<Begin Segment 5>

JH: Yeah, well, because there wasn't the regular political conversations in the home, besides having, when you're growing up you don't have the vocabulary or the interest to be talking about political things, we rarely had discussions of that sort. It's only after I had done research in Japan that I had the vocabulary to do discussions at a certain level in politics and religion that I was able to talk to my father about such things. But that didn't occur until my interests were focusing in on that. So that it was after the strike at San Francisco State, the third world push, and my shifting over to Ethnic Studies that I became interested in, specifically in talking to my, my father about the early days.

So it was one Christmas, fairly close to 1970, around 1970, that I spent the entire Christmas vacation with him. And so I decided to tape record all the conversations we had. Now, he was dying of cancer at the time and I think he knew that he had not many years left. He had gone to the holy land on a trip with other Isseis, and I think at that time he was in his mid-seventies and he was about median age. There are some Isseis that are up to ninety years old that went on that trip. Now, on the return -- this was a church-sponsored trip. And on the return from that trip, he got sick in New York and thought that it was something he ate, so he didn't do anything about it. When he got home, he kept being sick, so they finally had a check-up and found out that he had cancer. So during that Christmas holidays, I went up, I knew that I wouldn't have too much in the way of chances of talking to him, so that I wanted to record everything. And because he knew he was going he wanted me to have information. And so sometimes he would say, "Is that thing on?" referring to the tape recorder, and then he would tell me things. Sometimes he would say, "Turn that on because I want to read something," and he would pick out something he had written in 1914 or so, and he'd read it into the tape. So that I have about ten to twelve hours of tape locked up that I took back in 1970. And when I listen to the tapes now, because I've forgotten the conversation, it's like hearing the conversation anew. And because things were done really systematically, I had only really only one question I was going to ask him, and that was, "What's the first thing in your life you can remember?" And from then on, I only interrupted to ask for clarification. I didn't want to pose questions that would change his frame of reference. I wanted the story from his perspective. So I have those tapes now, which I'm still in the process of translating and typing out for the rest of the family. So at that time, he told me a lot of things about his religious philosophy and his political orientation, and I not only discovered new things about him, but I corrected things that I had always assumed were true turned out to be not true. So it was a very interesting kind of conversation. Let me see, we were talking about the alien land law...

EO: Did he tell you about that case during that time?

JH: Well, by then I had already done, asked specifically before about the case and I had done a lot of reading, so that I'm not sure... I'd have to go and review the tapes to see if he...

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 1992, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.