<Begin Segment 45>

MM: It's been, from my vantage point, a very illustrious academic career that you have had at the University of Hawaii primarily. Here's a, maybe a cyclical question: how has your identity as a Japanese American affected your academic career? Or is it more pertinent to ask, how has your academic career affected your identity as a Japanese American?

RK: As I said, I grew up in a community that was very cosmopolitan, and since my parents were used to Caucasians and so forth, I don't think I had that problem And even in the army I worked with many, all kinds of non-Japanese officials. The university was interested in this and then so we did the oral history unit at the university. One of their projects was to talk to those of us who were Japanese Americans and had positions, professorial positions at the university. I guess I was one of the early ones, although I was preceded by people like Baron Goto and Shunzo Sakamaki. But I guess we were a rare breed then. But I didn't find it uncomfortable. As I say, a lot depends not so much on race, I think, as personalities. When I went back to teach at the university, a lot of the professors accepted me as an equal but there were one or two of them who always thought I was still a student. [Laughs] One of 'em criticized me. He said, "I went back, I went past your classroom and all the students are laughing. It's not a laughing matter, you know." [Laughs] I said, "Oh, I was just telling 'em old fashioned jokes to keep 'em awake." But I guess it was unusual in the beginning. And the University of Hawaii has an interesting policy. I don't think it's enforced now, but if you were a University of Hawaii graduate, they didn't want you to come back to teach. Because they said, they said it was inbreeding.

MM: Uh-huh.

RK: So I was one of the lucky ones who was able to come back because my graduate work was all done at University of Minnesota. I was one of those who was lucky to come back to work. Increasingly, I think we have this happening now. I don't think ethnicity should be a real factor. I guess in some places where you have programs that emphasize this, it might be. I wish it would get to a point where, so often we talk about people being role models. I hope I'm not used as a role model because I'm Japanese. I think a role model should be if I was a, if I'm a good professor. This is what a good professor does regardless of whether he's this or that, or this or that ethnic extraction. So I hope we can get to a point where that racial factor isn't that much of a factor when you say "role model." Oftentimes that's what's emphasized and I hope we can get over that.

<End Segment 45> - Copyright © 2004 Japanese American National Museum. All Rights Reserved.