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TI: So today is Thursday, August 8, 2013. We are in Seattle in the Densho office, and we are doing interview number four with Roger Daniels. On camera is Dana Hoshide, and the interviewer is Tom Ikeda. So, Roger, at the end of the last interview we were talking about the '80s and the redress movement, coram nobis, all the things that happened in in the '80s. And before we move on from there, I wanted to first note that this week is the 25th anniversary of President Reagan signing the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, August 10th, so two days from today. And I just wanted to spend some time discussing the significance of the redress, or the Civil Liberties Act, Reagan signing that. And I thought I was going to try it this way. As a university professor, you've dealt with lots of undergraduate students over time. And I'm curious, if you had a U.S. history undergraduate student, how would you want him or her to answer the question: was this legislation important, and if so, why was it important?

RD: Well, I would hope that even the slower students, or the less interested in history students, would get the point that it was a great deal for the Nikkei community. That's indisputable. It wasn't a perfect deal, but it was a great deal. A deal... if you want to talk about twenty-five year anniversaries, a deal that Harry Kitano and I could have had no conception of when, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the signing of 9066, in other words, in 1967, when he and I put on that program that was the first academic symposium, public symposium on the incarceration, we could have had no notion that in such a relatively short time thereafter, not quite twenty-five years, there would be a thing called redress. We didn't think that was... that wasn't even on the horizon. That wasn't even our thought. We just wanted somebody to pay attention to this and wanted it to become at least a little note in the homefront history of World War II. I would hope even the slow students would understand that significance; the significance for the Nikkei and the fact that, even in a "good war," quote/unquote, there were bad things. I went through the whole essay on what I call "Bad News from the Good War." But I would hope that the better students would understand that this was important to the nation and for the Constitution, and even for other nations. Because if there had been no redress in the United States, as Mr. Kruhlak, whom we interviewed, made clear, the Ukrainian Canadian who was a high ranking civil servant in Canada, and responsible for emulating redress in Canada, which came almost instantaneously, within weeks of American redress. Suddenly, Canadian redress, which had been stonewalled, it wasn't going anywhere, was a done deal. And it didn't even take the Parliament, it was done by the Prime Minister's office, which was legal there. So it had some international implications. And in addition, it has helped to inspire attempts -- none of them really very successful -- in other nations, to get some kind of reconciliation, the most prominent case is South Africa where they've had all these hearings, and it's done some good, but it's not really achieved anything very much. But there are attempts, �and this is necessary. And the whole thing ties in with other things that have happened between 1942 and 2013, such as the genocide in Rwanda. And when books are written, and when lawyers look at these things, as Eric Yamamoto has done in some interesting speculative articles and law reviews, he's a professor of history in the law school at the University of Hawaii.

So this has had international impact, and it has, as we could observe, and today, if we're talking about college students... well, college students today really don't have any notion about what 9/11 was like. But in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, we could see some of the benefits to the nation of redress, because redress brought the whole issue before the American public in a way that had never been done before. So that, on the night of 9/11, all kinds of people, when they heard about various Muslims, quote/unquote "Arabs" being picked up, they said, "Hey, we've done this before, and it wasn't right then, and it's not right now." And that on the night of 9/11, all three television networks called my house in Cincinnati, managed to figure out where I was. And I said yes to the first one and no to the next two because it meant going downtown and this sort of thing, and I wasn't going to run all over Cincinnati in the middle of the night. And so we were on, and then asked questions about this: "Is this going to be like that?" and we couldn't answer the question, but we did that. As a matter of fact, I was interviewed in Cincinnati, and the other person they were interviewing was George Takei, and I don't know where he was. I'm sure it said then, but I wasn't paying that much attention to where he was. He said some very, very good things, and he got more attention than I did. But, again, that's something that would not have happened. So I would hope that the good students, and certainly the graduate students, should see all of these things and perhaps more. Because right now, the fact that there was an incarceration of Japanese Americans back in World War II is part of the general knowledge of the American people, which was not the case during the war and for decades after the war. And it was redress, and the discussion of redress, and the celebration of successful redress, that made this to be part of it. And the cases in the '60s and '70s and even in the early '80s. I talked to lawyers and law professors who'd never heard of Korematsu or Hirabayashi. And today, it's part of the general population.

