in 1984, the chairman of the history department, Jim Woodward, at Cal State Fullerton, called me on the telephone and said, "Arthur, get down to the department office. I want to talk to you." And I wondered, "What the hell is he mad about?" So I went down there, and Jim is 6'6" and he's a pretty formidable sort of guy who teaches history of science. And he says to me, "What are you doing leaving this old Japanese man out at the Ontario airport?" I said, "What are you talking about?" He said, "There's a guy called James Omura, he said you said you wanted to interview him." I said, "Yeah, but we don't have an appointment or anything. I didn't even know he was coming out here." So they told me the hotel that Jimmie was going to stay at in Los Angeles. The interview with him didn't occur at that time but I wrote to him and I said, "My goodness, I didn't know you were coming to southern California. I would have gone to the airport to pick you up with bells on and brought you to my home." So then we made formal arrangements, and he later on flew out to California and I picked him up at a hotel in Hollywood, and then brought him in to Orange County, and he stayed at my house in Yorba Linda for about four days. We had a very long interview, and even then, he was so self-encapsulated or involved in his story that, once, when the tape recorder experienced mechanical problems and I had to call Cal State Fullerton and have someone from the Oral History Program bring me a new tape recorder, I couldn't turn Jimmie off. And then each morning I would get up, Jimmie would be sitting on the couch down in my living room ready to start being interviewed again. He was really anxious to tell his story. Apparently he had done the same thing with Frank Chin. He'd given a long interview with Frank Chin for about four or five days. And so in any event, Jimmie and I really did have a good bonding, and we ultimately got the interview done.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 11>

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

AH: So that was in 1984, and ten years later Jimmie died, in 1994. We had had correspondence all the while through this interval, getting back transcripts and stuff like this. He was heavily involved and I was heavily involved in everything that was happening then in the Japanese American community. We had some common friends, the main one being Michi Weglyn. Michi Weglyn was kind of setting this relationship up because she was worried that Jimmie Omura would not finish his book manuscript before he died. And as it turned out, he pretty much did finish it. But she was trying to set up somebody who would finish the project for her, if and when Jimmie died. I was then working on what was going to be a full-length biography of Nisei war hero Ben Kuroki, because I'd written a lengthy article on him. But I was working on that and then the call came that Jimmie had died. There was about a year that went by before it was finally decided who would prepare Jimmie's memoir for publication by an appropriate academic or commercial press. There was a list of people who were prospects to do editorial work and then I got named to do this. I've been at it pretty much ever since to tell you the truth. This has been really, really the most time-consuming thing I've ever taken on in my life. But it's almost there right now. So in any event, I had to go out to Colorado and pick up the archival materials that were at the house of his oldest son, Dr. Greg Omura, in Grand Junction. And I went there and I picked them all up, there were about fifty boxes, and I brought them back to southern California. My wife teaches library and information science at San Jose State, and that program had a branch campus at Cal State Fullerton then and she taught an archival course both at San Jose and at Fullerton. And we took four years of her classes to organize all of Jimmie's papers. So we have organized all of Jimmie's papers. It has been arranged for all of these papers to go to Stanford University to the Green Library. A preliminary finding aid for these papers has already been prepared by one of the archival students who worked on organizing the material. It's an amazing treasure trove of material. I found out from interviewing a lot of Japanese Americans that, because they went through an obviously epochal historical event, they have become very much archivists of their own histories. We all keep photograph books and some valuable papers, but Nikkei kept everything in a lot of cases. And the museums like JANM have capitalized on this situation, and historians have capitalized on it. So, because I had done this long interview with him, I developed a close personal relationship with him. The last time I saw Jimmie was at Michi Weglyn's event at Cal Poly Pomona. Bob Suzuki was then the president of that university and they set up an endowed chair in multicultural to honor Michi and her husband Walter, and they also gave Michi an honorary doctorate in humane letters. And almost all the resister community was there for this event. Were you there, Martha? You weren't probably involved as much at that point.

MN: I was still in school.

