Densho Digital Repository - Sumiko Higashi Interview

Densho Digital Repository
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Sumiko Higashi Interview
Narrator: Sumiko Higashi
Interviewer: Brian Niiya
Location: Guilford, Connecticut
Date: November 11, 2022
Densho ID: ddr-densho-1000-521

<Begin Segment 1>

BN: We are interviewing today, Sumiko Higashi. It's November 11, 2022. We're doing a remote interview with Sumiko, who is at her home in Connecticut, and Dana Hoshide is doing the videography and technical support remotely. And I'm Brian Niiya, the interviewer. So good afternoon, and let's get started. I wanted to start by asking if you could tell us a little bit about your parents -- what you know about their prewar life and their background.

SH: I'm going to start with some photos. I don't know if you can see this very well. This is a picture of my mother taken shortly after she became engaged to my father. I think she was then, very early twenties, maybe late teens. Oh, and this is my father as a judo student; he studied judo and kendo in Japan. And this is what I had a few minutes ago. This is a portrait of my parents when they were married after they were repatriated here.

So what should I say? My parents were kibei. My father was born in Sierra Madre, California. His father had arrived here to work on a large estate to compile some capital. And then he returned to Hiroshima and he built this rather large house and went back to farming; they were farmers. And, in fact, decades later, I was having tea in a coffee shop in Little Tokyo, and this guy who was sitting at the table next to me -- he and his family and I started talking. And, of course, they were from Hiroshima, and they remembered my grandfather's house, which I visited when I went to Hiroshima after my mother died. My mother's family is interesting, I think, because of her mother's line. Her father came from a fairly prosperous family, but his father died when he was nine. And she doesn't know why but he wound up in Hawaii with a young family. She said he was working in some sort of a capacity like a foreman at a plantation, but again they were amassing capital. The interesting part of this story is that my grandmother, Itoyo, brought back to Hiroshima with her a sewing machine. Back then sewing was done in Japan by hand. She was very entrepreneurial so she started a business sewing school uniforms. And my mother said she remembered . . . helping out; she would sew on the buttons, etc. But my mother's family, the Nakashima line, that is, her mother's family were -- they had very interesting women in that family. One of her -- my mother's younger sister ran a restaurant, but the most interesting sister was named Omitsu. And she wore, my mother said, a hakama, a man's sort of long trousers outfit. And she would get on her jitensha or bicycle and go off to see her patients because she was a midwife. And I've always been very sad that I don't speak Japanese very well -- that's a problem I'll come back to -- because when I was in Japan -- my mother's sole surviving sister is still alive; she's a hundred and one. But her younger sister, who died in her eighties as a hibakusha or a victim of the bomb blasts, she was still alive when I (went to Japan) when my mother died. I just felt stupid because I couldn't ask them about that family. And so those are stories that are just lost and that I'll never know about, but it's interesting to speculate.

My mother's father, when he returned to Hiroshima, worked in a bank, but his real important role was that of the president of the town council. And she said he was juggling all these responsibilities, trying to find a way to get out of the bank early so he could go to a meeting, and that her house was just always crowded with people who were there for various reasons that had to do with his political position. And my cousin Yukio, who is now in Georgia, told me years ago that he didn't know what a great man my grandfather was until he died because so many people showed up at the funeral that they couldn't get them all into the temple. And my aunt showed me pictures of crowds of people, you know, standing in line outside, etc. So I think my mother's family, but also my father's family, were interesting but I don't have any information about them. I do sense, though, that when they came to this country, because of the intervention of the war, that they were on a downwardly mobile process that they couldn't arrest.

My father came out here because he was the youngest child in a large family, and I think, in fact, there were . . . I'm not sure, but there may have been two marriages that his father had been involved in. His oldest brother, Moriso, was eighteen years older, and he had come out to Long Beach. And according to my mom, he set up the first grocery store on Broadway in Long Beach. So, of course, after Pearl Harbor the FBI came and, you know, arrested him. But she said it was a fairly large store; they sold fruits and vegetables, and there was also a floral market on the premises. She said that next door there was a bakery and there was a butcher nearby, and that some of their customers were military personnel. In any case, my father had come out to inherit that business, and my uncle was stockpiling American merchandise, etc. that he was going to take back to Hiroshima. Well, the war broke out and you know the story. So they wound up in Amache, and I think that that process doubled the deracination. That is, they're already deracinated when they came here because they've been brought up and educated in Hiroshima and in fairly comfortable circumstances. My mother said she was sent to a private school, that she learned the tea ceremony and ikebana. In fact, her younger sister became a well-known ikebana teacher whose flower arrangement I saw in a book. So her mother, interestingly enough, put her on the boat or the ship in... not Hiroshima, but in Yokohama, and got my mother en route there a ring and a watch and made sure that she was outfitted with all these silk kimonos. But she came out here totally unprepared for life here. And then they were deracinated again in Amache, and I think there they were extremely marginalized because they didn't speak English all that well. My father had been going to a Long Beach high school to learn English and take over the business. But in any case, that's their story up until the point of being in Amache. Now, as far as that camp is concerned, I remember very little.

<Begin Segment 2>

BN: Before we go there, yeah, I want to back up a little bit. And -- What were your parents' names and approximate dates of birth?

SH: Yes, okay. My mother's name was Satsuko Kodama; she became Higashi. And my father was Setsuo Higashi, and they were both born in 1917.

BN: Okay. And then you said they were kibei, so they were born in the U.S. But it sounds like, as you're describing it, did they go back to Japan with their parents, with their families?

SH: Yes, and very young. So they hardly spent any time in this country at all.

BN: So culturally they were almost more Issei.

SH: Exactly.

BN: And then how? Were they already married when they came back to the U.S., or how did they meet?

SH: No. Well my father came courting because he was going to come to inherit that market in Long Beach, and he needed a wife. And he needed someone who could immigrate with him so he was courting my mother. And my mother said that he took her to what was then called katsudo shashin, but is now eiga. And they went to coffee shops and she agreed to marry him. I don't know if she was fully cognizant of what she was getting into.

BN: So it was sort of -- it was not an arranged marriage then.

SH: No. It was a marriage of convenience in the sense that he needed someone who could immigrate with him, someone his age.

BN: And then when they came back; this was pretty close to the beginning of the war, right?

SH: Exactly.

BN: When they returned?

SH: A couple of years or so, right.

BN: And then you mentioned -- this was his brother that had the store in Long Beach?

SH: Yes, yes.

BN: And you said he was later picked up by the FBI.

SH: My mother said that after Pearl Harbor, the FBI came and arrested him, and she remembers everybody gathering in the living room and saying goodbye to him. They wound up in Arkansas and later in Chicago.

BN: But were they running the store together, or did the uncle go somewhere else?

SH: Oh, no. At the time that he owned the store? My mother said he owned the store; his wife helped him; he hired another guy as an employee. My father came and he was employed when he wasn't going to the local high school, and my mother said she remembers getting up very early in the morning, washing the vegetables, polishing the fruit, you know, arranging them on the stands, etc. So the five of them worked together. However, my mother's recollection of her sister-in-law was entirely negative. She was not a woman who was at all welcoming or made my mother feel at home. And I think a certain amount of friction resulted -- at which (time) my mother knew some people, had gotten to know some people who offered my father some employment in L.A. And so they moved there. So I was born in L.A. But after the war broke out he had to go back to run that market because my father, I mean, my uncle had been dragged off by the FBI.