My wife, who reads a lot of contemporary fiction, was reading a book not too long ago, and the novel was reviewed well in the New York Times, so she got it from the public library, I think that's where she got it from. And it's a book about these three young women in law school, and it goes back and forth, but it opens at a time when one of them is being prepped for being examined by a Senate committee about a judgeship on the Supreme Court. So they talk about what she had to learn, and it was to learn to praise certain decisions and to downplay others: Dred Scott, Korematsu, etcetera. That would not have happened until very, very recently.

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TI: So the redress and coram nobis cases really helped to educate and make the story better known. As you said, it became more common knowledge.

RD: "Better known" is really a little weak. Made it known. Made it generally known, I guess is what we should say, because there were always some people who knew it. Nikkei knew it, although Sansei didn't for a while. And some Nisei didn't know it for a while. But, yes, that was very important, and it continues to be important. Whether it continues to be important or not in a generation or so is something that nobody can answer. But right now, there's no two ways about it. This is still... not at the tip of everyone's tongue, but at the conscious level of their unconscious mind, whatever that means. But it's there somewhere. Not in the front lobe, but somewhere back here, I have no doubt.

TI: Good. Is there anything comparable in U.S. history to the redress movement? What would you compare that with?

RD: Well, it's a little thing like the Emancipation Proclamation. Certainly it's, I think, even more significant.

TI: I'm sorry, redress is more significant?

RD: No, no, the other way around.

TI: Right, okay.

RD: There's not yet a stamp for redress, and right now I'm using Emancipation Proclamation stamps. And, of course, that has stayed important and become more important in the... it's the 150th anniversary this year, isn't it? Yes.

TI: So this is 2013.

RD: 2013.

TI: My math is not working...

RD: Sixty-three plus forty is oh-three plus ten is thirteen. I think that works. Long winded answer to a short question, but it's important. And I think that one of the responsibilities of Densho is to keep it alive.

TI: That's our mission. But going back to the redress, I'm trying to think, so one of the strengths of that would be if others can learn from it, and that similar things happen in the future. Do you see that happening? That's where I grapple with... it's great to study history, to document history, to make it available, but how do you keep it alive in a way that it helps move people to action?

RD: Well, this depends on historians and others who constantly help to shape and reshape the collective conscience of the nation. And this is done in all sorts of ways. And one of the ways we do it is by memorializing and by having anniversaries. And some of the anniversaries seem silly. Quite often we get nonsense in there, I mean, it's one thing to think about the impact of the Emancipation Proclamation, but some people think that having Civil War reenactments of Civil War battles, well, that may be fun and games for some people, but that's not what the Civil War was about. And unfortunately, much of what's written about the Civil War, and much of what's shown on television about the Civil War doesn't really talk about what the Civil War was really about. It was a war for freedom. That's enough. Maybe you want more.

TI: Well, I mean, going back in terms of how we keep the story alive, a question that we ask ourselves at Densho, so we kind of think about the hundredth anniversary of the signing of EO 9066, so that'd be 2042, so that's like thirty years from now. And we ask the question, and as a historian, you can help us think about this. How do you keep alive events that happened a hundred years ago? When I think about my knowledge of history, events that happened a hundred years ago, it's not really on my radar.

RD: Isn't the Civil War on your radar?

TI: So that's one of them.

RD: All right, well, that's it.

TI: But there are just very few.

RD: That's right, that's right. That's why you can get stupid public opinion polls that think Jack Kennedy and Bill Clinton are among the greatest Presidents. Neither one of them are anywhere near the top. But it's very dangerous, though, to sit here in 2013 and try to imagine what's going to be around in 2042, because a lot will depend upon what happens between now and then. Because in 1942 and 1967, if we were having a question, no matter how smart we were, none of us would have imagined in '67 that redress could possibly take place. It was unimaginable, and the circumstances of 2042 are unimaginable. It would depend on the state of the world in part. If we have a nuclear war or a global environmental disaster or a global economic disaster, that will refocus attention on other kinds of things. You can't predict the future.