AH: Okay, so you were still up at Stanford at that time. In any event, those in the resisters community were virtually all there at that time. It was an incredible event, but Jimmie was looking bad, as you can tell if you look at photograph from that event. I wasn't surprised. In fact, when he came to my house, he brought a suitcase with his clothes in it and another suitcase of about the same size, and he opened it up and it was all full of medicine. The whole thing had medicine in it. I mean, it was unbelievable. And we didn't have air conditioning in our house at that time. I thought to myself, "This man is going to die in my house." But he didn't, he lasted past that occasion by a decade, and so anyway, he left this document, his memoir. His memoir wasn't completely done, for there were big gaps in it and the documentation is the kind of documentation that you do when you're writing a draft of something. You'll just say for a reference something like, "Weglyn book," or something like this, but there's no pagination or anything. Only Jimmie did that with primary documents, too. So finding all the documents and getting the provenance for them has been a large part of my job as editor for Jimmie's memoir. Also, I have had to build up a separate chapter out of his disparate writings, since he didn't do much on covering his wartime years in Denver. And because I've written a lot about the Japanese American experience in Denver, I know that subject matter fairly well.

And then I've been cannibalizing my own interview with Jimmie, and then I've used everybody else's interviews, also. Emiko Omori did an interview with him, and Rita Takahashi did an interview with him, and of course Frank Chin did an interview with Jimmie. It's interesting when you're an interviewer to compare other people's interviews with your own. My interviews are fairly well organized and I strategically try to cover things. I go about it like a typical historical scholar. Frank Chin goes about it like a writer of fiction. During some of Frank's interviews, he and Lawson are shouting in the background, they're passing around beers, and who knows what else they're passing around. There's about twelve people in the room, it's a wild sort of thing. But Frank gets into all kinds of things that I would never think about getting into. You just know how brilliant he is at being able to penetrate into these interiors of a person. So his interview has been extremely helpful to me. In fact, I really value Frank Chin. Frank Chin has written one of the prefaces for Jimmie's memoir, which I have tentatively titled "Nisei Naysayer." Another preface for the book has been written by Yosh Kuromiya, who I regard as the most articulate... and the most rational of all the Nisei draft resisters -- and I don't mean rational in a clinical way, but rational in combining reason and emotion together. I always value hearing Yosh give talks at memorial services or reading whatever he writes. He's this very poetic sort of guy. But then the other person writing a preface for Jimmie's memoir is a guy who wrote his senior honors thesis on Omura at Stanford, Steve Yoda. He's now a lawyer. But Steve worked with on the Omura memoir for two summers, and he read through Jimmie's entire manuscript and made a lot of editorial suggestions and corrections.

The other person to do editorial work on Jimmie Omura's memoir was a woman named Mary Kimoto Tomita, who passed away last year at age 90. I don't know if you're familiar with her but she authored the book Dear Miya: Letters Home from Japan1939-1946. Bob Lee from Brown University worked with Mary as the book's editor. But she went through Jimmie's manuscript as a copy-editor. Mary was somebody who knew Jimmie; when he used to come out to California, sometimes he stayed with Mary at her home in Oakland or with other people in the Bay Area. I love the book Dear Miya. I thought Mary was a very bright person. And then Steve Yoda was just a fantastic guy to work with, also. That's partially why I decided to put the Omura papers at Stanford. And also Gordon Chang is the editor of Stanford University Press's Asian American Series. And I knew, too, that Jimmie had all of these preferences. I knew him real well, all of his prejudices and everything else. The last place he would like to have his papers archived is JANM. Because JANM, when they came out with The Encyclopedia of Japanese American History that Brian Niiya edited -- I thought it was a fabulous piece of work, that encyclopedia. I thought it was a remarkable piece of work and so hard to do -- when Jimmie reviewed the encyclopedia, he did so very nastily. His review was published in--now what was the name of that JA community paper, the tabloid-sized one?

MN: Tozai Times.

