Densho Digital Repository - Tom Ikeda Interview

Densho Digital Repository
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Tom Ikeda Interview
Narrator: Tom Ikeda
Interviewer: Bob Young
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: February 20, 2020
Densho ID: ddr-densho-1000-484

<Begin Segment 1>

BY: Okay. So I'm just going to begin by saying, for our sake, good morning, Tom. It's February 20, 2020, I'm Bob Young, historian with Legacy Washington. We're interviewing Tom Ikeda, founding director of Densho here in Densho's Seattle office. Tom grew up in Seattle, he's a chemist and engineer by training, he worked at Microsoft as a manager of multimedia before founding Densho in 1996, if I've got that date right.

As a way of setting a little context before diving into more Densho-style questions, Tom, I'd like to ask, did you ever think that, twenty-five years or twenty-four-plus years after starting Densho, you'd be protesting outside Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and having military police yell at you, "What don't you understand? It's English!"?

TI: Wow, good question. No, I had no clue. I mean, especially when I think of the origins of Densho and where I was in my life... I mean, I had recently left Microsoft, thought of myself, back then, more as a technologist. Oh, there's this incredible technology, we can do some community service. And in those twenty-four years, this position, this work, has just transformed me. I know you're kind of like a historian -- and I now call myself a historian -- and that's because it's so much about the stories. And I think, like you, the stories change you. As you listen and hear and connect with people, you can't help but get changed, and the stories change.

And so, in particular, went to Fort Sill, it was about ten years ago when I did an interview in Kona, Hawaii, and there was this elderly man, eighty years old. He was a community leader in Kona, and he told me about his father, who, during World War II, was picked up by the FBI and went to Fort Sill. In Kona, his dad was also a community leader, had three businesses, thirteen children. The community looked up to him to help do things with the Japanese consulate and things like that. And so because of that leadership, the FBI came and said, well, this person is really well-connected, so the FBI picked him up. But the story that stuck with me -- because when you're doing these interviews you just really connect with people -- and you could see this elderly man just starting to get emotional. Because he told this horrendous story about his father, who was so stressed at Fort Sill, this military base where, oh, I can't remember the exact number, but I think it was a couple hundred primarily Japanese immigrants being held, how he just stressed out and sort of lost his mind, and starting climbing a fence yelling, "I need to go home to my family." And as he was climbing the fence, a guard came up and shot his father in the back of the head and killed him. And when this man told me this, I could see how he became this little boy again when he told this story. And it was a story that sort of, I remembered, it's kind of haunting, and then last year, when the Trump administration announced that they were going to open a child refugee camp -- these are children that are being separated from their families on the southern border -- and bringing them to Fort Sill, I, like other Japanese Americans said, "We can't let this happen." So up to that point, I would write about what was going on in the country, I would talk about the similarities between the Japanese American incarceration and what's happening today and speak about it, but that story that I heard changed me to the point when I heard about this place and what they were going to do with children, I just had to be there.

So yeah, I went to this place, protested. We were willing to be arrested if he didn't allow us to speak, and that was, again, the first time where I was clearly, intentionally willing to do civil disobedience to stand up for things. So it was a very powerful -- and you can tell I'm getting emotional now thinking about it, very emotional.

BY: That was really your first instance of civil disobedience?

TI: Yeah, of that type. I would do, in Seattle we'd do protest marches, immigration marches, but to actually say we're going to be on government land, and we're not blocking anything, we're in front of the base, but technically we were on government property, and they could remove us or arrest us. And we said, "We are going to speak out about what's happening, and we will stay there until we finish talking. And if we are arrested, we will be arrested." And so I, along with about five or six other people, had that discussion beforehand that we would do that.

BY: So this has been a journey that's really been transformative for you, hasn't it?

TI: Oh, it really has. And so your first question just sort of really got me present to that in terms of how much I've changed over the years. Or grown or evolved, I'm not sure, maybe it was all there. I think about my roots growing up in the Rainier Valley in the '60s, and there was a lot going on. I think my older brothers saw more of it because they were drafted, had to deal with the Vietnam War issue, and there was a lot of racial unrest in Seattle during that time. And I was a little bit younger, I was aware of it, but not so much in the thick of things.

BY: Okay. Thank you, Tom.

<Begin Segment 2>

BY: I'm going to now step back to some more chronological questions beginning with, what is your full name and date and place of birth?

TI: So my full name is Thomas Kevin Ikeda. I was born in Seattle, I think it was Providence Hospital or Seattle General Hospital. It's one of the local hospitals. And born January 22, 1956.

BY: And who were your parents and what were their vocations at the time of your birth?

TI: So my mom is Mary Kinoshita Ikeda, and my dad is Victor Junichi Ikeda. My dad was... when I was born, he was an administrator with the Department of Defense at the old Pier 91 complex, and was a procurement officer. And had a career in the federal government, I think eventually the regional administrator for the Department of Labor for the Seattle Northwest Region. My mother, after working in a clerical position when she was younger, once she got married and started having children, she was a stay-at-home mom. I have four other siblings, so I'm right in the middle where my eldest brother, Dan, is four years older, he's a physician. The next brother, Steve, two years younger than Dan, two years older than I am, ended up working at Boeing for a career. Then I have a younger brother, John, three years younger than I am. He was a mechanical engineer and worked for the FAA. And then the youngest, my sister, who's three years younger than John, Karen, she was an account management consultant.

BY: And I note that your father said that she rose to this important position at Arthur Andersen, but then the Enron debacle sunk Arthur Andersen and I guess set her back professionally for a while.

TI: Right, so she had to switch. She got another great job and did more of the, moving away from the accounting/auditing area and more into management consulting. And so I think that was actually a pretty good move for her.

BY: And do your siblings all live in this area?

TI: No, they're sort of scattered. My eldest brother is in Sacramento, and then my sister splits time between Phoenix and Seattle. And then my other two brothers, one is in Kent and one is in Seattle.

BY: And I'm sorry to say that I don't know about the status of your folks. Are your folks still with us?

TI: Yes, I'm happy to say that they're both living in the house I grew up in, both of them. I just saw them the other day. So my dad's ninety-three, my mom is ninety-two, and they still are taking care of us. But the thing when I mention my siblings and what they did, I think my mom in particular, it's a source of pride that we all not only graduated from high school, but graduated from college and were able to get jobs, so that was something that, it was always something that was really, really important to her.

BY: Was she able to go to college?

TI: No, she didn't, and I think maybe that's why it was so important. That, and having good teeth, those were the two things that she would always remind us of. [Laughs]

BY: That's funny, that theme.

<Begin Segment 3>

BY: And when did your grandparents come to the U.S.?

TI: So they came at different times. Like many Japanese American families, my grandfathers came to the United States first, as laborers. So they came in the... I'm thinking about the dates, about 1908, 1907, both of my grandfathers, and they came as laborers. They both worked in this area, and then they both -- separately, they didn't know each other -- but they went back and married my grandmothers and then came back to the United States. So on my mom's side, Suyekichi Kinoshita, and went back to Japan and married Akino Kinoshita. What was her maiden name? I can't remember offhand her maiden name. And the interesting thing, and I mentioned the date, I'm blanking right now, but they came right before the Gentlemen's Agreement, that this was a treaty signed by the United States and Japan, so that Japan agreed not to send any more laborers to the United States. And in return, the United States wouldn't allow segregated schools in the United States. Because what was happening in California was that there were segregated schools starting to emerge that held Japanese and Chinese, that was segregated from the white students. And San Francisco was planning to do a similar thing, and the Japanese government stepped in and said that that was not something that they wanted. And out of that came a treaty where Japan agreed to stop allowing the immigration of laborers to the United States, and that was called the Gentlemen's Agreement.

BY: I didn't know about that.

TI: Yeah, so it's really fascinating. So it was, in a sense, an immigration ban. That if my grandfathers tried to come like a year later, would have actually been prevented. Then the loophole for my grandmothers was that if you are married to someone who's already a legal resident, then they could then immigrate. And so that's why my grandfathers could go back to Japan, marry there, and have their wives join them. That was also the emergence of the "picture bride" situation where the only way, at that point, a woman could come to the United States was to be married. So men who didn't have as much money would oftentimes get married by proxy in Japan and then their brides, their "picture brides" could then come over to the United States.

BY: And what attracted them to Washington state?

TI: I'm not sure exactly why Washington state. I asked my parents about... on my dad's side, because it was, in particular, as I started doing oral histories and learning about Japanese American families, oftentimes it was the second son or third son who would be the one that would emigrate from Japan to the United States. Because in Japan, if the family had any land, it would often go to the first son. And so when I started looking at my family's history, on my dad's side, his dad was the first son, and he had younger brothers. And so I was really interested. I said, "Dad, this is kind of unusual isn't it? I mean, why did" -- and I call him Jiichan -- "why did Jiichan come to the United States?" Because the family had land in, it was Kagawa-ken on the island of Shikoku, "Why did he come?" And this was a good chance to learn a little Japanese history, that during that time when he came, Japan was really building up their military. And my dad said, essentially, Jiichan came to the United States to avoid the draft, he was a draft dodger, which I thought was pretty amusing, that he did that. So he came because he didn't want to fight for the Japanese military and came to the United States where he... and as a laborer he did lots of different things. When I was young, we took a trip up to the San Juan Islands, and when we went to Friday Harbor, my dad said, "Well, Jiichan and Baachan worked here." There used to be a salmon cannery, and during the summer they would come up here with the family and they would be the cooks for the workers at the salmon cannery. And then during the other times they would manage hotels in the International District of Seattle right now. So there's all these interesting stories.

BY: What did you hear or learn about the racism that your grandparents faced at that time? Because a lot going on then. I think you know the history all too well, and 1921, the Alien Land Law and all that stuff.

TI: Yeah, so there was all these barriers. And so I know it actually more as a historian. I tried to get personal stories about this, but that first generation was a little bit hazy in terms of all the things they did. But one key thing when they were growing up was the inability to own land. And so that was probably the big thing. Because as I look at pictures of my grandparents, I think in particular -- now jumping over to my mom's side -- my grandfather on that side, Suyekichi. For a Japanese immigrant, he had an interesting job. He was the bell captain at the Rainier Club. So before the war, the bellmen were Japanese. And he was the bell captain, and so why that was a pretty good job was that he was able to get jobs for his friends and other people in the community at the Rainier Club. Because I remember seeing pictures of him, and he was very handsome, but very dapper, I mean, wearing suits. And so I'd ask, "What did he do?" and found out that he worked at the Rainier Club. And so I look at these pictures of them, and for a Japanese family, they look pretty prominent. He had six children, and they're all dressed well, they were leasing a house. And I think in that case, if the laws were such that they could own property, they probably would have had a house and things like that, which they never got around to doing.

<Begin Segment 4>

BY: And then at the time that World War II started, your dad's father was running a hotel, is that right?

TI: Right. So it was right on Yesler. I've seen pictures, I think when they put the freeway in, it was demolished, but it was a triangular building that was a hotel that was on Yesler. And so he was running that and so they had to leave that so it's right in the, kind of in the International District. And my dad had two older sisters. So my dad was just starting Broadway High School, which is now where the campus of Seattle Central College is. And he was one of three hundred Japanese American students who one day just disappeared from Broadway High School. I believe, at the time, Japanese American students were a significant portion, I've heard maybe about twenty-five percent of the student body or more was Japanese Americans and my dad was one of them, and they disappeared to go to the Puyallup Assembly Center. And the one thing interesting that I learned later -- my dad was too young so he wasn't graduating -- but the Japanese American students who were actually graduating, the principal actually held a separate graduation ceremony for the Broadway Japanese American students at the Puyallup Assembly Center. The Puyallup Assembly Center still is the fairgrounds for the Western Washington Fair. So that happened. But in talking to my father and mother about this, they were shocked, I mean, they were surprised. They grew up thinking that they were kind of... America was their country, and to be treated like this was surprising. And yet, it wasn't, in some cases, too. Because back then, they always explained this to me, was that they were seen as, the term, like a "second class citizen," that they recognized that certain things, they weren't allowed to do. When you look at just Seattle history, things like the public swimming pool, the Crystal Pool, which ironically is now the site where the Holocaust Center for Humanity is, so it's that same old building, but that used to be the Crystal Pool. Japanese Americans weren't allowed to go swimming there, it was a segregated pool. I talked to my parents, there were theaters that they weren't allowed to go into. I'll take that back, they were allowed to go in, but not through the front door to the orchestra area, they could just go up to the balcony to watch movies or performances. And so, as I learned about that, I never heard these stories growing up, it was much later as I became a historian and started asking these questions, you recognize Seattle and other West Coast cities had their own Jim Crow-like laws against Asians and Asian Americans. I mentioned earlier segregated schools in California, so it was such an eye-opener for me to understand and see that there was so much racism on the West Coast, but directed more to Asian and Asian Americans than to African Americans. And I didn't know those stories growing up, I just never heard about them.

BY: It's kind of an ugly history. I mean, the Chinese laborers were brought and then there was a lot of racism against them and they were excluded by the Chinese Exclusion Act then the Japanese came to fill that need, labor need, and then they were discriminated against. I don't know if you know the... you probably know the story of Takuji Yamashita?

