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TI: Well, and then your current work on Tule Lake.

RD: Well, that's another story.

TI: Yes, we'll save that for the next interview.

RD: So this book is out in 2013, so that means over a period of forty-three years, I've told this story essentially three different ways.

TI: And how has the story changed for you?

RD: Well, one change is that I now know more about Tule Lake than I knew until very recently, and that I had been too accepting of what the general consensus was about Tule Lake. I knew that Tule Lake was a problem, I've been trying to get people to write a Tule Lake book for a long time and never succeeded, so I have to do it myself, though I've got help. You know that, don't you?

TI: Uh-huh.

RD: And I'm trying to tell the Tule Lake story from a variety of perspectives, but I'm looking for things to talk about. I've dug up... there's a notorious doctor there who was beating up patients, raising hell, and hated Japanese. But I've got the papers of his successor, who was a very, very different fellow. Barbara dug up this memoir of a government official who was one of those people who went to work for the WRA as sort of a volunteer of conscience. He would be very different from the typical WRA. So that's one thing that's different in this book. The other thing is that I talk about these individuals in a greater way. I talk about the lawyers, I talk about the trials, but it's all part of a single history narrative. There's very little about the 442nd; it's there.

TI: So as you were talking, what occurred to me, what came to mind is it seems like one shift also is you're writing more about the people, the individuals, you know them. Versus I think when you first started, I remember in the first interview you talked about how Concentration Camps USA really wasn't about the community or the individuals in the community, it was really about the oppressor, the government who had done this. So there's that shift. You brought up the military, 442. How do you see their story as part of this overall story, the incarceration story? Where does that fit in this story? Because when I think of the amount of effort going on in the community today to document and keep the story alive, there's almost two paths: there's one focusing more on the incarceration experience and the overall happenings there, and linking to, very much similar to your work, but there's also another track that focuses on primarily the 442 and what they did in Europe.

RD: Except that most of the stuff that was published underplays the role of Hawaiians in the 442, and overemphasizes the role of... because the numbers are very different as you know.

TI: Right, yes.

RD: This is a Hawaiian story, largely. And there's a whole question of the MIS. The 442 is important. I think it certainly... the image of the 442, the support that came eventually from veterans organizations, not just 442 veterans, but veterans organizations, was a factor of more than a little significance in the Congressional vote. The whole business that Linda's talked about so well in the names of Hood River. And that was very important. Didn't turn veterans organizations around immediately, but it certainly helped. And I think, unfortunately, that if a significant number of Nisei had not volunteered, the whole redress story might be different.

TI: But as a historian looking at what happened, so redress is really important in terms of... what question am I asking here? I'm trying to get a sense of maybe how unique the 442 story is, and MIS story, in terms of, as a historian, the uniqueness of that. Because it's clear to me the World War II incarceration was something that needs to be understood and remembered from sort of a constitutional perspective, democratic ideals, and how these men, especially from the West Coast who went to camps and then volunteered, is a very dramatic story, and helped maybe later on in having the government apologize for what happened. How did those all fit? When you talk about things like, say, 9/11, Guantanamo Bay, that's where I'm trying to understand how these things...

RD: Where they fit is that the democracies can't be trusted in crisis. When you combat something, you often wind up using the same methods of fighting. We complain about terror, but the government clearly terrorizes a presumed hostile ethnic community. They don't throw bombs; they don't have to. They've got jails and places worse than jail. There's at least been a certain moderation of the all but unanimous support of the incarceration the Japanese Americans encountered. There was significant resistance, and insignificant resistance to what we're doing, even to what are clearly bad people. Those guys down at Guantanamo are not Boy Scouts. Some of them apparently were picked up by accident, but that's another story; that's just incompetent police work or military work. But that's one of the differences. It's really in some ways harder to defend bad guys than it is good guys, but even bad guys are entitled to due process. So it's very complicated. And modern media complicates it even more. There are all sorts of problems with the contemporary media, but it's certainly not possible to have the kind of unanimity or near unanimity that occurred in the Second World War. The technology is just too different. There are too many ways of getting stuff out there, and then we got these organized leakers. And it's funny because it now seems that this latest leaker didn't really get, and probably didn't try to get, the stuff that the government listened to on people. What he got was the government's records of what it was doing. Maybe those weren't protected as well, or maybe they were. I really think that they've got a machine there that nobody knows how to control, and they're paying people all kinds of money to do so. Nobody has revealed what this guy was being paid.

TI: And we're talking about Snowden, who recently leaked --

RD: Edward J., isn't it?

TI: Yes.

RD: But I imagine that he got a pretty penny. And when Congress finds out about it, there's going to be another minor explosion. But this Booz Hamilton outfit, like its predecessors, Blackwater... although there's no evidence that Booz Hamilton did anything that the government didn't want them to do, and the Blackwater people just ran wild and did what they wanted to do, but that's another story. But these guys aren't tough guys, they're bureaucrats and technicians. They don't use a gun or a dagger, they use a USB drive. [Laughs]

TI: And computers. That's interesting.

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