AH: Yeah, Tozai Times. It appeared in the Tozai Times and it was just basically Jimmie dumping on the encyclopedia. And largely it was because of two things. One, because he used to write sports, he didn't feel it had esoteric enough sports entries. The other thing was the entry on the JACL. He felt it was a complete whitewash and wondered, "How could any respectable organization sponsor something that would accept this slop for historical truth?" So JANM be one place he didn't want to have his archives. Another place he would never want to have anything to do with was the University of Colorado, even though both of his kids, Gregg and Wayne, graduated from the University of Colorado. It was because Bill Hosokawa was there in the Denver area, and Min Yasui was there, Roy Takeno was there, and they were all archenemies of his. They were all JACLers who were going to somehow or other pervert any deposit of his papers at the Boulder campus. So he didn't want it at Colorado; he also didn't want his papers at UCLA. He didn't trust certain things at UCLA, for there were people there that he thought might not be predisposed to him and he had some issues with some of them. For example, I remember Yuji saying to me something like, "Omura's a prune face." So he had these issues. The University of Washington, he was afraid of that, too, because even though he was originally from Bainbridge Island and graduated from high school in Seattle. But he had his issues up there because of all the old Jimmy Sakamoto influences and all the people who were up in the Pacific Northwest, they were going to malign his archived material. So it wasn't so much that Stanford won out, it's just that Stanford didn't have any serious competition. And he always praised Stanford because they were the first institution to buy a subscription to Current Life, the magazine he published and edited from 1940 to 1942 in San Francisco. That showed that Stanford was cosmopolitan and that people there had gone ahead and invested in this magazine of arts and letters that he had published and put it in their library.

[Interruption]

MN: Where are you on the Jimmie Omura manuscript, by the way? Everybody's asking about it. You know that, there's been a lot of pressure on you.

AH: It has six chapters, and I've basically edited the whole manuscript. What I'm doing now is all of the footnoting. Each one of those chapters has about three hundred footnotes in it. For his early life, he doesn't have very many footnotes as he just assumes that everybody knows these kinds of things. So what I have done -- and this is what an editor should do -- I write the introductory essay, and then I've taken selected material out of his manuscript. He wrote a laborious first chapter on the history of Japan, a place that he's never been to or anything. He asked both Frank Chin and myself and some other people how should he approach his manuscript. And we didn't say, "You're going to die fairly soon because you're in such bad health," but what we said is, "The thing that you know best is your own life and what it should be is a memoir and not a history." He was going to write a whole history of the entire World War II Japanese American experience, and we just knew he wasn't going to get it done. He sort of then divided his manuscript between being a memoir and a history. And then, somewhat unfortunately, he was around a lot of academics. What rubbed off on through this experience was this horrible sense of the driest, most desiccated form of scholarship. So he went back and wrote this torturously long thing on the history of Japan to bring it up to when his father came over from Japan. So I had to cut out that chapter. Then he had a huge section of one chapter that dealt with the military resisters. And he'd had big arguments with Shirley Castelnuovo who was then working on a manuscript that was later published in 2008 as "Soldiers of Conscience": Japanese American Military Resisters in World War II. Anyway, the two of them were simultaneously researching the topic of World War II military resistance, and Jimmie basically said, "I share data with her, but she's unwilling to share data with me." So they washed their hands of one another.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 12>

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

AH: Okay, so during our break you were talking about Paul Robertson, right?

MN: Yes. How did that interview come about? How did you find him, and did he even want to be interviewed?

AH: Well, Paul Robertson, I had heard about him because he was the director of the Leupp Isolation Center in Arizona. He succeeded Raymond Best in that position; he had previously been Best's assistant director. And then he later went to Tule Lake Segregation Center as Best's assistant again. He was the assistant director. So he was kind of involved with areas I was interested in, Moab and Leupp as isolation centers, and then I was also interested in Tule Lake as a segregation center. And of course there was a lot of resistance in each of those places and then Harry Ueno went through all of those and Sue Kunitomi Embrey, Betty Mitson, and I had done that book in 1986 for Cal State Fullerton's Oral History Program, Manzanar Martyr: An Interview with Harry Y. Ueno, so that was interesting. And then Harry is probably the one who humanized Paul Robertson for me. Because Paul Robertson lived up in Sacramento and Harry lived up in San Jose. Oddly enough, those guys got to be buddies of sorts well after World War II. Robertson was for a while a lay preacher and then he actually got his degree as a preacher and he was preaching at a Baptist church up in the Sacramento area. And Harry would go up there and then for a while they had some Leupp reunions. And there were other former inmates like Harry from Leupp who came to those reunions, and one of them was Kenji Taguma's Kibei boss at the Nichi Bei Times newspaper in San Francisco.

MN: Umeda?

