<Begin Segment 10>

FK: I'd like to hear more about your journey from, going to Oberlin to ending up in the other colleges, and how you ended up is, where you ended up professionally.

SO: Let me, let me kind of give you the up to date story first.

FK: Alright.

SO: Just recently the University of Washington had a special ceremony that dealt with the Niseis who were then going to school, in 1942, and the university granted an honorary degree, and I happened to be one of them. But I didn't get to the ceremony, but the university felt it was important enough to recognize what had happened, and I think it was a beautiful gesture on the part of the University of Washington. Now, how I got there is kind of an interesting tale of which I don't have all the answers. After working for a brief period in the summertime I had applied to Oberlin, and I guess, no, I guess that working comes later, but I had applied to Oberlin and a lot of other schools for no real apparent reason. I can remember at one point I was accepted at the University of Wyoming, and what did I know about the University of Wyoming? Nothing. But this is one way to get out of camp, is to go to school, but then that also entails one other thing, money. I mean, what kind of funding did I have to support myself to pay the tuition and living cost and so forth? But I was crazy enough to say I wanted to go to school. This is where the funny little bit comes into play. I don't know, to this day, how I happened to get to Oberlin, which is a private school in Ohio. When I say I don't know how I got there, you simply don't apply to school and then you're in because you have to have the source of funding and things like that, but any, at any rate, I got into Oberlin and then I was in school for about a quarter and a, no, two semesters maybe, thereabouts, and then the draft came, so then I was out of the picture. But then after I finished school -- excuse me, after I finished my time in the service, I went back and finished my degree and went for my graduate degrees, first at Michigan State and a Master's degree, and then a PhD in art history at Ohio State. And I did, I took the direction I did only because it was available. I mean, I didn't have any private funding that could send me through school ad infinitum. It was, no, that was it. So that then, after four years of graduate study, you do the obvious thing, and that is start writing letters to, "Dear Sir, I am a new applicant," and so forth, so forth. I did that, and eventually I did secure a position in a school in Illinois, and then from that I moved into others, it was Bradley, then I moved to Wayne State in Detroit, and then finally to Michigan State where I spent the last thirty years of my teaching, at Michigan State. But I, in all this, one thought still stays with me, and that's my high school teacher, Catherine Ellison, who told me, when she encouraged me to go to school, she said, "On your way you're gonna meet a lot of people. Try to get along with the best of them, and don't let, don't deal with the others." It was a little message that I carried with me, saying the people are gonna be different that I meet and deal with only those with whom you have good relationships. That has, I think, helped me in terms of my wandering through the world of academe.

FK: So when you retired, what, what position did you have?

SO: Huh?

FK: When you retired, what position did you have when you retired at Michigan State?

SO: Professor. Professor Emeritus, which is a way of the university's, the Emeritus is not an automatic thing. It has to be awarded on behalf of the university, but I think ninety-nine times out of a hundred you're going to score well in terms of this award, because it is a title that you have a right to, all the rights and privileges and so forth that they talk about. I, when I think of it, if I had to do that phase of my life over again, I would maybe select an Asian field as my specialty. Instead I've ended up being a specialist in American art, and my reason for American art was, first of all, there was funding available, secondly, people, at the point that I was going to school, would say --

[Interruption]

SO: But anyway, the matter of, what was I talking about, my going to school?

FK: Uh-huh, about going in American studies instead of Asian studies.

SO: Oh, part of it was because of a real nuts and bolts situation. At the point that I was going to school, it was rather traditional that, if you're in art history, you go and study and European art because that's where all the, quote, "great art" is. Well, I took a slightly different view, for survival more than anything else. I said, why must one go to Europe? Why can't one study the art that's here yet undiscovered? And since that time, more and more people have gotten into American art. I ended up teaching American art and Asian art, and it, if I had to do it over again, I would think I would try to combine these two in a more meaningful way so that I would more fully understand Asian art as well as American art. I think I ended up, in fact, I can remember when I took a, took the position at Michigan State, the condition was I'd teach the course in beginning Asian art, and it was kind of the, what we'd call a minor in the field, but for me, I had to work like the devil to at least deal with that, which I did. And I enjoyed that part, and I think in many ways it reminds me of an incident that I took, that took place when I was an undergraduate. This was a course in watercolor in which the instructor, who was actually born in China but not Chinese, looked over my shoulder and said, "That looks very Japanese-y." And at that point I didn't whether to interpret that as a positive or a negative, and I think I took it as a positive, because for him to say, there's something there that I see that's in you that maybe you can produce an art form in another setting. So then that made me feel pretty good, rather than thinking of this as someone saying, hey, that's "Jap art" or something like that. It was one of those things, actually, I can still recall that.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.