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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.

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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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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.

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TI: And not only in textbooks, but going back, it happened in your writings, too. You mentioned you have written about the incarceration in a substantive way four times. Starting with Concentration Camps USA, and then the one in the '80s, would that be Asian America?

RD: Oh, yes, there's a long chapter. The subtitle of that book is Chinese and Japanese...

TI: ...in the United States since 1850.

RD: Yes, since 1850.

TI: So you have Asian America, and then would the one in the '90s be Prisoners Without Trial?

RD: Yes.

TI: And then the fourth one is the one that will be published this November.

RD: That's right.

TI: And it's about the Supreme Court cases.

RD: It's called The Japanese American Cases. And then there are smaller versions. And then I wrote... it was almost an accident, a long essay called Words Do Matter, which talks about the different ways in which historians, Japanese Americans, and all kinds of other people have discussed the concentration camps, and which words they have used. And for a long time, and still today, the phrase "American concentration camp" is not something that all historians are willing to write down and put in one place. And a long list of terms: "exclusion," "relocation," not "exile," "ethnic cleansing," which are more appropriate terms. So the language changes, and there are language wars over that. Language is very crucial. If you can control the language used to describe an event, you shape the public parameters of that event. And that's why this whole debate within the Japanese American community, the so-called "power of words," is very important. And, again, that's another thing that has changed very much, and that is the community's consciousness of what it was up to and what happened to it. I wish I had a dollar for every Japanese American who said to me at one time or another, and in one way or another that, "It never occurred to me that I was in a concentration camp. I thought that would happen to other people." So that self-realization was very important. If you control the language of an event, about an event, you shape the way people see that event and these gentler terms are very important. "Segregation" and "apartheid" are two very different terms describing the same kind of process. One is much stronger, much harsher, than the other, and certainly South African segregation, which is apartheid, was harsher than American segregation. But it wasn't that different.

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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 prot�g� 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.

<Begin Segment 8>

TI: But going back to your... and we started this because you moved from the West, spent time with the West Coast, got know the Japanese American community, and then you were off the West Coast in Wyoming, New York, and then Cincinnati. How did that change your writing? How did that change your work, if instead you had stayed at UCLA?

RD: I'm not quite at all sure. I know it did. How it mattered, I don't know, but I think it gave me a different perspective on some aspects of it. I think I was more aware, effectively, of these people than Harry was. Harry really felt, down deep, that those folks were kind of peculiar. That's unfair. But nevertheless, he didn't have a good understanding of them. For instance, one of the things that I loved was that I was closely associated, for almost thirty years, with the Cincinnati Japanese American community. I knew, on a personal basis, large numbers of them, met with them regularly, observed eventually and concluded that one of the things that sociologists assumed was just not true. And that was that exogamous marriage reduced ethnic activism. Actually, I talked at some length to a large number of exogamous married Japanese American couples. In most of the families -- we're talking here ten or twelve families. In most of those families, the Japanese American member, either male or female, did not really have deep roots or deep personal concerns about the Japanese American community. When those couples began to have children or a child, there was an increasing concern in the family about, "What do we need to do for these kids?" And it seemed to me, from the interviews that I had, the discussions that I had, that more often than not, it was the Caucasian partner -- and all the partners were Caucasian -- it was the Caucasian partner who said, "This kid's got to have some..." and I got increasing insights from my experience with Asian American Cincinnatians. One of the most charming is a story that a colleague of mine who was Korean-born and who had two political scientist distinguishments, had two very, very bright daughters who went on to Harvard and such places. But he told me one day, coming back from a visit to Korea, on which for the first time he was accompanied by one of his daughters, who was either a pre-teen or at the low end of the teenage age. And in those days you couldn't fly to Korea; you had to fly to Japan first, or at least that was the rule, or you could go around the other way. And so they had to change in Haneda, and you've been in Haneda?

