Japanese American World War II Evacuation Oral History ProjectPart III: AnalystsEdited by
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Preface
Consistent with the student-based philosophy and practice of the Oral History Program (OHP) at California State University, Fullerton (CSUF), its extensive Japanese American Oral History Project (JAOHP) was launched in 1972 at the urging of a then CSUF undergraduate history major, Betty E. Mitson. Mitson was enrolled concurrently in an introductory oral history class taught by Professor Gary L. Shumway, the founding director of the CSUF program and a pioneer in the national oral history movement, and in a historical methodology class under my tutelage. Coincidentally, she had chosen to sharpen her technical processing skills in oral history by transcribing, editing, and indexing a series of tape-recorded interviews in the OHP collection pertinent to the World War II Japanese American Evacuation, the very topic I had selected for investigation by the students in my Historical Methods class.
At this point, I knew virtually nothing about either the method of oral history or the subject of the Evacuation. My motivation for assigning each student in my class to write a research paper on some aspect of the wartime removal and incarceration of West Coast Japanese Americans was that the thirty-year anniversary of this event afforded a convenient way of imparting historical perspective to the contemporary concern with civil liberties, human rights, and ethnic consciousness. Mitson soon convinced me that she could spend her time for my class more profitably by doubling her processing efforts relative to the Evacuation tapes and by collecting and collating research materials for exploitation by her classmates.
One immediate result of this arrangement was that, in reviewing Mitson's processing work, I was plunged into every facet of the oral history process via the topic of the Japanese American Evacuation. Before long I found myself becoming less Mitson's teacher than her student, as she instructed me both in the art of oral history interviewing and transcript editing. Moreover, the dynamic, dialogical character of the oral history data that I was working with had the effect of deepening my understanding of and stimulating my curiosity about the entire subject of the Evacuation. Mitson then encouraged me to suggest to Professor Shumway that the OHP formally constitute a project pivoting upon the history and culture of Japanese Americans, with particular attention being paid to the events surrounding World War II. Upon receiving Shumway's enthusiastic endorsement for this idea, the JAOHP, with Mitson as associate director and myself as director, became a reality.
During its twenty-year history, the project has evolved through three stages of development. This first stage extended through 1975, at which time Mitson accepted an appointment as an oral historian for the Forest History Society, and I succeeded Shumway as the CSUF-OHP's second director. The high tide of this stage was reached late in 1974 with the publication of Voices Long Silent: An Oral Inquiry into the Japanese American Evacuation (coedited by Mitson and myself), an anthology of project interviews, interpretive essays grounded in these interviews, and taped lectures delivered by selected interviewees in a University of California, Irvine, Extended Education series that I coordinated. The annotated bibliography of project holdings that we prepared for that volume is instructive. It shows that the project had inherited thirteen interviews conducted for the OHP between 1966 and 1972, all with individuals residing in Orange County, California, who, for the most part, were of Japanese ancestry and had been interned during the war in the Poston War Relocation Center in southwestern Arizona. More importantly, it indicates that within the next two years project members generated seventy-three new interviews, and that these taped recollections encompassed the Evacuation experiences of Japanese Americans and non-Japanese Americans from all over California, though particularly from the Los Angeles area—the prewar residential, commercial, and cultural center of the mainland Japanese American community. In addition to addressing the situations prevalent for evacuees at the nine other War Relocation Authority (WRA) centers apart from Poston, especially the Manzanar center in eastern California that housed primarily evacuees from Los Angeles County, these interviews embraced the reminiscences of: 1) Japanese Americans who had been detained temporarily in many of the fifteen assembly centers managed by the Wartime Civil Control Administration (WCCA); 2) resident Japanese aliens deemed "potentially dangerous" who were interned in one or more of the several centers administered by the United States Department of Justice; 3) children and grandchildren of the evacuees capitalizing upon the symbolic meaning of the Evacuation as activists in contemporary movements of ethnic consciousness-cum-cultural politics; 4) Caucasians who had been employed by the WRA as camp administrators; and 5) non-Japanese
What is less clear from perusing the annotated bibliography in Voices Long Silent is how this profusion of interviews came into existence. Although Mitson and I were directly responsible for the production of a substantial number of them, the bulk of the interviews derived from students enrolled in successive seminars on the Evacuation taught by the two of us. During this interval, individual and group forays into the field by project members netted an array of oral memoirs falling into categories noted above. The two most prominent student interviewers during this phase of the project, David Bertagnoli and Sherry Turner, undertook prolonged fieldwork with the aforementioned townspeople living adjacent, respectively, to the Manzanar and Tule Lake campsites. Then, too, other undergraduate student interviewers, notably David Hacker and Ronald Larson, substantially enlarged and enhanced the project's holdings by conducting key interviews with controversial personalities involved in intracamp policies at the Manzanar center. Finally, two other undergraduate interviewers, Janis Gennawey and Pat Tashima, played important roles during this period through the multiple interviews each added to the project's mushrooming archival collection.
