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TI: As you were talking I was thinking about the span of time that you've written these books, and in going back to something you said in terms of a person writes from where he or she stands. When you wrote the first book, Concentration Camps USA, that was right after time spent on the West Coast at UCLA, and then the next two books were written while you were based primarily in Cincinnati, off the West Coast, and wanted to ask you, did that make a difference, being on the West Coast versus off the West Coast and writing about the incarceration?

RD: Yes. Well, you really jumped a bit. I don't get to Cincinnati until 1976. Concentration Camps was partially researched while I was on the West Coast. What was eventually the final research and most of the final writing -- I mean there were segments that were done -- was done in Wyoming, a state that contained a concentration camp, at a university where the records of that particular concentration camp, or some of them, were happily collected. So that's very important, and I'm sure that my awareness of the Japanese American experience... well, let's get down to the basic thing. Although I had always intended, or I'd intended for a long time, to write something about the incarceration of Japanese Americans, as soon as I began to decide to be a historian, sometime in the early 1950s, but I never would have written the first book that I wrote on Japanese Americans, dealing with Japanese Americans, the Politics of Prejudice was my dissertation, which was done in California. And it was in California for the first time that I began to have contacts with Japanese Americans and I began talking regularly to Japanese Americans. I figured out some years ago that I had actually interviewed, in one way or another, not with a setup like this, not with records, and I never took notes while I talked to people, always did it later, but that I had talked to a thousand persons who had actually been in the camps. And more recently I calculated that it must be two thousand now, and there's nobody left to talk to. And two thousand of 120,000 is a little sliver. But when you consider the populations that public opinion polls are based on, it's a universe. And my interviews, with one or two exceptions, are with people who can be interviewed in English. So that cut out one element. But I spoke to Issei, Nisei, and Kibei, although overwhelmingly with Issei who were not Kibei. So I had that basis. But spending most of the rest of my life between 1968 and 2005, with only occasional visits to the West Coast, were important. That I was somewhere else looking at the West Coast from afar. But at the same time, I was writing books and editions of books with Harry Kitano all the time, which kept me in touch with a very important observer of the West Coast. Then with his protégé Mike Maki.

TI: Mitch Maki.

RD: Mitch Maki, yes. And I had other connections. I came to know Clifford Uyeda, very, very different, of course, who was the rare JACL leader who had never been near a camp during the war. Was in New Orleans most of the time, in medical school, which was a good place to be. So all of that was important. And the Nisei population and the ethnic population changed, the move away from the West Coast by a growingly significant number of people, a minority of a minority, but that was it. And what I don't know nearly enough about -- I've only been there twice -- is the Hawaiian community. That's a big hunk of Japanese Americans who are not usually included in the portraits of Japanese America. But it's a part of Japanese America. So it's complicated, but it's useful to have, for me, to have had both of those perspectives at different times in my life, and to be aware of the dual kinds of perspectives. I think, for instance, my friend Bill Hosokawa's work would have been a lot different if he'd gone back to the West Coast after camp instead of being based for the rest of his life, most of the rest of his life, in Denver. That's very different. The impact of the east of California minority of Japanese Americans is an increasing phenomenon, and interesting, and has not been adequate analyzed. My student, Alan Austin, sort of pioneered this, Greg Robinson has written about this and will surely write more about this. But it's terra incognita in terms of most surveys of the Japanese American population. Because what passes for description of the Japanese American population is really urban West Coast. But that's incomplete.

TI: And how would you characterize that perspective? I'm an urban West Coast Japanese American, so I'm sort of immersed in what I see oftentimes is... I mean, there's always maybe an urgency of more day-to-day concern about how things are maybe shifting or not happening in the community. I'm curious what that other perspective is.

RD: Well, we don't really know what it is. But it's folks, most of whose daily contacts are with people who are hakujins. They live in a very different world and have very different psyches. Some of them are highly conscious of who they are and where they come from. Nevertheless, their lives are very different kinds of lives. They have to be. And we need to know more about those lives. It's very complicated. And then there's the whole question of what Canadian Japanese call, Japanese Canadians call Shin Issei, who are statistically more significant in Canada because it's a small population. Probably have about the same number of postwar Japanese immigrants than the United States, but impacting on a much smaller Nikkei community. So they're more conscious of this, but that's an element we just don't deal with. And it's something that Densho might really want to take a more active and aggressive interest in. I know you do outreach, you want to raise money. How many interviews do you have?

TI: We have about 750 in our archive. And we actually do have quite a bit off the West Coast, that we have traveled to places like Minneapolis, Denver, Salt Lake City.

RD: How many... 750 what?

TI: Video recorded interviews.

RD: With everybody?

TI: With everybody.

RD: Including at least one hakujin?

TI: Yes. Actually quite a few.

RD: Okay. How many of east of Californians?

TI: Dana, if you have an estimate... I would say at least ten percent, maybe higher? Maybe fifteen percent? So around a hundred.

RD: Are you really talking about east of California people, or people who moved? An east of California person, a real east of California person is a person who's never lived on the West Coast or Hawaii.

TI: Right. So maybe for those who have actually grown up east of California, I would say it would be more on the order of maybe thirty to fifty would be my estimate. So with the other hundred being people who grew up on the West Coast and then relocated afterward.

RD: Could you search and find those in the Densho archive?

TI: Yes, we could find those.

RD: You could. Could I?

TI: Not as easily, but we could run that report in terms of where they were born, so we could quickly look and find people who were born as your term says, east of California. People who grew up in places like Nebraska.

RD: Well, I would think that it was not so much place of birth, but, for instance, a child born in a camp and taken east is really an east of California person, although he might have been born in Minidoka or Manzanar or Tule Lake.

TI: We could find that information out fairly easily. So we have pockets of that.

RD: These are important.

TI: As well as Hawaii, which, as you mentioned, is very different.

RD: Oh, yeah. That's something else again.

TI: And then the perspectives of Japanese Americans who...

RD: I think I have some understand of east of California. I have no understanding, in this kind of gut sense, of Hawaii.

TI: No, I agree that needs to be also documented.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.