TI: I have.

RD: It's a mess; it's hectic. And he'd gone to Haneda, from one airport, to a Korean Airline, and the positions of Korean Airlines in Haneda are not, for some reason or another, optimal, easy to get to, etcetera. So he's got a place to go and this sort of thing, and he's tugging, "What's the matter with the bag?" So he bends down, and she whispers into his ear, "Why do all these people have Asian faces?" And that, I think, is a kind of metaphor for what it's like for people to be raised -- because there was no Korean American community there. There were others, but there was no community. But for what it's like for people east of California who grow up in communities where there were not... and I think she intellectually -- he talked to her about this a great deal on that trip, and she understood what was happening. But nevertheless, the shock, the cultural shock of being surrounded by what seemed to be nothing but Asian faces was very disturbing to her. Even though both of her parents were Asian, and she knew this. And they were really Asians.

TI: I've heard that similar story of, again, a Japanese American growing up in a predominately white community, and for whatever reason, or maybe it's more rural on the West Coast, but then being sent to camp and for the first time seeing so many Japanese faces was a shock. You hear that in their interviews. And to complicate it even more was realizing they were all there because of how they looked is another part of that whole complex identity thinking that they had to go through.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 9>

TI: Okay, so Roger, let's get started again on the second part. And I wanted to shift gears and talk more about immigration and your work with immigration history. But as a starting point, why don't we start with the McCarran-Walter Act, which, from a Japanese American perspective, growing up, it was sort of told to me that this was this very important law that was passed that allowed my grandparents to become citizens. And so it was always viewed in a very positive light. It wasn't until much later, as I started reading more about immigration, that, in fact, this was a pretty controversial law that was passed in the early '50s. Can you tell me about that act and what you know about that?

RD: Well, I can tell you a lot about the act, but I can tell you about that particular aspect of the act best, I think, by telling you a story. In 1960 I got married, I finished my dissertation, as you know, my mentor, the historian of Greek immigration Theodore Saloutos, among other things, Greek immigration, was in Germany so I couldn't get my degree. And I had this job working for the Institute of Industrial Relations at UCLA. I learned a lot of things in that year. It was a part time job, I had two other part time jobs. But one day, shortly before the West Virginia primary in the 1960 presidential election took place, a man who worked with the Institute of Industrial Relations, like many people in Industrial Relations had all kinds of political contacts, asked me to come see him, to come to his office. And we got in the office and he closed the door, he says, "This is confidential. Do you know who Paul Ziffren is?" he asked me. And I sort of knew who he was. He was the Southern California boss of Democratic politics. Big boss was Jesse Unruh. Says, "He's got a problem he needs some answers for, and I think you may have some of the answers." And we went into a lot of things, and I won't do that. I had never met Paul Ziffren, and I've still never met him, he's dead now, but we spoke on the telephone.

And he called me up and he said, "This is confidential." He said, "I understand you'll keep it confidential." I said, " Yes, I will, at least for a while." He said, "Jack Kennedy's brother was on the phone with me, and he wanted to know why his brother got such a poor reception from the Japanese American community of Los Angeles." I said, "He did?" He said yes. I said, "Well, they're mostly Republicans, you know." He said, "Yeah, I know that," but he says, "this was different." I said, "Okay." So I got on the telephone and I found out right away what it was. He'd talked to Japanese Americans and he'd trashed the McCarran-Walter Act, which was only two years old at that particular time... no, it was older than that. It was ten years old. "Oh," he said. And there was a long pause, and he said, "You know, his campaign manager, his brother, Robert, is very interested in this. Would it be all right if he talked to you about it?" He said, "Why don't you give me your home phone number and he'll call you." I said okay. I understood what was going on. He was already notorious, but like the emperor of Persia, Robert Kennedy did not like getting bad news. It wasn't a good idea to give him bad news if you could help it, especially if maybe you had something to do with it. So I said okay, and nothing happened for a couple of days and I said, well, he's not going to call me.