The next stage of the project's development extended through 1980. This stage saw the addition of some thirty-five interviews, falling largely within four topical foci: 1) internees and administrators of alien internment centers; 2) celebrated dissidents at WRA centers; 3) Japanese American community leaders in Orange County, California; and 4) residents of the southwestern Arizona communities proximate to the former Poston War Relocation Center. The interviews comprising the last two categories were collected, respectively, under the aegis of seminars that I taught in conjunction with Ronald Larson and Jessie Suzuki Garrett in 1976, and with David Hacker in 1978. Each of these individuals, along with Susan McNamara, Eleanor Amigo, Paul Clark, and Betty Mitson, at one or another time during this phase of the project saw service as the project's director.
More central and, perhaps, more consequential than interviewing in this period, however, was the technical processing and interpretation of the amassed oral data. Owing to a contractual arrangement between the OHP and Microfilming Corporation of America (MCA), a New York Times subsidiary, project personnel were obliged to transcribe, edit, and index our holdings so that they could be disseminated internationally by MCA in a microfilm edition. In addition to the project directors named above, three other project members—Paul Hacker, Elizabeth Stein, and Mary Reando—were instrumental in converting raw tapings into polished archival documents.
With respect to the interpretive work accomplished in this stage, project members produced not only two more published anthologies of its interviews, but also two unpublished CSUF Department of History master's theses and one lengthy scholarly monograph based upon project material. The first of the anthologies, Japanese Americans in Orange County: Oral Perspectives, was edited with an introduction by Eleanor Amigo in 1976. More ambitious in scope, as well as more controversial in nature, was the 1977 anthology, coedited and introduced by Jesse Garrett and Ronald Larson and show casing the interviews transacted by David Bertagnoli and myself, entitled Camp and Community: Manzanar and the Owens Valley. The two theses, authored by Paul Clark and David Hacker, were completed in 1980 under my supervision. Clark's study, "Those Other Camps: An Oral History Analysis of Japanese Alien Enemy Internment during World War II," revolved around interviews he recorded (some with the translation assistance of Mariko Yamashita, a Japanese exchange student at CSUF affiliated with the project), with former internees and administrators of Department of Justice camps for enemy aliens. The thesis by Hacker, "A Culture Resisted, A Culture Revived: The Loyalty Crisis of 1943 at the Manzanar War Relocation Center," was informed by the many interviews in the project impinging upon developments at Manzanar, particularly an intensive three-day interview conducted jointly by Hacker and myself in the spring of 1978 in Norman, Oklahoma, with Dr. Morris Opler. A professor emeritus of anthropology at both Cornell University and the University of Oklahoma, Opler, during World War II, had headed Manzanar's Community Analysis Section. As for the unpublished monograph, "Doho: The Japanese American `Communist' Press, 1937-1942," it was authored by Ronald Larson and anchored by interviews done by himself and other project members.
The project's third stage, persisting into the present and encompassing some thirty-five new interviews, has been characterized by cooperative ventures undertaken with outside agencies and individuals. The first of these had its origins in a 1976 project interview with the central figure in the so-called Manzanar Riot of December 1942, Harry Y. Ueno. This endeavor was capped by a widely circulated and critically acclaimed 1986 project publication Manzanar Martyr: An Interview with Harry Y. Ueno, coedited and introduced by Sue Kunitomi Embrey, the wartime editor of the camp newspaper at Manzanar and the founding chair of the Manzanar Committee (a Los Angeles-based activist group known principally for leading an annual pilgrimage to the Manzanar campsite in the Owens Valley), Betty Mitson, and myself.
