<Begin Segment 19>
TI: I'm curious, during this time, did you have any contact with the Japanese American community?
PT: Japanese, yes.
TI: And how did they view you and your work?
PT: They never said anything. One of the leaders of the Asian American Studies movement was an Asian guy, Chinese, and he was one of my students. So whenever something happened, he asked me whether I would be the lead teacher. So when it first got started, he organize this event called the Yellow Symposium, and that's the beginning of Asian American Studies. And I gave the talk, and there must have been about five or six hundred people there, and that's the beginning of Asian American Studies.
TI: So this is late '60s, like '69?
PT: No, early '60. January '60.
TI: And then later on, I remember hundreds of Asian American Studies...
PT: Yes, I took little cases here and there. But after the School of Criminology was closed, I was pretty much out of it.
[Interruption]
TI: I want to walk around your house and look at some of your things, but before we do that, any other issues or topics you want to talk about before we walk around the house? Do you want to talk about your current work, anything about what you're currently working on?
PT: Yes. I think the reason for the camps still remains open. No one has address the question of why. Why the Japanese? And the answer is very easy: assimilation. In other words, white America did not want Asians to be marrying white women. But I would like to put it the other way: white women wanted to marry Asian guys. [Laughs] They're more stable. Isn't that right? [Laughs]
TI: So the thinking being that putting them in camps would keep them separate. That's the premise?
PT: Yes. Please read the one The Potato King. See, he has five thousand acres of potatoes in Stockton, and he has another one thousand acres in Oregon. And what he has to do is cross-fertilize the potatoes so you don't get big potatoes. So he's suggesting this as a...
TI: Like a metaphor.
PT: Yes, metaphor of intermarriage.
TI: You showed me that passage where they asked him about intermarriage, and he brings up the potatoes.
PT: But he says, "Yankee women are too expensive." [Laughs]
<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.