<Begin Segment 3>

BN: Okay. So when were you born?

SH: I was born in '41.

BN: Right before the outbreak of war.

SH: Yes. My mother carted me in as a child And she said it was just dreadful because I was a baby and I had diarrhea. She had no running water. And so it was just the beginning of a really bad time.

BN: And I know you don't have first hand memories of this at all but in terms of -- I know they went to Santa Anita first. Yes. Do you know if they were in the horse stalls or in the barracks?

SH: I think so; I don't know. My parents never spoke of that time, which is quite, you know, commonplace.

BN: Pretty common.

SH: Yeah. But the only time that I ever heard of them speaking about the camp was when they would get together with other people who had been there, you know on social occasions. And then when I was very young -- and you've heard this story repeatedly, I'm sure . . . . What are they talking about? Summer camp? I mean, what kind of camp are they talking about? So I grew up knowing practically nothing, and my memories are very limited. And I have a theory about this, which is very interesting. The only thing I remember is -- I remember one occasion there were men outside fighting snakes or something. I remember the long train ride back to L.A. Other than that, I don't remember very much at all. But what I do remember very clearly. I have a very dim memory, however, before that of going to school in Long Beach. But I remember very clearly we moved to Coachella Valley, and that's another unhappy family story. But my mother's cousin, who had been raised by her mother to a significant extent in Japan, had become a very successful farmer. He owned a gas station and a grocery store. This was in Coachella Valley, not too long after the war. Again, he was married to a woman who was very unwelcoming and not a very nice person at all. But my father went there because he couldn't find a job. When we were in that camp at Lomita, my mother said that he would go to the shipyards looking for work, and he would hitchhike and he would come home just wet on days when he couldn't find a ride home. But he went to run that grocery store and gas station in Coachella, but again there was a lot of family friction. So they moved out to L.A. He had saved enough money then to buy a pickup truck and start working as a gardener. Now, what I remember at that time was how very poor we were because we lived in this hotel. I've always wanted to locate that area, and I have � I have (several) pictures. But I think it must have been somewhere near downtown Little Tokyo, where a lot of warehouses were. There were railroad tracks in the back, and we lived in two hotel rooms that weren't even contiguous. And later on when some people moved out, we lived in contiguous rooms. And then we moved to a small apartment near Exposition Park, and then we moved into a larger house in that area. And I lived there -- I want to say through maybe my undergraduate years at UCLA, but I knew USC better because it was within walking distance, you know, you studied at the library. And I loved the law library; they never closed down.

<Begin Segment 4>

BN: Okay. Now, I'm going to continue on this in a bit. I want to back up a little bit just to, kind of, finish off the camp stuff because I know you don't have firsthand memories of this. And you said they didn't talk about it. But did you ever learn later more about what they did at Amache, or if they worked?

SH: No, you know, I never learned very much at all. But here's where I wanted to interpolate my story about my English. I assumed that when my parents went to Amache that they were very marginalized . . . [Interruption] And I remember this very kind woman named Mrs. Nabeshima who befriended my mom. She was from Japan and she spoke Japanese. And years later, (when I'm) on my first trip to Japan, I met her in Kamakura. And then she came back to this country because it didn't work out there. But I must have grown up among Japanese kibei who didn't speak English very well, so that I didn't speak English at all. And in my first year of school in Long Beach, the school administrators wanted me to repeat first grade because I wasn't conversant. At that point in the Coachella Valley -- what I remember in second grade in Coachella Valley is -- I distinctly remember learning how to read and write. I have pictures of my teachers from back then. And suddenly, you know, I just acquired English and I went through the second and third grade readers and I skipped a grade so that I went from second to fourth grade. And it's interesting to me that, to this day, I'm not very fluent in Japanese and that's the only language that I knew as a child. And so, you know, it's a heritage that I've lost.

BN: I've heard from many Sansei even and Nisei who have that same story. My wife was like that. Japanese was her first language. She was raised by her grandmother, and then it's gone at a certain point. Yeah. The other thing I wanted to ask you was -- I know in camp you had -- your younger siblings, I believe, were born.

SH: Yes. In fact, my parents said they couldn't leave the camp because my brother was born in July 1945. So my mother had to -- had to have a child before she could leave camp. But I don't recall very much. You know, I do have this theory though, and I'm jumping ahead. But, you know, there is this field called epigenetics now, in which it's argued that adults who experience extreme trauma have DNA changes that they then pass on to their children. And I've always wondered if I'm somewhat different from my two siblings because I was not conceived or born in the camp, although I spent my childhood there.

BN: Yeah. No, that's interesting.

SH: You know -- because of the three of us -- it was years because I went further than they did and finished my doctorate-- it was years before I understood that really they were brighter than I was. I don't know numbers at all. My brother was a grad assistant in stat in college, and my sister graduated Phi Beta Kappa and turned down a fellowship to Berkeley. And I often wondered, you know, why did I go further in postgraduate work? And I'm wondering if that wasn't, you know, if they have a different set of genes on account of having been conceived and born in the camps.

BN: Under such stressful circumstances.

SH: Exactly. I mean, I don't understand if you didn't have mass psychosis, I don't know what you had. I mean all that stress must have generated a lot of mental distress. There are all those stories about how fathers who spent time in the camps died in their sixties and so on and so forth. So there had to be extreme mental breakdowns, whether people talked about them or not, or experienced them or not, or, you know, were articulate about them or not. I think that that happened, and I think that kept the Japanese American generations from really fulfilling their potential.

BN: And then I also wanted to ask you about Lomita, the trailer park, because I know you had a photograph of the family there.

SH: Oh, yes. This is a photograph in which you can see the trailer and the car. And my sister and I -- well, there's my father, with my brother, and here's what I've always been amazed by. My sister and I are wearing gingham dresses with white collars, and we have two dolls with gingham dresses; they all match. And I'm wondering, where did my mother get the fabric? I mean, you know, she had a certain sense of what was correct, I think. I think she had been brought up like that. But I can't help but thinking that this is like pounding a square peg into a round hole; it just doesn't fit anymore--not folks who are American, not being Japanese American.

<Begin Segment 5>

BN: And then at this point, since you raised that about your mom. Can you tell me a little bit about just how and what your parents were in terms of their personalities and interests? Sounds like your mom was kind of creative and had the flower arrangement, did the flower arrangement and sewing and so forth. And your dad, I know, was -- had some martial arts training.