The second shared venture, done in conjunction with the Japanese American Council (JAC) of the Historical and Cultural Foundation of Orange County, consisted of fifteen interviews with pioneer family residents of the Japanese American community of Orange County, California. Of these interviews, which were done by enrollees in a CSUF Department of History community oral history class composed about equally of CSUF students and JAC members, seven were with predominantly Japanese-speaking Issei (immigrant-generation Japanese Americans), whose transaction and processing necessitated the services of competent bilingualists. Fortunately, these were provided on a volunteer basis by college-educated wives in Orange County's large overseas Japanese business community who were affiliated with the JAC. Published as fully bilingual volumes, these interviews, along with eight other ones done exclusively in English with Nisei (citizen-generation Japanese Americans), comprised the first phase of the ongoing Honorable Stephen K. Tamura Orange County Japanese American Oral History Project, named after the founding cochair of the JAC in recognition of his rise from his roots in the local Japanese American community to appointment in 1966 as the first Japanese American appellate judge in the continental United States. (In 1992, work on the second phase of this study began when two new project research associates, Alan Koch and Cynthia Togami, transacted interviews with the members of two prewar Japanese American communities in Orange County, Fullerton and Laguna Beach).
A third set of cooperative undertakings during the project's last phase has been the publication of two novels penned by project interviewees dramatizing the Japanese American World War II experience from contrasting perspectives. The first of these novels, The Harvest of Hate, was written by Georgia Day Robertson, an Orange Countain who supervised the high school mathematics teachers at the three camps in the Poston War Relocation Center during the war. Although submitted originally by Robertson for publication consideration in 1946, its ultimate publication did not occur until forty years later in 1986. Issued jointly with the JAC as a hardcover volume (in June 1989, it was released by Lynx Books of New York as a mass-market paperback), this novel depicts the crisis of the Evacuation through the eyes of the several members of the fictional Sato family, who farmed in the San Diego area prior to being interned at Poston. The second novel Seki-Nin (Duty Bound), saw print in 1989 under the dual copyright aegis of the project and its Nisei novelist, George Nakagawa. Also published in hardcover from, this novel focuses upon the plight of a Seattle-area Nisei, who, out of deference to parental fears for his future, forsakes his native country in 1940 to accompany his parents back to Japan, only to be drafted three years later into the Japanese army and sent to fight, and be killed, in China. Both of these novels, appended with portions of project interviews with their authors, have been widely reviewed in the mainstream and Japanese American community press.
In addition to these cooperative publication activities, the project has continued to extend and diversify its archival holdings. Consistent with its established pattern of collection, the project added more interviews with Japanese American wartime evacuees, especially those who took part in resistance movements; WRA appointed personnel; and social scientists who studied the Evacuation. But while these older categories were augmented, they were also broadened and variegated. For example, a 1982 interview with a Nisei teacher turned social activist, Hannah Tomiko Holmes, took up her wartime evacuation from the School for the Deaf in Berkeley, California, her incarceration at the Manzanar and Tule Lake centers, and her resettlement in Chicago as a student at the Illinois School for the Deaf. Then, too, a 1987 interview with a WRA administrator, Paul S. Robertson, highlights his seven-month directorship of the isolation center for alleged Nisei "troublemakers" established by the WRA in the spring of 1943 at Leupp, Arizona, on the Navajo reservation. Instead of recording further interviews with those "applied" social scientists employed by the WRA through its Community Analysis Section, the project branched out to interview five social-scientific observers connected with the theoretically-attuned University of California-sponsored Evacuation and Resettlement Study (ERS): Robert F. Spencer, an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, who served as a field anthropologist at the Gila Relocation Center in Arizona; Charles Kikuchi, a retired Veterans Administration social worker who was an ERS participant-observer at Tanforan (California) Assembly Center and Gila Relocation Center and also collected life histories in Chicago among resettled evacuees; Rosalie Hankey Wax, an emerita anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, who conducted fieldwork at the Gila and Tule Lake camps; James M. Sakoda, an emeritus professor of social psychology and statistics at Brown University, who carried on participant-observation for ERS at Tulare Assembly Center and the relocation centers at Tule Lake and Minidoka, Idaho; and Setsuko Matsunage Nishi, a sociologist at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, who surveyed the wartime resettlement pattern of Japanese Americans in St. Louis and Chicago.
