<Begin Segment 1>

[Ed note: Due to technical difficulties, the first thirty seconds of this interview is cut off.]

TI: Today is April 22nd, Tuesday, we're in Seattle. Doing the primary interviewer will be Brian Niiya, and secondary interviewer will be me, Tom Ikeda. We're interviewing Roger Daniels, and on camera is Dana Hoshide. And because this is going to be the first of several interviews, we're taking advantage of Brian's presence in Seattle to really sort of dive into Roger's -- especially in the '60s -- his time at UCLA and his start of graduate studies. And we'll pick up some of these other things, so we may be a little bit out of sequence with this first one, but we'll pick it up later. So with that, Brian, I'm going to turn it over and let you start.

BN: Okay, great. Yeah, as Tom mentioned, kind of wanted to talk about the origins of your interest in Japanese American studies and history, and maybe starting with what eventually became Politics of Prejudice. Maybe to back up, maybe to start with what brought you to UCLA in the first place, and also where the interest on studying Japanese Americans, what the origin of that was.

RD: Why don't we switch those two things around?

BN: Yeah, sure.

RD: Because I can date the first fairly precisely. Shortly after my seventeenth birthday, which was the first of December, 1944, I met, I think, the first Japanese American person I ever saw knowingly. This was in New York City at a party. I was introduced to this young man who was a young Nisei lawyer -- I didn't know the word, of course -- at a New York law firm. I knew someone who was slightly senior to him in that law firm but still a young lawyer. And he described, my friend wanted him to talk to everybody about this, and he talked a little bit about the camp he was in. If he mentioned the name of the camp, I have no memory of it because the individual camps, of course, meant nothing to me. And I got a chance to speak to him personally. I asked him where in Japan he had been born, and he said with some indignation that he hadn't been born in Japan. And I said, "Well, if you weren't born in Japan, what were you doing in a concentration camp?" Or whatever word I used, and I don't know that I used that particular term, or that he did. And he explained it to me, and I must say, I was dubious.

And sometime shortly thereafter, I think that week, or if it was a weekend party, the following week, I got myself to the New York Public Library at the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, and went up to the Research Questions room and I asked did they have anything? And they had a little pamphlet by Carey McWilliams, his book wasn't out yet. And sure enough, that confirmed that there were citizens there. And I just thought -- I was no scholar, high school dropout, I was in the merchant marines at the time on a sort of voyage to voyage basis. Lied about my age, and nobody cared much if you were big enough, etcetera. And I knew that it was wrong, and I knew that it was against the Constitution, and was astounded that everybody in America wasn't. It did not become at that time a burning ambition to do something about it, although I looked for further information. I saw a few things in the newspapers about the end of exclusion. I think I read them after I heard about this. But the way they wrote those stories, you never saw, it wasn't rubbed in or stressed in the press that these were United States citizens; that term didn't come up very often. I did a number of things before I decided that I wanted to be a historian. And without a high school degree, just had to take an entrance exam, which was no problem.

TI: I'm sorry, Roger, just to interrupt, did you ever see that person again, that Nisei?

RD: No.

BN: Do you know who it was?

RD: No. No, I have no idea what his name was, no clear memory of what he looked like.

TI: But with a New York law firm?

RD: With a New York law firm. Hines, Rearick, Dorr & Hammond. I don't know where I dredged that up from, but that's the law firm. Not because he was a member, because that's with whom my friend was connected.

BN: And that was the same law firm?

RD: Yeah.

TI: That would be interesting to see if we can dig up that name. That person, there probably weren't very many lawyers in that...

RD: In 1957, or let's say 1956/'57, when I was preparing to graduate from college, University of Houston, I knew what I wanted to study, and I knew where I wanted to study. And what I wanted to study, not only was history, but what I wanted to specialize in, and I had my eye on a PhD right from the start of my entry into college, which was interrupted by service in the Korean War. I wanted to work on twentieth century African American civil rights, and I wanted to work with a distinguished historian named C. Vann Woodward -- "Vann" is spelled with two Ns -- at Johns Hopkins. I got accepted at Johns Hopkins and discovered before I accepted the acceptance that Woodward was resigning from Johns Hopkins, was going to go to Yale, but had a two year fellowship he was going to spend before that, and I hadn't applied to Yale anyway. So one of my safety schools was UCLA.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.