TI: Right from the law school.

BY: And it just hurts when, righting about that, and he argues in front of the state supreme court, saying, a country built upon a foundation like the U.S. should not practice this kind of discrimination, his argument was much more eloquent. To which the state attorney general representing the state mocked his argument, "Tired star spangled oration," for believing in these values. It's kind of stunning. Anyway, so your mom's dad, at the time the war broke out, what was he doing? Was he still at the Rainier Club?

TI: Yes, still at the Rainier Club. And so then it was interesting because what happened was, so at that point, all the bellmen transitioned from being Japanese to African American, and so there was this switchover during the war that happened. And so, coming back, after the war, my grandparents or my grandfather on my mom's side, wasn't able to get his job back or anything like that, so he had to become a gardener.

BY: And one might think that, with that kind of position at the Rainier Club, he would have become friendly with some very influential Seattleites, and nothing, no favors for him, no help?

TI: No. I mean, the one thing that did happen in terms of a big help for the family -- and I'm kind of jumping around here -- the archdiocese of Seattle, so my grandparents on my mom's side, they were raised, they were Catholic. And when they were at Minidoka, their eldest son, so my mom's eldest brother, volunteered for the 442nd, and he was killed in action. One of the earlier casualties of the 442, so the first memorial service at Minidoka was for my uncle and six other men, one including... I'm blanking on the name, but the courthouse, the name of the courthouse? Nakamura, was also honored at this memorial service. And so it was a large memorial service, and there was a Catholic priest, Father Tibesar there, who knew my parents' family. And after that memorial service, a few months later, the government opened up the West Coast. This was still, the war with Japan was still going on, but there was a Supreme Court decision, the Endo decision, that essentially said that if you're a "loyal American," the government can't keep you in camp. And so with that decision, the government knew they couldn't keep the camps going, so they said, as a first step, this was January 1945, that people can return to the West Coast, and then later on they closed most of the camps during that year. But when I look at the records, and I talked to my mom about this, they were the first family back to Seattle, like, early January. And that was because Father Tibesar, seeing what happened at the memorial service, helped bring the family back to Seattle. Initially, the family worked as a housekeeper and cook for the archbishop in Seattle and helped tend the gardens. My uncle became the personal altar boy for the archbishop and my mom also helped out. So here was an influential organization and person who helped out our family, but it was not so much from the Rainier Club, it was more from the Catholic church.

<Begin Segment 5>

BY: So was Father Tibesar... do you know how to spell that?

TI: Yeah, T-I-B-E-S-A-R.

BY: T-I-B-E-S-A-R, okay. So was he the one who gave the commemorative flag to your parents?

TI: No, that's a good question.

BY: So this is something different. He was there?

TI: He was there. I mean, this was something that I have learned over the years, too. There's this photograph of my grandparents actually accepting the flag, it's a really powerful image because you can see this, it's outdoors, an outdoor memorial service. But the person who actually gave the flag was another Japanese immigrant, that there was no military officials there to give these flags, one of whom became a medal of honor winner. And I think about my grandparents, and I think about how immigrants are viewed today by many people. And you could not ask for -- and this is from kind of an American standpoint -- a hardworking, patriotic couple than my grandparents. I mean, my grandmother... so my uncle, he was at the University of Washington, ROTC student. And when he first was incarcerated at Puyallup and then at Minidoka, after several months of being at Minidoka, the government said, "Okay, we're going to allow Japanese American men to volunteer to the army." And so my uncle was one of the first ones to volunteer. But when he took his physical, he actually failed the physical, there was something going on with the kidneys, and my grandmother, sensing how sad my uncle was, gave him this herbal remedy, and with that he was able to pass the physical, knowing that her son wanted to very much be part of the military. So he joined the famed 442nd, actually the 100th Battalion, which in military service was the elite corps of the 442nd, and was a staff sergeant and was shot and killed.

BY: Excuse me, I don't have anywhere near your understanding, but I think it was one of their first forays, right, in Italy, north of Rome?

TI: Yes.

BY: Because I understand it was one of the first theaters of action, if you will. So, Tom, jumping around as well, when did you first see that photo of your grandparents?

TI: That was the other interesting thing. It might have been out there and I just didn't pay attention to it, but there was a point, and this was years after I had started Densho. And when I first started Densho, my parents were not in favor of me doing this. Again, I mentioned my technology background, I thought, oh, this new personal computer technology would be such a powerful way to capture and share these stories. And my dad actually sat me down and said, "I'm not sure if this is a good idea." And I said, "Dad, what do you mean? These stories are just so important." And he said, "You're going to," and I remember him saying, "you're going to bring up these really difficult stories that are better left untold. It's going to bring up bad memories, it's going to bring up a lot of memories of friction within the community." And my dad's right, I didn't really understand what I was getting into. I thought, I was thinking more like, oh, it's history, we have to collect these stories, we have to preserve them and make them available, we can learn from them. And my dad was really talking about it from the pain and how much people suffered, and didn't want people to suffer again. And so it was kind of with that context my parents were essentially saying, you just really have to be careful about this.

And so it was probably, I'm guessing, about eight or nine years after I had started Densho that my mother, it was just my mom and me at home, and I was just visiting. And she told me that she wanted to show me something, and I said sure, and so she brought out this photo album. And so I thought, oh, so she's sharing her life history, because it was kind of like her personal photo album. And in there was these pictures of her as a chubby little baby, the family, and I said, "Oh, these are wonderful. I've never seen these before." And I learned then that when she was young, like three or four, she went to Japan with her younger brother, and they were vising relatives. And then she told me a story that, at one point, I can't remember, I think it was my grandfather's brother, didn't have any children, and so there was some talk of leaving my mom and her younger brother in Japan with that family so that they would have children and come back. And I think, for some reason she told the story that my grandmother had already gone back to the United States, and my grandfather said, "Well, if I left the children here, I couldn't go back either." [Laughs] But she told me these little stories. And then as they got older, she got older, then there was this gap when the war started.

And there was this photograph of my grandparents or her parents accepting this flag in camp. And I knew what it was because every Memorial Day we would visit the cemetery to do flowers at my mom's brother's grave. And I remember, as a kid, going there, it was at Washelli. Because my parents brought lots of flowers, so it wasn't just for her brother. But she said, I mean, there were all these other Japanese names on these tombstones. There were tombstones for a lot of the men who were killed during World War II. So in some ways, as a kid, it became a game because we'd have this bucket of flowers, and it's like put flowers on the tombstones of other Japanese graves, that we would do that, and there were dozens of them. And so as a kid I kind of knew about this but I didn't really, totally understand. But when I saw that photograph, I knew what it was for. So I said, "Is this for Bako?" That's her brother's name. And she said yes. So, in some ways, I knew she was sharing something that was really important to her, that she had never, to this day, she really can't talk about. Because we have an oral history with my dad, he's a good storyteller, but my mom has always refused to do an oral history, and part of it is she knows that this story will come up. I've got snippets. She was, when her brother died...

BY: She was sixteen?

TI: I'm sorry, what's that?

BY: She was sixteen years old?

TI: Yeah, she was sixteen, and she was the only one with her parents at Minidoka when she found out. And I still don't know really what happened during that day, but I know that my grandparents were just crushed. And so she was there and had to really witness that.

BY: And this just reverberates through your life, because then we get to 2016 and the awful comments about Gold Star parents.

TI: I remember the last presidential election cycle, and it was at the Democratic National Convention, and I saw this speech by Khizr Khan, he's a Gold Star parent. So he and his wife were on the stage talking about their son who was killed in Iraq, and so Khizr Khan is an immigrant in the same way. And I remember seeing that and just thinking of my grandparents and what they had to go through. And so, surprisingly, I reached out to Mr. Khan and explained what happened to my grandparents and Japanese Americans, and just said that if there's anything I can do to help, especially in terms of the targeting of Muslims in America, and he responded right away, and we brought him to Seattle where we did an event at the Seattle Center. There were over a thousand people where he talked about his story, his son. I talked about my grandparents, and part of this, and I think it was important for people to hear, and I mentioned earlier, our country is made up of immigrants. And yet, we treat immigrants so poorly, especially immigrants of color. And they've made such huge sacrifices, and it was an opportunity for us to share that, and to share it in a way that we weren't trying to make people wrong, we just wanted for people to understand the sacrifices and what people have gone through after being treated so poorly. And so that was a very powerful experience. And my daughter is a filmmaker, and when Mr. Khan was in Seattle, she just followed us. So she was there when I picked up Khizr Khan at the airport, and I brought him to just meet my parents, so they could have this quiet moment. So that was really special. And you can tell that this story, it's kind of interesting in terms of the emotions I feel. And it's because you just more understand, as people share what happened, it just opens up all these feelings for me.

BY: Did Mr. Khan and your parents embrace and that kind of...

TI: Well, my parents are a little more formal, so I think they shook hands. But there was this moving moment, and it was for my mother. Because he knows he gets a lot of attention being a Gold Star parent, and in some ways, because of my position, telling the family story, my uncle's life gets attention, and my grandparents. And we were talking about this, and Khizr Khan looked at my mom and said, "No one wants to be a Gold Star parent." And I remember my mom just... tears, and it was really, I think, a powerful moment for her, because I think there was healing for her just to hear that. Because I think so much of her not able to talk about it is dealing with that, those feelings. So it was a really special moment, and I still stay in touch with Mr. Khan, and it's developed into relationships. I mean, when you're able to make these connections, and oftentimes from a place of suffering there's an understanding and compassion that comes from it. I think about the Fort Sill, I talked about earlier, the compassion I felt for this man's son and how much it hurt him, it compels you to recognize the suffering that's happening in detention facilities now, the families. And when you feel that, you're just compelled to do something.

<Begin Segment 6>

BY: Can you, how much more do you know about Uncle Bako? I'm curious to just know more about him.

TI: Yeah, I talked a little bit about his father and how dapper and good looking he was. The same thing, when I look at his pictures, that incredibly good looking, I've talked to people in the community, he was a really good athlete, good student, viewed as a real leader in the community. My parents told me that he had a girlfriend before he went off to the war and they were planning to get married, and so that was another tragedy. And so as I talked to people in the community, they would all just talk about how devastated people were that he was killed, because he was viewed as such a, with so much potential. And so I know, in particular, for my mom's family, how devastating that was, because I think so much was being put on his shoulders as the future of the family. He was at the University of Washington, so he was the first person in the family to go to college, and so to lose him was so hard.

BY: By the way, while we're on the subject of Uncle Bako and the 442nd, because of your knowledge, so describing the 442nd, is it all Nisei, almost all? What is the best way to say that? Because I've seen everything from all Nisei to, Bob in this book saying "mostly," I think?

TI: The 442nd -- and this was, again, the 1940s -- it was a segregated unit. So it was formed to create a Japanese American infantry unit. But having said that, the officers tended to be Caucasian or white. They even had one officer who was a Korean American who was pretty well-known in military history, Colonel Kim. So it wasn't all Japanese-Americans, so oftentimes the officers were white. But generally the infantry was all Japanese American. I don't know, I mean, there were some infantry who were maybe half Japanese and half white and things like that, but in general, you were a Japanese American if you were in the infantry.

BY: I was wondering if the distinction was all the troops, if you will, Japanese American, the officers white, that's why some historians stop short of saying "all-Nisei," okay. And then I've also read different, it's put different ways, but would you say it's the most decorated unit of its size? Is that the preferred term?

TI: Yeah, it's interesting from a historians' standpoint. The question is who said that first and how was it documented. It was actually first said in some military... what's the right word? Like newspapers that said that the 442nd was the most decorated unit for its size and duration of service. And that was based on the number of medals, in particular the number of Purple Hearts, they were nicknamed the "Purple Heart unit" because of just the astounding number of Purple Hearts they received. But what we've been trying to do is find the underlying documentation for the army to have made that statement. We haven't found that yet, but that phrase has been picked up and used. And once -- as a historian, you know this -- once it's been used in several sources, then all of a sudden people say, "Oh, it must be true." We haven't found the underlying documentation for that. So what I tend to say is it's clearly one of the most highly decorated units in military history, but I don't say it is the most until I see the actual numbers.

BY: I know, this history is hard at times, isn't it? [Laughs]

TI: And then when people, especially from a credible source, if they say something that maybe stretches a little bit, it becomes the new truth. And part of what we wanted to do at Densho was to really be a really credible, trustworthy source of information. Because on one side, people might be deniers of what happens, and we want to make sure that we have this record. But then on the other hand, we don't want people to embellish it in ways that say it was worse than it really was, too, we want to be clear about that. So we have pushed back, especially in the area of documentaries or plays or fiction, saying, well, it wasn't like that. It wasn't like a, say, a Nazi concentration camp where someone may portray it that way, so we will push back in that way also.

<Begin Segment 7>

BY: So back to your folks, what can you tell us about their removals and what they left behind, and how distressing it was for them?