And a few days later... and the West Virginia primary was going on, which was a primary in which Kennedy had to win because he had to beat Humphrey in a Protestant state. He'd beaten him in Minnesota, but he'd only carried the Catholic parts of the state, and Humphrey had won the Protestant parts of the state, and most of the country was Protestant, and West Virginia was Protestant, so that was it. And I'm not thinking of anything else. Judith had just gone to bed, and it's midnight, and the phone rings. And I pick it up and it's Robert Kennedy. He introduces himself, says, "Professor, it's a little late, I hope you don't mind." I said, "Yes, it's late, it's midnight." He says, "Well, yes, it's three o'clock here." So he's up at three o'clock in the morning and he's finally getting around to this particular call. So he says, "I think you can tell me." I said, "Yes, it's very simple. Your brother came out, and in good Democratic politics and tradition, he trashed the McCarran-Walter Act. However, there's a little part of the McCarran-Walter Act that even Truman liked." Truman had vetoed it in a brutal message. "And that was it ended the barring of American citizens, including the parents and grandparents of most of the people he was talking to. They've come to think of that as a very important act." "Oh, the dumb sons of bitches," he said. And he wasn't talking about them, he was talking about the people... nobody told him that. "Nobody told me that," and his voice got very... he said, "I'm sorry, Professor, I appreciate this very, very much. And I apologized that I disturbed you." I said, "I was up. You woke up my wife, but that's okay." And he said, "Oh, I'm very sorry about that," etcetera. Anyway, that's the story. Ziffren survived. I don't know what happened to the advance man who let him do that, but at least he knew now.

So the McCarran-Walter Act deserved the veto that it got from Truman, and Truman, in his veto, went so far as to do something I don't think a President ever has done. He apologized to the Issei. It was put right into his message, that he's sorry, that he'd asked for the bar, what it was was a little clause in the 1924 Immigration Act which had just been continued by every other subsequent, or ignored by any subsequent piece of immigration limit done, that barred the naturalization of any "alien ineligible to citizenship." In other words, it didn't mention Japanese, it just said, "alien ineligible to citizenship." When that bill first passed, there were riots in Tokyo. And it was one of the things that helped discredit the very weak, lowercase, democratic political movement in Japan. Most historians feel that it was probably a doomed movement anyway, but this didn't do it any good. And among others, George Kinnon writes that that's an important factor in understanding why Japan was ready to go to war with the United States. So it was important, and since I had written about that in the Politics of Prejudice, I knew all about it and knew what it was like. So it was important. And this was, again, wonderfully typical of American politics in that politicians go out appealing for votes on what they think ethnic prejudices are, and they sometimes run very badly afoul of them. I mean, Republicans are finding that very hard. Do all this stuff about blocking immigration reform, or change, or positive change, and then try to get Mexican American votes, and it doesn't work very well. And it didn't work very well for Kennedy. It's very clear, Kennedy probably would have carried California regardless, but it's very clear that, although California voted slightly for Nixon, and therefore against Kennedy, it's quite clear that Japanese Americans voted in very, very large numbers against Kennedy.

TI: Against Kennedy?

RD: Oh, yes, it's quite clear, quite clear. Hawaiians, for whom the McCarran-Walter Act didn't mean a thing, voted for Kennedy very, very strongly.

TI: Well, it's kind of interesting, just in terms of Japanese American politics, Southern California, as you mentioned, is more Republican, but Honolulu, San Francisco, Seattle, is more Democratic, the Japanese American community.

RD: Well, I'm not sure the Japanese Americans in Seattle... I don't know the demographics of the 1960 election in Washington, so I don't want to say anything about it. But I think the Japanese Americans generally didn't vote, they voted Republican. The few Japanese Americans who were in camp and voted that I know about, three instances, voted for Roosevelt.

TI: Oh, that's interesting.

