<Begin Segment 14>

CO: Since the war, the Japanese American communities have come back to the coastal areas. How do you think they're different from the prewar communities?

JH: Well, of course, the situation has changed quite a bit. I think that the community is changing. I think that you have much more of a continuity of certain kinds of patterns, prewar patterns, that did exist initially after the war, but things have changed quite a bit. And the Sanseis have gone down different paths. But I think that the things that have happened recently show that the community is not disappearing. It's changing, but it's not disappearing. There are certain kinds of things that I think the Sanseis, particularly the ones that have taken Asian American Studies in the colleges and things like that, they begin to re-look at the traditional patterns. This doesn't mean that they're going back to exactly the traditional forms, but they're doing things that are comfortable, though some of the things that are, that have been aspects of the community in the past have been re-interpreted and exist now.

CO: Also, do you have any thoughts on the fact of the silence in the Japanese American community about the internment for many years?

[Interruption]

CO: One of the things that I have noticed is that the community itself, the members, have been relatively silent about the internment experience.

JH: Well, yes, I think, I think the Sanseis think that we're somehow ashamed of what happened and so we're quite, the Niseis are quite silent about that. I've never felt that myself. And so one of the reasons I haven't talked very much about the internment was because my kids never, never asked and it's something that you just don't sit your kids down and say, "Well, I want you to hear about what happened to me in the past." But when my son was going to Sonoma State, for his senior thesis he wrote on the internment and did a series of interviews with the Nisei, and at that time I talked freely to him. And I don't feel any kind of shame or reluctance or anything like that connected with speaking of the camps itself. I don't know how other people feel, but anyway...

EO: It might just, to follow up, might just be age, because people's experiences were different.

JH: Sure, sure.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 1992, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.