<Begin Segment 12>

JH: Of course, for me, I guess most of my life I was busy trying to assimilate. I guess I knew that full assimilation probably wasn't possible given the circumstances, but this is the only life I know, this is the only place I know. So that I was bent on becoming as assimilated as possible. You know, growing up in those days, all the movie stars were white models. All the baseball stars, the sports stars are white. So that I guess maybe I was following in my older brother's footsteps, to go to school, to find some profession and to make my way in life. There didn't seem to be any hesitation in my mind about going to college. Gordon had gone to college, and I know that a lot of my peers that I grew up with, that were interned with me, stayed being farmers. And, but I went off to college and of course, like most Niseis being influenced by parents, we were thinking of going into medicine or dentistry or engineering or something like that where we'd have some sort of income. And so when I went to the University of Washington, I signed up for a pre-med course. But before I even started, I was influenced by one of my older brother Gordon's friends into just freelancing instead of going into -- because she knew that I didn't necessarily want to go into a pre-med program. It's just that I was doing what I was told. So I went into a pre-major program and just kept taking all kinds of courses in the humanities and the arts and, as well as the sciences. And finally ending up about junior year not having a major. And of course, you can't graduate out of university without a major so that I started looking around for majors. And about that time, I went out on an archaeological dig, and I liked the fellows, I liked the subject area. And so I decided to go into anthropology.

[Interruption]

JH: But archaeology was too much like farm work, so I didn't go into archaeology. And I became a social anthropologist. And then I got a scholarship to go to University of Tokyo, so I went to University of Tokyo and that's when I did my field work. Then I came back and I got accepted into the Ph.D program at Harvard, so that that's where I went to finish up my Ph.D. And then I took a job at San Francisco State. And that was in 1960 and that's essentially the only job I ever had because I stayed there until I retired some thirty years later. But during the period that I was at San Francisco State, there was this Ethnic Studies strike which I joined. And subsequently I shifted into Ethnic Studies. And this changed my attitude towards ethnicity. When I joined the San Francisco State staff, I was the second Nisei to teach, become a teacher there. Professor Hayakawa was the first Japanese. And so in as late as 1960, there were only two Japanese Americans on the staff at San Francisco State. And then in 1970, the strike started and then I shifted over to Ethnic Studies which changed my attitude towards ethnicity and being Japanese American. And ever since then, I've shifted my focus of attention onto Japanese American culture and society and I'll probably be doing that until I die.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 1992, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.