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TI: The other thing I wanted to talk about was your involvement with the Asian American Experience series with the University of Illinois Press. Can you talk about that and how you got involved?

RD: Well, it wasn't that I got involved, that was a series that I created. I persuaded the then-editor of the University of Illinois Press that I would like to establish a series that he would publish, that I would select the books, they would of course have to approve them, or the manuscripts, and we would publish them and I would supervise the publication of them, edit them, write an introduction to them, and they would pay me a fee for each book, and a small percentage of the royalties of all the books. My ambition at that time -- and there were other publishing enterprises that I undertook -- was to eventually get at least ten or twelve books in the series. What are there now, thirty-two are out, one very interesting book by Eileen Tamura, it's a biography of Joe Kurihara, which will be out this year or next, it's done. I think it's going to be published this year, but they sometimes get delayed and have a press problem, so it's not out yet. And there may be one more. So rather than twelve, we've had thirty-four. And the series is continuing, and other people are editing it now and are bringing out books.

TI: Well, it's interesting, too, when you mention Eileen, she was one of your first authors to start the series.

RD: Yes, the first two authors were both named Tamura, no relation. I introduced them, as a matter of fact, at a meeting. In addition, on my own, I published a large series with a publishing firm by the New York Times called Arno, which published reprints and documents in series of various aspects of history. And this was about Asian immigration in the United States, and it included such things as General DeWitt's report, the Tolan Committee hearings, a lot of unpublished and unpublishable doctoral dissertations, various collections of documents, some collections of works like scholarly articles on Chinese exclusion, and on Japanese Americans. Anyway, this was a large collection of about forty books, which formed, for many college libraries when they bought them, the first of their basis of their collections in which Asian American history could be studied. So part of my work with commercial publishing was to create -- and with scholarly publishing -- was to create a body of work to support Asian American history, which was beginning to be something. There was no such thing as Asian American history.

TI: Well, based on the numbers, it's pretty spectacular. I mean, between those two collections we just talked about, that's over seventy books.

RD: Yes. Altogether I've edited more than a hundred. And editing, in this case, only involved my having to identify them, and then Arno went usually to the New York Public Library, got a copy, photocopied it, and then put it in good binding, and these are uniformly bound, so if you're in the area of the library you can really see them. They're all in this dark red binding. Very cleverly marketed. And they were expensive. And some of the things were really rare. For instance, there was a two-volume collection of anti-Japanese laws and regulations that was published by a lawyer, hired and subsidized by the Japanese government, of which there were a few copies. Not very many. And I interviewed the lawyer who was kept on retainer by the Japanese consulate; the checks came from the Issei organization, but it was really the Japanese government. And they hired this lawyer, Guy C. Caulden, who I interviewed. He was a very, very old man, he was in his nineties. And he gave me big hunks of his library, including this stuff. He said, "I'll never use them again." So you have them now, these books.

So there's the story of some of the books that I've given you. But this was a very important part of what I was doing, and it was with consciousness. I wanted to develop Asian American history. I was not particularly interested in trying to promote Asian American studies, which I thought, and think, although it was very useful as a place in the university for Japanese American and Chinese American and other Asian American students to go, to have a place to go and to learn about their own identities, I think it's led to a lot of people taking a degree in Asian American studies, which left them not well trained in anything that can be identified as a discipline. I think that was an educational blind alley. And it's one of the reasons why the people with Asian American degrees have produced so relative little in terms of important scholarship, as opposed to, say, Asian Americans with legal training and an inclination to write. They have something they can write about it. Not that Asian American subjects are not worth writing about, or else much of my professional life has been wasted. It was a poor way to organize someone's education. But the struggle for these was an important part of raising the American consciousness. So you can't say it was all bad. It certainly had some important effects. And as I say, the place where this happened was not the prestigious universities, but largely, initially, it was San Francisco State when San Francisco State was a college. All the state colleges became state universities. But they're distinctly second tier universities in the California system. Nobody denies there are some good people in them, but they have less money, less prestige, they spend more hours in the classroom teaching and administration, and consequently less on research and publication.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.