SH: So, well, my mother, I think, you know, to this day -- and I know this sounds prejudicial -- I think my mother was really an extraordinary person. I think the experience of being so deracinated, coming here, etc., being in the camps, you know, my mother hated being called a Jap. I think that, like a lot of women, she survived better than my father. I don't think he survived very well at all. She realized -- and this is where the sewing comes in handy -- I think she realized when my father started gardening in L.A. that they needed more income. And so she worked three jobs. She had three children; she made all my father's clothing, etc., our clothing. And, you know, being a Japanese housewife, not only did she make dinner, but she made breakfast and obento, and sent my father off to work. But then she went and started working in the fashion district, in garment factories. And she did that for years. And she got -- well, she was good at it anyway, but she got to the point where she just couldn't sew on the Singer anymore, so she bought, you know, an industrial-sized sewing machine for her own use. She was -- she had a wonderful eye. We loved to go shopping, and she had a great sense of aesthetics. And I'm very insecure about a lot of things in life, but I'm not insecure about my sense of aesthetics. I get that from my mother. And I remember taking her to the Norton Simon Museum garden. I was just astonished. She knew all those plants; she knew all the Latin names, and then she'd say, "Oh, I don't know this one." So she was an extremely -- I don't know -- accomplished person. She had a great sense of humor. I remember one year there was this film from Japan, Okoge, about Japanese homosexuals, and I took my mother to that movie. And I told my friends and they said, "You took your mother to see that film?" Well, it didn't faze her, you know. She had this great black sense of humor that you see in certain Japanese films, and I think that was her saving grace because she lived an extraordinarily hard life here. And her father, years later, met Moriso, the guy, the uncle who owned the grocery store and his wife when they visited him (in Hiroshima). And he wrote my mother this letter and said, "I'm sorry; you must have had a very hard life." Because he met that woman and he knew that my mother had to put up with, you know, an extraordinary . . . . Well, she looked after their four kids at that moment, and she'd been very exploited. And I think she had a lot of difficulty, but she never lost that crazy sense of humor of hers.

And my father is -- it's harder to recall him because I don't think I understood until my sister was diagnosed very late in life -- and I mean in her sixties -- that he really actually had bipolar disease. And my mother said that he wasn't like that but he became increasingly so, you know, after the war. He lost his brother in the atom bomb blast, and it was the brother he was closest to. That brother and his wife unfortunately went into Hiroshima the morning of the explosion, and they were horribly burned and disfigured. And her mother, well, her sister, Kikumi, ran across their bodies as they lay dying in a school. And so her mother brought them home -- to her home, and she said, "Oh, no!" She just used up her good ofutons and had to throw them out. But then they wanted to die in their own home, so she made sure they were transported back. But I think that experience really broke my father. That and, you know, it was an accumulation of events that he experienced, and I think at a certain point he just cracked up. And you know that Janice Tanaka film, Who's Going to Pay for These Donuts, Anyway? And the definition of, well, who decides who's mentally ill and who's not? I could so -- you know -- I knew when I saw that film -- I wrote a little bit about it. It really rang home.

BN: There's also the classic Hisaye Yamamoto story, "The Legend of Miss Sasagawara."

SH: Oh, I've read about that but I've never actually read that�.

BN: You've also written that afterwards, I think your mom, right, was constantly sending material goods to relatives?

SH: Well, she couldn't go back to Hiroshima. You know years later I asked her, "Would your life have been better had you stayed there?" And she said, yes, she thought so. Well, I met her father and her mother. I met her whole family when I went to Japan the year before I went to graduate school, and then I've been back twice. I have to say, my mother and father's family are like oil and water. My mother's family is just, you know, very warm and welcoming, very generous, etc. My father's family is very repressed and you know. So anyway, I'm sorry, I'm rambling. What were you asking now about�?

BN: About your mom sending material goods back to Japan.

SH: Oh, yes! Yeah, my sister once commented about that. She said, you know, she stood in endless lines in Amache -- meals, etc. And then she came out . . . she stood in endless lines in the post office. Because she wrote home and everyone said, "Don't come back here, there's no food, there's nothing." So I remember for many years -- we would be -- and she would -- I would be packing all these boxes, you know, sugar, cans of Crisco, candy, yardage, etc., notions, etc. And she was . . . . And I would be writing on a card and what was the value, etc. And she would be sending these packages, and I went back to Japan and everybody said how much they relied on those packages. And she was mailing those packages home regularly.

BN: Did that -- I mean, did that create any sort of hardship for your family?

SH: You know, my mother never thought of hardship in those terms. I mean years later my cousin Yukio comes out here, and it's like she had another child all of a sudden. She had to take him shopping, buy him clothes. And he went off to graduate school; she was sending him money. And I'm thinking, "Well, wait a minute, hasn't she done enough? Why does she have to take care of him, too?" But she was always like that. I looked upon -- I wrote about that in that -- there's a book -- you have a couple of pieces in it, too -- about the Japanese American family. And I wrote about my own very ambivalent feelings about Japanese womanhood, especially in the films of Ozu.

<Begin Segment 6>

BN: I wanted to ask you also about -- you had mentioned accompanying your father sometimes on his gardening routes, yeah, and your memories of that.

SH: Well, I was a young girl, and I don't know how that happened but I would get on his truck and go with him to his various, you know, to the various customers, his route of customers. And I would get out and be raking leaves, whatever, and my mother would pack a lunch for the both of us. And I did that for a (while). I think I was about eleven or twelve years old. So I knew something of what it was like to be a gardener then.

BN: What was his area that he worked in geographically?

SH: Well, you know the area... I think he had a lot of Jewish customers, you know, the Fairfax area; he had a hotel up in Highland, that area. But I don't think my father ever had a sense--I don't think he ever had a good head for business. My mother did, not him.

BN: How long did he remain a gardener?

SH: All his life, really.

BN: His entire postwar career, basically.

SH: Yes.

BN: Did you get a sense of who his customers were, or did you get to meet any of them?

SH: I met one woman who had taken a liking to him. She would come out with a tray full of, you know, coffee and sweets when we were there. I thought that most of his customers were middle-class Jews in the Fairfax area. And I'll leave it at that because then I'll get into some political statements that might not be politically correct.

BN: Okay. And then in the area you grew up in: where was that and what was the neighborhood like? I mean, were you . . . . Or . . . ?

SH: Well, after we moved out of that hotel with the railroad tracks in the back, we lived on Exposition Boulevard. And that was a -- sort of a deteriorating neighborhood. Although when I moved in, there was this --a Canadian woman -- who was extremely kind to me, who gave me an old watch and so on and so forth, and took me to Knotts Berry Farm. It was really a deteriorating neighborhood, and I went to Manual Arts High School, which, at the time, I think, was at least fifty percent if not more Black. And -- Oh, I have to tell you, when we lived in the hotel with the non-contiguous and then contiguous rooms, my sister Kimiko would not stay in school. She kept walking home. So my mother put her and myself to look after her in Maryknoll school. So I went to Maryknoll school for three and a half years, and that structure is still there in downtown Little Tokyo, surrounded by a whole bunch of ugly high rises in a gentrified neighborhood now, which, by the way, is only like ten minutes' walking distance of tents and the homeless. It's just, you know, extreme disparity within fifteen minutes. So I went to Catholic school for three and a half years, and I got a very good education. And when I went to Manual Arts, I can honestly say I practically learned nothing, you know. But I was very active in all the clubs. I learned how to run an organization, I learned how to work on a high school dance, you know, I learned how to do those kind of things. I didn't learn much academically. So that when I wound up at UCLA, I made the dean's list at the end of the first year, but I have to honestly say that I was sitting down in the library reading (a lot of political) philosophy, and I thought, "Well, we didn't read this in high school at all." And, in fact, my husband, who went to the Taft School, which is a very preppy school here in Connecticut -- we compare reading lists some days, and it's just really hilarious. He's sitting down reading George Orwell and here I am at the library looking at Sue Barton, Student Nurse. And I mean it's just really ridiculous. That library, by the way, is now the USC faculty center. And I have a friend who teaches there, and I've had lunch and I'm looking around thinking, "Well, didn't I used to run around here looking at looking . . . at novels?"

