Densho Digital Archive - Art Hansen Interview (denshovh-hart-01-0024)

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FC: How old were you when you first got wind of the Japanese American story? Where were you?

AH: About the evacuation itself?

FC: Yes.

AH: I didn't really have a good sense of it until I was a senior at UC Santa Barbara in 1960. And I took a course in what was then called minority group relations and there was a visiting professor from Harvard. And I took that course and we had to write a paper on something. And I had a number of Japanese American friends and they didn't talk very much about the evacuation. And, but I took this class and I did some investigations, and about the same time, I had a Japanese American dentist and he started talking to me about it. And he sent me out for this very paper to interview his wife. Turned out this particular dentist I had had been a JACL leader. I didn't know anything about the JACL then but he was one of the people that was part of the delegation that went up to see Governor Olsen, and I uncovered this from looking at documents years later. But at the time he was very outspoken to me about it, and very angry about it still. And then I started to read the newspaper, the, the journal articles that were coming out in 1960. And it's when they were starting to talk about this being, the evacuation being a blessing in disguise, that, in fact, a lot of the stories in Time and Newsweek have that title because Japanese Americans were now becoming the "model minority" and they said this was the great thing 'cause it dispersed them around the United States and it sent them off to these various colleges and things, and they have more of a commitment to being able to get out of their ghettos and into the mainstream and things like this. And so, so I wrote a ridiculous sort of paper about this thing in which I was a captive of, largely of the sources, you know, that I was using. The thing that bothered me was hearing the voice of my dentist and interviewing his wife, where some other message was coming out. So I did have some confusion about it and then returned to it when I started teaching at Cal State Fullerton. I'd returned to it during a period of ethnic consciousness and dissent and the protest against the Vietnamese war. And so I returned to that and taught a couple of classes in which I had everybody in the class write about something dealing with evacuation, and by the time I got those papers in and students had done interviews and everything, it was a very different picture for me. Within a couple of years I wrote an article on the "Manzanar riot" and at that particular time I think that I was into a different frame of mind altogether.

FC: When you first encountered the story, did you expect to find resistance, did you go looking for it?

AH: You know, I guess I was too naive even though I was a senior in college, or else too much a child of World War II myself and its socialization, because I found it a little odd that people could be so willingly accomplices to their own imprisonment and degradation. So there must have been at some level or other a problematic or some questions, but they must have been muted by more powerful sort of forces. But the fact that I returned to that, that topic later on and everything and I was, had this sort of nagging sort of suspicion that it was wrong. It's kind of ironic because when I was at Santa Barbara I could have gone to the sociology department instead of taking the course that I did take, and went from Shibutani, who was there, and Robert Billigmeier, both of who had been social scientists up at Tule Lake during World War II. But I didn't even know enough about the topic to realize that they could've been involved in it. Nobody ever said anything about it either.