TI: I think it was pretty typical. They got rid of almost everything that they could. They left things in trunks at places like... I'm trying to think. So my mom's side, they were with the Catholic church, Maryknoll, so I think they were able to store things with them as they left. But they had to, they were renting, so they just had to leave their homes and do that. So there wasn't much... yeah, so they just got rid of things. And I think, on my mom's side, this was part of Japanese American history, her oldest sister, Hiroko, was the personal secretary to Jimmy Sakamoto. And Jimmy Sakamoto is an interesting figure in history. He was one of the founders of the Japanese American Citizens League, and this was a national Japanese American organization that was formed in the 1930s, and it was made up of... and they were very pro-American. They didn't allow immigrants to join, so you had to be a U.S. citizen, and their focus was to really show Japanese Americans as these really patriotic Americans. And Jimmy Sakamoto was, in Seattle, one of the leaders of this. The JACL took a stance of cooperating with the government when the war started, so Jimmy Sakamoto was part of that. And my mom's oldest sister worked closely with Jimmy Sakamoto. So as you asked that question, so I realized that the family was able to, I think, get help from the JACL in terms of storing some things, too, through my mom's older sister and her connections, because she was able to stay in Seattle a little bit longer than other Japanese Americans to help in the removal process.

But in Japanese American history, especially during this time, this was a very divisive issue that, in particular, the immigrants, my grandfather's generation, were critical of, or some of them were critical of the JACL, thinking that they were collaborating too closely with the government, and that they were, in fact, maybe informing on different people when they shouldn't have been. So there was a lot of friction going on that not only happened in Seattle, but then went into the camps. Because of Jimmy Sakamoto and the strength of the JACL locally, the administration at Puyallup had this group, these Niseis, these U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry, actually do a lot of the administration at the Puyallup camp. And that caused incredible friction to the point where the leadership of that group, rather than going with the rest of them to Minidoka, Idaho, were actually sent to different camps because it was so tense in terms of some of these things.

BY: Yeah, I guess I hadn't realized that. It seems like it's pitting one generation against the other. I hadn't thought about the JACL mission in that way.

TI: Yeah, when you think about -- they met and they decided the best stance was to cooperate as much as possible to show the United States that we were, Japanese Americans were loyal, and so there wasn't... and they actually suppressed resistance against the government. So when, locally, when Gordon Hirabayashi decided to challenge, that was not with the support or blessing of the JACL. In fact, they didn't want those things to happen.

BY: Just excluding their own parents from membership seems tricky to me.

TI: Yeah. So it was... and so these are, going back to my father, when he said, "You don't want to get these stories," because he knew that these tensions were all there. And so there are people who, the JACL, we have people in our interviews calling, well, the nickname for them are the "Jackals," and that they were, or inu, which is "dog" in Japanese, that they were traitors to the community. And some believe to the point where, if they had taken a much stronger stance, that perhaps the removal wouldn't have happened. So there's all these tensions that were happening during this time period.

And later on, I talked about my family, my mom's brother who volunteered and fought in the 442, there was incredible tension in terms of men who believed strongly that they're under duress, they're being incarcerated, if they said, "Let our families and community free and we will fight for this country, but by what the government has done to us, we're resisters of conscience." And when they did that, it caused incredible friction in the family, and it even exists today, these divisions that happened. Because on the one side, the JACL felt, well, these resisters, by doing so, they're jeopardizing the whole community by taking this stance, that it's going to make it harder for the community by doing this. That by the actions of the 442 and our showing of patriotism, we will eventually have to go back into the community, having that as our story will make it much better. Whereas the resisters are saying, "No, we're Americans, we have to stand up for our rights. That's the best thing for our community, for us as individuals, and the country." So that was their stance, and it really became a very divisive thing.

BY: And your family embodies that in some ways. I'm trying to remember, your father-in-law's reason for resisting, I just read about it and it's escaped me.

TI: Yeah, so my wife's father, Frank Yamasaki -- and he's one of the reasons why I decided to actually start Densho. Because when I was dating my wife, now thirty-seven years ago, I remember just sitting down with him at the kitchen table. And I had read about the draft resisters, but this was the first opportunity where I was just sitting across from him over a couple bottles of wine, and he just opened up and told me what happened. And I just remember thinking, oh my gosh, I didn't know this. And it's so important for me to hear this, because I remember when I was in high school, and this was after the Vietnam War, the messiness, and I was very anti-war, having a conversation with my dad, who was a World War II vet, he eventually was drafted and joined the army. And I said, "So, Dad, why didn't you do that? Why didn't you resist?" And he got pretty upset with me. And I remember... and his stance was, "You really don't understand, you don't really know what it was like back then and what we had to deal with." And so I knew that story, so when I met my father-in-law and he talked about it, and just sensing to his core that what was happening to the community was wrong, that no one did anything wrong, and then to come into the camps and draft them to fight. At a time when the sense, the rumors, and actuality, it's probably true, the 442 was almost viewed as a suicide mission, that the casualties were so high that they were being viewed as, people thought, as cannon fodder. That they were always given the worst possible tasks to do, and they took heavy casualties, and that was intentional, and that was a way. So these men are saying, "This is just ridiculous, so we have to stand up for our rights." So all this was going on, so I heard this, and remembering, unless we captured these stories, and really sort of these less-told stories, they're going to be lost.

BY: And have your father and father-in-law talked about their differences at the time?

TI: Yeah, we do at family parties, and I will bring it up. I mean, my dad... so he joined the army right at the end of the war, because he was a little bit younger. My father was a really good athlete, and so oftentimes, before the war, he would be on these sports teams where he would be on teams where his teammates were two, three, four, five years older, and he played baseball, basketball, football. And so he kind of hung out with these older boys, generally. And he told me -- and this goes back to why he didn't want me to do the project -- this group, in particular, they're called the OTs, which was this group, and they thought they were pretty hot stuff. But he said of the fourteen, seven of them ended up going, joining the army, and seven of them either resisted or ended up going to Tule Lake. And so there were two distinct camps, and before the war, they were the closest group that he said you could ever imagine. And he watched that decision, having these men make decisions, just split them to a point where, after the war, they wouldn't even talk with each other, and that if they knew someone was going to be at an event, they would avoid it. And he said that it was the saddest thing, that he would watch this, and he had friends in both and so he would often try to get them together, but he said it was impossible. And so he saw the divisiveness, so he could share that with Frank, and Frank could talk about his, so I think there was some discussion and understanding about that.

BY: And what did OT stand for?

TI: Okay, I asked my dad...

BY: Because he's kind of evasive about that, I think.

TI: So the OT stands for "Odorless Turds," because they said they thought they were so good that their, essentially, their shit doesn't stink. And so that was their...

BY: Because I think euphemistically he says it's "Old Timers" or something like that.

<Begin Segment 8>

BY: So, Tom, you were ten, about ten when the war ended? No, I'm sorry, you were born about ten years after the war. So was the war and imprisonment discussed much at home? What did your parents tell you about it and what kind of things did they say?

TI: They didn't really hide it, but they didn't really talk about it. I mean, the way they talked about it was when we're out in the community, and they would mention, "Oh, we knew them in camp, and they were in Block 16," or whatever. And so there was this sense that there was something that happened where all these people were together, but it wasn't clear. They never sat us down and said, "So this is what happened to us." So there was just these little tidbits of information. It really wasn't until I was in high school, when there was a teacher in particular, Elaine Wetterauer, and Elaine was a Japanese American, and she was born at the Tule Lake concentration camp in California. And I remember Elaine, one day, giving me a book to read, it was the novel No-No Boy, and she said, "You need to read this." So I was a good student, I read it, and this was a novel about the World War II experience, but more the aftermath from the perspective of a draft resister. And so I learned a lot, and I remember then going back and asking my parents more about what happened. And they, again, answered my questions, but you kind of get a sense, when you ask questions of your parents, when they don't want you to keep going. And so they would answer, but it wasn't like they were that forthcoming with a lot of what was going on. And so I learned a lot at that point in terms of just reading books. And it came out around then, that I think Michi Weglyn's book Years of Infamy came out, that's when I was in college, but I read that. So there was, at this point, sort of more and more literature starting to come out that I could read.

BY: But we think of Franklin as a very fine institution, you were not taught about what white people call internment in high school?

TI: No, so this was not part of our curriculum. Even though, when I was at Franklin, a third of the population was Asian American, of which probably a third of that was Japanese American. So there was a significant Japanese American population, it was not part of the curriculum, other than these little things where the teacher would, like Elaine Wetterauer would give me this book.

BY: Could you spell Elaine's last name? I guess the first name is the traditional spelling?

TI: Yeah, and W-E-T-T-E-R-A-U-E-R. And she was one of, this incredible, incredible teacher.

BY: Now, did I understand right that that was, her class was the one in which your classmates were Lynda Barry, Mark Morris?

TI: Right, right. So she taught the junior level honors language arts class, and this was a class where... and she was this incredible teacher that would challenge us to think and write. And in that class, I graduated in '74, but in there was Kenny Gorelick, the saxophone player Kenny G, Lynda Barry, the writer/cartoonist who, I guess this year just got the MacArthur genius award. Mark Morris, the international choreographer and dancer was in there, kind of the class comedian was John Keister, he would always keep us in stitches. So it was a very interesting, creative group. And it all came out because I remember one exercise that Elaine had us do was we each had to give a presentation in front of the class. And she said, "Pick your topic," but you had to go up there give a ten-minute or fifteen-minute talk. And there you could just see the personalities come out, where I remember distinctly Mark Morris had fencing gear, and he's up there showing us how to fence and all the different moves. It was just a really interesting, fun class.

BY: Just amazing to have a teacher as inspiring as that. So in his oral history, your father doesn't seem to really complain or grieve, kind of makes light of things like the lack of toilets and some other harsh elements about coming back one day and being greeted by men with, soldiers with guns pointed at them. Was that typical, to downplay or minimize the awfulness of the experience?

TI: Yeah, I think it's common. The other thing, too, it's interesting, because the interview was done by a white male National Park Service park ranger, and I think you probably see this, too, I think the interviewer matters a lot in terms of what comes out in the interview. And when I look at the body of work that, and this was done with some of the Manzanar park rangers, I detect a difference in terms of, oftentimes, especially that generation, and how they talked about the experience. I think, if you can imagine, someone who's gone through that kind of experience, talking to a white government official about what happened, I think there was some of that going on. That I think if I were to do the interview or someone else, we would probably capture other things. And that's very interesting in terms of just the whole art of oral histories, and to recognize the role of the interviewer, and to also, in some ways, it's interesting then to -- and I'm sure they're going to do this sometime in the future with artificial intelligence or something, to just look at the body of thousands of interviews we have online and to start maybe seeing some of these patterns, and if there are patterns. Especially if someone has done multiple interviews, and were there differences in how they talked about it, things like that. My dad tends to be pretty upbeat and optimistic, but I think if you ask the right questions, in particular when I talk about how his close-knit group kind of broke up, I'm not sure if that came up in his interview, but that would be something that would be very important to dive into. To set up what it was like before, sort of how they were, and then why his friends made the decisions they did, the impact of it, and the consequences of that. It's incredibly painful to my father.

<Begin Segment 9>

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.

<Begin Segment 10>

BY: One other question, kind of leaping ahead, is, so one aspect of the camps seems to be that Japanese Americans lost self-confidence and became docile, because they were threatened forever with disloyalty. And as somebody in Bob's book says, men were almost "castrated" by the experience. After all you've learned from hundreds of oral histories, how would you describe the impact on the people who were imprisoned?

TI: That's a good question. I think I would liken it to a form of posttraumatic stress. You have this layer of really... we talk a lot about what the government did to Japanese Americans. They had this policy, they targeted them, they removed them from their homes, put them in camps. Something that also has come up in interviews that I find really interesting is that their friends, like their white friends or other organizations like the ACLU, didn't come to their support either. And so it's more than this governmental force did this policy that was unfair and happened to us, it was also that there's a sense of almost abandonment by their communities, too. And, sure, there were people that said, "Oh, this is so bad it happened, but how can we help you do this?" or whatever. And I get that the times are very different from the '40s, but I do have this sense that that's part of this feeling, I mean, this feeling of shame and guilt that we see over and over again of people who have gone through this incarceration. Even though they did nothing wrong, it's like, okay, the government did this to us. The people that are in our communities, they didn't come to support us, we did something wrong, or something's wrong with us. And when we came back, it was never talked about, and there was always this suspicion. So it's kind of living with that, and in that kind of environment, it makes sense to me that you're not going to talk about it, you're going to keep it sort of stuffed. It's all there, there hasn't been this clearing or space for people to really share this. I think it shifted during the redress when the government started having hearings and people came out. I think the apology by Reagan and the Congress was really important because it at least clarified that what happened to Japanese Americans was wrong, and there was an acknowledgement of that, and the payment, the restitution payment. And so it's helped people open up more, and I think Densho came along at the time it did after redress, because people were more willing to talk about it. So I wouldn't go so far as what Bob Shimabukuro says, people may be castrated and stuff like that, I think it's this posttraumatic stress that people had to deal with. And for some, I've seen, especially if they've done an in-depth oral history and shared it with their family, friends and others, I actually see people healing from this. So it is something that, again, reminds me of people who go through posttraumatic stress. That as you share this and start feeling those things, you can actually sort of advance through some of this.

BY: That's interesting, because one thing that's so awful about shame is that it's kind of a self-imposed prison, if you will. But, in a sense, the fact it's self-imposed allows one to be released from it, if you can get to that kind of catharsis that you felt, too.

