<Begin Segment 40>

LH: Well, I just have a few more questions for you. Just going back, I guess to -- you've talked about teaching, and you've talked about your coaching -- and I guess the one thing we haven't really touched on is your art. And sort of how your art has developed and how you've been working on that in the last couple of years, few years, and how that's actually developing? How do you feel when you think about the kind of art that you do?

FF: Yeah, in high school when I was teaching art I taught a lot of techniques and I even used my tell -- I taught my students my techniques that I... you know, some teachers, students will say -- who were good in art -- would say, "How come Mr. Fujii teaches us his secrets?" And I said, "So what? You're not gonna be the same. I could tell you everything what to do but it's never gonna be same." And so I make them do projects and where I use the same technique and it doesn't even look like my stuff. So I said, "That's okay." But I think because of that teaching specific projects and variety, I never found my own niche. So until I finished teaching high school and then I even taught as a mid-management person at the college, I even taught the art classes. We all had to teach one class, and I taught creative painting techniques, and I enjoyed that. And so when you teach that, I think there's a tendency to do different specific techniques and style, not still finding my own niche. But now that I'm on my own now and retired, there's a, you know, I'd like to think I found a niche. It took a while, because it's been eight years since I retired from the college and I felt that I really found a technique or an identity in my work that you could say, after you've seen my stuff that you would say, "Hey, that's a Fujii." And I like that. And then I, I'm saying I'm trying to attain something like that -- at least it's a goal. Rather than to say you're an artist that just does artwork, I think the artist himself has to have some type of specific goals of achieving to, for identity. 'Cause that's, that's what you always hope for. But most teachers, though, like my buddy Bill Mair, who's a art teacher and a college teacher, he always goes in college, never goes in high school, but he, he even says that. And I think to, to have this identity is important -- to me -- and as we compare ourselves with -- no, I shouldn't say compare -- as I talk to Paul Horiuchi about what he thought of his artwork, his identity. He says something very interesting -- that you could see all the Horiuchis in his house and he's not too happy -- and I'm saying, "How can you say it that when you've got some good stuff?" But when you put these art works separately into someone's house it looks completely different and I'm saying, boy, that's true. Instead of like, right now I'm looking at three or four of my artwork that's much alike, it doesn't look that good together. But when you separate it and put it in a specific house in a specific place, it's very special. It took me a while to kind of understand that.

So, that has been sort of my forte at the, my years as I'm getting older to find, and, like I said, even at my age, to still be setting goals or trying to achieve a level of importance to my life. I think art has been, always been by my side. It's been a great release for me, plus a consolement, very... the creativity of it, I've enjoyed that 'cause I like to think I'm creative and... that creativity has even, is a bounce-off, where it's a, you could bounce things like even coaching. When you're creative, you try different kinds of crazy things just to see if it works and even coaching, I even tried -- just to back up a little here -- that I tried different kind of defenses and some coaches would say to me after a game, "What kind of defense were you trying there, Fujii?" He says, "You got three guys going over here, another guy over here." I says, "That's my secret." And I try it and I could chuckle to myself because we might have barely won the game, or lost the game, but they couldn't figure me out. And I'd say, "Hey, that's cool because yeah, I didn't win the city championship that year, but I was able to do some creative things even at that level."

<End Segment 40> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.