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BN: What I wanted to ask you also about was at the time you were doing the research and writing in the book, that the Japanese American community was largely not talking about this experience. I wanted to ask you to talk a little bit about the 25th anniversary conference that you and Harry Kitano organized.

RD: Yeah. It really ought to be the other way around. Initially there was support for it from the Los Angeles JACL chapter. And the University of California Extension which sponsored it, supported it, and paid... not us, but paid the expenses of people who came from outside. We did as much as possible use on-campus people, for instance. We were able to use Leonard Arrington who was spending time as a visitor at UCLA. But they paid some expenses. Nobody got an honorarium to the best of my knowledge and belief. But the assumption was that we'd publish the proceedings, and that it would be done by the university, but that most or all of the expenses would be covered by JACL or people it raised. Very quickly, as word got out of what was going on, and before it had been held, the climate changed in the community. People... I don't know whom, but I have my suspicions, began to put pressure. I didn't realize some of the pressure. Harry, for instance, got phone calls from senior members of his family. Not the direct members, but the larger group, saying that it would be a disgrace to the family name if he participated in such a thing. And Harry told me about this years later. He didn't want any pressure or some such thing, or maybe it embarrassed him at that time, I don't know. So that it was not universally popular. Nobody, of course, no Issei or Nisei who disapproved came and protested, because that is not the way things are done. But I know that there were people in the audience who sat there with grim faces, but most began to feel that it was something to do. I had one classroom experience. Niseis are not tremendously, were not then much involved in the humanities. They felt much more confident in the sciences. Not social sciences, but in the sciences, where they felt that whatever linguistic difficulties they had, and cultural difficulties they'd had would be minimized.

But I had, in one year, the year in which I taught an immigration history course, two male Nisei students. And one of the things you have to do in my history courses, immigration history courses, is do a paper on your family history with the objective of getting at least one parent, one ancestor on each side to a specific place in a specific foreign country. For African Americans, who are not great fans of immigration history generally, the qualification was from the South. Anyway, each of these guys -- they were both males -- told me that they had been born in Los Angeles. They have a family... everybody has to be, your birth dates and death dates for those who have died. And one in 1943, and one in 1944. No Japanese American babies were born in Los Angeles County in either of those years. My assumption was that they were ashamed; they didn't want to mention it. I had to have interviews, everybody had to come in and talk to me, and these guys came and talked to me. No, that wasn't the case, no, no, no. "I wasn't born in a concentration camp." Because they'd heard about concentration camps, so they knew about the camps from me, if nowhere else. So I said, "Well, you go home and talk to your parents," said to each of them separately. These were separate interviews, nobody else there. One guy came in the next day and says, "Professor Daniels, you were right. I was born in a place called Topaz. I'm kind of in shock." Other kid didn't come in, and didn't come to class. And then his parents came in to see me. He'd left home. And I got in touch with him and he came to see me, he eventually came to class. And he said, "My parents have lied to me all my life. I don't even know who I am anymore. I can't have anything to do with them." You can imagine how I felt. And I don't know if you've ever had to deal with a self-satisfied, arrogant, smug nineteen-year-old who thinks he knows everything about a certain situation, but that's what I had there. And then it dawned on me that a person I knew well from our mutual services on a committee that was concerned with race relations on campus was in the psychology department. I called him up, and I asked, "Do you know," and I told him what it was. I said, "Can you help me with that?" "Roger," he says, "I wouldn't touch that with a ten foot pole. But I have a colleague who for some strange reason specializes in teenagers. I'll have him call you." So he called me. And he got to see the student, and he got to see the parents, and they had a conciliation meeting, this sort of thing. He probably would have gone home anyway, but that was a great relief because you can imagine what the parents were like. They were a well-to-do middle-class couple and they were just distraught, and, "What have we done?" and feeling guilt, which they're very good at. And anybody who has a Jewish background has observed this. But it was also emblematic of the way in which the community had just suppressed this business.

By that time, of course, I was, Japanese American people were asking me to give talks, people wanted to meet me, and no ethnic group can be more grateful than Japanese Americans. Most ethnic groups, my colleagues tell me, are not too happy with historians writing about them. But Japanese Americans are delighted to do so. I've talked to a number of JACL chapters, talked to different groups. The chapter in Cincinnati is a fascinating chapter. When my friends come out, or when people come out from the West Coast who are officials and see these chapters in places like Cincinnati, which are now dominated by mixed couples, and my surveys and discussions with these people lead me to believe that in a majority of cases, the impetus to get involved with the JACL is a result of having hapa offspring. And that at least in the people I talked to, the impetus came more from the non-Nikkei parent than from the Nikkei parent. Whether this is accurate is something else again, but it's not inconceivable to me that this is in fact true. And Brian is nodding as if he thinks this is the case. Anyway, all of these kinds of things continue to enrich what I know.

Apart from working with Harry, no single individual was eventually a greater influence on me, Nikkei individual, had more influence on me. I suddenly realized, Tom, that since I've met you, that has to be in the past tense. And Gordon Hirabayashi, who I spent a quarter of a leave in residence here, working on Japanese American materials, mostly in the UW library. I spent an incredible amount of time there, and the footnotes show it. It's a wonderful collection of very special things. And Gordon was here then and it was just after redress. Of course, I was a celebrity since I had been in Washington and dealt with the committee. So we spent a great deal of time together. We'd known each other before that time, and had corresponded a lot and seen each other occasionally, but that was a very intensive period. And that's the period in which of course I did a long oral history interview with him.

[Interruption]

RD: And last week, in San Francisco at the convention, I was approached to do a small paperback book for classroom adoption about Gordon, which would be full of documents, and there would be attached to it for this series a website in which all kinds of videos could be put. And I've not signed a contract, but I told them it's ninety percent sure, but I've got to get other things out of the way. And as described, it's not a full biography, it's something I can write left-handed. But I'm very happy to be able to do so. I haven't yet read Jim and Lane's book. I want to see that, and I'm sure there'll be stuff in there. Now, go on.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.