BN: So just to back up, the time you were at Maryknoll, were you living throughout at the hotel?

SH: No. We moved to that -- to an apartment.

BN: Right, okay.

SH: --near Exposition Park.

BN: So you're commuting to Maryknoll.

SH: We were commuting on a bus, yes. And I have to say that, you know, the Catholics do a great job of educating you. I mean it's totally unintended, I'm sure, but it's made me rabidly anti-clerical.

BN: I've heard that from a few people, actually. Now, your parents, you know, as we've mentioned, were kibei, and many gardeners also were kibei. Was that kind of a social circle, or did they go to Japanese -- ?

SH: My father was--he belonged to some organization, you know, bI don't remember; he'd go to dinner every once in a while, you know. But I don't recall much of that.

<Begin Segment 7>

BN: Okay. Did they go to -- did your family go to -- like, Japanese church or involved in...?

SH: Well, this is really weird. When I was at Maryknoll, on Monday we would be -- I mean on Friday we'd be reciting the rosary in the chapel. And then on Sunday my mother would take us to Nishi Hongwanji. And then when we moved to Exposition Park, you know, she would give us car fare and we would take the streetcar because there was such a thing as a streetcar in L.A. in those days. We would take the streetcar to Nishii Hongwanji. But, you know, actually what that did was it made me an atheist; I ended up not believing in anything. Although temperamentally and spiritually, I find some of Zen very, very interesting, especially the aesthetic aspects of it. I know more Catholic history than most people, but I've forgotten more than most people ever know. And so I'm very familiar with Catholicism but I'm totally not in sympathy.

BN: Did you and your siblings have to go to Japanese language school?

SH: There was Japanese language school at Maryknoll, which is why my mother sent us there.

BN: Oh, okay. But beyond that, after you were done?

SH: No, not afterwards. Well, you know, my nephew, who's half African American, went to Japanese language school for years, and then he studied Japanese at Irvine, and then he went to Japan and taught in Japan for five years. So the last time I was there, I was traveling with him and having him read all the kanji because I don't read it at all.

<Begin Segment 8>

BN: Now, I know you went to UCLA, and did all your siblings also?

SH: Yes, you know there was no 10 then so commuting to UCLA from where we lived was�. And I have to thank my father for that. He bought a car so that I could commute to and from UCLA. Thank God there was no tuition then; even there was no tuition when I was a grad student when I was signing loan papers like crazy. But, yeah, we went to UCLA, all three of us. And you know something? I thought that that's what you did in LA. I thought, oh, when you got out of high school, did you�. Well, actually, no, you didn't. I was kind of surprised to find out my mother's friends' daughters, they didn't go. Why did they wind up at a Cal State school? What's that about? You know, I mean back then it wasn't that hard to get in so I just assumed that everybody�. But then if you think about how many people were actually college-educated back in the '60s, I think my parents accomplished a great deal on very little money.

BN: Yeah, that was going to be my question . . . as you're growing up, was there just this expectation that you were just going to go to college?

SH: There wasn't just an expectation, there was just an assumption. And, in fact, my mother always read people extremely well. She was very excited -- my sister became a psychotherapist. But anyway, aside from questioning your morals, the worst thing my mother could say about you was, "You weren't educated." The worst thing: "Well, she has no education."

BN: Did they steer you in any particular direction in terms of, you know, you're going to major in this or that?

SH: No. And, in fact, I wasn't steering myself very well, you know. I was in English and history, you know, and at times I wondered, "Well, why was I studying those subjects?" And they led you straight into a teaching credential, and I taught for a year or two before I realized, "Well, this isn't for me." But I wanted to travel so I taught for four years, and I traveled in Europe and had one of the best summers of my entire life running around on a Eurail pass or whatever. And then the summer after that, I went to the Orient and I met my mother's family. Then I went to grad school.

BN: What did you end up majoring in?

SH: I ended up being a history major.

BN: As an undergrad?

SH: Yeah, but I was also -- I was also a French minor and an English minor. I could have gone in any of those directions, really.

BN: Were you involved in other kinds of activities on campus with clubs?

SH: No, I was not.

BN: And you commuted. Did you commute the whole time?

SH: Yes, I commuted the whole time. And so that took up a lot of . . . and then in my senior year, I had a job as a PBX operator on the weekend. So, no, I wasn't active in any organizations, etc. However, in -- I forget what year this was in -- in my sophomore year or so I started to date this Jewish guy, Don Heitzer, who later became an AD and a production manager. And I started going around with this Jewish club, and that was just totally unlike kids that I had known because they just -- I don't know -- they just had a lot more money and a lot more unconcern and freedom. And Don was into films, and so then I was going with him and his friends to Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa, etc., and that's how I got into films, and so that became my interest.

<Begin Segment 9>

BN: And then you said you did some teaching after you graduated. But where was that?

SH: This is in San Fernando Valley, which at the time, by the way, was a very middle-class white neighborhood. The only concentration of non-white people were in the Pacoima and San Fernando proper. And I used to hate to go to those schools. I walked in one day and I couldn't stop the planes from flying. And this one Black guy was giving me a lot of . . . . I said, "Richard, get your ass back in that chair," and everybody started to laugh. It was really quite crazy.

BN: This is in the L.A. Unified system?

SH: Well, I taught there for four years, yes. And then the whole time that I was a grad student, I was a substitute teacher -- during which I went to every junior and senior high school in San Fernando Valley -- every one. And, you know, it's really strange because before I went to grad school, I was one of two finalists for a job. Was it Taft? I can't remember -- a school in the valley. And my chairman and I were the finalists, and, of course, the job went to him. And then I went to Europe and I interviewed for these jobs to teach in the American School. And again, a guy came out and interviewed me at UCLA and then he said, "I'm sorry, we thought about you, but we hired somebody with a little bit more experience. Because I only had a year or so. And because none of that panned out, I ended up going to grad school. And at that point, I only intended to get a master's degree so I could go teach in a junior college. (It was then called a junior college.) And I interviewed for some of those positions in Orange County. (But then one night) I went out with a guy to dinner. We went to a cafeteria on campus and we started going through his biblio and I thought, "Well, I could pass these exams in two fields now. What am I doing in the MA program?" But it took me a long time to decide that I was going to go for it. And then when I told my mom, she said, "Well, when are you getting married?"

BN: The MA, what was the MA program in?

SH: The program?

BN: What field? What field were you -- was the master's program...

SH: Oh, in grad school?

BN: Yeah.

SH: I was in history.

BN: Okay.

SH: But you know, I was never all that interested in history proper; I was really interested in what is now called cultural history.

BN: Okay. What was the particular area of interest? Was there a specific topic?

