<Begin Segment 17>

RK: You know Tetsuden Kashima?

MM: Yeah, up in Washington.

RK: Yeah, he's written his recent book, (Judgment) Without Trial, or whatever it is, in which he examines more carefully the experience here. But he has a chapter on Hawaii. You know, he's kinda indicating why was Hawaii different? And Tom Coffman in a way got a clue from that. So he told me, "You know Tetsuden?" I said, "Yeah. I know him." So, I put him in touch with Tetsuden, and they're corresponding and digging deeper into this through the contrast. That'll make an interesting story.

MM: Wouldn't you agree that part of it was just simply the sheer numbers...

RK: Oh, definitely, numbers have, play a role. But the fact that here, on the West Coast, most of you had to live in isolated communities, what the sociologists call ghettos, like Little Tokyo here...

MM: Right, right, rather than being integrated...

RK: Yeah. Although in Hawaii, we did have camps and so forth, but everyone's a minority in Hawaii. And that tells a different story. But I also think in Hawaii, too, greatly helped by the Hawaiian spirit of aloha. The Hawaiians share everything and the great aloha feeling. I think that really helped. James Michener, interesting enough, in his book on Hawaii -- and I heard him say this -- he said, also, Christianity played a great role, the whole emphasis on brotherhood. He gives that credit, too. But the whole idea of American democracy and equality, although for many years and maybe to some extent today we still talk about in words but not always practice this in life. But that overwhelming feeling that we have equality in this country is, I think, very important. I looked at one of the contrasts. You go to a place like Fiji, where they're having real problems, and here... anyway, numbers play a role. There are the native Fijians, and the India Indians that were imported, imported mainly to work in the cane fields, here again. And now they're about, almost equal numbers. And they have real tensions. When I visited Fiji, I'm really surprised at how segregated they were. You know, the Indians had their own school. They still wore their saris and so on, many of 'em, and the Fijians had their own. And in a sense, this is what led to the upheaval when they finally, they had an Indian elected prime minister, the natives, in a way, couldn't quite stand for that. And so it's a divided society. But if I may say so, I also think, see, they didn't have this Hawaiian spirit of aloha as pervasive as we have in Hawaii. And also, I think, British rule is different from American rule. The British colonial system was still pervasive there, whereas in America, although we may have had our slave trade and all of this, we still had the Jeffersonian idea of equality.

MM: It also sounds like in that particular case, you're talking about two primary groups, versus in Hawaii it's a multi-plural society where it's not just the Japanese Americans and the haoles, but it's the Chinese and the Filipinos and the Samoans and so forth.

RK: Right. Yeah, so numbers play a role, definitely.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2004 Japanese American National Museum. All Rights Reserved.