<Begin Segment 15>

TI: Why do you think there's such resistance, then, to diversity, in so many parts of America?

JU: Well, that's a cultural question that happens to ever racial group in the country. For instance, when I was in New York, right, going to school and helping to run the Japanese Methodist church, we often said, we were often told that the minority in Manhattan Island is Jewish. I said, "What? I don't consider them a minority in Manhattan Island." I said, "I don't want you to take this too seriously, but it seems like Manhattan is controlled by the Jews. They're not a significant, quote, 'minority' in New York City." And I said, I went to Boston, asked them, "Who's in charge here?" And they informed me the Catholics were a serious minority. I said, "In Boston? A minority?" Then I taught at Westminster in Utah and said, "Who is the minority out here?" "Well, it's the Mormons that are a minority." I said, "I don't believe this." [Laughs] I think this is really crazy. How can the majority be a minority in these big cities? And I said, "It's not possible." Well, it's a cultural thing that gets planted somewhere. And as Will Herberg's book says, the most vicious culturalists are the third generation of immigrants. And, of course, I worry about the Japanese, right? I worry about, "What's the long distance of this cultural identity that people are so vigorously holding on to, the third generation?" And, of course, the third generation in my mind are the Nisei who, eighty-percent of them -- this is a fact I picked out of Pacific Citizen -- eighty percent of the third generation marry out. And, of course, that means the fourth generation will really be vicious in maintaining the Japanese tradition. And it's just, I don't know what the future will hold.

TI: So that's... I want to make sure I understand this. So you're saying that these future generations, even though they're getting, in some ways, dissipated in terms of interracial marriages, you're thinking they're going to get more tenacious about holding on to their Japanese culture?

JU: Yeah. And it comes in very different ways. I was reading the PC yesterday, and the PC lists Meiko -- you know who Meiko is? She's a singer.

TI: Oh, yeah, right.

JU: And she was born, and she never knew her mother, born in Roberta, Georgia. Well, my goodness, Roberta, Georgia hasn't seen Japanese in several centuries. Anyway, she's become a great singer, and she becomes a great Hollywood actress because she's the star of an evening program, the medical one. What is that one? I think Dana knows, but she's keeping very silent. Anyway, and she says she wants to go to Hawaii to meet her mother. She's never known her mother. And then she wants to go to Japan. And you can just see it coming. She really wants to study her cultural past. And then, of course there's another article --

TI: But going back to this, I'm trying to get a sense of... and so is your sense that that's, I'm not sure if you want to place a good or bad on this, but, or make an observation, but what do you think of that? Is that kind of just a natural effect, or do you think that's a negative effect?

JU: I think it's a very natural effect that happens to every immigrant group in the country. It's like asking an Irishman today, "Why do you celebrate St. Patrick's Day?" He says, "Well, St. Patrick's Day, everybody's Irish," you know. And, of course, it's their mentality that wants to preserve the Irish. But, of course, I don't know where it's going because as I was going to say, there's a fellow also, a picture of a fellow who was one-eighth Japanese, and he's looking for, and he's very sick, he's looking for someone whose blood will match his.

TI: To, like, do a bone marrow type of transplant?

JU: Yeah. And biogenetically, he's got to find somebody who's a match, and so he's advertising. And that's, what it does is it drives the Japanese culture somewhat together. Because the kid's got to have an operation. And the third and fourth generations, I think, do get more cerebral about it and more driven by it. It seems to me that... and you ask, "Where's it gonna go?" I was going to ask you who's doing the study. Where's it going to go? [Laughs]

TI: Well, so this is a good segue. Because in some ways, your parents had this view, which is a segue into, your dad started this Japanese Young People's Christian Conference as a way of, I think, promoting leadership amongst Japanese, the Niseis, with a sense of wanting to, perhaps...

JU: Get them to succeed.

TI: Succeed and perhaps succeed within a Japanese community also, or to help propagate the Japanese community.

JU: But also he was a patriot. And in the Americans sense of the term, and he wanted them to be Americans because he was a globalist. When I first went to New York as a graduate student and as a pastor, I asked Dad, "Why don't you come to New York and visit me sometime?" He was there in a second. [Laughs] Well, a minute. He said, "Sure," and he bought himself a ticket. Tried to get my mother go come with him, but she wouldn't do it. But he wanted to see D.C. He'd never seen Washington, D.C. And he says, "I want to do New York, want to see American Wall Street, want to see D.C." And I said, "Why?" He says, "Because I wanted to first, I want to look at the Lincoln Memorial." That's what it was. So (he got) a ticket, he came, we walked the streets of D.C., we walked the streets of New York, we went to the tower of Miss Liberty, and we went to (the Lincoln Memorial), and the Washington Memorial, too. And one of his pastor friends, Andrew Kuroda, Reverend Kuroda, he was, he was the guy they beat up in Tule Lake. But he became the curator of the Japanese section of the Library of Congress and he wanted to see Andrew because he was a Methodist preacher just like him. And he told, he told Andrew, "So this is what it's really like." [Laughs] Because he said, "It's more important to be a citizen of the world." I said, "Well, you've been reading too much Plato." Socrates says, "I'm not an Athenian, I'm a Kosmios. I'm a citizen of the cosmos." And he loved that.

TI: But it seemed like he took these things to heart. I mean, his actions and the things he promoted were very much global, bigger picture.

JU: Yeah, he'd love Obama, I think. Even though Rush Limbaugh hates him. [Laughs]

<End Segment 15> - Copyright ©2009 Densho and the Twin Cities JACL. All Rights Reserved.