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KL: Bringing it back to you, you've said that there was kind of a trigger for starting to think back about your own experiences with Japanese American removal and confinement.

WI: Oh, yeah. Well, I always sort of had that in the back of my head, like assimilating in the workforce. When I was going to school, that was fine, it was all fellow students and all that. But then school ends, I come back to my home, and here I am with all my friends in our enclave. So being away from home and being in what you might call the "big white world" was a little scary for me. But like I was saying, in our industry, it's all predicated on what you can do at the drawing board, it's not who you are or what color you are and all that. I was at Warner Brothers for six years. Nobody ever mentioned anything about, "You're the only Japanese American," that has ever worked there and all that. But after I left, I investigated, and yeah, I was the only Asian. There was a Filipino fellow when I started there, but he was just there for a couple years. But basically, from the very inception of Warner Brother cartoons, I guess I was the only Asian or of Japanese background that has worked there. But it was never brought up, never mentioned, no one ever made an issue about it. I thought about it later and says, "Oh my gosh, yeah." After I left, a Chinese fellow came aboard. But little by little, our industry started to flourish with a lot of Asians, especially when we started to do what we call "runaway production." Because the production output exceeded the amount of personnel in Hollywood to do it, so we had to look to Japan and Korea and Taiwan and now the mainland China and also the Philippines, and even New Zealand -- I'm sorry, Australia's got studios. But at that time, we started to import also a lot of highly talented Japanese animators from the anime industry. So we have a number of them now. Plus, with the use of computers, which a lot of the Asian countries excelled in a lot of the computer graphics, so we have a lot of computer technicians also here working.

But that was my point, and then it was kind of interesting. I was always on the, served on the executive board of the Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists local union. And one election period I was nominated, and got elected as vice president of the Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists guild. And at one of the very heated meetings, our president got really upset with the membership and stormed off the stage. Well, I forgot that I was vice president, so I'm sitting there saying, "Oh, gee, that's unfortunate." The Sergeant at Arms says, "Willie Ito, you're vice president, you take over the meeting." Oh, my gosh. [Laughs] I was really caught with my pants down then. So anyway, I went up there and I did the Robert's Rules of Order and conducted the meeting, did as good as... thinking that Charlie, the president, will return next month. Well, he didn't. So meanwhile, the Hollywood media, paper like the Hollywood Reporter and the Variety got news of the fact that a Willie Ito was president of the Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists. And so I started getting phone calls from the trades. And they're saying, "Ito, what are you?" I said, "Well, my ancestry is Japanese, but I'm American." He said, "Well, the point is, you're a president of a big cartoonists industry." I'm thinking, well, what of it? Well, during that period, Hollywood industry was lily white or nepotism. So if you wanted to be in the cinematographers union or the makeup union or the grips or whatever, it was either you were a relative of a producer or you were white.

KL: When was this, approximately what year?

WI: That was prevalent in the late '60s, early '70s. And so I got written up in the Hollywood trades that it was kind of unique that I was president. But then we had African American president, but the name was like, well, his name was Bob Goe, so no one from the trades bothered. The other was Bill Perez, but could have been Spanish, you know, not Mexican. So that's when I... I used to go to the big international meetings where all the teamsters and all of that, it was kind of strange to see, you go to Hollywood, Florida, and they're all wearing the short white sleeves and all these big burly teamster type guys hitting the gavel conducting meetings. And then here our group, which not only was ethnically mixed, but gender-wise we had, half of our executive board was female and all that, and we would go and sit at our table that had the sign Local 839. The whole place was just all men, and half of them look like they drive trucks and all that. [Laughs] So our little group was rather unique in that way. It was always fun at the cocktail parties, I'm standing there with my little cocktail and these would come and say, "Hey, what do you do?" "What local is that?" I'd say, "We're all cartoonists." [Laughs] They just couldn't make any heads or tail of our little group. So that was also another interesting experience with my ethnicity. There was never any sort of animosity, it was always sort of done more in curiosity than that.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.