AH: Yeah, I think so, the Japanese editor at the Nichi Bei. I had heard about reunion deal from Harry Ueno. "Paul Robertson is still alive?" I couldn't believe it, but it was apparently true. And then one of my graduate students, Reagan Bell, was doing a thesis on the military police and he was focusing on Tule Lake. So we had a double reason for interviewing Paul Robertson, so the two of us went up to Sacramento and did the interview with him. That's probably one of the most exciting interviews that I think I've ever been involved in. Not because Paul Robertson was very forthcoming, but because I drew him out. There was a guy who worked as the head of security at Leupp named Francis Frederick. And Francis Frederick had been at Gila River Relocation Center and he'd been the assistant head of security there. And he felt he had been railroaded out of Gila and transferred to Leupp, with a higher rank but at a reduced salary. And because Frederick felt he was being "kicked upstairs" he was really pissed off at the Gila project director, a guy named Leroy Bennett, and Gila's director of internal security, W.E. Williamson, and he was gonna fix their wagons. And one of the people he had known when he was at Gila was Bob Spencer, who was with the Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study. And this guy Frederick fancied himself something of a social scientist, too. Not a trained one, but he liked to talk about these things. So Bob Spencer was using him as an informant. So they had this relationship. Then when Frederick went to Leupp, what he did was he immediately said, "I'm gonna fix their ass." He said, "All of these people incarcerated here at Leupp, I'm going to go through their records and find out why they were put into this isolation center as "troublemakers." So he wrote biographies for each one of them. And in almost every case he concluded that there was no good reason to pick these people up. "This isolation center is so highly illegal." And then Robertson was kind of naive. He's a guy who grew up in the South, and when I asked him about segregation there, he had nothing to say about it. I couldn't believe it. But anyway, Robertson was just a real sweet man, a really kind Christian man. And he had the so-called dangerous people in the isolation center babysitting his kids and he and his wife would go somewhere off the site, for a visit or shopping or whatever. And here you had a high-security camp with a great big man-proof fence and you got a whole battalion of soldiers guarding the compound. But Robertson didn't think they were doing anything wrong and this impression was reinforced by these reports that he got from Frederick. And so finally Frederick got Robertson so worked up that he went back to the national War Relocation Authority office in Washington, D.C. And it was said that he was carrying with him, under his arm, this whole sheaf of documents, these biographies that Frederick had written. And that convinced the national WRA office to close Leupp, and they immediately closed Leupp because they were afraid of the repercussions of keeping it open. So Frederick was sort of a resister but nobody had any kind words for him. Because he was a real -- among the people in camp -- he was a bully. It was like "my way or the highway." And Harry Ueno said, "I thought his name was 'Seeme' because he said, 'See me'" so many times. [Laughs] He said, "See me! See me!"

So anyway, through my research at U.C. Berkeley's Bancroft Library, I had access to all those letters that went back and forth between Frederick and Spencer, and Spencer was frightened of Frederick. He said, "This guy has this steely eye that he'll look at you with in this strange sort of way, and you didn't know what it was all about." Spencer said Frederick was kind of an evil person, but he said he was getting all of this data from him. And by that time Spencer had left Gila and he was at U.C. Berkeley, and he was working in the language program for the Far East and Southeast Asia. Because the U.S. thought they were going to be occupying all these countries and they needed these languages, and he was one of the guys that knew Korean as well as Japanese. So Spencer was over there doing that and he'd get these strange letters from "my buddy," "my pal," from Frederick. And so Spencer just kept the letters and then he kept drawing things out from Frederick and he would give the information to Dorothy Swaine Thomas. He passed it along to her. So it then ended up in the archives at the Bancroft Library and then I came across it and I couldn't believe it. It was just a treasure. Then Richard Drinnon came across it, and Drinnon uses those letters in his 1987 study, Keeper of Concentration Camps: Dillon S. Myer and American Racism. So I was really anxious to do the interview with Paul Robertson.

When I went up to the Sacramento area, to interview Robertson at his home in Carmichael, he had no knowledge that all of this stuff was going on and these letters between Frederick and Spencer were being written. And here I am on the tape reading aloud large sections of the letters. And Robertson said, "This guy has quite an imagination," or, "he was full of himself, wasn't he?" But that was a real interesting interview. And then at the end I said to Robertson, "I appreciate that you made your testimony." He said, "Oh, I haven't made my testimony yet, I've just given you some information." He said, "If I had given my testimony, you would be falling down on your knees. You'd be making your peace with the Lord." So he had felt that he had a Christian obligation to not just give me information, but to give me faith. But anyway, that was that experience. So we did that interview and I immediately got it transcribed, and it's been published for a long time. I'm surprised it hasn't attracted a lot of attention. It's a really interesting interview.

