Densho Digital Archive - Gordon Hirabayashi - Jim Hirabayashi Interview (denshovh-hgordon

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JH: Well, do you remember when you came over to San Francisco about the time of the strike and people were wanting to use you as sort of a symbol? Do you recall that?

GH: Yeah, yeah.

JH: I think for a long time, people weren't interested in being Japanese American and things like that and so --

GH: This was the latter part of '60s, '69, something like that.

JH: That's right, that's right. And they're digging into the recent past and looking for various kinds of symbols.

GH: Uh-huh.

JH: And l recall at that time their wanting to look at your particular experiences in your case.

GH: Yeah. Sort of discovered me in the records.

JH: That's right.

GH: Very uncomfortable for me when you were talking to me about playing that role. And l remember we talked halfway into the night, three a.m. or something.

JH: Uh-huh.

GH: Before I could get the perspective of the role, not a personal one, but kind of a social, cultural symbol.

JH: Well, why did you find it somewhat uncomfortable?

GH: Well, I didn't feel I was any kind of a culture hero for that event, and it seemed out of character for me to try to play something like that. And it took a long time, probably if it were not for the opportunity of talking at length from all kinds of angles with someone like yourself that I could talk with, I don't know that anybody else in San Francisco could have done that, you know, on my short visits over and so on.

JH: Uh-huh. Well, I appreciated those days for another reason. As I recall, we didn't have much relationship with each other when we were young because of the separation in age and you were at the university. So that it seemed to me that that was a first time that we began to talk to each other as adults.

GH: Yeah. Person to person.

JH: Yes.

GH: That's right. Earlier, in your growing up period, I was away at school, university, eight years' difference even when we did visit, made a lot of difference. I'm talking to a little kid brother, you know.

JH: Yes, right.

GH: Getting dents in old man's car and so on. [Laughs] So that's right, both with you and my youngest, our youngest brother, Dick, who was thirteen years younger, it's only recently we've been sort of man to man relationship.

JH: Well, I think I think the significance of your case for the young Japanese Americans, it rather changed something that was you personally to something that was a symbol. And so you had the change from looking at it from a personal standpoint to something that is happening at a different time and for different reasons, it seems to me.

GH: Yeah. I remember discussing with one of your students who had come from Hawaii, where being Japanese American was second nature. They were the majority there. And then, discovering what Japanese Americans meant on the West Coast after she had come to school here, and it had been so live awareness that she couldn't understand why I wasn't always carrying always the Japanese American flag wherever I went. And I was trying to tell her that while I was teaching in the Middle East, American University of Beirut, it didn't make any sense to myself nor to anybody else to raise that flag. Part of the time, my identity was as an American overseas, or sometimes even as an international, as apart from the locals. So Japanese American in that context was irrelevant. But it's a different story here.