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TI: Going back, you were talking about after you became better-known in your relationship with the Japanese American community and how -- I'm not sure gratitude is the word you used -- but how grateful the Japanese American community is for your work, maybe more so than maybe other ethnic groups. And I'm wondering, is it because... you were reporting more than just on the Japanese American community. It was about an event that really affected them. So it wasn't like a traditional historian doing something about an ethnic community. I see your work more in terms of uncovering or helping to show an injustice that happened to the community.

RD: Yeah, and that's important. For instance, during my stint at UCLA as a teacher, Sue Embrey came to me and asked me to speak. I had the experience for the first time of speaking in a Buddhist temple surrounded by all these things, it was the one in West L.A. And an anecdote about that: while I'm talking, I knew that there were people in that audience who didn't want to be there or who objected to what I was saying. I wondered what was going to happen when the question period came. And the first question, from one of the guys who'd been most fidgety and obviously just unhappy at where he was, popped up. He said, "Professor, that's all very well and good, and I appreciate what you're saying, but what has that got to do with juvenile delinquency?" And what happened was that there had been a schedule switch that not everybody knew about, and there were two meetings scheduled for there. And their meeting had been there and it was supposed to be somewhere else. Some people had actually gone there, so that was the reason for that. [Laughs] And that was the first experience I had had in speaking to a totally Nikkei audience in a very Nikkei surrounding.

BN: This is when you were at UCLA, so this was in the '60s.

RD: Yeah, that's right. And then in the little book that Sue Embrey put out, there's a piece by me.

TI: Now did you ever push back? Because even when I started Densho in the '90s, I felt a little pushback from the community to not do the project. It's sort of, "Don't stir up the old stories, let it go." Did you ever feel that from community members, like, "Professor, that's enough, don't do this"?

RD: Well, I talked to a lot of people, interviews, and men were more difficult than women. Women talked. They didn't always talk frankly. I'm not sure how originally, how well I originally realized that people weren't being frank. I think I always knew it, but I wasn't sure the extent. What I didn't realize was the degree that was almost a community conspiracy not to talk about certain things. When fate took me surprisingly to the University of Wyoming, which naturally meant that my model camp would be Heart Mountain, and where there were archives with the complete run of the Heart Mountain Sentinel, etcetera, I discovered something. Bill Hosokawa and all those other folks hadn't told me that there was massive draft resistance. I went back before I published and tracked down several people who had talked to me who were from Heart Mountain and really knew about it, and asked them about it. "Oh, Professor, you're interested in that? I'm so sorry, it was so unpleasant, you know. I didn't want to bother you with it." That may not be a quote, but that's really what it was all about. And that happened three times. I had a couple other people to see, and I said to hell with it. They weren't right there, they were in San Francisco, and I didn't know if they were alive still. But altogether in that period I did what no sociologist would continue in interviews -- though I don't call them interviews -- I had talked to more than a thousand Nikkei about their incarceration experiences.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.