<Begin Segment 19>

TI: So how about the title for this book? How did that come about?

RD: It's my title. I mean, other people had used "concentration camps" not quite in that style. It was apparent to everybody that these were concentration camps. If you'd been at my talk, you'd have heard this. I opened up with quoting from... I quoted just from four documents and sat down. But the first document was a memorandum from... slipped my mind. From the second director of the War Relocation Authority Dillon Myer to all his chief subordinates for distribution throughout the agency, before he had ever seen a relocation center, and maybe before he'd ever met a Japanese American. "The words 'concentration camp' are not to be used in connection to these processes, even to deny that they were concentration camps." And then I used, I read the transcript of the Roosevelt press conference to point out that it was pretty clear they were press conferences to these folks, and I talked about more contemporary things. No, I'm pretty good at titles. Gary Okihiro, by the way, thinks and has said so, that Asian America is a terrible title. He thinks that's an awful title. Maybe you do, too.

BN: Your 1988 book.

RD: Yeah. He thinks that's a terrible title. You think it's a terrible title?

BN: I didn't care for it either, just because it's not very descriptive of...

RD: To me it is. To me it's essentially descriptive of an era in which Americans born in Asia were the leading figures in the Asian American communities, and that after that, after the Second World War, that ceases to be true. Not the day the war was over, but that really ceases to be true. And this is true in all immigrant generations. Language and orientation, the influence of the home country, is very important to that first generation. It's a tie, it's something that doesn't break, and the kids born here almost rarely can really speak the language, and rarely have any real attachment to a country most of them never saw. Today's Nisei of various ethnicities, even when they're poor, really have more stronger roots. They grow up surrounded by videos from the home country, telephone, electronic communications, and reasonably inexpensive airfare. I mean, the percentage of immigrants and the immigrants' children, very recent immigrants' children who go back to the home country for a visit, is now a very, very high thing. If there were a situation in which somebody was trying to figure out the percentage of what we call Kibei from any of these would find it's a much higher percentage, so that's it. But I think it's important. This is when, this is a time when most of the groups -- I'm talking about Japanese and Chinese only -- most live in segregated environments, most have few contacts with people who are not of their own ethnicity. That's why I use it. But I can understand why the people... and it's not in any way a denial of the American-ness. And then the subtitle is, I think unobjectionable.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.