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RD: But the first Japanese American person I would call my friend was Harry Kitano. And when I returned to UCLA in the fall of 1963, I went around to see the people I'd seen before and I went over to the Institute of Industrial Relations and saw Irving Bernstein, a senior political scientist, but really a historian. He's written the best history of labor during the Second World War in the United States. There's a new book now that may be as good, but certainly in his time he was the outstanding historian. And he said that there was a new young man, a professor from Berkeley named Harry Kitano that I ought to meet. So we met and very quickly got along. He knew my work and I knew his. There weren't that many books on Japanese Americans published in the early 1960s. Maybe of the ones that have survived and are still significant, Harry and I wrote one way or another, but not together.

TI: At this point -- I'm not familiar with Harry's writing. So what at this point had he written?

RD: One book, his doctoral dissertation. Japanese Americans... something about culture.

BN: You're talking about the Evolution of a Subculture book?

RD: Yeah. Japanese Americans: The Evolution of a Subculture, there we go. With help I can remember anything, even some things that never happened. [Laughs] So I liked his stuff and he liked mine, we became very friendly.

BN: Now you're talking about, this is when you came back?

RD: This is in '63. This is '63 post. And we eventually agreed to try to write a book together. And my wife has been a tremendous support in everything I did, and gave me always very good and sensible advice. This is the one thing that she was wrong about. "Roger," she says, "you shouldn't do that. You're two very, very different people. Your personalities are entirely different; you're gonna clash, you're never gonna get to agree on a book, and you'll waste time and lose a friend." And I told her that I didn't think that was the case. And it's the only thing that I can think of, of a major decision, that Judith was on the wrong side of. Because Harry and I wrote four books together, one of which went through several editions, one of which the first was a massive bestseller. It was the first academic book written for paperback that could be used in classes anywhere that had the word "racism" in it. And it was really a book about California, and I forget what our title was, but it had California in it. And Prentice Hall, without changing the contents -- and we did say a couple things about national stuff -- said, "No, we're gonna call this American Racism." They said, "Look, we understand marketing, Professor. Don't worry about it." And they used to give us printouts of this thing. One of the things that always stunned me, I found out about it later, why later. But one of the greatest places for that book, quarter after quarter after quarter, was Anchorage, Alaska. Well, there was one big course in Anchorage, Alaska -- in the Anchorage College, which was a community college, not a university -- that everybody had to take, that was about... I don't know what they called it, and they probably didn't call it this, but it was about the varieties of ethnicity, not just in Alaska but in the United States. And they used it. I mean, I imagine they papered walls with it eventually, but they were selling hundreds of copies every semester because that's how many students. And it went down -- although they continued to use the book because there were a lot secondhand -- but it was intellectually a fruitful and successful proposition. And we each continued to do our own works. And the only thing we ever disagreed about was baseball.

TI: How'd you disagree on baseball? Different teams?

RD: Yeah, he was a Dodger fan by adaptation, you know, the Dodgers came to L.A. And I was a Giants fan by natural means. [Laughs] Based in New York, I had very little use for the move to San Francisco. But as long as Willie Mays was playing, that was my team. And I could never have any affection for the Dodgers under any circumstances no matter where they moved.

BN: I won't ask you about Willie Mays on the Mets.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.