<Begin Segment 11>

BY: Question about Franklin, Tom, and the fact that it wasn't in the curriculum in school with so many Japanese American students. Do you happen to know what the curricula today has in it about World War II and the Japanese American experience?

TI: It's minor. I mean, I actually have done quite a bit of teacher training, so I remember when one of my sessions, it was a Franklin teacher there, social studies teacher, so I was curious. They said now it's still, maybe a paragraph or something, so it's minor. But today, teachers are using more and more online resources, so they can tailor their curriculum and get more, that was one of his reasons for being there at this teacher training. My sense, I've trained thousands of teachers, in places like Seattle and San Francisco and the major West Coast cities, teachers are fairly aware of what happened and have a sense of what's going on. But it's really interesting, when I move off the West Coast, even to places like Spokane or others, it gets spotty. There are always teachers who are very aware and understand the history, but there are some who are kind of clueless. Or worse than clueless, they actually have a, almost a World War II era perspective of what happened, "But weren't these like prisoner of war camps because they did something wrong?" And they thought the whole Japanese American incarceration was part of the war and that these were prisoners of war and they were fighting against the United States. So things like that, that there could be that kind of misinformation, and these are teachers.

BY: Right. Well, my own ignorance is kind of shocking, and I won like an American history award in high school. [Laughs] I mean, granted, it was, I think, up to the twentieth century, that I won the award for. But I got to this point in my life, a journalist, always interested in current events, and I just knew the experience as "internment," whatever that was. I mean, what is that, "internment?" It was like internships? So anyway, it really fascinates me.

TI: Well, and that's kind of what is exciting for me about Densho, because this one topic that we focus on, the World War II incarceration, and really understanding that, allows us to really, I think, more informed and intelligently make these connections. Whether it's the Muslim travel ban, and when the Supreme Court came out with their rulings, and just mentioned the Korematsu case from the Japanese American cases from World War II. We could actually understand what he was saying, but can dive in deeper in terms of, in some cases, we think Chief Justice Roberts got it wrong in some ways. But we could do it intelligently, like this is what Korematsu said, this is what you're saying, here are the similarities, you're actually not saying this correctly. But to be at that level because we know the topic so well we can add to the conversation about those things. That's the beauty of history, too, because we have the time and resources to actually study something more intently, to help bring more understanding to some of the things we grapple with today. I mean, it was interesting talking to a reporter from San Francisco yesterday, a radio, and California, today, announced that they're apologizing to what happened to Japanese Americans in California, and the reporter wanted to talk to me about this, but he didn't realize that, in 1988, Reagan signed another apology, so he thought this was a brand-new thing and we had waited. And so he asked me that question, so I had to... because I know the history well enough, I said, "Well, first, yes, it's great that California did this, but let me remind your listeners that back in 1988, Congress passed and Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988," and on and on. And the guy said, "I didn't know that." But it's important for people like me to really know the history so we can provide that context, so people have that information.

BY: It was very diplomatic of you, the way you did that.

TI: Yeah, how would you do that?

BY: But I could have been that reporter, easily.

TI: But then that's what we're trying to do. It's not a debate for us, I think of myself more as an educator. And if we can educate people so that they understand these things, so that they can start understanding so that we have issues that come up over and over again. I mean, Washington State, we had the issue last month about the border patrol stopping all people with Iranian backgrounds, even citizens, Iranian Americans, and doing similar things that were done to Japanese Americans. If people really understood what happened to Japanese Americans, and knew that was wrong, they could start making those kind of distinctions. Coronavirus, in terms of how Asian Americans are being targeted. If I go out to a crowded place and start coughing, people start looking at me, I'd say, "I've never been to China," or, "It's not me." It's really interesting how things like race and things play out constantly, and we're constantly trying to teach and learn about this.

<Begin Segment 12>

BY: Back to your youth, so you made The Seattle Times at eleven for winning a punt, pass and kick competition, what was your childhood like? What were your favorite hangouts and activities?

TI: Yeah, so I grew up, up until fifth grade, up on Beacon Hill, and there were a lot of Asian Americans up on Beacon Hill, Beacon Hill Elementary School. Boy, I'm guessing maybe half my class was Asian American. And on my street, I lived on Nineteenth and College, we would have, play street football, and could easily get sort of an eight on eight, and it would almost be all Japanese Americans playing, there was that many kids in my neighborhood. So I grew up in an environment where being Asian American felt like the norm, and I didn't know anything really different. But in sixth grade, our family moved to the Genessee Park area, and there weren't very many Asian Americans then, and so that was a different environment.

Where I won this football contest, the Rainier playfield, I started playing organized football there. And the squad was predominately African American, I think there were two Asian Americans and two white players, and the rest were African Americans. So this was a very different environment for me, and I started learning about, I think more about racism. What was interesting, we were a really good football team. I think we took the city championships two years in a row, and our coach was this older Jewish white man, James Greenfield. I say "older," he probably wasn't that old when he was coaching, he just seemed like an old... but a tremendous coach. But I remember one time when he lost his temper. We were playing a team up north, I think it might be Wedgwood or some team. And we were a stronger team, and I think by halftime we had pretty much won the game. And our coach was putting the second and third stringers in to play, and with our second and third stringers, the other team was maybe as good or many in some cases stronger, so they were starting to make headway. And I remember during that came, sort of towards the end, where one of the second stringers came back and he was in tears, we could all see it. And we said, "What's going on?" He says, "They're calling us the n-word out there." And I remember our coach just getting livid. He was so angry, and I'm not sure if it was the best thing, but he would then, at that point he yelled out and said, "Okay, first stringers gather," so we all, I was on the first team, we'd go there, and he said, "This is what's going on. They're out there calling us the n-word, and that's just not acceptable. So first team, you're back out there, and show them who we are." So we went out there, and of course, the first team's back in, we're bigger, stronger, we're faster, and we just blew right through them, because we were, at that point, angry, too. But it was such an interesting moment for me to experience. Because I wasn't African American, but being part of that and just seeing this and seeing what was going on, it was just a, I remember, a powerful moment. And to have this white, Jewish man so angry, I'm like twelve, thirteen, I was trying to process all that. But then it just opened up this other world that...

BY: Did you feel anger yourself?

TI: Yeah, I did, but it was part of, because you're caught up in it. And I said, oh yeah, this is so wrong, how could they call my friends the n-word? We're going to go out there and show them. So yeah, it was something that started opening my eyes up to some of the things that were going on.

BY: I'm curious, did you, the coach have you shake hands afterwards?

TI: You know, I don't remember that. Back then, I don't think we did that, like we do with kids today where they line up and shake hands. I don't recall that happening. I think I do recall, though, our coach going over and talking to the other coach, and I think there were angry words exchanged.

BY: Wow. So other favorite hangouts? What did you guys do for...

TI: On Beacon Hill, I remember fondly, up on Beacon Hill we called it the Junction. It's right by the, well, they moved it slightly from where the public library was up on Beacon Hill. It's just a couple blocks from Beacon Hill, the old Beacon Hill Elementary School. And one of my old hangouts was there was a drugstore called Owens Drugs that sold comic books. The owners were Japanese Americans, and so it was just kind of a nice place where I didn't have to buy the comic books but I could sit there and read them. [Laughs] And so that was a fun place to go. I was very much a reader when I was a kid, and would hang out a lot at the public library and read comic books. I remember in the summer, at one point, the librarian actually, they had this... it wasn't necessarily a contest, but just a way to show how many books you read over the summer, and you would put this up there. At one point, the librarian was saying, "Did you really read all these books?" Because I would literally take two or three books home, read them in a few days, and come back and say, "Okay, I need more books," because I just loved to read.

BY: What kinds of books?

TI: Oh, I remember like the Danny Dunn series, mysteries, biographies, I loved biographies, I loved to read about people. Science fiction was something else that I...

BY: Do you remember the first book you read?

TI: I mean...

BY: Or at the library?

TI: Not really. Yeah, I can't remember.

<Begin Segment 13>

BY: So you entered Franklin in the fall of 1970, two years after a famous sit-in by black students there, led in part by Larry Gossett. Were you aware of that history, did it impact you in any way?

TI: Yeah, I was aware of it, because I had older brothers, and they were both Franklin High School. And I remember, in particular, my oldest brother Dan was there, he might have been a senior or something when that happened. And he remembered some of the, for him, the violence that was going on during that time, it was sort of a scary time for students. So I was aware of it. I didn't really, at that time, maybe understand the issues of what was going on, but it was a very turbulent time.

BY: Were you political in any way? I mean, you're graduating in '74, so Watergate has happened, the Vietnam War has been roiling the country.

TI: I think I was... because I loved to read, and so I would follow everything. So there were things that I would do that maybe are, I realized were more political. I mean, I talked earlier about my mom being helped by the Catholic church, and so I was raised Catholic. And I remember as a young teen reading more about what the Catholic church was doing in poor countries in South and Central America, and just feeling that all this wealth of the Catholic church and the excesses of Rome and all that, they were taking resources. So I remember telling my mother that I'm leaving the Catholic church, and she was not happy with that. But I said, "How can I support a religion that does this?" So I remember leaving, and so not getting confirmed, which my mother was very upset about, but that was something political. And I was anti-war, Vietnam, and that led to my conversations with my dad about how he could be a veteran, or how could he join the army when they were doing this to Japanese Americans. So I think I probably was. I didn't think I was that much, but...

BY: Being a veteran, was he supportive of the war in Vietnam?

TI: No, he was not actively supportive, I think he was against it. But he would not maybe protest or go against it, recognizing at one point he worked for the Department of Defense, and he still was a government official. He was a high-level regional administrator for the government. But he never was an advocate, I would say.

BY: It's also curious to me, the time that you're in high school, we're watching television and there are shows like All in the Family and The Jeffersons even depicting African American life, but was there a show that depicted Asian American life? I don't remember one. I mean, there was Kung Fu, but...

TI: Yeah, you have (David) Carradine, a white person in yellowface, right?

BY: Even though that show, which I watched, did depict racism in the 19th century, it was odd that there was this Anglo playing the character.

<Begin Segment 14>

BY: So back to that question, Tom, of, at that point in your life, what kind of, if any, racism are you encountering in Seattle?

TI: So something that... so when I graduated from high school, as a freshman went to the University of Washington. And something that became clear to me, part of what we, to your point, the representation of Asian Americans, and recognizing that the University of Washington didn't have courses on Asian American history, or a department. And so I remember as a freshman joining protests about that. And just having this experience of, if it weren't for this teacher giving me the book, novel No-No Boy, I wouldn't have really dived into this and known more. And so why aren't there courses to have in literature, history? And so I remember protesting at the University of Washington for that. So it was more like, at that point, maybe not this explicit racism to hold me down, but there is this racism in terms of not having the stories known by not only Asian American students, but others, it was treated as something not important.

BY: Let's say on a weekend night, whatever you're doing, or even on the basketball court, did you encounter overt racism?

TI: I don't remember anything that... so I did a lot of sports. Yeah, there was little things, taunts. The simplest one is when people would sort of pull their eyes back and do things like that, or when you're at the free throw line, try to, just sort of disrupt you. Yeah, I mean, there were little things when I was younger, the taunt, which, I'm very analytical, they would say, "Ching Chong Chinaman," I said, "I'm not Chinese, I'm Japanese." Things like that. But there were things like that. But I grew up on Beacon Hill and the Rainier Valley where there was a very diverse environment. And I think that made it easier. I mean, if anything, there was sometimes this friendly bantering amongst the races about some things, but it didn't feel that negative. So I didn't have to deal with that much with that.

BY: And when you were in high school, what was most important to you?

TI: I think sports and academics.

BY: Did you play varsity sports?

TI: I was the captain of the swim team, one of the captains of the track team, and then I played football until my junior year, and then I dislocated a shoulder. I was 135-pound running back, my mom said, "You can't play this anymore." She was afraid that, and rightly so, at that point, the linebackers were two hundred pounds plus, and I would just get creamed.

BY: Were you ever concussed?

TI: Not that I remember. I was careful not to put my head down.

BY: What was your event in track?

TI: So I was a sprinter long jumper. And so I think I had the distinction, we had a really famous long jumper, Terry Metcalf, who I think still holds the school record, but I think I was the first one to go over twenty-two feet in the long jump since Terry. But Terry, I think, actually did twenty-five, so he was twenty-four, twenty-five feet, so he was way, way out there.

BY: And I think you've described yourself as an introvert at that point, is that right?

TI: Yeah. Again, I love books, I loved to study, and I think I was known as studious. I think at Franklin I was voted smartest, I think, for the class, you know, the class they always do those votes.

BY: You have a yearbook around somewhere?

TI: Yeah, at home I think I have one.

BY: I might have to hit you up for that.

<Begin Segment 15>

BY: Then you went to the UW and you studied chemistry, correct? And then did you go right to graduate school?

