<Begin Segment 11>

FA: Tell me about Current Life. Tell me about Current Life. We were showing it on screen, what was Current Life?

AH: Current Life was a Nisei magazine of politics and letters. And it was edited by Jimmie Omura and it started in 1940, was operated on pretty much of a shoestring. He paid for virtually everything out of the money he was making working in the florist industry, so it was never a full-time sort of job for him. But he felt that the Japanese American voice was a provincial one. And what he wanted to do was to make it more cosmopolitan. And he wanted them to talk about more important things, he felt that the discourse in the community was dominated by triviality, and he thought the JACL was chiefly responsible for this. He saw them having social butterfly type parties and hobnobbing with people and not really addressing the winds of change that were going on that were bound to affect the community. I mean, Jimmie was smart enough to be able to see that the situation in the world was deteriorating, that eventually there was going to be some kind of fireworks between Japan and the United States.

But he was also very, very driven by the fact that -- and in some of it, he wanted to elevate, and it was almost like a Victorian, he wanted to elevate the tastes of Japanese Americans. He wanted to introduce them to opera. I mean, he was a very kind of mixed person because on the one hand he wants to get in the voice of people like Saroyan and he wants to get in Carey McWilliams and he wants to get in this, you know, ethnic diversity and everything, and he wanted to have cross-cultural sort of things. And this was sort of populistic but then at the same time he also would have these reviews in there of a violinist concert and things like that, that seemed almost stilted. I mean, you know, so when I read the back issues of that publication, I see its, its strengths, but I also, you know, sort of see its limitations. It still was quite provincial, striving for something more, but... he, the best thing about the whole publication and probably the reason it existed at bottom was the fact that it gave him a forum for being able to address some things. And some of the things that he addressed most urgently was who is taking, who is leading the Japanese American community and where are they leading them to? And this got him into the battle with the JACL. If you go back through and do a qualitative sort of assessment of what's going in those, in those editorials, you'll see that the most insistent kind of thing that he talked about was that very question. So I mean, this, this goes back to the early '30s, this running battle that he has with the JACL. So it's nothing new at the time of World War II.

FA: And yet Frank Chin observed that Omura seemed to like Masaoka in the late '30s.

AH: Well, yeah, even the one copy of, if you look at Current Life out of Chicago they had this award for the outstanding Nisei of the year and it was Mike Masaoka. And he runs this picture of Mike Masaoka as a real comer in the community and everything, and probably it was somebody that he admired. I mean, until you know the person and you just know their sort of achievements... I mean, Jimmie was really very, very patriotic. And I think Masaoka's success was something that he admired. It was when he started to scratch the surface of Masaoka and he saw something else there, a sort of hunter after publicity, a manipulator, these were the things. He didn't know Masaoka. He knew him less than the Japanese American community and they didn't know him very well. I mean, this is what is really incredible, that the Japanese American Citizens League was led by, in World War II, by somebody who was not organically part of that community, who was a rank outsider, really, and it was unfortunate. I mean, that really, somebody else would have felt more constraints from the community, would have taken things slower, would have taken more counsel with other traditional leaders in the community, he didn't. He proceeded in a veritable cultural vacuum. And as a result, they made some decisions that were totally out of character for the community to make.

FC: Wasn't that why he was chosen to lead the JACL, though?

AH: I'm not sure about that, actually. I'm not sure if that was, that was a cause or a consequence, I really don't. I'm not, I haven't settled on that.

FC: How did he get the job?

FA: How did Mike Masaoka get the job?

AH: I'm trying to remember how Masaoka got that job.

FC: Saburo Kido.

FA: Oh, yeah.

AH: Well, oh, I do know a couple of things about it, yeah I do. I don't know what Kido's relationship was to Masaoka, how well he even knew him before that, but I know that the JACL put out a call to try to get somebody to be the executive secretary and there were a couple of candidates. And the one that almost got the job was Togo Tanaka. And they wanted somebody who they felt was articulate, highly Americanized and... I can't remember, I'm sorry, I really can't, I'm blanking on why, why it was that they...

FC: Take, take a sip of coffee.

AH: Okay.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 1998, 2005 Frank Abe and Densho. All Rights Reserved.