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TI: So you have these external forces, but going back to when you and Harry had the 25th anniversary conference in '67, not able to predict that redress could happen by '88, for instance, but wasn't that a case, so in '67 you had people like Edison Uno and others who decided that the community was going to do something about this.

RD: That was later.

TI: Later, but in that time period, from '67 to '88, the community sort of took it upon themselves -- and I view this as kind of an internal type of thing -- where they decided, "We're going to band together, work together, educate people and make something happen."

RD: Well, I really think that what happened in that period that helped make that possible was that the historical information about the incarceration was greatly increased. The first really important piece of the puzzle was an article by the military historian Stetson Conn, which I referred to earlier, in 1959. But by the time folks like Edison Uno, Jim Hirabayashi, and others, begin to sniff around about something called redress, there's a lot more information out there. And they come to this after putting together the first narratives, classroom narratives, teaching programs, to teach about Asian American -- really of Japanese American, because "Asian American" was not really a concept yet -- but to teach Japanese American history. And at the same time, Him Mark Lai and others are at the same place, San Francisco State, are beginning to look at the longer period of Chinese American history, which had a very, very different architecture, and a false architecture that had to be demolished, so that those things were happening. And what historians write and what historians don't write is very important. Had historians not written about this first, I don't think the activists would have gotten in there.

TI: So it's this combination. So, again, it's trying to predict, but it's hard to predict what would happen.

RD: It's impossible.

TI: And in addition, you mentioned not only the historians, including your work on Concentration Camps USA that came out, that the Civil Rights Movement was...

RD: That's another factor that's very, very important. And it took a long time for the Nikkei community, or for any important segment of the Nikkei community, to understand that they and African Americans and other ethnic groups had common -- called "non-white groups" -- had a common problem and should cooperate. Many community leaders, many members of the community could not see this at all. And in many ways socially, Asian Americans behaved like white people in that they joined "white flight," the creation of the diminution of Nihonmachis, Japantowns, Little Tokyos. Turned into Gardenas and other largely Asian American suburbs in greater Los Angeles is an example of this. And one of the few people in the Japanese leadership who understood this was Mike Masaoka, who didn't understand a lot of things, but he understood that. He cooperated in Washington. Have I told this story?

TI: Right, about during the redress.

RD: Masaoka was up to that. And I was stunned to discover that; just caused me to come to a mental quick stop. Saying, "Wait a minute. He's doing that? Him?" And then I discovered he got a lot of static, not published static -- Japanese community leaders don't, when they're trying to have an argument with people within their circle, don't go public with it. But he took, I know, took a lot of heat on this.

TI: As you were talking, there's a metaphor that came to mind, I used to swim a lot when I was a kid. And when you swim in a lake, it's pretty much your own actions that propel you through things. And coming from the community, the Japanese American community, oftentimes you hear comments that it was the Japanese American community propelling redress through sort of this static and lake-like environment where the actions were themselves. Versus when I swim in the ocean, you learn to swim with waves, and how powerful waves are, and as a swimmer, you learn to use the waves. You learn to time things, or you're just swept up in waves, and that propels you much faster, much more powerfully, than just swimming on your own. And it strikes me, as you're talking, that redress benefited from these large waves, things like the Civil Rights Movement, the work of historians like you and others who got the story out there. The Vietnam War probably helped propel some of the thinking in terms of helping redress along. All those forces, much larger than just the community propelling this on its own.

RD: But there's another element there, and I think that a negative side of all of this, the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, was that it caused people to distrust the government. Now, distrust of government is a good thing in some ways; in other ways it's very destructive. These are very complicated emotions; that's why you get some of the strange juxtapositions that occur in what people believe and don't believe. But certainly the growing alliance of people of color in American politics may well be -- it certainly has had influences -- but it may well be, if it hangs together, a truly crucial factor in the twenty-first century. But we can't really see, at this point in the century, how that is going to work out. Because there are interesting kinds of deflections moving off as class differences. There was a time when you could say, as a whole, all people of color in the United States are part of the economic underclass. There were always some very well-to-do black people, black millionaires as early as the late nineteenth century. Not very many, but there were some. There were Asian American successes, but still, you could make that generalization; that's no longer true. There are communities of color that have a higher economic profile than the white community or communities, and how that will affect voting is not at all clear. Futureology is not history, but certainly this is going to be a factor in the history of the immediate future; that's clear. Because, except for the occasional, almost apocalyptic changing event, which makes history go this way instead of going that way or that way, there's a lot of continuity. And there's always some continuity. If you're making a bet every day on the future, if we count the number of days, you'd win your bet if they're all the same size. More accurately, if you bet the future will resemble the past more than it does not resemble the past, that there are transforming eras, this doesn't make any sense at all. And when people who are doubling up just go flat broke... but the world isn't a casino, so it's not the best metaphor, but it's a metaphor. Prediction is a very dangerous thing.

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