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TI: And when you mention that -- and you would know this better than I do -- but someone once told me that there's a seventy-five year rule for the most confidential information, and that in 2017, that will be the seventy-fifth anniversary of the signing of EO 9066. Will there be more information coming out in 2017 after seventy-five years about, perhaps, the bombing of Pearl Harbor or other, perhaps, military...

RD: I think not. That rule applies to certain kinds of things, largely to various personal kinds of things. For instance, the censuses. We've just now gotten access to the full 1940 census. So you can find out things now about the 1940s that you couldn't find out... I'm not sure the exact, but the census material becomes available, it's statutory. And there are other kinds of statutory limits. That really applies mostly to personal kinds of things. The assumption is various kinds of criminal records. You could assume after seventy-five years, most people who have criminal records, whose criminal records were created seventy-five years ago, those people are pretty well dead. But that's not the crucial kinds... those are mostly not the crucial kinds of documents. That doesn't mean to say that there may not be a document or documents that changed things very completely, but it's certainly not axiomatic that there will be such documents. And there's always stuff that gets lost or mislaid and refound. That's one of the reasons, but that's not the major reason that history is "a debate without end." It's because historians are influenced by their own history, and by the history that they know. And once you know a certain part of history, you see everything else a little bit differently. So there will be these changes. And we can't even begin to imagine. We can't even begin to imagine what history will look like in 3013, in a thousand years as opposed to a hundred years. We can't begin to imagine.

TI: But as a historian, even though you can't imagine, that doesn't stop you from uncovering information, writing about it, analyzing it, publishing it. When you do your work, do you think in terms of a hundred years, two hundred years, a thousand years, in terms of at least putting the information and ideas out there for these people to look at in the future?

RD: Well, there are occasionally historians who write one good book and then spend the rest of their life trying to defend it, or to make sure that that stays the same. That's bad business. I've written significant narratives about the incarceration in 1970, in the 1980s, in the 1990s. I'm publishing another one in November of this year. It's all written, locked up, I worked on the index this last week. Anyone who sits down and reads these narratives will realize that some things stay exactly the same, while other things are very different. I know more, and I've read more, and I've experienced more. For a long time, one of the things I had to deal with -- and I took a lot of heat from this -- was to raise the question: "can it happen again?" And I've always said it could. Anything that's happened once can happen again. These things can happen to a society... lot of things can't happen again. Your first date, for instance, can never happen again. The event itself hasn't changed, but my own knowledge about the event, and my perception of the event and my perception of history and my perception of the stage on which it has occurred and its relationship to all kinds of other things, has been greatly expanded. I know a hell of a lot more than I knew in 1970. The basic impact of that book is still valid. But by the time I wrote that book and got a reaction to it, it was clear to me that one part of the battle was over. I had gotten attention focused, not on me, but on the event. I knew, once the professional reviews began to come out, and there was general acceptance for what I was saying, I knew then that the incarceration was here to stay. Although not everything that is written in the textbooks that have appeared since then is fully accurate, no textbook... well, when I published Concentration Camps USA, one textbook in general use, one history textbook in the United States in general use mentioned the incarceration. It devoted one long sentence to it. The others did not mention it; it did not exist. World War II existed, there were chapters on the homefront, but it did not exist in history textbooks. That's no longer true. When I gave lectures on this at universities years later, students were coming up and saying, "Professor, did that really happen?" I'd ask them what texts they'd used, and some of them knew the history courses, I said, "Well, it's in there." And they said, "I read the text, I don't remember that." Well, it's a little thing in a big book. In other books, it's more... so it's there. So that had occurred. But there are all kinds of implications that are quite different. And if you look at these things, you can see, if you get a whole series of American history textbooks from the '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, and take a look, you can watch the thing expand, and it related to other kinds of things. Now you'll see discussions of this as a major issue in American civil rights, whereas early histories of the Civil Rights Movement in the '60s and '70s had no places for Asians or Asian Americans or other peoples of color. They're just not there.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.