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Title: Frank Miyamoto Interview III
Narrator: Frank Miyamoto
Interviewer: Stephen Fugita
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: April 29, 1998
Densho ID: denshovh-mfrank-03-0001

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Stephen Fugita: So, last time we were talking about what the community was like in the late '30s, and so forth. So maybe we can pick up with what your academic position was, and what your career pattern was evolving in the late '30s. You had this very successful MA thesis on social solidarity focusing on the Japanese American community, and then you got a temporary position, teaching position at Washington, as I understand. So, maybe you could pick it up there and tell us what happened.

Frank M.: In a way I was lucky on that MA thesis in that, the departmental chairman was a man named Jesse Steiner, who had made a name for himself in community studies. He was a product of the University of Chicago, which was the outstanding sociology department of that time. In his background, however, he had been a missionary in Japan, so he had Japanese interests. He came over here and got into sociology at Chicago around 1917 or thereabouts. Made a name for himself in community studies and came to Washington. He was by that point a well-known sociologist. He encouraged me to do this study of the Japanese community when I talked to him about it, and therefore, he was perhaps the instrumental person in getting me started on my project. In addition, there was a fellow named Forrest LaViolette who has written on the Japanese Americans, who came out of Chicago also, and was interested in doing a study of the Japanese Americans here for his doctoral dissertation at Chicago. So he came and joined, he invited me to join him in a joint project of field research, I working on my MA thesis and he on his doctoral. So -- and he in addition said I could live at his home, where he and his wife had a small house, but he had extra rooms where I could stay, and as a matter of fact eventually another graduate student moved into another room, also. So we had this setup where he and I spent hours talking about sociology, almost morning and night, because we lived together. And talking about the Japanese American community, and I'm sure living with him helped a great deal in shaping up the ideas that I would work on. I don't think he gave me so much the ideas exactly of what I (should) do, but he encouraged me to think about things that I otherwise might not have dared to work on. So that turned out to be a very successful Masters thesis for reasons of encouragement from both Steiner and LaViolette.

At that time also, the University of Washington sociology department had a very active graduate program of teaching. And from the university's standpoint that was good because they got a lot of cheap teaching done, of the introductory classes. But for the graduate students, it was a kind of experience that not many students in the country got, of fairly heavy teaching loads, while working on their doctoral or graduate studies. So by the time -- oh, and then, because both Steiner and LaViolette were from Chicago, they encouraged me to go there for my doctoral dissertation. And by the time I got there then, I had quite a bit of background in sociology of a kind which other students did not necessarily have. They had hoped to get for me a scholarship or fellowship in the Department of Sociology, but it didn't work out. Steiner was very upset about that. He said, "You know, you've got all the background for getting scholarship support." But they did arrange means for me to get a scholarship at the International House, and within the department a small scholarship, and so on.

And so, although I didn't have any money to speak of -- this is the Depression period, as you know, and my father had died some years back, so I didn't, I had to, I was pretty much on my own. And then I worked in the summers in Alaska, which is another story by itself. I had a good job there, I could save several hundred dollars, in a way that young people often didn't, were not able to do in that time. So then I had enough means to get to Chicago, pick up my studies there, and by the second year I was there, I had a fellowship that carried me, and so on.

SF: You started Chicago in 1939?

FM: '39. Yeah. And in the meantime, I had done this MA thesis, and it was published, luckily, again with Steiner's assistance. But, the thesis essentially got buried, as MA theses do, at that time. However, it was the means by which I later got into other things, which I otherwise would not have gone in.

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