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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-03-0017

<Begin Segment 17>

SF: In retrospect, knowing what you do now, how might you have structured the study so that it had conceptualizations, or theories, or adjusting...?

FM: How much might we have done?

SF: Yeah, how would you have done things differently, now that you know...? Supposed to be kind of a hypothetical question.

FM: If another event of this kind came along, I think I would know how to organize it. At least, from the standpoint of my own interest. I think I would organize it around what you might call collective behavior theory, because what happens tends to be not organized behavior in the usual sense -- that is, organized, institutionalized behavior. Rather, it's organized, collective behavior in the sense of riots, and rebellions, and protests, and things of this kind, as the most likely events to occur under these circumstances. And that would be one of the foci I would choose. I think that that would make the most sense, as a matter of fact, the best study that came out of Dorothy Thomas' project, I think was The Spoilage study, which is the study of the Tule Lake center under segregation. And, although Dorothy Thomas herself had no theoretical conception to work with, the data that I see there, lend themselves very nicely to a collective behavior kind of analysis. So, that is the way in which I would organize it. It turned out to be a whole series of protests, riots, strikes, assassinations and so on. If you try to understand why people would behave this way, I think collective behavior theory probably is the kind of thing that would best lead to an understanding of that kind of process.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.