RD: They had to be people who were already on the registered rolls, it was all but impossible to register in camp if you weren't registered. But if you were registered, and if you wrote and applied for an absentee ballot, you could get one and vote it. And I know of three instances of people who told me, or in one case wrote in a document that they voted for Roosevelt. They voted against Roosevelt, I beg your pardon, and I suspect that most in camp did, but I have no evidence for this. But it's clear that in 1960, most Japanese in Southern California voted, and it's very difficult to isolate Japanese American votes in other settings.

TI: I'm wondering, could you do something just in terms of whether or not they registered Republican versus Democrat?

RD: But you got to know who they are. All you can get in the records is the precinct and the numbers. And in Los Angeles more than anywhere else, it's true a little in San Francisco, but the San Francisco Nihonmachi was broken up very badly, so was it there. But there's nothing comparable to Gardena anywhere else that I know. And I don't know if it's possible for one to isolate and identify Japanese American votes from the available Washington data, so I just don't know.

TI: That's interesting. Mine is more anecdotal.

RD: But it's quite clear that all the prewar people who were active in politics in Seattle, Japanese Americans, were Republicans. There was no room for them. The labor movement was very anti, with the exception of the union for the Red Caps. You know about that, don't you?

TI: Right.

RD: Do you have anything on Willard Townsend?

TI: Not that I recall, no.

RD: He's the Chicago-based president of the Red Caps union. It wasn't called that, but that's what they did. And he was very outspoken in defense of his members there, and the treatment they were getting, which was almost unique in the labor movement. Not quite, but almost unique.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 10>

TI: So let's move on. In 1986, you became involved with Ellis Island in New York, I think it was the Statue of Liberty - Ellis Island Centennial Series.

RD: No, well, that comes afterwards. Let me describe my relationship to immigration history. Working with a distinguished immigration historian, it was natural -- and I taught the immigration history course that he had instituted at UCLA, I taught that. And always taught immigration history as a subcourse, and always spent more time in the general survey course, which I always taught, on immigration than most other people did, for that reason. And the Politics of Prejudice, my first book, is in part a history of Japanese immigrants and what was done against them in California and elsewhere, but mostly in California. So that this was a topic I'd dealt with. Sometime in the 1970s -- I can't date it at this sitting -- the National Park Service came to the Immigration History Society, which is now the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, IEHS, of which I was a member, asking for help in the planning of the museum on Ellis Island. And it was a meeting in Cincinnati, the largest organization of American historians, the Organization of American Historians, OAH, was meeting there, and he came to a meeting at which members of the Immigration History Society, he, a representative of the Park Service who had previously contacted some of the leadership, came, and he spoke to a group of immigration historians, everybody who was at the convention which included, of course, me. And a committee was formed to work with them, and it was chosen from people who did various kinds of immigration history, and it included me. And the immigration history that I did was, of course, Asian American history. And it was my notion that I was interested in the museum, I thought it was a wonderful opportunity. We became an official adjunct of the Park Service and of the government, and participated in the planning of that, in regular meetings that went on for years and years. The committee still exists; I finally resigned from it two or three years ago. I can date that, not right now, but it was since I came here, so it's after 2005. So I was on it for about thirty years, maybe a little more than thirty years. And we had a lot to do. And one of the things I found out, interestingly, was that when Asian American individuals and audiences found out that I was on this Ellis Island thing, even though practically no Asian immigrants came through Ellis Island, they were generally enthusiastic that I was doing so, and seemed very, very interested in it. And that surprised me. I didn't think they'd be interested. It was difficult to get them interested in Angel Island, which most of them had never heard of. But Ellis Island they'd heard of and were interested.