SH: Well, you know, you didn't have much choice. Back then at UCLA, you had to have four fields for your orals. And most people did two fields, early modern and late modern Europe, and then early American and modern American. And I thought, oh, you know, this sounds like a drag. So what I did was--I went to the English department and I got someone to sponsor me so I only had one field in American history and the other field was in American lit. But then, after I passed my orals -- well, as I was preparing for my orals -- I had to come up with a dissertation topic. And here there was a big socialist movement in L.A. in the early 20th century, and I was beginning to explore that. And then I went farther afield and I thought, you know, I stumbled into the movies because they began you know, on the East Coast but came to the West Coast. And I just got -- I just went into film. And at that point, it meant jumping disciplinary boundary lines, and it was many years before I could figure out how to marry two disciplines that in some ways had very antithetical assumptions because one's highly theoretical, the other one is, you know, more data-based. But I finally evolved a way of working those two fields, but it took me several years to figure it out.

BN: What was your dissertation? What did your dissertation topic end up being?

SH: Well, it was about the silent movie heroine. And to do that, I had to go to the Library of Congress and the Museum of Modern Art, and especially George Eastman House in Rochester, New York.

<Begin Segment 10>

BN: Were you--now, I'm not sure what year this is.

SH: Oh, I finished in '74, which turned out to be not a very good year because that year produced a lot of history PhDs who wound up unemployed.

BN: Right. So what I was going to ask you is, at around that time, late '60s, early '70s, there was this kind of blossoming of what became known as the Asian American movement and publications like Gidra and all of that stuff going on -- a lot of it centered at UCLA. I'm wondering if you had any interest, connection, thoughts about what was going on.

SH: No, that was just then beginning to happen. Ironically, when I was a senior, I had very briefly dated Yuji Ichioka.

BN: Wow.

SH: And he went off to Columbia, with the Woodrow Wilson, and I remember getting a letter or two from him; he was very disillusioned there. But then, you know, we didn't keep in touch after that. Although later on, I dated a guy, a Jewish guy, who told me that a Jewish friend of his had gotten really emotionally involved with a gal who eventually married Yuji. What was her name? Emma Gee?

BN: Emma Gee, yes.

SH: And my advisor, Alex Saxton, knew the both of them; he knew Yuji and Emma. But I never crossed paths with him. At one time in 2000 I did a visiting gig at UCLA after I retired. And I always meant to try to look up Yuji at that point, but then when I wasn't teaching classes, I was at my father's board and care because he died not too long after that. So, you know, I just didn't have the time. It would have been an interesting attempt, anyway.

BN: Yeah, yeah. And I think Yuji was also ill at that time.

SH: Yes, he died very young.

BN: He died just a couple years later, yeah.

SH: And in fact, I think I had-- What's the name of the Japanese guy who was in the film studies department? I had his office for a few quarters, Dan?

BN: Bob Nakamura?

SH: Yes, I had his office.

BN: Yeah, oh, okay, yeah. I just saw him a couple weeks ago.

SH: I loved that film of his, you know, that's at JANM? I think that's a wonderful film. I don't know if they're still unspooling it all the time.

BN: Which one?

SH: There is a film--didn't he make a film?

BN: He's made quite a few for JANM, I'm just wondering which one. Is it the prewar silent movie one?

SH: I can't remember now, but I remember seeing a film there that I thought was quite good.

BN: Okay, okay. But anyway, what . . . I was asking originally about your interests or exposure to kind of the whole Asian American Studies stuff, and you mentioned Yuji. But did that pique any interest in you academically or have any influence on you at all? I mean, I know you have written about some Asian American films.

SH: You know, I went to undergraduate and graduate school before there was any such thing as multiculturalism. And so, no, I didn't broach those subjects at all. I did write about DeMille; he made that famous film The Cheat and so I'd written about that film. But I didn't write about Asian American film. And at that time -- this is many years ago now because I've been retired for over twenty-two years -- there weren't that many Asian American films at the time. Now, you know, there's a festival and all sorts of film. But I wasn't involved then. I was not interested in Asian (cinema) or (Asian American cinema). And a gal that I used to know, Gina Marchetti, she wrote about the yellow peril in cinema. And to her credit she explains why she, you know, with Italian American genes was interested in that subject.

<Begin Segment 11>

BN: So after -- you mentioned you finished in '74; there was a lot of people on the job market at that time. Where did you end up going subsequently?

SH: Well, I had a one-year slot at the College at Brockport, SUNY in upstate New York, which, by the way, was the perfect location because it was twenty-five minutes from George Eastman House. And I knew James Card, the curator, who said he was totally whimsical in terms of his decisions about who got to look at the films in the archive. Of course, it's more bureaucratized now. Then because that was a one-year slot, I had to immediately (start) interviewing for other jobs. And this is very interesting. I was interviewed for the job that obviously was going to Mary Rothschild at Arizona State. And I think they flew me out to doctor up their affirmative action papers because I was not told until I got there that I had to make a presentation. And I thought, "Well, this doesn't pass the smell test." Right? Because I had previously interviewed for a job at New Mexico, and I was told that I had to make a presentation. So I came out with my slides and a lecture and so forth. And then I withdrew from that position because they were dealing with history using what I called the "whole hog" approach. In other words, you know, the whole world from time immemorial to now. I thought, "Well, I'm sorry, but that doesn't sound doable to me." And I wound up at Simmons College next--for a year. And living in Boston was an interesting experience. And then I was invited back to Brockport as well as, you know, being given an extension at Simmons. And I didn't know what to do, but I knew that I wanted to get back to that film archive. And I couldn't have published what I did, you know, without access to George Eastman House. And I didn't, by the way, at the time even know that I was interested in publishing. I had no idea, you know. I mean, in fact, I remember a chairman, a guy who had been recruited from the U of R to be the chair at Brockport. And I remember telling him, "I don't even know if I want to do any more scholarship." And he said, "Oh, that! We all go through that." You know. So he was very dismissive. But he was right. Eventually, you know, teaching becomes a kind of a rut. You have to try to make it interesting. But research is always interesting, you know.

BN: What kind of teaching load did you have?

SH: Oh, it was really onerous. We had three courses except when I was Women's Studies Director -- then I had released time. And then we had to do a lot of advising. And my students were working-class, lower-middle-class students -- a lot of whom were not at all prepared to be in college at all. Then, of course, we had some extremely bright people that we sent to Chicago and Yale but they were in the minority. And actually after I taught for two quarters at UCLA, I thought to myself, "Well, you know, this is really sort of a caste system." Because in the teaching institutions you have to really run twenty-four/seven. In the research institutions, I want to know if you're not publishing, why aren't you? And, in fact, a number of people in that UCLA film studies or theater department, when I was there, struck me as having been on a permanent vacation.

BN: What was the demographics of the student population?

SH: Where I taught?

BN: Yeah, right.

SH: They were all white, really. They were white students, mostly from lower-class and working-class households. I had one Black student from Rochester. Occasionally you would get some Black students. I had my white students read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which led to quite a heated discussion in class. I think I did well teaching because I'm generally, you know, very casual and uninhibited in class. So I could get along with younger students, although I learned that I had really allowed them to cross the line a little bit too much because for a while it was possible. I used to get the athletic department's blessing and bus my students into Eastman House for a Monday screening -- during which people would be yelling at me from the back of the bus and they'd be calling me Su. So I thought, "Well, maybe I should dial this back and become a little bit more formal."

BN: Where did you live when you were teaching?