TI: No, so I went chemistry because I was planning to go premed. I remember seeing my oldest brother in med school, and I remember one time he came home for dinner and he fell asleep at the dinner table. He had been up for two nights straight or whatever, and I looked at him and I said, "I don't think I want to do that." [Laughs] And so in addition to my chemistry, I got a chemical engineering degree and worked in the bioengineering field, I did research on developing hemodialyzers, the artificial kidneys, and did that for a couple years. At which point I decided, I tried to decide whether or not to go back and get a graduate degree in either chemical engineering or chemistry, or another plan. And because I didn't know, I decided to actually take a year, year and a half, and I just drove across the country. And my kids describe it, "Dad, you sound like you were homeless." I mean, I literally lived out of my car, just wanted to see the country.

BY: By yourself?

TI: Yeah, by myself, because I'd never been off the West Coast. Totally stressed my parents out, because I had this nice kind of interesting research, engineering position, and I just called them one day and I said, "You know what? I'm going to quit." And they said, "Oh, what are you going to do?" I said, "I don't know." [Laughs] "So, really, what are you going to do?" "I think I'm just going to drive." Because at that point, I really didn't know what I wanted to do.

BY: And that job was here in Seattle?

TI: No, it was in Walnut Creek, California.

BY: Oh, glad I asked.

TI: It was in the Bay Area. And I just wasn't clear. Because in many ways, I felt like there was a very clear path. From high school, I would go to college, and then get a job. And after two years of being in that job, I said, "I don't know if I want that to be the rest of my life," and so that's when I quit, not knowing what was going to happen next.

BY: What do you ascribe that kind of questioning nature to? As opposed to just getting on a path, like many young people do, and saying on a path like your older brother did?

TI: It was just not feeling, kind of, fulfilled, that there was something more to life than that. It was just like this sense of, there has to be more to life than just getting a good job and just doing that, and then finding other things, there must be a larger purpose or something, it was just sort of gnawing at me. And, again, not really knowing what that was. So I literally thought, "So I'll just drive and I'll find it." And I just drove and saw the country.

BY: How far did you go?

TI: Well, so I ended up, eventually I ended up in the Washington, D.C., area. I was fascinated by all the museums and things, so I was there. And when I was there, I actually just did a job interview with NASA at that point, and actually had a job offer. It was kind of in their material science, and probably would have been working on things like the space shuttle, things like that, materials. And so they offered me this job, and I said okay, so I accepted it. And that was when Ronald Reagan was elected president, and one of the first things he did was he put a hiring freeze on the government. And so, literally, I had accepted the offer and was supposed to start in like a month or something. And in that period, Reagan had done the hiring freeze, so at that point they said the job had to be rescinded so I couldn't join. So I ended up coming back to Seattle.

BY: Would that have sent you to where, Houston?

TI: No, they actually had a research facility in Bethesda or someplace in that area that I would have stayed there.

BY: Wow, so you were almost a NASA engineer.

TI: I was almost a NASA engineer, and that would have been a whole different path. At that point I had run out of money and didn't know what I wanted to do. So I decided to go back to graduate school, but rather than in the sciences, I actually decided to do it in business. Because I remember when I was a research engineer, it was a fairly small company, it was called Cordis Dow, it was actually a subsidiary of Dow Chemical, which had developed this hollow fiber membrane technology that we used to make these hemodialyzers. But I remember distinctly, there was a decision the company had to make in terms of direction. And from my perspective it was pretty clear, from a technical reason, that we should do, go down this one path. And the company decided to go the other way, and I just was confounded. And the reason given was, "It's for business reasons." And I just said, oh, there's this powerful thing called business that would make a company do this versus something which I thought was right from the technical, everything I'm trained to say it should be this, and they did something else for business reasons. So I decided, well, I'm going to learn more about this business side. And so I went back and got an MBA to just try to understand that side more.

And so I went back to the University of Washington, got my MBA, and it was that time when I got exposed to personal computers. Because between my first and second year in grad school, I had an internship with IBM. And it was the year that the IBM personal computer came out, and I remember being in a sales office, downtown Seattle, when literally these boxes showed up. And they didn't know what to do with me in this office because they usually had interns that didn't have as much experience or even programming abilities. So these boxes weren't being used, so I just opened them up and I started playing around with the IBM PC and programming, Fortran, and doing some VisiCalc and things like that. Pretty soon I'm showing these guys demonstrations of what this little thing can do. And they're all fascinated because they sell these really big IBM boxes where you'd need teams of programmers to just get something to show up to do something. And here this intern was, like, creating these visual programs and doing things. But then I was just sold on personal computers. I thought, oh my gosh, this is going to change the world, and this was like 1981 when the PC came out.

<Begin Segment 16>

BY: And so I guess that explains, I was going to ask you about, in '85, you were managing director of Compufair, billed as "The Northwest's largest event focused on personal computing."

TI: Yeah, so I started Compufair my second year in graduate school. Because what I found in graduate school was, the first year was pretty interesting because it was all brand-new and I didn't know much about business. I found the second year, it started to become repetitious, that it's like, "Oh, we did this already. Why are we doing this again?" And so a professor allowed me to get credit to, it was an entrepreneurship class, actually get credit to actually start a company called Compufair. And I did this with another student, Al Bennett, and we decided to create the largest personal computer trade show in the Northwest so that people can learn about this new technology that was going to change the world. And so it was an interesting thing where we would invite the hardware manufacturers, software people, and have seminars. So it was fun; I brought people like Timothy Leary to Seattle to talk, Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, I think that was his last public talk that he gave. People from the PC industry, we tried to get Steve Wozniak to come up here from Apple. And it was an exciting time where we saw our role as sharing the knowledge about personal computers and doing these trade shows, so people could come and look at all the new technology, the new software. Paul Brainerd with Aldus back then, desktop publishing was kind of the cool thing. So it was all these new things that I would get involved with, we would kind of show that.

BY: And did that lead directly to Microsoft?

TI: Yeah, it did in the sense that, so I got to know some people at Microsoft through that, and doing computer trade shows in the early '80s was okay because literally you had probably about forty different computer manufacturers, most of them are IBM/PC clones and stuff. But by '84 or so or '83, there was this huge consolidation where most of them when out of business. When you do computer trade shows, it works if you have lots of exhibitors, and so these computer manufacturers would come. But now, we didn't have that, so essentially, there was no money to made. And I think the last show I did, we lost money, and so at that point I realized I could not continue that. And so I just approached Microsoft and said... actually, I saw this trade journal, and in there, Microsoft announced that they're going to do the first international conference on CDROM technology, so the CD discs, but using it as a data disc. And so I realized this was going to open up all these different possibilities, interesting technology. So I called over Microsoft and said, "Hey, do you guys need any help? I can put trade shows on." And they said, "Come in and talk." And they said, "Great, the vice president who announced this, and the show's going to happen in three months, just announced it, and we don't know how we're going to do this. Can you work on this?" So I said, "Yeah." I worked on it, it was twelve dollars an hour or something, it was this really low contract work.

BY: What year was that, Tom?

TI: This was, I want to say '83.

BY: So let's see, if '85 you were managing director of Compufair...

TI: So by then I think I had... well, let me put it this way. So my contract work with Microsoft was under Compufair. So I still was, but I was doing, at that point, not putting so much on computer shows, but I was doing contract work with Microsoft, putting on things like that CDROM conference. And things like when they did PC Excel I did the rollout for that. So I was known at Microsoft during this time as someone who could pull off these sort of technology shows for them. So I did the CDROM conference for three years for them and then did these other marketing rollouts for some of the products. At which point I was offered a job to actually join the multimedia publishing group to actually start developing CDROM titles. Because I told them, "I can do these computer events or trade shows, but I have an engineering degree and I'm actually interested in product development." So I became first the director of operations for the multimedia publishing area. So my trade show experience got me in the door at Microsoft first as a contractor, and then once I was known in the company they offered me a job to actually join in product development.

BY: Do you remember what year you became an employee as opposed to a contractor?

TI: Yeah, it was kind of later. I think it was either '88 or '89 when I became an employee. So I was a contractor for several years before I did that, which was fairly common at Microsoft. They actually got in trouble with the IRS by having so many contractors who were essentially full time on campus, and the only thing differentiating us from an employee was, in our email, there was a C-dash to start off your email address.

BY: And then how did that impact the stock options?

TI: So the stock options, so when they offered me to become an employee, that's when I was granted stock options. Because I actually resisted a little bit because as a contractor doing these sort of, not emergency, but Microsoft was moving so fast then that oftentimes they would need someone to do a big project, their staff was just totally overworked. And so having my skillset, I could be thrown at these kind of little more intricate jobs, and so they were fairly well-paying. And so when they said, "Do you want to become an employee?" I said, "Well, I'm not that interested. I actually like what I'm doing now, it gives me more flexibility." And as part of the recruitment, they offered a stock option package, and that was '88 or '89 I got that.

BY: And you left?

TI: In '92, I think, '91, '92.

BY: So were you a millionaire when you left?

TI: I did, yeah, I did cash in. Although by then, to fully vest your stock options -- and this was something that drove my dad crazy -- you had to be there for five years, and so by the time I left, I was only vested at the two and a half, three year level, and so actually at least half my stock options were unvested when I left. But at that point, the price, the level of Microsoft stock had risen enough so that the stock options, even half of the ones I had, allowed me to, I think, bank not... I wasn't one of these super multimillionaires, but I think it was like about two million.

<Begin Segment 17>

BY: And at what point did you begin a romance with your wife, Sara?

TI: So we've been married thirty-six years. Well, actually, back up earlier. We first met when we were at the University of Washington. So this would be 1975-ish. And we were both freshmen, and actually it was in our sophomore year that we were in the same creative writing, short story class. I think the reason we were both there was there was a well-known Asian American author, N.V.M. Gonzalez, who was kind of visiting the campus and teaching this short story course. So I signed up for it and she did, and so it was there that we first met. But at that point we were involved in different relationships when we first met, but we noticed each other's writing, and I think that's when we were first interested. It was, I think, ten years after that that we met again, and that's when we started dating.

BY: She's written a lovely piece about that that I suspect you've seen. And she said that you asked her to dinner on a two for one coupon.

TI: [Laughs] You found that.

BY: But what impresses me about that story is that at that point, she seems to have recognized your calling as a storyteller it seems. She was smitten by your storytelling at that point as I recall in this thing she wrote.

TI: Yeah, she noticed, she said she noticed my writing when I was an undergraduate. I was, to help pay my way through college, I was a lifeguard at the Medgar Evers swimming pool, and one of the things I enjoyed was actually teaching swimming lessons. And one of my short stories was about these, or a scene I wrote about was the excitement of these kids coming out of the locker room to get their swimming lessons, and how this one young girl in particular, she didn't know how to swim, but she was so exuberant, she just jumped in the water and just started thrashing. And just described that, and Sara just says she was so captivated by how that scene was played out, so she remembered it. And I was embarrassed because it was the type of writing class where you write it and turn it in to the teacher. And I didn't think of myself as a writer, but Professor Gonzalez, it was one of the first classes, he said, "Oh, I'm just going to read some of these," and he read my story, which I was sort of embarrassed about. Because you have all these real writers, English majors, and I'm this chemistry guy here.

BY: Well, I would argue you are a storyteller, and I would argue that she recognized that.

<Begin Segment 18>

BY: So the story of Scott calling you and getting you to meet Steven Spielberg is, I think, pretty well documented, and I don't know how much of our time I want to spend on just that because it is well documented. What I'm curious about is what about that visit has not been conveyed, if anything? What don't we know about that trip of meeting Spielberg? And I think I looked at some photos where it appears that your kids met Spielberg as well.

TI: Right, right.

BY: So how did that happen?

TI: Well, so there was the initial meeting down the Shoah Foundation, and then the Spielberg visit was actually several years later after we had actually developed some technology, and so it was an opportunity to actually show him. Like, one, thank you, because your organization helped get us started with the ideas, but take a look at this. Because rather than using really expensive technology, we did this all on personal computer technology. And I remember him being astonished, because he didn't understand personal computer technology. So I was doing this on a little laptop, and I was talking about streaming video and stuff like that. And he's looking at his people, says, "So how can he do this on this little computer, and what's this streaming video?" So I remember mentioning Rob Glazer, who was at RealNetworks, and so I think he went over there and talked to Rob about streaming video. Because he said, "We're like fiberoptic cable, from point to point, and that's how we do this. What's this internet and streaming video and how do you guys do that? Because it seems like that's the way to go." So that was interesting.

But going back to the first thing I'll share that I don't think I've shared was how skeptical I was about doing this project. That there was a lot of convincing, and part of this was I had a career doing pretty sophisticated technology projects, creating new products and things like this. And walking into community meetings where people really don't understand what's involved in doing these kind of projects, and then wanting, and not understanding what was possible either, and there were a couple things going on. One side, when they said, "We want to capture the story of the Japanese American community," and they're talking about, we'll do some interviews and maybe create a VHS video that we can then duplicate and then give out, was probably the top idea that was being discussed. The second one was, or we can write a book and that would be another way. And I just, having just left Microsoft and knowing all these things, said, oh, there's just so much more that we can do, but then also being somewhat reluctant because you're walking into a situation where people don't understand what's involved and maybe some of the resources and the kind of work or people you would need to do this. And so there was kind of this reluctance on my part to start this, knowing that it was going to be fairly difficult to do. But the trip to the Shoah Foundation was probably done, in talking to people, to recruit me. They knew that if they could somehow show me this, that it would make a difference in my thinking. And so part of it was, in talking to some of the people who were arranging the trip, it wasn't just to learn about what the Shoah Foundation was doing, which was, they wanted to, and Scott Oki could get us into the door and see that, it was really, they felt that it was important for me to see this, to sell me, which it did. Because I looked at this, and the challenge of, okay, we can do this with personal computer technology, we don't need the expensive mainframe technology, the robotic hard drive systems, the fiberoptic cables, we could actually bootstrap this up with personal computer technology and upcoming networks like the internet. So that was... but the thing that I don't really share was how skeptical and reluctant I was at the beginning. And if you talk to some of the people there, they would say the same thing. They said, "We could see that you stood at the back of the room with your folded arms, kind of going, 'Oh, what are these guys doing?'" [Laughs] It's like they're so old-fashioned or backwards in terms of what they were thinking, and I said, "Why would I want to walk through that door," because it would be so hard. So the Shoah trip really was kind of a turning point where I just said, "Okay, I know we can do this. It's going to be hard, but it's worth it."

