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BN: So at USC, what was your sense of the course of study? I mean, we talked earlier about what you didn't like about Berkeley, was USC more along the line of...

FS: Sure. I think a lot of it has to do with circumstance (and) the kinds of professors one has. It happened that at the time I went to USC, several of the professors were younger, they were veterans of World War II. The first person I had was one of the most popular -- this is night school -- and he taught basic design. But he immediately responded to a book I happened to take in because I liked it and shared it, and it was on Katsura Palace in Japan. Well, he was a landscape architect. I didn't think about those distinctions then, and he really loved that. And it was the first time the world I knew as far as anything about architects. I didn't know that much about architecture per se, as I do today, but it was something that I kind of got from my dad about nature and the beauty of Japan and all the things that are, the Katsura Palace represents. And he immediately responded to that. So that's quite a change from the guys that were teaching classic Roman, European architecture, the Greek stuff, and all this stuff that's all over the UC campus that we, I couldn't relate to. And so at USC at the beginning, it was very meaningful. And then the subsequent different second, third year, people happened to all be practicing architects. Although they had hired nothing but people that practiced, they weren't scholars, they were practicing architects. So several of them were very people-oriented. To the point where I think a couple were red-baited during the McCarthy period. And in a positive way, these were people that, I guess, because they talked so much about people, they thought they were Communists, right? So I think those teachers were special in a human way. They're also quite good as designers and talented as architects or whatever. But several became quite prominent, too, but it was feeling very natural. It felt like I fit in, I guess. Even though the history course is taught with the same textbook that I couldn't deal with at Berkeley, they used what they call Fletcher's, it was written by Sir Bannister Fletcher, so you can get a sense of how it's written with all the classic stuff from Europe. That was the worst part. But other than that, the general faculty are quite good. They were not quite as ego-oriented. A few, in the senior year somewhere, because they lived in that world, the elite people. And they were written about by the media. And this all kind of links together, because people that liked to read about it are usually people of wealth. So that's how it goes, I learned a lot of things in my life. And it's through a field that I didn't know what I was doing in it.

BN: Now, had you been going to architecture school ten or fifteen years earlier, it would have been difficult for a Nisei to find a job on the outside. By this time, was it your sense that there was still some of that, or was your sense that you'd be able to find a job in that profession?

FS: Well, you see, I'd like nothing more than to open the door for people, well, for anybody to really understand that we had a lot of guys in Southern California that hit the glass ceiling, not known about. We only hear about the two giants, Yamasaki and Obata, but they're corporate. So they didn't have to hustle for work. Or they might have hustled... if they hustled, they had a team of Anglo partners. And I don't know too many... you know, it's only recently I realized, at my time, because the guy that was older than me, and I have become friends now, he looked up to me because I was, I had my own practice in the Bridge in Pasadena. And I used my name, Sata, Japanese name. And he didn't know anybody else that had their own practice. And that kind of made me wonder if there were anybody... I know O'Leary Terasawa, I know other guys, Caship Horie, Mark Horie was like a big brother to me because we worked at the same place. And he was a few years older, but I think we used to always talk about whether, you know, how can a Nisei/Sansei, at that time, or earlier, get out there and make a living? It was that simple, you had to get to work. And Kazumi Adachi, I think, is one of the few (I heard of). But he was able to do it because by doing many residential stuff, and I guess there must have been enough people that knew him, but not too many like that. So for me, I recently, somebody sent me a link to watch an interview because there's a lot more interest now in architects of that generation. Even though Latino/Mexican guys that were trying to practice in the '70s, '60s, how difficult it was, and this is an interview being conducted at SCI Arc, which is now one of the elite avant-garde schools. And they were talking about the difficulty of practice and things, just getting work in the public sector. And that didn't occur to me because I was, I walked into a situation that evolved. But I know of a lot of Niseis that, very talented, that didn't have (recognition), that contributed, but they were hidden, and that's kind of how it is. I mean, but times have changed, so there's many Asians now that are succeeding and women, too. But I don't know that the story about what happened to, like you say, the generation before World War II and after. And I knew several of them, so I'm even hoping to educate JANM, which is supposed to be the history center for everything. But they don't know the architects' struggle. That's how it is.

BN: Yeah, something no one's ever written about, other than the two famous ones.

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