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TI: Anything else about Concentration Camps USA before we move on? So we talked a little bit about the reaction... I mean, the New Ground, we talked earlier about Stetson Conn helping you with things...

RD: Well, what happened is that the arguments I made in that book quickly became standard in most textbooks. And I think that was important, it became... and it established me as an authority. The first book was very interesting, had done very well, but this one... because the book got adopted and used in a lot of places, and talked about in a lot of places, and it meant that I was somebody who got called on to settle questions and to be emulated. So it was good for me, and it was good for the topic.

TI: And how much do you think... because as we'll talk about later, the redress movement really started gaining momentum in the '70s, mid-'70s, later '70s, and especially in the '80s. But they needed a base, some kind of strong content base to make their case. And do Japanese American groups ever mention the importance of your book as part of that?

RD: Well, I had a real ego trip at the ceremony for the opening of the Korematsu Center. And I was invited, I participated, you were there. But at the dinner that I don't think you went to, when all the attorneys -- not all of them, but a great many of them -- turned up. And by the way, it was the first time most of them had ever met one another. Time and again, some of them publicly, some of them privately, said how much they had learned, or how only when they read my book did they understand some of the things that had happened. And that made me feel very good. And I came home from that meeting, Judith asked me how it went, and I said something to the effect of, "I could have walked on air all the way home." I didn't, I took a taxi. But that was very nice. It was very nice to come to know Min first, then Gordon, I knew Gordon better, and eventually Fred. I never met Mitsuye Endo, she didn't want to meet anybody. I guess the Nichi Bei obituary for her made the point that her daughter was an adult before she had any notion of what her mother had done, and that she never talked about it. I knew people in the Chicago JACL hierarchy who knew her and were in contact with her, and on two separate occasions a decade apart I asked people to see if she would talk to me or answer a questionnaire I would send her, or talk to me on the telephone, and she didn't want to be part of it. And, of course, I respected that privacy.

TI: That reminds me of the story that Karen Korematsu tells me about how she heard about her father's case, where I think she was in school and someone mentioned Korematsu v. U.S., and she asked her father, "So are we related to this person?" And her father said, "We have to sit down and talk about this." [Laughs]

RD: Yes, well, that's that old Nisei habit, "Don't tell our kids anything."

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