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TI: Prediction is within, again, you have this historical perspective. And when you think of the Japanese American incarceration story, going back to that focus, I'm wondering if we have just experienced, in some ways, the high water mark in terms of it being known by Americans. We went through the redress, the coram nobis cases, a period where people who experienced the incarceration during World War II were alive to share the story, we are now reaching an era when people who were in camps won't be around to tell their personal stories, and redress will be a fading memory. The Japanese American community when this started was a more significant Asian American group in terms of size, is now number six or seven.

RD: You can assume that it will be a fading memory, but it is not necessarily the case. I would say, to use a coeval phenomenon, that the consciousness and the impact of the Holocaust is stronger than it ever was. It's a different kind of thing, but again, you couldn't have predicted this. So it's very dangerous. What you say about the impact is perhaps true, but you can't assume it. Because if, for example, Guantanamo continues to be an issue, incarceration is going to be more and more discussed. So we just don't know where you... in geography as well as in history, what you see depends upon where you stand. Where you stand in place, the waterfall looks very different from one side than from the bottom, or where you can see the whole thing. So it's very dangerous to assume that. It's likely to be the case, but history isn't something that's preordained. When you founded Densho, and the people who helped you found it, you were engaged in what we can call a public conspiracy to change the way people look at Japanese American history. And the degree to which you are successful in that is going to be one of the factors -- not the only factor -- in determining what people, to get back to your anniversary question, in 2042 are going to think about the incarceration. And what the reaction will be when -- as I would be willing to bet will take place -- when, as that anniversary approaches, there will be groups who will come to Congress and say, "We want to have some kind of a national celebration, a national recognition, of this important event. What are you going to do about it?" And there will be legislation that may or may not pass that will try to do this is in various kinds of ways. We have the concerted efforts of the Park Service, which have been intensified, largely because of... well, a lot of things. But what's been crucial has been presidential edicts from Clinton, the second Bush, and Obama, all of which collectively have directed the Park Service to create public spaces in which the history of the incarceration can be preserved, can be looked at, can be displayed and discussed. We can't see what that is going to result in. We know what it's resulted in so far, and it's resulted in pilgrimages to Manzanar, Tule Lake, to Minidoka, because those camps are most convenient to the three largest continental collections of Japanese American people. And now they're even going to have places out in Hawaii where as recently as the 1970s, the general population was less knowledgeable about the incarceration than the general population of the United States, certainly than the West Coast population of the United States. I think the general population of the United States is accurate as well. So it's a very complicated thing, so there are all sorts of forces. And you can say that, well, those three Presidents signed orders instructing the Park Service to do this, and that will certainly have an impact. How much? Well, we can't say. We don't know what it is, and we don't know what the impact will be, but it will be there, and there will be constituencies therefore dedicated to doing something about it.

TI: As you were talking, so from where I stand today, I think about the scholarly work that has been done, the books that have been published, the government actions, not only redress, but as you mentioned, the National Park Service and what they're doing, I think the work of some of the community organizations like Densho to collect and preserve the story, so I guess right now there is a sense of optimism that on the hundredth anniversary of EO 9066, the story will be there and kept alive in some form. But I guess now the question I'm asking is, what do we need to worry about in terms of... is there a danger, is there a threat of somehow, even with all this work that's been done, and knowledge that's been collected and documented, that the story could somehow change in a way that isn't the real story? I mean, is that something that as a historian that you also see? That over time, that story can change? Is that something that we have to think about?

RD: Well, every generation revises history in one way or another. The relative importance of events changes as those events recede in time. That is absolutely a general rule, but not a universal one. And we see that the Holocaust and the wartime incarceration -- and those are two events on very, very different scales. They're not comparable events, but they are a similar kind of event, and it has a similar mnemonic history in that unlike most events, it has become more significant in the first half century after it occurred than it was at the time, or at any intervening time before that. And that's unusual. It's not unique, but it's unusual. Some things we learn of only long after the event. This week, in England, is a time when papers about the Falklands War are being opened. So that we've learned this week that it's people who care about these things and read them, and we have available this week information about the Falklands War of... which I can't date at this moment. It's very interesting that neither of us can do that. But it wasn't largely an American concern, but we know things today about that war, and the things that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and a lot of other people did and said about that war that we didn't know last month. So this is true; we're constantly learning new things about the past, and we're constantly learning that things we thought we knew about the past were really not quite the way we thought about them. So that there are these kinds of changes that have nothing to do with these larger sweeps that we've been talking about. So there's always modification. History is... one of my favorite historians is Dutch historian Peter Haile, writes, "History is a debate without end." There are no final histories; there's always more to learn.

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