<Begin Segment 10>

SF: More probably, when the Japanese community again had these activities in the '20s and perhaps early '30s. Do you think that -- this is jumping way ahead to right after the incarceration. Do you think people became more self conscious or less self conscious about being Japanese and was the self consciousness different from the pre-war days as compared with the trauma of having gone through the incarceration and being so stigmatized by the larger society? And when they came back, how did their feeling about being Japanese, being seen doing Japanese-y kinds of things in a public setting change from the prewar to the postwar era, do you think?

FM: This is a question which I have some difficulty answering because I feel that my own attitudes were not very close to -- my attitude changes were not close to those which occurred in the community. I was not sufficiently tied into the community as such, except as an observer -- an outside observer. I wasn't tied in sufficiently to be able to tell you what I think happened in the community. However, I do have some comments on what you're asking. I think the very important point to be made here is that the Western society -- now American society changed before as against after the war. Let me cite you a personal example that emphasized for me how much the society changed. Before the war, when I was going to the University of Chicago, I had a very good friend living in the International House where I lived who's of black background. A black American named Franklin Edwards. Came on, went on to become a very distinguished professor of sociology at Howard University. And I had again, at the University of Chicago, many Caucasian friends, and then there were two or three black students there at the graduate school, a very small number. But they were generally quite outstanding black people who had been capable of making it to the graduate program in Chicago, which incidentally was rated at that time the outstanding in the country. So it was something to be able to have gotten into this kind of sociology program. Anyway, one day, Franklin Edwards and I went downtown. I guess we were going to one of the national conventions that was being held in Chicago on that, at that time. And we happened to be downtown at a time when we wanted lunch, so we said, "Let's go and have lunch somewhere" and I saw a restaurant off the side the street that looked reasonable enough. We're not wealthy as you know, as graduate students, but it looked okay for us. And so I said, "How about this place?" And Frank Edwards looked at the place and he said no, he said not there. And then he became very particular as to where he would go. Because, and then, as in due course he explained to me. He says, you know, "A black person cannot go to that restaurant." And it had never occurred to me that the restaurant or the cafe I was pointing to would exclude anyone. Like me for example, I could go into any of these restaurants. Maybe they didn't like it, I didn't know. But anyway, I never had any feeling about being excluded in a place like this, where as Frank Edwards knew that a black person could not go in downtown Chicago loop area into any restaurant and be served. He just, and he knew that he should not do that, so he picked the particular place we should go to. We went to that restaurant and he, we had a nice lunch with no difficulty. Now that to me emphasized the degree to which the black society in the prewar world was excluded from participation in the larger society. That was not a kind of barrier that I'd ever encountered and it surprised me. However, if you think what black America, I mean white America was in the prewar days, you have to think in terms of that kind of experience which I had. Black Americans were totally excluded from large areas of American life. Japanese were of course excluded in certain areas, particularly on the West Coast, but, nowhere near the same degree. However, as Japanese, as a person who was of racially different background from the white world, I had a sense that yeah, I'm excluded from this and that and so on. And I'd better not try to form myself in, or if I do, then I'll have to anticipate difficulties that I'll have to fight with.

Anyway, after the war however -- well, during the war, as you know -- in American society, the black Americans as they moved northward from the South pushed harder and harder for positions in the industrial, military industrial complex and they got FEPC rule, laws passed that would prohibit discrimination against blacks, or from racially colored persons from participation in employment. And by the end of the war, and certainly by ten years thereafter, why American society was totally changed, or changing, or changed from what it was in the prewar world. In the prewar world I described in terms of the kind of experience that Frank Edwards pointed out to me. The postwar world, was a world in which black Americans immediately begin to insist that they be given the same rights of education, for example in Kansas as well as Mississippi, as that of the larger society.

So if you asked what happened in prewar as against postwar and to what degree was, were the Japanese more or less race, race conscious, you've got other factors entering in that makes it more difficult to analyze just exactly what happened. I think the Japanese were certainly, in the immediate postwar era, self-conscious because of the experience which they had. Certainly the detention, their exclusions and so on gave them very strong mixed feelings about this company. The fact that they had been excluded unjustly gave them a sense of the injustice which they had experienced. The fact that they were allowed to come back to this area for example, the Pacific Coast area for example, gave them a sense of well, we've got to reestablish ourselves. And I think that was strong motivation in that direction, but with a certain wariness that, you know, the white people again might be hostile to us in one way or another. But, at the same time, you're seeing, you're now in a world which is rapidly changing from the character of racial discrimination that had prevailed in the post, prewar era. And blacks are now up in arms insisting that we be given recognition and the Japanese people are being carried along with the tide of this type of event and by 1960s you're getting a world in which ethnicity then is no longer -- well, ethnicity is given a different kind of emphasis than it had before.

As a matter of fact, it just occurs to me that another thing that happened in the postwar era that made the world different, the American world different, was the fact that so many white troops landed in Tokyo and in Japan as occupation troops and were there for, anywhere from six months to several years as occupation troops. These people come back to the United States and they now have a totally different kind of concept of the Japanese than the pre-World War America had. In pre-World War era, the Japanese were aliens saying people, totally stereotyped and non-human in a sense. Whereas in the postwar era, there's an appreciation of the fact that these are human beings just like ourselves. They were our enemies, but now they are human beings. And I remember one article in a magazine, I've forgotten which magazine. It was one of the home, women's home companion type magazines in which there is an article about shibui. Shibui means something severe. A little bitter, if anything, bitterness. And the article had to do with Japanese art. And the shibuic quality that is emphasized. In other words, kind of a restraint and kind of stress that is picked up in art of the Japanese kind, rather than the floral and blossoming out kind of thing, it's kind of restricted, disciplined and so on. And this quality, the magazine article goes on to say, is not only distinctive of the Japanese art, but is something that we should emulate. And you know, it was very interesting that Japanese art at this stage -- I mean the American society at this point, stage now comes, comes to appreciate Japanese art in a fashion that they never could have.

One other type of experience that I remember that emphasizes this point. Back in the pre-World War II days, 1939 or '40, I was in New York City once, for the first time. And I went to Japanese restaurant. It was one of the big Japanese restaurants on 56th Street near Rockefeller Center. And the restaurant's name I think was Miyako or some name like that. It was considered "the" Japanese restaurant in New York City, but it was only one of maybe two or three in the whole city that was a Japanese restaurant. The Japanese restaurants simply were not well known to the, or Japanese food was not well known to the American public. And I remember seeing a Caucasian in that restaurant and I thought, was surprised to see that there was an American who would be eating Japanese food, simply because it was so unheard of, or not unheard of, but it was relatively uncommon. Not only that, he was eating, as I remember, sashimi. And I thought, "Wow!" [Laughs], you know, this guy knows something about Japanese society. [Laughs] Today of course, the sushi bar is more American than, than chop suey. And it's, it just indicates how different American society was then, as it is now. And already in the postwar era by the time you got into 1948 to '50 and so on, why you were getting these articles about shibui or what, what there was about Japan that we should understand better and so on and so on and so. It's a totally different world into which the Japanese Americans are now trying to adjust. It's a world in which prejudice and barriers to acceptance are still very definitely there, but it's breaking down, and as you get a breakdown of these kinds of barriers, why people are not predictably behaving in an anti-Japanese or anti-black, or anti-ethnic fashion.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.