And working on that was a fascinating experience. It involved me in all kinds of things, including one Japanese American experience, which had to do with the exhibition of JANM, Japanese American National Museum, on Ellis Island, which resulted in a splinter group of Jewish Americans in New York going to the newly appointed superintendent, not a Park Service official -- the museum is part of the Park Service -- but the Park Service unit includes Ellis Island and Liberty Island. In other words, it includes the two iconic places in New York Harbor. And they told her that this exhibit, which had the word "concentration camps" in it, was an affront to American Jews and to Holocaust victims, and it had to be changed. And she said, "Okay, I'll do that. I'd better do that." If you know anything about ethnic politics, you'll understand that this would be real pressure on the superintendent. And she was very new and very inexperienced and very unwise, but she passed this on to the Japanese American Museum, which wouldn't do it. They came to me, and I was horrified, and I got on the telephone right away. I'm not sure if Karen Ishizuka sent me an email or a telephone call or wrote me a letter, but I found out about it and got on the phone to my friends in the Park Service, and they were horrified. They didn't know anything about it. This had been done and they didn't know about it. Nobody in the headquarters in Washington knew about it, and their protocol is that superintendents really have charge of their own units and do all sorts of things. And they can get into trouble, but you don't just reverse them right away. There was a movement going on to reverse it. However, other people had complained to other persons, some of whom had a great deal of influence, one of whom happened to be Senator Daniel K. Inouye. The National Park Service is part of the Department of the Interior. The Secretary of the Interior, a man named Bruce Babbitt, was at that time in great political difficulties. There was a scandal about him that turned out to be a phony scandal raised by his Republican opponents, but he was in the fight of his life for his political life and political career and his political office. Washington gossip was at the time that he's going to have to go. At this instance, he gets a hand-delivered letter from Senator Inouye that began, "Dear Bruce," this is from memory, but I have a copy. "I hate to bother you at a time of your personal distress, but," and he described this. And our negotiations, the Park Service's negotiations with the superintendent were immediately superseded because Babbitt just said... because Inouye then brought up the thing, he says, "Stop that nonsense," and it was done. And it's too bad it went that way, but that's the way American politics is. It did get changed, and some positive results came about.

There was a very interesting and fruitful meeting between Japanese Americans and representatives of Jewish American organizations in New York who praised the exhibit, went to it, etcetera. And, of course, later, many, many years later, during The Power of Words, a somewhat more prestigious group of Jewish Americans had protested, tried to put pressure on the JACL not to use the word "concentration camps," because some of these people felt that "concentration camps" belonged to the Jews, which is, of course, not true. The first use of the term as we now understand it today had to do with South Africa and the Boer War and the camps that the British set up for the women and children of the Boers who were fighting, the men were off fighting, and they left the women and children on their farms, and the British grabbed them. If the man was absent, the assumption was he was fighting in the Boer army, which was a guerrilla army, so they put them in camps where there were terrible rates of death and disease. So it was a very awful experience.

TI: And at that point was that when the term was coined, "concentration camp"?

RD: In this usage. I have found a contemporary usage in the United States by searching The New York Times to describe a place where army supplies for the war in Cuba were assembled, lowercase "concentration camp." It was not a title of anything. But so there was at least that usage, and there may have been other usages, but this is the first usage that historians recognize as having to do with incarceration of people who were not criminals or indicted for crimes, but who were there for political reasons. And it was then used in all sorts of places, including Germany long before the Holocaust. The first inhabitants of concentration camps in Germany were primarily political opponents from the left, many of whom were Jewish, but they weren't in there because they were Jewish, they were in there because they were members of the Socialist or the Communist Party.

TI: Going back to the incident on Ellis Island with the exhibit America's Concentration Camps, so after Interior Secretary Babbitt said, "You know what, we're not going to change it, we're going to use the same term," did the Jewish organizations know that that decision had been made? Because my understanding was that there was good faith negotiations between JANM and the Jewish organizations to come up with a solution, a compromise, which included a description of the term "concentration camps."

RD: That all happened after the deed was done. And I think if you read Karen's book, I don't remember that she refers to the letter. She knew about it, because I told her, but her book was Lost and Found, if you look at that with some care -- I'm sure you will -- you'll see her description. No, that happened after the fact. That happened after this thing was reinstated, and after there was, in fact, an exhibit, and these people went to the exhibit together or as a group, they were there at the opening, so they saw the exhibit, and then had this agreement which some of their successors had forgotten about.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 11>

TI: So talk about also the book Asian Americans and Asian America. Or, first, Asian Americans, because this is something you did with Harry? So 1987 you have Asian Americans: The Emerging Minorities.

