Densho Digital Archive - Jim Hirabayashi - Rick Shiomi Interview (denshovh-hjim

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Q: Jim, can you talk about what you remember about your brother making the decision and your family going, you and the family going into the camps?

JH: Well, it was not so much knowing very much about the decision making. We were all caught up in this rush about getting ready for the camp and things like that, so that I wasn't aware too much of the decision making on his part. Just hearing some things through my parents, because you have to remember that I was about eight years younger than he was. So that we were much younger and so we weren't in the decision-making process. He discussed these matters with my parents, I'm sure, but as for us, we finally found out later on that he wasn't going to be with us.

Q: Do you remember what you thought when you heard he wasn't going to be with you?

JH: Well, you know, we sort of looked up to him because he was the oldest brother. And being the oldest brother, well, he was almost like a father figure. Because when you're in a situation where my parents or my grandpeople, the person that would intercede mostly between us when we were growing up and the culture, the dominant society around us, it'd be the older brother. So that we had sort of a view of him being our protector and he was an idealist so that I think we sort of all admired what he did, and I think we emulated him also. We all sort of went into academia probably because he was doing that.

Q: Do you have, added to the, more specifically, do you have feelings about why, what sort of went into making him make that decision?

JH: Well, I think he's always been sort of an idealist. He, even when he was growing up, he was in the Boy Scouts and he went further than anybody else. Whatever he did, it seemed like he was doing these sorts of things to the fullest. And so when it came to this decision, I think it was taken pretty much the same way. He just thought out what was correct and just did it. So it wasn't so much whether he should do it or what would others think, he just did what he thought was right.

Q: Rick, do you have any feelings for how Japanese Americans might have viewed such action then and now?

RS: I think it's changed quite dramatically. Initially I think a lot of, there was a lot of support for him among certain segments, I think, of the Nisei, but there was also a lot of people who thought that he was just a fanatic, they thought he was either a religious fanatic or he was either somebody who was out to be a martyr or he was somebody who was trying to get attention. There was a lot of reasons why, or a lot of reasons that people thought he did it, and I don't any of them really were, were fully valid at all.

JH: Some thought he was rocking the boat.

RS: Yeah. Really, I mean, he was being a radical and rocking the boat and all that, so they really, they sort of thought him as an aberrant, somebody who really represented none of them in a way. But on the other hand, like, you know, he's a man of great patience, and so forty years later, and with his court case and that, there's a lot of people that have really swung around and have supported his position. And I think that that's great. That, to me, is like... he never set out to, to show the Japanese community that they were wrong. He never set out to show them, to show them up, in a sense. It's their own, perhaps, their own embarrassment at the time that they felt that way toward him. And I'm glad now that there's been a lot more support for him because there's been a recognition of how difficult it was to go that route alone when a lot of people didn't think you were doing the right thing. And still, you know, he did it.

JH: I thought that change came over during the time when the Third World push came, and I think people began to search in the literature for people that made a stand whenever, way back. So that many of the students, particularly during the student strike at San Francisco State, they began to look about for culture heroes and he began to gain some recognition at that time.