Densho Digital Archive - Randy Senzaki Interview (denshovh-srandy-01-0010)

<Begin Segment 10>

FA: Could you explain to the person on the street, fifty years later, why can't Japanese Americans resolve a fifty-year-old dispute over those who resisted and those who cooperated?

RS: Because they're unwilling to find the forgiveness in their hearts. Their pride and their ego and their sense of who they think they are in the community, their status. It's almost like, analogy, a small community sometimes -- and an ethnic community can become a very small community, irregardless of numbers -- it's like an inbred little community. It's like a small town where people know, know everybody else's business. And unfortunately, when people are unwilling to stand up and speak out for what they believe in, or if when they do, other people feel nervous because they're speaking out on how they feel instead of following the collective sheep, then we have problems with that, Japanese Americans. I do think it's an issue of psychology, I do think it has something to do with the internment, with a sense of guilt that Japanese Americans still carry to this day, this hyper-Americanism, this need that I think borders on dysfunctional at times, that's a part of why they won't forgive. Because if they stood back and understood, and they knew in their hearts that it's time to forgive, they could let it go. But people get frozen in time, they want to be king of the small time, big fish in a little pond, I could go on and on. You know what I'm saying? And a lot of people in JACL, that's how they view themselves and their role in the Asian American or Japanese American community. And so it's hard for them to say they made a mistake. Their pride won't allow them, their ego, their basic fundamental insecurity, lack, what they lack is magnanimity, and it's a function of their insecurity. And so yes, it's hard for them, their ego won't allow them to say, "I did make a mistake, I'm sorry." They're too stubborn to do that. Ignorant, too.