RD: Oh, yes. There's another book, it's very complicated, called Asian America that's about Chinese and Japanese in the United States. This is a series, our first book that Harry and I wrote together. We wrote three different books together. Well, I wasn't an author of the third, I was an editor. The first was a book that we put together about racism in California, and Prentice Hall renamed it on their own and told us about it. "We'll call it American Racism." "What do you mean? We're not talking about America, we're talking about California here." He said, "Listen. California's in America, and we want to sell a lot of books, and this is the way to sell a lot of books." And they were absolutely right. This book sold a large number of copies, very profitable. There was one course...

TI: In Alaska you mentioned.

RD: At a junior college in Anchorage, Alaska, where it was the required book for several years for a course that included, all students had to take. And Prentice Hall didn't know that that course would be, but they knew that a book called Racism in California could only get adoptions in California, and a book called American Racism, at which time there weren't any books that were called American Racism. That wasn't something that was talked about very much. So they were smart. It was intellectually dishonest, but commercially very profitable. So this was another book for Prentice Hall, eventually that book became out of date, and this book -- and it went through several editions, three different editions, I think we had to keep updating it -- but this was about all Asian Americans. This was really about Asian Americans, and there were individual chapters on law, and then on each of the major ethnic groups, and it kept expanding as people came into the country in very, very large numbers, and very few of the postwar immigrants, of course, were from Japan, and Japanese Americans went from being the most numerous Asian American minority to be something like the seventh or eighth largest. And most of the others had more than a million, and the most numerous were Chinese, Asian Indians, Vietnamese, Koreans. All of these groups had more than a million people.

TI: And also Filipinos.

RD: Yes, how could I forget Filipinos? And Filipinos, who, unlike the others, had been in California and were treated, Filipinos were treated in our first book, the American Racism book. There was a section about them. That was unique; it was the first book that ever talked about that. And those were very profitable books as well.

TI: And this is the Asian Americans series?

RD: Yes. The other book was, since I mentioned it, was the book that Harry, Mitch Maki, and a women whose name is... you've got the list. Achieving the Impossible Dream, it's a history of redress.

TI: Here it is. Megan Berthold.

RD: Berthold.

TI: Yes, so Mitch Maki, Harry Kitano and Megan Berthold. Now why did you name your books so similarly? Asian Americans: Emerging Minorities, and then a year later Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States Since 1850. Seems like there would be confusion between the two.

RD: They're very, very different books. That was a large book published by a university press, it had a distinct subtitle which was used with it. Gary Okihiro, for instance, thought it was a terrible title. He didn't like the title at all. But I used it, and I justified it because for the period that that book covers, the communities were led and looked to the country of origin as a source of support and influence. And as Frank Miyamoto said years and years ago about the community -- he was talking about Seattle but it was everywhere -- if there was a Japanese consulate, the Japanese consul was the most prominent person of any Japanese American gathering. So this is to reflect that particular period. We'd never use that today. And they were, in many sense, many leaders were still trying to create a community model on their perception of what had been and what was taking place in Asia.

TI: And so what was Professor Okihiro's criticism of the title?

RD: He thought it was awful.

TI: Why?

RD: You know, you don't go around asking why.

TI: So I'll need to interview Gary, I guess, and ask him.

RD: No, I assume he still thinks so. I think he thinks it denigrates, and it wasn't a denial when you read it, that Japanese Americans were Americans. I've never denied that, Chinese Americans were Americans. But they have a very different place in American life than other immigrant groups, particularly they and nobody else, except those other minor Asian groups, at least minor in number, they and nobody else were "aliens ineligible for citizenship." That was a category that only they fit in, and something that the McCarran-Walter Act ended.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.