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BY: Well, on the subject of -- kind of leaping ahead a little bit  -- but on the subject of interviews, Tom, what were the challenges you faced trying to get all the women you wanted to do oral histories, and how did you tackle or overcome that challenge?

TI: Yeah, so when we first started, we wanted to really focus on what we called the "stories less told," and in particular, we wanted to get the stories of women. And it didn't surprise me, but oftentimes, the women, when we asked them to be interviewed, these are Japanese American women, our elders, a lot of them would tend to be very deferential, saying things like, "My story is not important, you should interview someone else, nothing really happened to me," or things like that. And so it was always harder to get women to do interviews. I think it helped, or it helps a lot that we had a lot of women interviewers, and oftentimes we would have other women approach women about being interviewed, to say that we really wanted to talk about issues like what it was like for you to maybe have a child in camp, these are really important, talking about the medical facilities or things like that, and from a woman's perspective. And I think it was really helpful to have another woman, oftentimes a Japanese American woman, make that ask. And so I think that helped a lot. We had this incredible, our first oral history coordinator, Alice Ito, who did this, and so she really focused on doing that.

BY: How much would you say you employed female interviewers for female subjects?

TI: Well, so we have generally always had someone either on staff or available, women interviewers to do that, and we try to pair them. I tend to specialize in a lot of men, the veterans, and I tend to do a lot of that. Or sometimes I focus more on the redress area where I've done a lot of those interviews, too.

BY: Yeah, I just think of when you come to things like having children and women's health, it seems like it would make a big difference.

TI: And it really does.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2020 Densho. All Rights Reserved.