BY: That's interesting, because it's often depicted as, rather, you go down there and you see it and go, "Wow."

TI: And there was that, but going in, I was literally not on board. And I think Scott, to his credit, was also, he's the master sales guy. He was an executive vice president at Microsoft, heading U.S. sales and marketing, he was good.

BY: Well, it seems like you had a good bit of foresight, and that story about approaching Encyclopedia Britannica, and, of course, the value of the CDROMs to them, and them not getting it, and it just was a painful reminder of what the newspaper industry has become, just not seeing the internet. Has any... so a quick question, so were you thirty-nine or forty when you quit Microsoft, somewhere in that range?

TI: I was thirty-five or thirty-six when I left Microsoft, and I started with Densho when I was thirty-nine.

BY: Okay, so there was a little more of a gap there than I thought.

TI: There was a three-year gap where I played kind of the stay-at-home dad helping, bringing the kids to school, got involved with a lot of youth sports, started doing a lot of coaching during that time period. So there's large segments of, at least in our community, that I'm known more as a coach of youth sports than anything else.

BY: That's cool. Has any Densho donor equaled or approached Scott's initial one million stake?

TI: No, not at this point.

BY: And you started working at Densho for free. When did you start taking a salary?

TI: So it was about ten years in.

BY: And so what are we up to now in terms of the number of visual oral histories, digitized images, annual visits to the public, by the public?

TI: Right, so there's about a thousand oral histories. I think we're a little bit under that, but we're close to a thousand. In terms of other objects like photographs, documents, newspapers, about eighty thousand. I think in terms of hits on our website, I think it's over a million annually.

BY: And how many of the interviews did you conduct personally?

TI: About two hundred fifty.

BY: Two fifty

<Begin Segment 19>

BY: Can you tell us about your children? Names, ages, what they're working at, how they've influenced you?

TI: Sure. So our oldest child is Tani. She's now thirty-three, she's a filmmaker.

BY: An accomplished one.

TI: Yeah, accomplished filmmaker. And she, in many ways, I think of the generations. Tani and I talk about this, when I was in my early thirties and thinking about my parents who were about my age, early sixties. And here I was in this brand new field of technology, which was just totally a new world to my parents. In many ways, when I see Tani and what she does, it feels the same way. In particular, when it comes to social equity issues, she did work with Black Lives Matter and others, with the Women's March. And she's very involved and aware, and her awareness has really been an education for me to learn so much.

BY: She was in Charlottesville, right?

TI: No, she had a cameraperson there, so she wasn't there personally. So she's been on the front lines of a lot of these movements and has a strong awareness of that. Which she shared with me, which I learn a lot, which I think has an impact on the work at Densho. Because when I think of other Japanese American organizations, I think Densho tends to, on a spectrum, be more open. And there's more movement in those areas, and a lot has to do with the awareness we have, not only with staff, but I think my awareness, and a lot of it comes from Tani.

Our other child, Casey, who is thirty-one, so he is now a teacher, teaching history in the high school and middle school level. And he, his undergraduate was in history. He's done quite a few oral histories also in the Japanese American community, and he went to school in San Francisco and worked for seven years down there in the Japanese American community with a nonprofit down there. And recently, or the last couple years, moved back to Seattle and has been teaching. So he is very much, we have these -- as I do with you -- discussions about history and what it means, and what we can learn from our community's experience and how it relates to today. And he gets the opportunity to share that with his students, which I think is so cool.

BY: Is he teaching in public schools?

TI: No, he's teaching with an independent school, and part of that was he doesn't actually have his teacher's certification. He wanted to go into teaching and was planning to actually go to graduate school and get certified and then probably teach in public schools. Casey's a really good athlete, and the sport that he gravitated towards is Ultimate Frisbee, and so he was on the U.S. Worlds team, and has now become a really good coach in terms of the sport. And actually, someone from that school he's teaching at now just observed him on the fields with students, or with youth, and his presence and how he was coaching, and just came up and said, "Are you interested in teaching? We're looking for someone." And Casey, who was thinking, "I'm starting to apply to graduate school, I can actually start teaching and see if this is really what I want to do." So that's what he's doing right now, and I think he's coming up to the point where he has to decide whether or not to get his certification and do this, or do something else.

BY: Yeah, to be certificated, as they say, that awkward word, is a challenge, it really is in this state.

<Begin Segment 20>

BY: And then more generally, and boy, Tom, excuse my pronunciations all along the way. But more generally, so what do the Yonseis -- is that how you say it?

TI: Yeah, Yonsei.

BY: What do they think of Densho?

TI: Oh, I think they're... I mean, again, thinking of my children, they're so appreciative. That if we had not captured the stories that we did, a lot of them would be lost to that generation.

BY: Do you think, have you ever encountered any of their friends or contemporaries who don't get it, don't get Densho? "That's so long ago?"

TI: Not really. What's interesting, and in some ways, the Yonseis get it more than the Niseis and my generation. Because to them, of course, history and this information should be captured and online, it should be digital, it should be searchable, it should be connected. That, yeah, to them, whereas I talk to people, and say, "Oh, yeah, it's so cool, this technology thing," a Yonsei or millennial would say, "Well, why wouldn't you do it that way? I mean, if you don't do it, it's like it's not going to get used." And so what we do and how we do it, I think the younger generations get it much more easily than a baby boomer or someone older.

BY: That's great to hear. I mean, as a historian, I'm always interested in how to, I mean, I just think our main audience should be young people, and feel too often like our main audience is actually quite old, and so how best to reach them? And I'm fascinated by what directions or steps Densho might be taking, other than just being online. So, for instance, I came across a piece that Nina had written about the "5 Badass Japanese American Women," and it just had such a youthful tone to it, it's "dude-centric," and the kind of terms it used is... how much do you want to move in that direction, or is that piece just specific to a blog style?

TI: Well, I mean, strategically, what I view is, of foremost, what's paramount to us at Densho is that we have this really trusted repository of somewhat vetted content that will be around for a long, long time, if not forever. And the reason being is, by doing so and making it really accessible, people like Nina or others, anywhere in in the world, can actually, in some ways, repurpose those stories in ways that we don't even know how they're going to do it. We didn't know about podcasts or blogs or what's emerging, and we're working with some universities, things like machine learning algorithms to analyze our content to look at different connections in terms how we should think about, the example being, you get all this information from me in this interview. That's interesting, but how is it connected to the thousand other stories that is on Densho, or other repositories? And to have a human doing this, it would be impossible, it would take so much time. But then to have a machine do that for you, said, "Oh, it's interesting, Tom's story is actually very similar to these stories and for these reasons." And that you would see that and says, "Oh, that's interesting." Or something that is... I know this is very controversial, facial recognition. I talked about the eighty thousand objects, many of them are historic photographs, right? Many of them are photographs of people, we don't know who they are. But if we are creating this very detailed, comprehensive names registry of every Japanese American who was incarcerated, and we link that to one known photograph of that person, like we know this person looks like this, and then with facial recognition say, well, "Search all the other ones. Is there anywhere else that this person shows up?" And then for it to come back and say, "Oh, here are a dozen other photographs that we think this person is," and then we can take a look at this. "Oh, yeah, here are photographs that are out there that we didn't know that person was there." And so there was, again, this structured information and data that we can start doing in terms of making the archive more interesting.

BY: Yeah, it's kind of a different context than it's normally used, connectivity as well, because the researchers can hopefully with these kinds of algorithms will be able to find all these connected aspects of the research.

<Begin Segment 21>

BY: So you now -- I just wanted to check this, and I think you answered it -- but you would consider yourself by occupation a historian now, correct?

TI: Uh-huh.

BY: So did you ever think, in the 1990s, when you're starting Densho, that its legacy would be to -- back then, I mean, I think you're all about preserving this history before it disappears -- but did you ever think the legacy would be to try and ensure that another U.S. president doesn't exclude or imprison people because of their religion or heritage?

TI: Frankly, I didn't think we'd have, we'd be in that position. I just think of my life up to the '90s, and I felt that there was this gradual progression of things advancing in ways that, equity and issues like that, would continue. And that, yeah, there would be ups and downs, but the thinking would be we would never be talking about large populations being placed in camps because of, primarily because of who they are rather than what they did. And so I am, today, sort of dismayed and disappointed. I mean, I did not think we would be in this position at all, and it is profoundly sad. And I think of, going back to my parents and talking to them, and for them to see what's happening in our country today... they, one, they're not necessarily surprised, but you see, you talked about how many Japanese Americans are maybe, not bitter about the experience, but when they see what's happening in the country today, there is anger about it. Because they know what is happening to families today that they experienced and they just think that is so wrong. So there is profound sadness that we are where we are today as a country.

BY: Do you see Densho existing in perpetuity? Why or why not?

TI: Yeah, I do. I do think so. That's something that I am focused on now in terms of setting up a structure and a foundation in terms of fundraising and finances and management and policies that can really propel Densho into the future. I think that's something that's really important. Because the community trusted in us to collect these stories, and for us to now put this effort, to keep our promise that this will be around forever, would be a failure. And so that's what I'm really focused on. And it's trickier, in many ways, in the digital world, so we have to kind of think this through clearly in terms of different scenarios that could happen. So even if we lose electricity, we still need to have these stories in a format that can survive and to think about all those issues.

BY: And so are there more interviews to be done?

TI: Yeah, we're still doing interviews.

BY: Still doing Nisei?

TI: We are. The story has shifted, we're doing what we call younger Niseis. They may have been, like, eight, nine, ten. But then they have those powerful stories of what it was like coming back with their Issei parents to places like Seattle. Niseis who were more my parents' age, oftentimes they went off to the military or jobs and left the family, and so we're getting these interesting stories of, in many cases, the hardships of the Isseis through these younger Niseis.

<Begin Segment 22>

BY: Do you share in the Sansei attitude, I think Bob mentioned, of this kind of, "What took you so long?" I mean, the thirty years from the camps 'til the rise of the redress movement, did you ever have that feeling?

TI: No. Again, I think back to what I said earlier about the posttraumatic stress. I think it's this evolution in terms of what a community goes through. In many ways, I admire, actually, how the Japanese American community has come through this. I mean, to go through such a traumatic experience, and from that, to be able to organize, speak out, to have something like this redress movement. Historically, it's pretty rare that the U.S. government offers an apology for something that they'd done in the past. Where it's a full-blown apology, where Congress, where they'll have hearings, a commission to look at this, Congress will enact legislation, pass that, and the president will sign it, including payments, is pretty extraordinary. And so for them to have healed enough to do that, and then to... and I think through organizations like Densho, the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles and other places like that, to memorialize this, and to make sure these stories will be preserved and be accessible. And then this next phase that I see the community really waking up to is now really being very thoughtful and strategic about helping other communities. And when I think about it in that way, sure, it takes a long time, but I just see it more clearly in terms of what happens. I think what will be big that will also emerge, when I think about the redress and this process of, how does a community heal? Or how can our country heal? I think of reparations for slavery, and reconciliation that we need to do. We have an example with the Japanese American experience, that we can look at that. A clear wrongdoing by the government, and the harm it happened, having those same people part of this process of redress and reconciliation, to talk about this, for the government to apologize, for the community to memorialize and to learn from it and to connect it with others, we have to do that in other areas, too. And I think if we can share and learn from what Japanese Americans have gone through, and the country can learn from this, I think it's very important. The fact that we have so many now memorials at the sites of where the incarceration happened is part of this healing process. I think about slavery and what's happening in the South, I mean, most of the monuments are about the Confederacy and things like that, nothing about, hardly anything about the victims and what happened to that. So I think there's a lot to be learned. I'm trying to think about this more, because I think that is also a very powerful part of what the Japanese American experience will uncover and grow from.

BY: Do you ever sense that there's a large part of America that seems tired of apologizing? Because there's a lot of apologizing to be done.

TI: I'm sure there is. And more than "tired," I think maybe there's a resistance to go down this process. Which, again, I think is kind of natural in the sense that I think it's human nature. But something that my wife would always say, "What you resist will persist." And until we get through that resistance and start having these conversations -- and I'm not necessarily saying that it has to be reparations for a certain amount or anything, it's just having this open conversation. That until we do that, we're not going to advance. There's always going to be this resistance and fighting. For instance, if the government had not apologized for Japanese Americans, probably the Japanese American community would still be focusing on "righting a wrong." We'd be spending resources and doing this, and angry, and now our focus can be on really trying to help other communities and using our story to do that. I think that would be so valuable for our country to do more of that.

