<Begin Segment 26>

SY: What's amazing to me is you founded this, or this group came together to form this organization without any kind of funding to speak of, right?

RN: Yeah, well, it was mostly grants. We did early on, like Gidra and other organizations, we received a lot of support through the Asian American Studies Center. And they were formed in 1968 or something like that.

SY: So a minimal amount of funding?

RN: Yeah, or they'd hire us as work study students or they would find money or help us do proposals.

SY: So aside from that, you were just looking for grant money?

RN: Yeah, yeah. But grant money was a lot easier then, I have to say. Because this was the early '70s, and everyone wanted to... were either behind the revolution or wanted to keep the revolution down. So they were handing money out 'cause there were student strikes and all this going on. It was kind of a political and cultural... revolution's a good word during that time. So there was a lot of money available, 'cause people were scared. I mean, the ruling class was kind of, yeah, scared. So there was a lot more...

SY: So you had a basic office staff that was being subsidized?

RN: No. We'd live off of grants.

SY: So it was project by project.

RN: Project, yeah. And that was the downside of everything, 'cause you'd have to work day and night and then just be able to keep a little bit of the grant to sustain ourselves. So it was very, very rugged because we had to keep producing in order to sustain ourselves.

SY: Because I'm looking at your list of films, and they were generally every three years, five years. Was that --

RN: Yeah. We cranked out a lot of films, and they were on grants.

SY: I imagine besides -- so your filmography, is that the same as VC's? In other words, were there others between the ones that you did?

RN: No... yeah, there was a lot that...

SY: Were not attributed to you.

RN: And I just called myself executive producer on those because that's what I did. I'd rather be making the films, but I needed that for my academic resume, so I put executive producer because that's kind of what I did. But there are other films that aren't on there.

SY: That VC... so you were probably doing, VC was probably producing a film a year?

RN: Uh-uh.

SY: More?

RN: More. We were going, we did like five. These were short films a year, so that was quite a, we did quite a bit. I'd have to look at our filmography. And we were doing, documenting things and creating our archives, doing educational materials, slideshows, in between, too. And those we did a lot for free using our other grant money.

SY: So how would you characterize those early years as far as how you... I mean, was it a good time in your life? Was it a hard time?

RN: Well, it was a hard time in the fact that I was running out of money, I mean, only goes so long. And I had a family, so keeping, making ends meet and being a father and a husband, going to grad school, and being part of VC, that really spread me thin. In fact, that's probably why I got gray so fast. But I'm glad, looking back, I don't know how I did that. Of course, eventually, that kind of caused my, the breakup of my family. And eventually I had to quit, I mean, I had to take a legitimate job later in the mid-'70s. So making ends meet was probably the real downside. I mean, we had to scrounge. A lot of us remember eating nothing but Cup-O-Noodles, right? But the upside, of course, was, that was probably -- and a lot people will say I'm probably romanticizing it, but that's probably the best time that I can recall. It was better than Eames, because I was able to use the creative process that I learned there in developing the right work atmosphere and creative atmosphere and apply it to content that I really wanted to work with, something that was relevant. I think all through my photojournalism things I could get published, my advertising work, all of that, the thing that I lacked was relevant content. So even at Eames, I was learning so much in terms of craft and aesthetic approach, but what he was doing wasn't that relevant in terms of content to what I wanted. So that the movement and VC offered me that outlet. You know, you want to, I think anyone who works at something likes to feel that there's meaning to what they're doing. So that's the first time all the training and other that I've gone through, and all the work I've done, this is the first time I could apply it to something that was totally relevant and something I was very passionate about. So that's why I really look at that as kind of a high point, probably the high point in my life.

SY: And it seems to me that's it's a philosophy that sort of has guided the rest of your life.

RN: Yeah, and once again, at the time that all of this... and lot of things I'm probably articulating in retrospect, but somewhere along the line, the idea of using media, a big buzz phrase in the movement was "serve the people." And so the idea of using to serve people, serve the people, or use it as service as opposed to self expression or art, whatever, and I think that was where I felt I had really learned something when I came to that decision. And a lot of it was unlearning Art Center and a lot of other things.

SY: And it seems as if you made a shift really from commercial art to really, I mean, the ultimate in non-commercial, when you say you wanted to serve your own community. Is that something that you know that you made a conscious choice then and it sort of stayed with you?

RN: Yeah, I think it was... well, it was from the time that I wanted to get out of here and go to Japan, and it was a restlessness, a dissatisfaction. And looking back, one thing is that I could not relate to the work, or the content of the work that I was working with, the photojournalism, the material that I got published was not really relevant to me. Obviously shooting pieces of furniture and things like that in my commercial studio was relevant to me. So it wasn't until the movement, working at Gidra, grad school and part of EthnoCommunications and grad school and VC, all of that. I think there's one thing that we need to define sometimes. The movement, most people look at it as political, you know, as a political movement, and to an extent it is. But there's a lot of us, whether we want to define ourselves that way. It was building, it was culture-making. That's... part of defining and building a community is it's not political, it is also developing in this case an Asian American culture. So I think there was... I think Gidra, although it served it's political, our political ends, it also worked on our culture, defining who... even the artwork, if you looked inside that, the poetry, I think VC did that with the films because they're about ourselves. And they have their own aesthetic and everything, but a lot of the people who joined the movement were looking for... well, it's cliche now, but it's true, looking for identity, who are they? Wanting a sense of community. And so I think in music was Hiroshima, you know, trying jazz fusion with Asian instruments, and Gidra and VC, and there was other... and the posters of Chris Yamashita, so there was all these things that we can say, "Well, these are part, this is an Asian culture, Japanese culture, this is Western American culture, it's this thing we call Asian American." Then I think what was probably the other important cog in this wheel for me was it gave me a place to work with relevant material. But the other is it gave me a sense of community, see, which I never had. I think there's a lot of us who may be really active in the movement because we didn't grow up in a Japanese American community. I grew up in kind of a hostile white community. So there was always that feeling of the alienation. But joining the movement, kind of creating our own culture and aesthetics and all of that. And then so ever since that I've always had a sense of belonging to a community, be it working at Asian American Studies Center teaching, going to Senshin Temple or hanging out at VC, doing this. So I think that was one of the... for me it was nothing but benefit for me because the movement really gave me the opportunity to do the work I want to do, and also gave me kind of a sense of community.

SY: Very, very well said.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.