SH: Well, I lived in apartment houses, and then I met my husband at a department meeting and then we lived in a house. And I have to say, to this day, I don't understand why people think that living in white suburbia represents some sort of ideal. I think it's a form of slavery.

BN: Did you visit family often or did you come back to L.A.?

SH: Oh, yes. You know, when I was a grad student I used to substitute teach one day a week, and then one day a week I went home to my mother's house. She's sewing all week in a factory. So I would clean her house, I would take her grocery shopping, I'd take her to Macy's, etc. And, you know, I think what I did was I gave myself twenty-five years. I gave myself twenty-five years to have a career -- and then while my book was published rather late unfortunately because my husband had two children from a prior marriage and a very mentally disturbed daughter. But in any case, I did get my book published finally and at that point a lot of things changed for me. However , you know, I came home during intercession to take care of my father in a wheelchair, and I went back and I busted my arm. And I thought, "Okay, I can't do both anymore." And so I took an early retirement option. And then I was constantly on the plane. And I really made a mistake retiring here in Connecticut; I should have been in L.A. . . .

BN: So you stayed in Connecticut, but you were constantly going back and forth?

SH: I was in upstate New York, and then we moved here to Connecticut to be near my husband's family. And we maybe should have moved to L.A. to be near my family. I mean, I think his family's all right, but, you know, I'm not particularly chummy with them. And so I should have gone to be near my family, but I was worried about how he would, you knowm fit in there; he's very New England.

<Begin Segment 12>

SH: You know, I don't know much time we have left, but could we talk about a more painful subject? And that is what I think is the legacy of the camps. Could we talk about that?

BN: Absolutely, I was going to get there.

SH: Well, I knew Gary, who lived at my mother's condo at Tokyo Villa, Gary Ono. And that's how I got involved. I was in touch with Francis [Itoh Palmer] in Seattle. And during a phone call I broached the idea of doing a newsletter because I had done the newsletter for Tokyo Villa for a while and I knew how to turn one out. And I had some publication commitments for the first issue, but since the second issue I've written every word or copyedited or edited every word. And what I found in this last issue -- and I've since resigned -- is that people who go back to Amache have sort of a standard-issue response that's pre-digested. And it goes something along the lines of "Well, you know, it was very worthwhile for me to return to the site of my parents' imprisonment, and we hope that Amache becomes symbolic of injustice so that such violation of civil rights never occurs again." But I've sort of come to think those responses are rather kitsch. In other words they're protective in a way; they're self-protective. I think that it's very difficult to understand and confront the nature of the really virulent racist hatred that our families in camp . . . and why were they in horse stalls? Well, because they weren't considered human, that's why. And you could only mistreat people like that and deprive them of their property and their hopes, etc. -- you couldn't do that unless you thought that these people were not human. And I think that that's a very, very difficult legacy to confront.

And I myself had a lot of problems and I've never been able to get through No-No Boy. There is so much self-destructiveness in that novel. You know, it's so much internalized self-hatred. And I just wanted to throw my hands up in various places and say, "Well, why do you have to identify with any of these people?" But, you know, my husband has always had this term for me, "sui generis." I'm out here in Connecticut. I have no contact with Japanese people at all. The only time I do is when I go back to L.A. But I think that what the camps did -- and we all know this -- is that they destroyed the Japanese American family and community and dispersed them. So that -- I can't remember what work I read -- a Japanese American named Moriuchi -- I think it was he that said that, well, we're a couple of generations behind. I think we're more than that. I think the legacy, the fallout from all that, is more lasting than people are willing to acknowledge and more devastating. And I have to say that I'm very suspicious of writers of color who become adopted by white critics. I want to know what it is they're getting out of it: Orientalism, slumming, tourism, voyeurism, etc. So you have to balance that against the fact that a lot of these people could never get grants, could never get published, could never get their films out unless they adhere to certain, you know, forms, certain acceptable forms. So then given this situation, you know, is anybody permitted to express what this experience did to us Japanese Americans in way that is, you know, unvarnished? And I'm not sure. I'm waiting for those works to still come out. And I have to admit that my own reading has been rather spotty so I need to -- have to go back and read more. But I did read Dillon Myer. Was that his name? Who was the head of the WRA? I read his work. I think it was published in the late '70s, and I was totally appalled when he ended one chapter by saying that he thought that, you know, several Japanese Americans had gotten ahead, and they would not have gotten that far ahead were it not for their experience in the camp. And I thought, "How does anybody think like that?" You know, that's the worst form of white bourgeois noblesse oblige. And I would rather somebody, you know, scream racist epithets at me from across the street. At least you know where that person's coming from.

So I think that the literature -- oh and, by the way, I have to say I went to Yale, and they need to clean up their act. I went into the stacks, and they only had two shelves of books on the subject. Why is that? I think that with any field of study, you have to be sure that the tools are there, that they're in the library. And I find it alarming that the library is increasingly going to digital books instead of hard print, hard copies because you find so much, you know, serendipitous time spent, you know, in searches; they're involved in serendipitous finds . . . some jewels.

BN: Yeah, a lot of the newer books aren't going to be in there in hard copy, they're just digital.

SH: Right, and I think that's a shame. So, well, that's a larger library issue. But the fact that . . . I mean I would assume that at UCLA you'd have a magnificent collection of books on this subject.

BN: Fewer than you would think, I think, for the same reason.

SH: You can't have, can't be limited to two shelves. I mean I went to the stacks and I said, "Well, wait a minute, where's the rest of this?"

BN: A little more than two shelves, but yes, still a lot of -- yeah, a lot of the recent works are just available in digital.

SH: Well, why is that? The library won't allocate?

BN: Well, I don't know, but I mean, I think for students it's more efficient in the sense that . . . like I'm teaching a class and I can assign a book that's digital, and the whole class can access it at once. Whereas if you have one copy of the book on the shelf , you know, that only serves one student. Or back in the day when you had course reserves and you could only check it out for two hours or whatever.

SH: Two hours at a time. Well, you know, this gives me an idea because the UCLA library is in my will, and I've thought about media because I love the media. But I think I should write down Japanese American studies specifically.

BN: Specifying hard copies?

SH: Exactly, exactly. Because, you know, I myself had developed a kind of a cynicism about the term "Asian American." I mean I know it's politically convenient, but I frankly have nothing in common with most South Asians. And you know that book, Minority Feelings? Who was the author of that now? She won an award? Was it Cathy Park? I can't remember. She concludes her book speculating about why Japanese Americans weren't more resistant, you know, about that camp experience. I wrote her a letter; I hope she read it. I said to her, "Maybe you should Google more subjects before going into print." So, you know, I think that this is a problem; the whole Asian American thing is a problem. Unless we think that all this bureaucratization that's resulted from Amache becoming an historic site under NPS -- I'm very ambivalent about that, you know. It leads to a, you know, a lot of government red tape, etc. The film that's being made has to meet their requirements, and, well, already it's becoming a standard-issue talking heads film. But in any case, I wish that there was more opportunity outside the, you know, established channels for expression.

<Begin Segment 13>

BN: I want to back up a bit and ask you about what your thoughts were on the whole redress and reparations movement that took place in the 1980s. Did that... I mean for many Nisei, that gave them license to talk about their camp story to their children and so forth. Did that have any effect on your parents, or your family, or your own views of the camp?

