<Begin Segment 18>

Q: Can it happen again?

RD: Can it happen again? That's a... that's certainly a good question, and there's no way that anyone can answer a question like that for sure. But think if we remember back just a few years to the Iranian crisis situation, the Iranian hostage situation, when the government seemed on the verge of doing god knows what to Iranian students or other persons of Iranian nationality in the United States, although they didn't really talk about interfering with citizens, I think certainly, it could happen again. In an emotional situation, in a situation in which the United States were to suffer some kind of large-scale trauma, reversal, the instinct to take it out on someone, the tendency toward xenophobia, the fear of the foreign, which seems to have been at least one small part of our heritage from the time of the Puritans on, that theme might again restate itself. One certainly hopes not. One certainly observes that we got through our difficulties with China, during the Korean War, without a large scale internment of the Chinese American population. Certainly we now seem to recognize that there are "good Asians" and "bad Asians," obviously in quotation marks. That we have allies and enemies in all parts of the world, and that more and more, I think, we are concerned in this country with ideology more than race and ethnicity so that I would certainly say that the chances of it happening again, at least on racial or ethnic grounds, are much less than in the 1940s, but I certainly would not suggest for a moment that it was impossible.

[Interruption]

RD: The postwar recovery of the Japanese American people is certainly an amazing phenomenon which if it hadn't happened, no one would have predicted. I think we ought to tick off some of the things that made it different. First of all, by the time the Japanese come back to the West Coast, there are other groups who have come to the coast, blacks and Chicanos, who the public feels very, very ambivalent, to say the least, about. In addition, in 1959, the admission of Hawaii to the Union, which brought Asian American congressmen and senators to Washington, our postwar romance for a while, at least, with Japan, the greater cosmopolitanism in the United States, the remarkable social cohesion of the Nisei in their recovery, the fact that Japanese Americans, as a group, have attained higher social and economic status than the general population, are all hallmarks of what we could call Japanese American, Japanese American success. We do have to remember, however, that it was a success for which a great price was paid and... it was a success marked by limitations. Limitations that were both self-imposed and imposed from the outside.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 1983, 2010 Densho and Steven Okazaki. All Rights Reserved.