I had given a paper on this topic of Francis Frederick. One of the projects that I have in mind is, I had mentioned to you last time, is an anthology of articles that I've written. And only two of them will be new ones and that will be one of them. It was over half done, but I'd started it as a paper I gave at the Association for Asian American Studies conference in Honolulu in 1991 on a panel with Lane Hirabayashi and Gary Okihiro. But that article is a real tough one. At the beginning of Drinnon's book, what he does -- you've read Drinnon's book, haven't you? Did you review it? Lane did, I remember that, for the San Francisco Chronicle or the Examiner, maybe it was. But in any event, Drinnon dedicates the book to "the people who've said 'no.'" Because half of the book has to do with Dillon Myer and Japanese Americans, because his Keeper of Concentration Camps, relates in part to the concentration camps for Japanese Americans, and then the second half of the book deals with was Native Americans because after the war Myer became the commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Anyway, half of the names in Drinnon's dedication are Japanese American ones. He didn't have either Jimmie Omura or Harry Ueno on his dedication list. I was in touch with Drinnon because I wrote to the University of California Press along with other scholars to help make sure that Drinnon's manuscript got accepted for publication. And it did, a pretty big hit, too, in some quarters. In other quarters it didn't. Roger Daniels doesn't like it, I'm pretty sure. What went on after that was... what was I saying here?

MN: You did a paper on Frederick.

AH: Drinnon went to Harry Ueno up in Santa Clara County and he talked to him and then he went to Denver and he talked to Jimmie Omura. And, in fact, he did an interview with Jimmie that's in the collection of materials that I have, so I've listened to this interview. Drinnon and his wife traveled there to Omura's home in Denver and they did this interview. But Drinnon thought that Robertson was just a lamb, that he was so naive. So he didn't see him as a person that really should be counted as any kind of resister. The list that Drinnon used for his book's dedication to Japanese Americans, I would actually alter the list a little bit, of the people who said "no," a little bit more expansively than he did. I think he liked the people who said "no" in a certain kind of way, and I think there are different stripes of resistance. I think that killing 'em with kindness is a type of resistance, too. And I thought that Paul Robertson was a person, even though he was naive, who humanized the people who were considered to be the baddest of the bad. And he did this when he was in a pretty important position: the director of the isolation center at Leupp and then the assistant director at Tule Lake Segregation Center. So I may not applaud Robertson's resistance in the way that I applaud someone else's like Omura's because Omura's resistance had a self-consciousness to it and an awareness, and there wasn't that sort of awareness in the case of Robertson, but there was the resistance.

Another person who's problematic is Karl Yoneda's wife, Elaine Black Yoneda. She was really against Harry Ueno and all of the people who were resisting Fred Tayama at Manzanar, but partially that was because of the politics of her being a Communist, and at that time taking a strategic decision to work with the JACL in a common front to defeat fascism. But she raised enough objections to what actions were going on in the camp that made for improvements in the camp. So she resisted within a certain sphere. So what you have to do is define the type of resistance. So what I've done for all of the interviews that I have in this book I'm doing called Barbed Voices, is I've given a name to each one of the resisters a name that corresponds to their respective genre of resistance. And some of the resisters were resisters who resisted after camp rather than during camp. Sue Embrey did not have a lot of resistance to offer during her camp days at Manzanar, but she had a reservoir of predisposition towards resistance that later came to roost when she was a little bit older. So the resistance that she did was through the Manzanar Pilgrimage. It was kind of a retrospective but still historical resistance, insofar as she was, revising the record. Hannah Takagi Holmes, who was a deaf mute, resisted, too, in her own way. It's just being able to explore the type of resistance. I'm really anxious to get through with this Omura memoir project and get on with that "Barbed Voices" anthology because it's something that I started out doing of my own volition.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 13>

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

MN: Now, you mentioned that you were surprised that Leupp and Moab haven't received a lot more attention, and you've done this paper on Frederick. And I'm actually surprised, too, but do you think it's because Leupp was such a small detention facility, where they only had maybe at the most eighty men there? That therefore people don't care about it no matter how illegal it may have been?