BY: I ask that question in part because I think, it seems to me that a component of the "Make America Great Again" movement is resistance to apologies. And I feel like I've read, once or twice, somebody saying that. Because a part of this kind of enlightenment a number of Americans have experienced is about recognizing some of these horrors and incidents in our pasts and apologizing for it. And I'm just finishing this profile of the longest serving Chief Justice in the state, Gerry Alexander, who led the court in bestowing the posthumous bar membership to Mr. Yamashita. And I think, like you, Justice Alexander is optimistic about the country, more optimistic than I am. And when I asked him about that optimism, he says it's because we have, for him, it's because we have this ability to recognize our mistakes and to try and make amends for them. So I find that tension between the people who don't want to face up to what America too often really was, and the importance of apologies. These kind of two channels I see.

TI: Well, and the Japanese American experience. When you think of redress, there were flaws along the way, but overall, it is this incredible success story that our country went through, and with the community involved, and we can learn from that. So it's not like it's never been done before.

BY: It seems to have been incredibly healing, as difficult as it was.

TI: Yes. And, of course, it wasn't perfect, but overall, I think if we did more of that, it's very powerful. And I'm just coming clear about that, because I think so much of our energy -- and we say this a lot -- is "never again." "Never again is now," I mean, focusing on trying to raise these red flags about, "Oh, it's happening again," which we have to. But this healing process, too, this resistance to forgiveness that stops us so much, if we can address some of that, I think it gets to the root of some of the issues that we have as a country. And until we do, I think we're destined to just keep fighting, and that's not going to be good.

BY: Yeah, I think it's hard for, it seems like it would be hard for a lot of white people to deal with that, I agree. Is it your view that the payments were really, it wasn't the amount that was important, it was more the symbolic gesture and an admission that people were owed something from that experience.

TI: Yeah, I'm of that camp. But I'm glad that there was a payment, because if there wasn't a payment, I think, looking back historically, because, oh, that was nice, but it was probably not, it was just an apology. It's kind of like what California did today, they passed an apology, which is, again, nice and brings attention, but the process that the feds went through in terms of having, again, this commission, spending the resources to really have hearings, to listen, to hire researchers to go through the archives, to do the findings, Personal Justice Denied, and to have findings that show recommendations for the government to apologize for this. And then for Congress to debate it, at the time that was controversial, and to have a conservative Republican president sign it, going through that process, as arduous and difficult as it was, is really, really important. That it meant something, and we have to, forgiveness and reconciliation isn't easy, and I think we have to take it really seriously. But it's healthy. I just think of personal relationships, right? I think all that is healthy to be able to do that. And if you just keep pushing away, ignoring, it just causes more and more tension and separation.

BY: Whose attitudes about expulsion and incarceration, I mean, this history just of the times, wow, blows me away. But whose attitude surprised you more, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Earl Warren's, or Michelle Malkin's and S.I. Hayakawa's?

TI: Huh, that's a good one. What surprises me more? I mean, what disappointed me more was the Earl Warren, FDR. That historically, I have so much admiration and respect for both of those men, and still do, and it's tainted by their views on what to do with Japanese Americans during World War II. Earl Warren has apologized and FDR never really did. Yeah, you would hope that they would have seen more clearly, and so I'm more disappointed with them. I think Michelle Malkin... I think of FDR and Earl Warren being in positions of really deciding and making an impact with their decisions. Someone like a Michelle Malkin, who is this partisan hack, in my mind, was just trying do something, so I don't have much credence in what she had to say.

BY: How about...

TI: S.I. Hayakawa? I don't know enough about him. I don't have a good opinion about S.I. Hayakawa right now, I don't really know enough to say much.

BY: I guess what interests me is he's a man of letters and a deep thinker, and that's one thing that makes his views at the time so surprising to me. But then again, people were all over the place on this issue. You think about J. Edgar Hoover.

TI: Yeah, so someone who we demonized at a point, but he was actually sort of against the mass incarceration.

BY: Yeah, people were all over on this.

<Begin Segment 23>

BY: Tom, what are your current thoughts about the use of the term "concentration camp"?

TI: When I first started the project, I think I was of the opinion that it was probably not a good term, and a lot of it had to do with that use of term with the Nazi concentration camps. I felt that it would be hard to talk to people with that term, and that was twenty-five years ago when I first started. Over time, it gets to what I saw as my role as a historian, and to try to be as clear and accurate as possible. And as I looked at it more and more, what that term meant, and how, if we start using words or avoiding words because of political reasons or others, then it actually increases this layer of confusion. And it just felt that that's what these camps were. That we rounded up people because of who they were. Not for what they did, because Japanese Americans weren't guilty of anything, it was because they were of Japanese ancestry. And two-thirds of them were U.S. citizens, and it wasn't even that, it was just like there was no reason other than their ethnicity. And that, under armed guards, they couldn't leave, so that, to me, very much fit the definition of concentration camps. So I've come to feel very comfortable using that term, and explaining it in terms of when I'm in an educational context, or in public, to differentiate it from the camps that were in Europe. But yet, as I do this, I also talk about there were similarities. I mean, on the exact dates that they were rounding up people in groups of about eight hundred to a thousand in Germany, they were on the same exact day doing this in the United States in places like Santa Monica, Tacoma, and very similar in terms of people taking only what they could carry under armed guard, boarding buses or trains, not really sure where they're going or how long, and there are similarities there. I talk about... and I get this from ADL and the Holocaust Center, the "pyramid of hate," it doesn't go from nothing to genocide, because all these steps, and with that, the Japanese American incarceration is part of that "pyramid of hate" in terms of getting there.

BY: I have no reservations personally about using the term, but it does seem to provoke some people, and I don't want it to take away from the story, to have people stop and do their intellectual exercise about it. I don't know if you found it most successful to use the term but with some kind of qualifying statement about, "No, they weren't death camps, but..."

TI: I do that, and I also talk about how it's problematic to call them "internment camps," because then it gets confused with the Enemy Alien Act, and that was a legal process that you can go through. And yeah, they abused it by not having really good hearings and things like that, but it gets to the point -- and I talk about the history -- the point for me is what the government did was, one, in this body of people, they suspected in that body there were some people that might be dangerous. And they knew that the vast majority of them were not dangerous. Knowing that, they put that whole body into camps. And that... and so if there's a process to really find people that they really think are dangerous, and to have some hearings or due process to figure that out, I'm not opposed to that. It's this idea that because this body, they're saying they can't tell for racial reasons or whatever, and to put all these innocent people through that process in terms of being removed and incarcerated, that's the wrongdoing. And so "internment" is problematic, because if done appropriately and reasonably and done well, that is a process to try to figure things out.

BY: But to the vast, I would argue, to the vast majority of Americans, a, it doesn't even have a meaning, "internment," okay, what is that? And that's where language becomes so important. And you especially have to be, I think, mindful of governments and these kind of euphemisms, "Camp Harmony," for instance. Small question, Tom, so why, today, do I still see 110,000 a bunch of places and 120,000 a bunch of places?

TI: Because that number, it's different for different parts of the process. So in terms of the removal from the West Coast, it's actually 110,000. But when you look at how many people were incarcerated, so these are, there were births in the camp, there were transfers from the Department of Justice camps. So in terms of how many were incarcerated in the camps, it's 120,000. And if you want to talk about including all of the Department of Justice and military camps with the WRA camps, then it's 126,000. So it's within that context of how you do it. And I get it's confusing, but when I talk about it, so I say, "110,000 were removed from their homes into the WRA camps." But when I say how many people were affected by the incarceration, it's 120,000. And then if I include the DOJ camps, it's 126,000.

BY: Oh, okay. And by the way, no Japanese Americans were ever convicted of espionage during World War II. Is that correct?

TI: Well, there's this interesting case that a scholar mentioned to me. There were two Japanese American women who were convicted of aiding prisoners of war, but they were German POWs in, I think, Colorado or some state. And so those are the only two known that I know of.

BY: Huh. Helping German POWs.

TI: Yeah. I guess there was a romantic kind of encounter or something and they ended up helping these two.

BY: That's a fascinating story.

TI: Yeah, I think Eric Muller, scholar, wrote a book or something about that, or an article, so he let me know. So it's not true to say that no Japanese American was ever convicted during that era, but it wasn't to help Japanese, it was German POWs.

<Begin Segment 24>

BY: And why do you say, "History may not always repeat itself, but it often rhymes"?

TI: It's kind of like what you can imagine. So if I say, oh, the Muslim travel ban is just like what happened to Japanese Americans in terms of racial profiling or profiling, people will say, well, it's not the same. You're talking about Japanese Americans, two-thirds U.S. citizens, you're talking about people who are coming in. But the way it rhymes is in terms of when you, first you demonize a group, you have these negative stereotypes, you position them as being dangerous. You then have policies based on the group versus the individual, those are the things that I now say they rhyme versus rather than the same. So it's trying to say there are similarities, and yes, they're not exactly the same. And it's important for us to know the differences and to be able to talk about them, but to also talk about the similarities, and I think "rhyming" is a good way of doing that.

BY: Do you think an overarching lesson in the experience is that elected officials are easily swayed, cowed, or made skittish by hysteria amongst their constituents? Which I think is... which makes Densho and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, all the more important because I think this is a facet of American life. I'm curious if you agree.

TI: Oh, I agree. I mean, when you look at the findings of Personal Justice Denied, when they did redress, the three causes were war hysteria, racial prejudice and a failure of political leadership. And people ask me, so what does political leadership look like, or what could it look like? And actually, I use an example, and I do this intentionally, it's with George W. Bush. And this is told to me by Secretary Norm Mineta when he was Secretary of Transportation. And so two or three days after the terrorist attacks on September 11th, there was a cabinet meeting with top congressional leaders, and there were reports and rumors in the Dearborn, Michigan, area, where there's a large Arab American population, that there were plans to do camps or to ban them, Arab Americans, from flying and all these things. And George W., when he heard that, he said, "Absolutely not." And he turned to Norm and says, "We are not going to do what we did to Norm and Japanese Americans." And later on that week he came out with his "Islam is Peace" talk. I think George W. is problematic in terms of how things kind of worked out, but at that moment, that's an example of political leadership. That you publicly come out and you acknowledge these fears, you have the awareness of what happened. When Norm tells this story, he said part of what's great about this story is a few months before 9/11, he was a guest at Camp David with George W. And Norm talks about how George W. is notorious for being, going to bed early, he doesn't stay up late. But he said one night, George asked Norm, "Tell me about what happened during World War II." And Norm says he actually stayed up pretty late and heard Norm's story. And so when -- and I think that mattered. And so I think, later on, when he said, "No, we're not going to do what we did to Norm and Japanese Americans," it was with this knowledge and awareness. And then took it another step further by having his "Islam is Peace" talk. So that's an example of political leadership that I would love to see, and obviously we don't have right now.

BY: It's hard to even imagine.

TI: I know, I know.

BY: Even just the curiosity. [Laughs]

TI: But I like that story because for people who are, like Republican or conservative, to hear that story and to say, "You know, it's not partisan. This is what we stand for."

BY: Boy, can we get back to the good old days, huh?

TI: I'm not going there. [Laughs]

BY: One thing that surprises me is to learn that these Democratic members of Congress in the state of Washington, Warren Magnuson, "Scoop" Jackson, Mon Wallgren, were, supported removal and incarceration. And then Jackson and Wallgren were even opposed to resettlement when the camps were closed. I'm curious about your thought on this, Tom. Do you think history doesn't care much about prudence and nuance and that it imposes its own kind of ruthless justice as to whether people are on the right side or wrong side of issues?

TI: Whether history does? I think as... how I view it is the power of history is it's not black and white, it does feel nuanced. I mean, earlier in my career I was a chemist, chemical engineer, did a lot of software development, and a lot of that work tends to be more black and white in terms of how things are. I mean, the thing that I...

BY: Binary.

TI: Yeah, binary, exactly. And what I have appreciated about the work I do now in history is, especially when we dive into the stories of people, it's very non-binary. It's very nuanced, it's open to interpretation. And that's good for me because it helps me to question what's right or wrong, or is there a right or wrong. I think you have perspective, and I love kind of the use of historical thinking about, again, issues, and just saying, okay, so who's saying it, what's their perspective, why might they be thinking that or saying that. And it does provide, I think, avenues for people to come together and actually work together, versus a more binary, well, if you think that, then you're this, and there's not that space to come together. Whereas history, through stories, and you can tell the stories from a different perspective, you can kind of understand why things happened and why it progressed to certain things. And at points where it could have been so different, and I think that's the beauty and power of history, and I've come to appreciate and learn that so much. And I've come to learn the importance of the individual, and that's why I am speaking out more and doing more, because you realize that, historically, one person can really make a difference. And to not feel like it is like it's predestined, that things are doing, that it's actually, we know from the stories that something happened. Because it may be serendipitous, or something, but somebody was influenced, and it changed the course of history, and that to me is exciting.