SH: You know, I don't know because by then I was away on the East Coast. So aside from what I've read, I know very little about the movement itself. As for my parents, I would assume that they felt some sort of compensation, but my mother was always very bitter. You know, when there was all this activism in the late '60s and '70s, there was this photographic exhibit called "Executive Order 9066." I think that was circa 1971. And that was one of the very first times that I was exposed to, you know, media about the camps -- which before then I had just heard about the subject as it was being discussed or referred to by my mother and her friends. And I asked my mom if she wanted to go with me to see those pictures. [Interruption] And she said, "I don't need to see those pictures." That was her response, you know. I've really wished that all of this that I've been involved in in the last few years -- that this had happened while she was still alive and I could have asked her. But like a lot of other things in my life, it's all lost. There's more loss in life than anything.

BN: So your parents never really, 'til they passed, really talked about or wrote about their camp experience?

SH: No, no. My mother made comments every now and then; she said that the government made a really bad mistake, but she never went on and elaborated.

BN: You did write a bit about some of the films that were made, documentaries that were made about the incarceration.

SH: Oh, yeah, briefly.

BN: Are there ones that have -- you mentioned Who's Going to Pay for These Donuts as being meaningful to you. Were there others that you particularly thought were worthwhile?

SH: Well, there's the one that that -- I think it was Rita Tajiri's film, History and Memory.

BN: History and Memory.

SH: Yes, that's been written about a lot because it's a more conventional film, you know. She cuts to all the movie stars, etc. I think that's a well-done film, and I think what comes out of that film reminded me of Donna Nagata's work. Her mother did not want to be filmed, you know, she kind of avoided the camera's focus, more or less wished to remain invisible. And, you know, that stance reminds me of what Nagata talks about in her book about silence, the silence surrounding this issue. People who were actual survivors never spoke about it, and then their descendants are the ones who want to know, who ask questions, and who were probably involved in all these bureaucratic movements and organizations to conduct pilgrimages, etc.. I think that that issue is very interesting -- you know -- not being seen, not being heard -- you know -- being the model minority, keeping your head down, which means not being seen, not being heard, etc. I've never been like that, and I've gotten into a lot of trouble, too, because, you know, I've been carpet bombed by both sides for not adhering to stereotypes. And another way in which I don't adhere to stereotypes -- I don't do numbers at all. So. . .

<Begin Segment 14>

BN: Now, I want to ask you, going back to your academic career. You had mentioned that just the that -- the fact that you were a woman and Asian and that you had trouble with people taking you seriously in your field. I wonder if you could talk a little about that.

SH: Well, the last conference that I went to -- well, no, I went to one after that. But right before I retired, the last conference I went to was in Ottawa. And I was part of a workshop on film history. And I knew a gal named Marina Heung who was teaching in the CUNY system. And she and I and another gal named Esther Yao -- we had met at a coffee shop in Pittsburgh and organized the -- what we call APAC, Asian Pacific American Caucus. Anyway, I talked her into coming to the workshop; it was well-attended. And then afterwards she said, "You know, this Black guy was there and he left. And after he left I was the only nonwhite person there." So, you know, I don't think it's changed all that much. A friend of mine with whom I have stayed in touch--but not so much lately--she told me that she went to these conferences and always noticed how white it was. And she organized a panel of Black women and she said, "Guess where they put us? Eight o'clock in the morning." So I think this is a real issue.

Right before I retired, (I went on the internet and) I wondered, "Who gets to write about what, and why?" If you are a so-called person of color, your expertise is limited to your culture, or the history of your racial or racialized people, etc. And I went to school before multiculturalism so I didn't pay attention to that. But it has not been lost on me that I could have gone much further in my academic career if I had written about --oh, you know -- about Issei women who immigrated to this country, or something like that. But you know, I'm writing about silent film. And my last book and my last two essays have been about the fan magazines. All right, so I'm not writing about subject matter that has to do with Asians or Asian Americans. And I find that because that's not the case, that I'm much more suspect as a scholar. Already I'm suspect. I remember having this discussion with a guy who I phoned one night. I wound up on the nominating committee of the Society for --well, it's now the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. And the person who was selected to run for office decided not to run, and then there was this opening. And it was dumped in my lap and I thought, "Oh, I'm not going to -- well I'm tired of this anyway." And I called this, you know, Asian guy and I said, "Do you want to run for this office?" And that was a way of getting him on. But, you know, he did not start out being interested in Asian American cinema but he wound up specializing in that field. And I heard somewhere that Gary Okihiro started out writing about Blacks. Okay?

So, you know, now there's all this brouhaha about appropriation. If a white person -- I mean, like, why is a white woman the president of JANM, the CEO of JANM, or whatever? Okay, so is that a form of cultural appropriation? What do you want to do about that? I mean these are real, very difficult issues because they involve resources, jobs, you know, positions, money, power, recognition, etc. You name it. All right, it's all on the line here. And so I'm always suspect about positions that people take on this issue, but I am really fed up. I mean just because you're Russian doesn't mean that you're not qualified to write about Scandinavian history or Japanese history. But, you know, if you're a so-called person of color, your area of expertise is severely delimited. And I once asked someone, "Why is it that you're" -- this is a nominating committee too --"Why are you running two people of color for this office? Why is that?" She said, "Well, otherwise people wouldn't vote for them." So, you know, what exists is a result, too, of trying to circumnavigate around the issue, but it's there. It's there and it's not going away. So, you know, I've had a lot of problems because I'm Asian American and a woman -- that I'm not writing about . . . . I did write about women a lot, that I did do.

BN: Do you think the situation has improved over time, or are we, yeah, has it not changed much?

SH: Well, you know, I haven't been in academia since I retired over twenty years ago. My guess is that I don't think it's improved. You know, there was this series on called The Chair; it was on Netflix.

BN: Oh right, yeah.

SH: I wrote a letter about a review of that in the TLS, and my letter was published. Basically what I said was that as a woman who was, you know, a woman of color, who was a professor, I found that my relationships with white women as well as with women of color in academia could become rather toxic. And so we're not natural allies; we're just not. And I think it's just better to be wide-eyed about that. I don't think it's changed all that much. I'm just guessing because I'm just irate that all these right-wingers think that academe is a hotbed of liberalism and radicalism. No, it's not. It's very conservative, it's elitist, it's racist.

<Begin Segment 15>

BN: What advice would you give to, you know, a younger version of you coming into the field? Would you advise them to go somewhere else, or what would you say about, who's considering entering the field?

SH: You know when I was at conferences and gave talks, younger women would come up to me. I mean younger Asian women would come up to me. And, you know, we'd exchange emails (about biblio), etc. I don't know if I would tell them to go into some other field. If you're not in the field, you can't change it, but then you might find that the field can't be changed anyway. You know, this is funny. Years ago when I was in grad school, the person that I was closest to in my grad school days was then known as Diana Pelli. But she took her father's name later on, Diana Balmori,. She was married to Caesar Pelli. And one day I said to her, you know, "I've always been interested in aesthetics and I've always wanted to go into interior design." And she said to me, "Oh, no, Su, you don't want to do that because that field is full of homosexuals." And I've thought about that, and I thought, "You know, they wouldn't be as discriminatory as academics." At least I don't think so.