AH: Yeah, to give you an example of how people don't care about it, just at the detention sites conference the other day at JANM, one of the speakers started to talk about Leupp being run by the Department of Justice. Well, it wasn't. It's a WRA camp, it was just, for instance, like a facility that they had for "bad people." But it's still under WRA jurisdiction, and the same policy prevailed. If they'd gone to a Department of Justice camp, they would have operated under the rules of the Geneva Convention and those detained there would at least had a hearing. They didn't have a hearing when they were at Moab or Leupp. I just thought it was such an anomaly, that particular institution, and people couldn't get a real handle on it. You know, it's sort of funny. It's like looking at the Japanese American experience in the stylized way that we talked about it earlier. When people say "the camps," they're comfortable with the idea that there were ten camps. Tetsuden Kashima writes this book in 2003, Judgment Without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment during World War II, in getting at this whole proliferation of camps, and as Lloyd Inui has said, there was some kind of facility in every state in the United States during the war that dealt with the Japanese Americans. And a lot of these detention facilities are not in the public consciousness because the symmetry is not right for them. But this decalogue of the ten camps is something that people seem to understand. "Ten camps in these godforsaken places." You start hearing the stereotypical thing, and the images become stereotypical. It's so great to see a fresh photograph, something that hasn't been shown in fifteen books and thirty documentary films. But it doesn't fit right now.

Now what's happening, too, is as they understand Tule Lake and the segregation center better, before, the Japanese Americans didn't want to go there, so to speak -- only if they held their nose. Because again, people who had renounced their citizenship, they didn't want them to be associated with them. Even though, on the one hand, they're saying, "We don't like this model minority," they're maintaining the boundaries for a model minority definition of the community by creating their own boundaries. And certain things were deemed to be outside the pale. Now, finally, with all these years of these Tule Lake pilgrimages, their organizers have finally battered down that door, and people are starting to look searchingly at the Tule Lake experience and Michi Weglyn spotted that a long time ago. She said, "People somehow or other, what they need to do is to read the second half of my 1976 book, Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America's Concentration Camps, before they read the first half, because the second half is all about Tule Lake." And she said, "When I was researching that aspect of renunciation, I was so proud of the people, whole blocks of people who were renouncing their citizenship. This is what Americanism is about. This is what dissent is about. But to just see the renunciants as troublemakers or to see them as 'pro-Japanese' misses the whole point." And that statement written by her which was read at a Tule Lake pilgrimage in her absence when she couldn't come, it's become emblematic for me of really what's important about that Tule Lake experience. Which is something that I said a month or so ago when we had this public program at the museum for Michi Weglyn, that this really is the heritage that you want to remember. I think it's too easy for people to turn Michi Weglyn into this toy doll that was on Perry Como's show that dealt with the clothing of the show's cast. But no, this is a warrior, and you've got to see that aspect of Michi Weglyn. She was just starting out on her journey when she did that book. But where was she going? You've got to take a look at that, too. So I think it's extremely important.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 14>

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

MN: I'm getting a sense of where you think the state of Japanese America is, but I want you to define it a little more. I always hear where Chin feels the state of Japanese America is, and he's not happy where Japanese America is. Do you think Japanese America is where it should be, or do we still have a ways to go in terms of accepting?

AH: I think Chin would say, "Art, when you and I are no longer serving a function, then Japanese America is on the right road." No, he really would. I wouldn't go quite that far because I think the Japanese American story is larger than just people of Japanese American ancestry. I think it's always to say there's a community story, but there's also an American story and a human story, too, and we've got to recognize that. But I'm happier than I was, just because I got started fairly early field of Japanese American studies and I know where the story was when I began my inquiry in 1972. And I also, as a historian, my situation is different from that of, a dramatist or a novelist in that they do imaginary literature. If you are a dramatist or a novelist you can create in total the reality that you want, and you can make changes rather rapidly. History, however, has all of these countervailing pressures all the time. And if you are in history, you have to be aware, for instance, that change, even incremental change, can be very, very consequential. And the way that history moves is that it moves this way and then comes back, then goes sideways. And it just doesn't have this dramatic sort of turnaround where everybody has an "aha" experience, and now we're going to look at the situation different. People are very resourceful at being able to undercut what progress is being made. You can be real happy that Obama gets elected President, and then people are ready to dump on the guy after six months. But that's the idea. This is a heroic sort of figure, but no, you have to take a look at some of the complexity of historical reality.

