Densho Digital Repository - Roger Daniels Interview III (Densho ID: ddr-densho-416-19)

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TI: One other... no, we talked about that. Any other stories from redress?

RD: Well, I was very impressed with the work of the coram nobis folks. They were on the phone to me a lot, and they asked good questions. And I was so pleased that they got that stuff done. It was, I think, very important. Let me talk -- this may be a good time to do it -- I'm thinking about this because last night I got a request to go to the University of Minnesota for the fiftieth anniversary of the Immigration History Research Center there and give a talk. And we went back and forth by email about what I should talk about, and I want to talk about the work I've been doing, which he said, "Well, why don't you first talk about the history of your work?" So what I'm going to do is I'm talking largely about The Japanese American Cases book, and I'm going to point out that I have really told the Japanese American cases three times in print at great length, and that some people might say one of these days I might get it right. But they were very different books. The first book, Concentration Camps USA, was a door-opener. I had to lay out in absolutely meticulous historical detail the whole process of how it happened and the results of that. And that, of course, came out in 1970. When it came time to do a second book, and Hill and Wang came to me -- actually a historian who was editing a series for them who came and gave a talk at the University of Cincinnati approached me, would I do a book on Japanese Americans for that series? So I did a story that became Prisoners Without Trial. That was a book written for a different purpose. Redress had already taken place, and the world was very different. Where you stand depends on what you see. Stand on the wrong side of the mountain, the wrong side of the Olympics, you'll never see the Pacific Ocean. So by 1984 -- I can't remember the exact date, it's later than that -- Prisoners Without Trial, first edition.

TI: First edition 1993.

RD: 1993. So here we are, almost a quarter century later, well, the world looked very different. Redress has happened. And I had to deal with the whole question of could it happen again. I dealt with that in the first book, but now we'd gone through all kinds of other things, Vietnam had happened. And then right after 9/11 or shortly after 9/11, Hill and Wang wanted a second edition. So I updated it again, it's still the same story, and it's very little different told. The book I've just finished, The Japanese American Cases, is in a legal history series. Mostly legal history is dealing with lawyers; I'm much more interested in plaintiffs. And I hung this book very much as a way of telling the story of the Japanese Americans through the experiences of Gordon, of Fred, and Min. And I knew all three of them, and I knew Gordon very well. I didn't know Mitsuye, and she wouldn't talk to me or anybody else. She was a quiet woman; just wanted to be left alone. I talk more about her than most people do, but I can't say certain things. But her daughter was a grown woman before she knew her mother was a hero. And she's very important. But it's largely through them, then later I look at the coram nobis version and talk about them. Then I look at the renunciants and talk about some of them, particularly one couple. And then I need to talk about 9/11 and Guantanamo. So we've got different things to look at. But the basic facts remain the same; I haven't changed my opinion about anything.

TI: So this last one, you're really making linkages to other... linking the Japanese American incarceration to things like 9/11, Guantanamo.

RD: Well, I've always tried to make those linkages. Early on, a very, very smart friend, when I was writing Concentration Camps, said, "You know, you must never write about this event that has a happy ending," and I haven't. I always try to raise at the end the point that bad things continue to happen in a democracy, etcetera, etcetera, and that's one of the ongoing lessons of the Japanese Americans. So this book will really be sort of a fourth take, or maybe there's a second and a half take, since there are two versions of Prisoners Without Trial. And there are other places where I've talked about, I've talked about some of the details, military details in Asian America, but that's really a broader book. But it is sort of unusual for a historian to return to essentially the same subject in three different books.