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TI: As you tell the story, it just reminds me so much of my experiences with my grandparents from Japan.

RD: It's the same kind of... you know, when I taught immigration history, what I made people do, made the students do -- some of them didn't like to do it, or complained about it -- but I made everybody create a family genealogy. And what they had to do was find, go far enough back, some of them did more than that, but the absolute minimum was the demand that they get one person on each side of the family out of the United States from wherever. And for African Americans, I asked that they get one person out of the South. That was a kind of immigration. I never taught in the South. So that the African Americans... and most were able to do that. I said, "If you have problems, come in and talk to me about it." Some people's parents don't want to talk, some of them don't know. But it helped students -- many students told me later that that really helped them understand things about their own family and their own life as well as understand immigration history in a particularly personal way. But that was very important to them.

TI: But the part I like about your story about your grandmother, or being in Rotterdam where she left, when I was traveling in Japan about ten years ago, I had a similar feeling just realizing as I was going to a particular temple where I knew my grandparents had actually visited also, just being in that same place, that same sort of visceral feeling of being connected to Japan and your ancestors, just in that moment, that came unexpectedly, it just hit me.

RD: Where was the temple?

TI: It was in Fukuoka. So a little temple outside Fukuoka.

RD: How did you know that?

TI: My mom told me that they would have been there. And so, again, it was more intellectual, that I knew those things, and had kind of had that information, but when you're at that place, all of a sudden... it wasn't maybe a shudder like you felt, but just a very emotional, this wave of emotion came over me.

RD: Well, in my case, the shudder came because if I had thought if at any time -- and I hadn't done that -- if I had thought my grandmother came through here, I ought to think about it. Because I was thinking about other things and other aspects of it. And so this really blindsided me. But it's a little spooky, particularly when it involves... and how well you knew your grandparents, but I, of course, knew my grandmother very well. There aren't too many moments like that in your life, for some people, anyway. I think for a lot of people, moments like that, one way or another, do occur. When you suddenly realize connections that you knew about. Language is a funny... German has several different words for "knowing." Kennen, which is "to know," and verstehen, which is "to understand." So I knew about this, that this was a kind of understanding that I hadn't had before. It was very interesting. I would have liked, when it was possible to do so, to actually go out to that place, but we didn't have time to do it because the excursion boat didn't dock at that particular pier. I forget what our program was. This was at a time when we were, we had rented an apartment in Delft, which is very close to both Amsterdam and Rotterdam, and the train transportation is wonderful. And it would be much more expensive to have rented a place in Amsterdam itself, but we could get there in half an hour in the morning if we really wanted to do that. And we went various places, we had a rail pass, so we went on the train everywhere, and covered pretty much two-thirds of Holland very, very well. Didn't get to the northern part of Holland, but we did the central and the southern parts and saw most of the big museums, etcetera. And we'd take various cruises; it's one way to get you off your feet, you get to sit for a while. [Laughs] And you can sit on trains, of course. Too much time, probably.

TI: So I wanted to bring you back to when you were a child, you loved books, you read a lot. Were there any particular books or writers that influenced you when you were young?

RD: Well, it's a point of view I reject now, but the British imperialist writer Rudyard Kipling. There was a whole set of Kipling's works in the house, and I read every word of it, including a book he wrote about the regiment in which his son, who served in the war, died. In the Great War, the First World War, died. And, of course, it was in praise of the British Empire, etcetera. And that's not my view of that period of history, but as a child, that was very important, and there was a kind of -- despite his imperialism, his political views, which I reject -- Kipling's a wonderful writer. He really creates a "new world," and some of his worlds were fantasy, animal stories, the Just So Stories, the story of a boy who's raised by wolves, etcetera. But wonderful storyteller. And he tells about history and about other races. So although it's an imperialist view, which I no longer support, it was very important. I read many other things, and by the time of the Second World War, I was very fascinated with every aspect of the war, so I read most of the popular books that were published about the war. Books like Richard Tregaskis' Guadalcanal Diary, several books by journalists rather than historians. Later, I'd read historical works, but that's something else again. But in my formative years, I read a great deal about the Nazis, a great deal about the war, war both in the Pacific and in Europe. Read nothing at that time about Japanese Americans or the 442nd. As I've told, I had this shock meeting with the Nisei from the camps in New York when I was seventeen. By that time, my politics were pretty well established as left or democratic, pro-labor, etcetera.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.