And I think that Japanese Americans are way more in control of their own history, way more willing to talk about it right now, way more interested to hear other people talk about it, to explore it, and to bring about some changes in it. So I'm not happy with it, like I say; but when I criticize the Japanese American National Museum, I'm really not feeling that they're just a retrograde organization; rather, I'm saying that they have done a hell of a lot for this progress that I see, but they should do a hell of a lot more. They need to push the envelope a bit more whenever they can. And I think they're going to find that if they don't do it, it's not only bad history, but it's going to be bad actually for their own membership and public involvement in their programs. It's just like Densho. Densho started as a Pacific Northwest kind of thing, and Tom Ikeda, Denho's executive director, knows about these things because I had to write an appraisal for a book proposal that he submitted and I wrote a very strong one. But what I wanted to say is that when I went up there to Seattle in 1997 to work with Densho, I thought it was a bunch of "gee whiz" people who were in love with technology and what they wanted to see done with it. But then that has changed as time has gone on. Densho is way more diverse in the people it's interviewing and the subjects that it's getting into. So that's the kind of evolution that is positive. And I think that Densho's ahead of where the community as a whole is, and partly it's because of this background that Tom has had. On the one hand, he's got a wife whose father was a draft resister and others in his family who were in the military during World War II -- so he can't be polarized into this or that. You can see, for instance, that such a heterogeneous background produces good things. And then having people like the draft-resisting Akutsus, Jim and Gene, for cheek-by-jowl neighbors, showed Tom by their very example how they coped with life's challenges. But I think that there's hope, and I'm happy overall with what's gone on within Japanese America. The very fact that, Martha, when you were working for the Pacific Citizen, that you were able to write the articles that you did. If they were really wanting to whitewash the reportage in the PC, for instance, your tail would have been out of there in no time. And there were enough people who wanted you out of there. But the fact that you wrote those articles directly or indirectly critical of the JACL and the PC, a JACL newspaper, published them means that they recognized need for criticism and diverse opinion. And I think they recognized it on two levels. One, that it's important that these things be said, but also I think they recognized it in a business sense. If these things weren't being said, the rest of the younger group coming up would no longer be interested in a JACL membership or reading the Pacific Citizen. So I think it's important.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 15>

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

MN: I want to ask a little bit about you personally in the sense that I know whenever I talk to you, you're always helping a student. And I don't know how you find the time, and your students have won a lot of awards, and you've won a lot of awards. How does it feel, now you have a scholarship and a lecture series named after you at Cal State Fullerton? How does that feel and how did that come about?

AH: [Laughs] Just being older than dirt. Being involved in things like oral history and Japanese American studies for a long time and sticking with it. Other people move on to different topics and varied research methods, and that's their career. And their career is a lot more illustrious a lot of times because they get grants to do different things. I got started in topics that had no status. Japanese American studies had no status and neither did oral history. But they did give you one thing, they gave you a lot of freedom to do what you want, a lot of opportunity. So I kind of dedicated myself to that, and the whole business of partnering, it's intrinsic to oral history. You partner to get knowledge. So the idea of sharing and helping comes with the territory. But the awards probably don't mean as much to me because I have also the egoistic kinds of concerns of a scholar who wants to get major publications out there. Because I can write a good article, and somebody never even sees it. I can read, for instance, a real fatuous book, and yet everybody knows it, the book is out there and stuff like that. So there's some things, necessary prices you have to pay. And that legacy is that -- I'm not religious and so I don't believe in immortality in that sense -- but I am somebody who believes in the concept of intellectual immortality, that once things have been made a record of, especially now that Google is republishing every damn thing that ever existed, there is an afterlife, there is a continuing life for things that are written and are down there. And I drove in today and I heard on the news that Don Meredith, the former football star and sports broadcaster, had just died, and Don Meredith is exactly my age, seventy-two. And every time I hear about a person who dies that's younger than me or my age I know that my mortality is at risk. And these are a lot of times athletes who are in good shape, and then there they are, they're gone. And probably Meredith did a lot of elbow as well as skirt chasing, so there's probably some other things at work there, too.