BN: Yeah, my daughter is thinking of going into academia.

SH: Oh, what advice did you give her?

BN: Nothing so far. [Laughs]

SH: Well, if she's going into a field that has to do with Asian Americans, I think she'll do well.

BN: Yeah. She's kind of, sort of. Anyway, we'll talk off camera about that. But I wanted to kind of end with also asking a little bit about--we talked a little about this--but just your involvement with the Amache Historical Society, and kind of why you went into that and what you felt you got out of it?

SH: I've never been really very involved. As I said, it was my idea to start the newsletter, and I have worked on the newsletter. The historical society was very -- it was very ad hoc, you know -- it was volunteerism. And now it's the Amache Alliance. It's become bureaucratized; the relationships are more formal and hierarchical. And as a historian, I know that the beginnings are always more interesting; they always are. It's more freewheeling, it's more inventive, it's less bureaucratized. And I see that happening now, that all the formalization of what used to be, you know, volunteer activities, etc.--that that's beginning to occur. And being out here alone in Connecticut and not in California, let alone in the Denver area, I'm not in touch with people who are very active. And so I've had to rethink this whole issue, and I think that I can't really be active. I am involved in the filmmaking -- there's this film coming up -- because that's my field. And I have written a little bit about docus because I've studied docs, and so I can comment about that as a film person. But as far as the Historical Society, or the Alliance, or, you know, whatever transition is occurring towards the administration of the National Park Service, etc., I can't really be active in that because I'm not there. And also I have a couple of family members who have really life-threatening health conditions so that's very time-consuming.

<Begin Segment 16>

BN: What do you... from where we are now, what Densho does, other organizations, like I said, What? Where would you like to see, you know, the way the history of the camps is being told? How would you like that? What direction would you like that go to in the years to come, especially as we get further and further away and the generation who has firsthand memories of, you know, is no longer living?

SH: You know, I think what you're doing is very important because you're collecting the data while all these people are still alive and recording it so that others will have access to it. That's extremely important. I'm a historian and I've always appreciated data. I've always thought you can't have enough data. I don't know about -- and you would know this because it's not my field. What kind of research and writing is being done? Who's publishing? I think -- this was over ten years ago -- I went to my last conference in Washington, D.C., and I noticed that, wow, Asian American Studies has become a big field. So I assume that there were a lot of people who were taking those courses, writing papers, writing articles and books, etc. There has to be a better excuse as to why Yale has only has two shelves. But I think more work is going to come out. I'm not sure in what direction. I'm still thinking that, as far as, you know, understanding the response to what's happened . And I'm not in any way minimizing the need for a good work . . . like the -- how do you pronounce her name, Connie Chang?

BN: Connie Chang, yeah.

SH: Nature Behind Barbed Wire. Okay, books like that. I think we need those books. But in terms of how we're going to understand what people were actually feeling, you have to go to novels, you have to go to (...) fiction, maybe film. But I'm getting increasingly cynical about film because I'm bored with talking-heads. And maybe enactments, but I don't know. I don't know about what kind of theater is being done. I know that George Takei put on a musical, but it sounded too mushy by half. I just couldn't get myself to go see it. So I'm hoping for rigorous scholarship that's read by people who are not necessarily interested in the field but might read it for interesting methodologies, or use of data -- how to present data. I'm waiting for someone to write that really terrific novel. I did read When the Emperor Was Divine, and I was appalled that some school district in Wisconsin has outlawed that book. It's ineffably sad, and, you know, it's the kind of book, unlike No-No Boy, which is just corrosive because it's so filled with anger. But that other novel, When the Emperor Was Divine, that's filled with a sense of irreparable loss and sadness and to me that's much more informative or knowing than somebody being really angry all the time because . . . . And I'm a very angry person. I know from my own my experience carrying around the weight that I do, the legacy of the camps, that I'm very angry. But I've learned to use that to be propulsive, you know, not just to adhere to a stereotype. But also as my mother was all her life, I'm very anxious and depressed. And I noticed that Japanese Americans carry that -- those qualities or those, you know, that kind of self-restraint and self-restrictiveness within them because they are depressed and angry. And generations pass that on. It doesn't disappear.

And one thing we haven't talked about is the outmarriage. There's so much outmarriage going on that I don't know if there's any Japanese American culture left. I regret very much that I don't know the language anymore. I sent for five workbooks and I'm trying to relearn but not . . . very successful. I try to stay in touch with my relatives in Japan, but I get so frustrated because I don't have enough vocabulary. But I think that the learning of the language is very important, and I'm hoping that that takes place in the various Asian American studies programs.

BN: That's an interesting point. Yeah. I feel like it, for various reasons, it hasn't and maybe it should.

SH: I think it should because it's the key to understanding the culture. Right? I remember going for a mammogram one year and this technician told me her husband was Japanese, but his parents raised him in such a way that he did not know any Japanese at all. He knew nothing about Japanese culture, he knew nothing about Japanese Americans. They thought that the best way to rear him was to totally sever him from his cultural identity. But I think these identity issues are related to language, and so I'm struggling with that in my old age. Why did I forget that language? Why can't I relearn it? It's like losing a part of yourself that's not there anymore.

BN: I totally agree. [Interruption] Okay, was there anything else you wanted to talk about? Or? I did want to ask you since, you know, you had mentioned trying to keep connection with relatives in Japan. Have you been able to maintain that connection?

SH: Well, I go through my nephew because he was in Japan and he knows better than I. I said, "Tell Mayumi this and that." The thing that really irritates me is that I use Translate and send her messages, but she doesn't know -- I thought all Japanese were geeky and techy -- but she doesn't know how to do Google Translate on her end and send me a message . . . . . You know, it's really very sad to me, but I met Mayumi for the very first time when she was -- she's about fifteen years younger than I so she must have been ten during my first visit. She's the only person in my mother's extended family that I just felt immediately drawn to. But I don't know the language and there's the continent and ocean . . . it's just another loss.

BN: Yeah, there are a lot of things I need to ask you about, but we'll continue that off camera.

SH: Okay.

BN: So, yeah, unless you have anything else, is there anything you want to close with?

SH: Not really except the business about the language and identity. Getting back to those issues because that's at the core of what has to be recovered in order to understand, you know, what it is about the past you want to preserve.

BN: Yeah, I feel like that's part of the legacy of the incarceration experience.

SH: Right, being divorced from who you are.

BN: Parents driving us to be so all-American and neglecting...

SH: Right, what's so good about being American? You just turn around and repress somebody else. You know -- I mean, I won't denigrate the opportunities, etc., and I realize that if I were in Japan, I'd probably be in a rice field. You know, so I'm not negating that, but I think that being an American is a really horrifying legacy, in some ways, because so many people of color have been slaughtered and imprisoned, etc.; it's not a very pretty history at all. In fact, interesting thing is I went online because I found out that the Sand Creek Massacre site was near Amache, and it was also being administered by the NPS. And I could not get over how sanitized that website was. I just thought, "Somebody needs to rewrite this and be more truthful and forthcoming." So I hope we're more truthful about Amache in our experience.

BN: Well, thank you very much.

SH: Thank you, it's an honor, thank you.