BY: One reason I ask that is because one of the great values of practicing journalism is you learn how complicated stories are, and you may go in thinking they're black and white, but you rarely come out thinking that. And that's what's important about that sense of balance and fairness, talking to multiple people. But when I was reading Born in Seattle, and at the end where you see some of the congressional delegation wavering or agonizing, and some of it may be legitimate handwringing like in the case of Al Swift, it seems, but I'm just cringing when I read Rod Chandler and Don Bonker's responses, and they might be invoking prudence in terms of the financial matters, they've got to worry about the government purse strings, blah, blah, blah. But you're reading it and it becomes rather binary at times, and it's just like, no, you're on the wrong side of history, man, and that's all there is to this. So anyway, I'm sorry for that little bit of editorializing. [Laughs]

<Begin Segment 25>

BY: One question I want to ask, Tom, and I've got about maybe ten more if you think you're up to it, and that is, what can you tell us about the motives of groups organized in Seattle against the return of Japanese Americans to the area? How much of it in your sense was financial, racial, or just ignorance?

TI: That's a good question. I think it's all of those things: ignorance, racism, and financial. I think of... again, I think of the stories, and I think of the difference one person can make. In our community we have the example of Bainbridge Island, where you had Walt Woodward there who was a newspaper publisher, writer, of the Bainbridge Island Review, or the Islander, the Islander, I think they call it. But he made it a point to, when Japanese Americans left Bainbridge Island, to stay in touch with them and have them write in the Bainbridge Island, and so that people wouldn't lose touch and knowing them. And their return was a welcome. And to this day you have these really strong relationships based on that, and I think a lot has to do with the Woodward family.

In contrast, you have Bellevue, where there was a group to, in some ways, block or prevent Japanese Americans or dissuade them from coming back. And you have there, back then, one of the leaders in Bellevue was Miller Freeman. And Miller Freeman was one of the strongest proponents of this anti-Japanese sentiment, for them to be removed. And I think that had a lot of influence in Bellevue, and I can't help but believe some of that was economic. That in 1941, the floating bridge went in that connected Seattle to Bellevue, and whereas previous to that, Bellevue was very difficult to get to and was viewed as a very rural area. With the floating bridge, Bellevue, the property, the value of land there skyrocketed. And prior to World War II, Japanese, primarily through leasing, controlled about forty percent of the land in Bellevue. And to not have them return is an economic boon to people in Bellevue.

BY: And then Mr. Freeman was involved in the real estate business or land development?

TI: Yeah, so Miller Freeman is the grandfather of Kemper Freeman, who is well-known in business, so the Freeman family, they controlled a lot of the land in Bellevue. So that's an example of two communities, other sides of Seattle, very different stories. And such a contrast in terms of, one, very welcoming, a difficult situation, not welcoming, and people profiting from that.

BY: Has anybody really written about that comparison and fleshed that out?

TI: Not that I'm aware of.

<Begin Segment 26>

BY: Wow, that's a great story. So, Tom, today, do you think that, it seems that one of the more profound effects of removal and incarceration was this damage to Nisei confidence. Do you feel that confidence has been recovered on a broad basis?

TI: I think there has been a lot of healing going on, which I think has helped the confidence. We kind of mentioned earlier about, I think the government apology was important for the Niseis to know that. I think prior to that, there was this sense that, well, there must have been really a good reason for that, I mean, the government wouldn't have done this otherwise, and they've just kept it under wraps. And I think the redress process and the commission hearings kind of lifted that cover and said, "No, the government actually misled people and this wasn't needed," and then the government to apologize, I think has allowed them to be able to speak out and have more confidence, whereas before...

BY: Did you see that in your parents?

TI: That's interesting. I didn't really talk to them that much before redress, to have a sense of where they are. But now, I'm mean, my parents now would say, "Of course we were innocent." I'm not sure if they would have said that before the whole redress process, I'm not sure.

BY: Do you still have visceral reactions as, doing archival work and you've seen these newspaper headlines, "Jap" this and "Jap" that?

TI: Yeah, I do. Maybe not as much now than, say, twenty years ago when I first started doing this. But I mean, it helped me understand the Niseis to see this, because when they say things like, "Well, you don't really understand what it was like back then," or, "why we felt like we had to do this." Because I'm seeing through the lens of this sixty-four-year-old baby boomer who lived my life, and thinking, yeah, if something's not working, you stand up, and you just, like, "I have as much right as anyone else." But you look at their world and what they were called publicly and how there were laws that prevented Japanese from coming, so there were immigration bans, and couldn't own land, it was a very different environment, and those things helped do it.

BY: Couldn't become a citizen.

TI: Yeah, yeah, couldn't become citizens.

<Begin Segment 27>

BY: Were you involved in the first Day of Remembrance? I'm guessing not because of your age.

TI: No, I wasn't, but I've interviewed people who were.

BY: Any chance that you recall what you were doing that Thanksgiving, 1978?

TI: Well, '78... so I was in college.

BY: Just graduated.

TI: Yeah, so I was in college. But in some ways, I think, back then I was pretty swamped by just getting through college with my chemistry and chemical engineering degrees. But I was aware of it, but I wasn't involved.

BY: So Densho, in a sense, is standing on the shoulders of the Seattle Evacuation Redress Committee, in my opinion. Can you tell me who among the committee particularly impressed you and is there anyone involved in Seattle redress you think was overlooked or who deserves more credit than they received?

TI: As someone who was there at the beginning of Densho -- and I didn't really realize his involvement with the Seattle redress group -- was Henry Miyatake. And so Henry, I think was really important. And I remember, in particular, when we first started the project, how do we get the support of the community? And someone mentioned, who wasn't as knowledgeable about the history -- they said, well, boy, we should get the national JACL to be kind of a key endorser of Densho because that would unlock, open a lot of doors. And I remember Henry saying, "No." And when he first said that, I thought, oh, that's interesting. I didn't really understand the nuances and all that, but he said, "No, absolutely not, we won't do that," or, "you should not do that." And that actually, and the discussion that ensued, helped us to say, okay, so probably we are going to be unattached to any organization because any organization we attach ourselves to, there's a perspective or baggage or whatever, so we could be this brand new one that's actually viewed as very much Sansei-led and new in that way. So that people will scratch their heads and say, "Well, so who are they aligned with?" And the idea being, we wanted to be able to get stories from the activist groups, the military people, on and on, JACLers, and the anti-JACLers, because that's part of the whole story, so it actually kind of worked that way. So Henry had a key influence, I think more than anyone. And if you ever get a chance, you should see his interview.

BY: Yeah, I'll make a point of that. Because I think he's really revolutionary, I think, well, at least Bob's account. And one thing that just really makes Hayakawa's -- and I think it becomes a proxy for reactionary conservatism -- makes his views so abhorrent, is he tried to ascribe the redress movement to Japanese Americans just wanting to get in on the radical chic of the other groups. And to think that middle-aged Boeing engineers started it.

TI: No, it's a really good story.

BY: Curious to me also, Mike Lowry played a quite important role, it seems. And I'm wondering if you think his role has been discounted in any way because of some of the problems he had as a governor.

TI: I don't think so. That's an interesting... you referenced Bob's book, which looks at it from a Seattle perspective. I've talked with, on a national level, other people who were involved with redress, and what I'm thinking is that Mike Lowry, in his early legislation for redress was important to get things moving. But my sense was, when I look at how it all played out in the parties and what was needed, it probably wasn't connected and strategic with some of the other key pieces. The Seattle group was viewed as a little bit of a renegade, and that was important. I think they really moved the needle in terms of things happening. But they weren't the body that I think, that people coalesced with, that they could make this thing happen, and there needed to be some other forces in play, which I've come to appreciate. I think when I first read Bob's book and interview, I had a sense that the Seattle role was more strategic, including Mike Lowry and what he did. I think it was maybe, could be viewed more as a catalyst versus, than actually as strategic in what happened. So I think his role, if people don't know about him, that's a shame, but I think he's known as the congressman who was the first one to pass legislation and that helped move things forward.

BY: Enthusiastically embraced the cause, yeah. So I can't remember if we closed this loop. But, so has the division around those who joined the army and those who resisted, has that been healed?

TI: It's much better, because, frankly, many people are now no longer with us that had the strongest feelings. I think the ones who felt the strongest ill feelings towards the resisters were a lot of the 442 vets who are generally not with us anymore. And the same thing with the draft resisters who felt most hurt by it and actually angry are no longer with us. And so I think part of the disappearance of that tension is because many of the major players are no longer with us, and if they were still here, it would still be going on because it was that deep.

BY: Because I lost track of some of the formal, was it JACL efforts to mend...

TI: Yeah. So the JACL, they did apologize to the draft resisters, and that must have been over ten years ago. And then more recently they did an apology to what they called the Tule Lake resisters, people who were renunciants, they apologized to them.

BY: If you could recommend just one book about Japanese Americans, what would it be?

TI: Wow.

BY: You can get back to me on that one if you want, Tom.

TI: Yeah, I'll get back to you. That I'm not sure.

BY: But soon, please, because I love to ask people that question, because it's proven so valuable in my experience.

TI: Okay, I'll give that thought. People ask me, yeah, that's a hard one.

BY: It is, but I tell you, that question has done me a lot of good in my life. Have you met any Japanese Americans who have kept mementos such as a coil or strand of barbed wire?

TI: Yeah, or the ones I see oftentimes are these little pins that people made from the shells like at Tule Lake, because that used to be an old seabed and they made these ornamental shells. Or you will come across, and they'll show me some of the furniture that they made in camp from scrap wood that they still have. So those are, I mean, they're kind of practical almost, mementos, but they have things like that.

BY: Because I was reading the New York Times obituary of Aiko, and it was just beautiful, it was like the last line of the obituary was just kind of this, oh, yeah, by the way, she keeps a strand of barbed wire. I was like, wow.

<Begin Segment 28>

BY: This could be the last one. So, where are we with the Supreme Court of the United States and its rulings on curfew, expulsion and incarceration?

TI: Yeah, so that's a good question. So I think you're in particular talking about maybe the Korematsu decision that was 6-3 in favor of the government, and has been known as a decision that, from the moment it was made, I think there was a lot of critique of it. More recently, around the Muslim travel ban.

BY: Because if I've got this right, after Korematsu, Henry, who says at the end of Born in Seattle, that he's disappointed because of just that, he doesn't feel like we've come far enough because it still stands, right?

TI: Yeah. I mean, when people -- and I will differ with people -- they say, well, it was unconstitutional, the mass removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans. "Well, the Supreme Court ruled that it was." And there was the coram nobis cases in the '80s, which vacated the convictions of Fred Korematsu and Hirabayashi and Min Yasui, but they didn't overturn the original ruling.

BY: That's where we get to the Muslim ban.

TI: Yeah, the Muslim ban. What's interesting is Chief Justice Roberts repudiated -- and I say repudiated, he didn't overturn it -- but he said, and I'm paraphrasing, but, "In kind of the annals of history and others, it's clear that this was wrong and justice. And what we're doing here today is not the same thing," is what he essentially said. So he, again, kind of repudiated, but it wasn't a formal overturning of that. The hope was that Justice Kennedy would have ruled the other way and that he would write the majority opinion of the Muslim travel ban, say that it was unconstitutional, and in that, formally overturn Korematsu. That was the hope that we had, and we had a sense that there was a possibility that he might do that, and so there was some work to make that happen. Obviously, it didn't. In fact, Chief Justice Roberts repudiated, I think, misstated his, what Korematsu meant. Because he said whereas Korematsu, he said, was about racial discrimination, of course we're not about racial discrimination. Actually, Korematsu was ruled based on military necessity. Back then they said, no, it's not about race, it was all about military necessity. And what we've come to know, and why it's viewed as such a horrible decision was that military necessity argument was just this really thin veil to hide the racism behind it. And so my stance is that the Muslim travel ban is the same thing. They're talking about national security reasons, but the way it's been written and done, it's really this, again, a thin veil to show our discrimination against Muslims. So I think it's really the same as Korematsu, and I think that's where a lot of legal scholars...

BY: Justice Sotomayor spoke strongly to that.

TI: Yes, she did.

BY: Now what I wonder, Tom, but has the Muslim ban run its course in our courts? That's what I'm still confused about.

TI: I think so.

BY: But that case? Because I've looked at all the Bob Ferguson lawsuits, I can't keep track of it.

TI: I think they could bring up other instances, but that was a pretty strong ruling there that was pretty disappointing.

BY: I'm just fascinated by that because of what he said, "History condemns this." But yet, the Court in its action did not officially, so it remains.

TI: Right. And his argument was, again, for military necessity reasons, that's why we're doing it.

BY: But didn't the commission basically say, nix the military necessity argument?

TI: Exactly.

BY: Which I believe was given to us by our Aberdeen native Karl Bendetsen, correct?

TI: That's right.

BY: Really interesting character, but that's for another time. Tom, that's it for now.

TI: Okay.

BY: I thank you so much.

TI: Oh, this was good, this was fun.

BY: I'm glad you survived all three hours and seventeen minutes of it. I could keep going myself, I'm really jazzed, but I think that's it for now. So I just will have a ton of followups that we can do by email and phone.

TI: Perfect.

<End Segment 28>