So as you look to those things, you want to be able to have that type of achievement. Especially when you've spent all the time that you've had, not just your time but other people's time, collecting usable information from them, getting invaluable help from archivists, the whole apparatus of knowledge construction you have been a user of, there is a moral obligation to return something tangible to posterity? And you can return it in different ways. And I think I have returned it in a lot of ways, but I think there's another way that I have to return it that I have not. So the Omura memoir is the first thing, and even that is Jimmie's book and I will make that clear. A lot of editors of other people's work are not very self-effacing about it and deceive themselves into thinking that they themselves wrote it. And the person who actually wrote it becomes for such editors an afterthought. But Jimmie Omura's the one who's got to be in the big lights, not Art Hansen.

I just want to say one other thing and then we can probably wrap this interview up unless you have more questions. It's the thing about doing oral history, why I did it in the first place. Instead of writing a book, for instance, on the Manzanar Riot from just reading the articles, instead of going out interviewing all of these people. And a lot of time I even transcribed the interviews I tape-recorded. So there was a lot of work involved in it and an incredible amount of time to do that. Which is enriching, too, and you learn a lot of things. I do come from a working-class background, and I am not above doing that sort of work, and transcribing can be mental ditch digging, too.

But the thing is that I was not Japanese American, and during the time that ethnic studies was getting going, there was a strong emphasis on that kind of essentialism. The idea that somehow or other, essence is more important than anything else. It's more important than social construction. And I didn't even know the words essence and construction in that kind of binary that now exists. But I did know by looking in the mirror what I was and what I wasn't in terms of racial-ethnic ancestry. I think that what was important was first-person testimony, and so I thought that one of the contributions I could make was by actually talking to other people about their own history and letting them bespeak it. And that acts as kind of a prophylactic against your own agency as a writer in a sense because now you're always feeling a little funny when you're giving voice to yourself rather than acting as a conduit through which other voices are speaking. I don't know that it's not, for instance, a question of what's right and what's wrong, it's a question of what you feel and how it translates within your own system. I think I mentioned the last time, the first time I met Jim, the first question he asked me, he said, "Art, I want to talk to you a little bit about a question that's been nagging at me: How does a white guy get along in Japanese American history?" And Jim has more claim to not being a white guy than I do in the sense that his middle name gives an index to the fact that he has a Hispanic background, too. But Jim is perceived as white, and then he goes to UCLA and majors in Asian American Studies, and then there are some other whites have done the same thing, and Chris Friday, who is now a historian at Western Washington State University, immediately comes to mind. There's a whole group of people who have gone through graduate programs in ethnic studies. It was typically hard to get jobs in ethnic studies if you didn't have the face of that group, or a damn near closely related face. David Yoo could do Japanese American scholarship even though he's Korean American, although there was some hesitation there, too. But the thing is, that one's racial-ethnic makeup does play a guiding role in ethnic studies. So I think that my being a white scholar studying Japanse American history pushed me more into oral history than I might otherwise have been.

JG: Wow, it's just interesting to hear you talk about that. Yeah, it's very interesting. I'm not sure I even have a question, but I get what you're saying. I think the reason I'm sitting here now, not with a tenure track job in Asian American history is because I believe that it's never good enough to be doing that work in the first place. Because I let people get inside my head and let me know that even though working with someone like Yuji, for example, that gave me a certain imprimatur, but I was never Eiichiro. I mean, it's interesting, because I certainly, when I got to Brown, I made the conscious decision, I said, "Screw this, I've put up with this for long enough," changed my entire career around because of that idea, and it's interesting to hear you say that at this stage of your career. I don't know. Not that there's anything to say about it, but I do get where you're coming from.

AH: Well, I'm sure, for example, if I did the same amount of work early on when the field of Asian American studies and, in particular, Japanese American studies hadn't been settled, I wouldn't have been at Cal State Fullerton my whole career either. Because other people who were not doing much more were able to move out of the California State University system. Lane Hirabayashi was initially at San Francisco State, but he couldn't get a substantial scholarship done with such a heavy teaching load demanded within the CSU system. He tried really hard, but he knew that the big books were going to elude him. And so he went to the University of Colorado at Boulder and very soon thereafter put out two books. Gary Okihiro was at Humboldt State University in the CSU system, he had a spike in his scholarly productivity, just moving to Santa Clara University and within a few years going to Cornell University. These were very, very talented and hard-working scholars, ones who even managed a productive scholarly career when their positions permitted them little in the way of discretionary time and institutional support for travel and research.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.