<Begin Segment 21>

FM: Well then he -- I continue in sociology, I get my degree at the University in that field and by this time, oh, and then I decided I would go on for my Master's degree in sociology and I could do it only at the University of Washington, so I'm hanging on there. And as I come up to a thesis topic, I wasn't sure just exactly what I wanted to do. But the idea of the Japanese community had always interested me, partly because in all the reading I had done, I got a sense for, you know, the interesting and somewhat unique quality of the people and behavior of people in the Japanese community. This characteristic style of behavior that, the organizational bent that was characteristic of the community. The strong network of relations that characterized the -- and all this kind of provoked my literary sensibilities. Gave me a sense of a community that was rather interesting and worth writing about. But I had not, up until this point really thought of it in sociological terms. I was thinking of it as the setting within which a novel might be written or something like this. But now I'm a sociologist. So when I had to find a master's thesis, I kind of talked with Steiner about this community interest I had, and he encouraged me with that thought. Now one reason was that he himself was an analyst of communities. He had written books on small community studies. So he was directly in line with his own interest and the kind of idea he had, he thought was worth pushing. And so I then went to work on it.

What I realized as I got into it was, that there were some very striking features of this community, the Japanese community in Seattle, that were quite interesting. The network of relations is the thing that really caught my eye from way back when, but having matured into this kind of sociological interest, the fact that there were these obligatory relations that were characteristic, for example, of the way in which my father carried on business in the Japanese community. And the obligatory relations that existed among relatives and among the ken folk. Also, the networks of the, oh, the formality of relations. The bowing and the, the common phraseology that was used by the Japanese which is so, so characteristic of the Japanese people distinct from almost any other people I know of. All this kind of fascinated me, and therefore I thought of this as the thing I would like to write about. Now, as it happens, I also have strong theoretical interests in sociology and I realized that the German terminology, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft fitted very nicely into what I was trying to analyze and I was at that point, a very strong student of Durkheim and his distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity, again caught my attention as something that was reflected in the Japanese community. Incidentally, at that point, my thought was, the Japanese community is Gemeinschaftlik, where as the American community Gesellschaftlik. Now at the present time, I've revised my notion that the, in the Japanese community, there's an overlap of both the Gemeinschaft and the Gesellschaft that, in the sense that Hayashi says you will find primary relations in the secondary relations area, and vice versa. I think that's the way I would word it now, but, back then, in the 1930s, I thought of the Japanese community as predominantly, and maybe it still is, predominantly a kind of Gemeinschaft and here is then the larger community, the Gesellschaft community and I was interested in the question of how these two things fitted together... so, this is the type of thing that led me into writing about the Japanese community.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.