Finally, this phase in the project's development has witnessed the production, in 1989, of two more CSUF History Department M.A. these by project members. The first, "Medicine in a Crisis Situation: The Effect of Culture on Health Care in the World War II Japanese American Detention Center," by Michelle Gutierrez, makes resourceful use of existing project interviews with an Issei, Dr. Yoriyuki Kikuchi, chief of the dental clinic at
During the course of its two-decade existence, the Japanese American Project has been fortunate to have the dedicated service and support of countless individuals. Apart from those already named, a number of other people associated in some significant way with the project deserve recognition for their contributions. Dr. Kinji K. Yada, a colleague in the CSUF Department of History and a wartime internee at the Manzanar center, has assisted the project as a resource person from its inception through the present; not only has he provided timely translations and trenchant advice, but also taught classes taken by project personnel in Japanese and Japanese American history and shaped and sharpened the M.A. theses of a selected few of them. Elizabeth Stein, later a faculty member in the CSUF Department of English, gave unstintingly of her time and editorial talents as an undergraduate while discharging her duties as the project's associate director during its second stage of development. Others who were important to the project for their promotional work in this same period were Duff Griffith and Reed Holderman. Since 1980, the project has benefited greatly, particularly in connection with its work on the Honorable Stephen K. Tamura Orange County Japanese American Project, by the efforts of volunteers drawn from Orange County's Japanese American population and the county's overseas Japanese business community. Noteworthy in the former category were the following individuals: Myrtle Asahino, Yasko Gamo, Susan Hori, Charles Ishii, Gale Itagaki, Hiroshi Kamei, James Kanno, Carol Kawanami, Grace Muruyama, Dr. Ernest Nagamatsu, Clarence Nishizu, Shi and Mary Nomura, Iku Watanabe, Dorothy Wing, and Rae Yasumura. The latter category was headed up by Masako Hanada and Yukiko Sato, who coordinated the team of translators, transcribers, and editors associated with the production of the bilingual volumes in the Tamura collection. Members of this team included: Keiko Akashi, Kokonoe Baba, Kazuko Horie, Hisako Maruoka, Etsu Matsuo, Setsuko Naiki, Kyoko Okamoto, Yoko Tateuchi, Yumiko Wakabayashi, and Chiharu Yawata. CSUF students instrumental during this third phase of the project have been Phillip Brigandi, Celia Cardenez, Jeanie Corral, Richard Imon, Reiko Katabami, Alan Koch, Lisa Nobe, Noemi Romero, Cynthia Togami, and Ann Uyeda. Although the CSUF Oral History Program staff, spearheaded by its able and indefatigable former associate director/archivist Shirley E. Stephenson, has facilitated the work of the project in many ways from its beginning, in recent years the role of staff members, Kathleen Frazee, Shirley de Graaf, Debra Gold Hansen, Nora Jesch, Gaye Kouyoumjian, and Garnette Long, especially in the area of technical processing, has been both spirited and substantial. During the 1980s and 1990s, the project has enjoyed the support of two new OHP directors, Professor Lawrence de Graaf and Michael Onorato, both faculty members in the CSUF Department of History, the OHP's administrative parent. Finally, the four History Department chairs during the life of the project—Professors George Giacumakis, Thomas Flickema, Robert Feldman, James Woodward, and Frederic Miller—have demonstrated leadership beneficial to its growth and development.
Throughout its history, the project has been largely self-supporting as a result of the sale of its assorted publications. In its formative years, a small amount of subsidization was provided by the CSUF School of Humanities and Social Sciences and a series of research grants awarded to student project members through the university's Departmental Association Council. The largest infusion of funds into the project came about, however, during its second developmental stage via Comprehensive Employment Training Act (CETA) salary payments for trainees attached to the project. In recent years, financial assistance has flowed from several sources: 1) the Japanese American Council of the Historical and Cultural Foundation of Orange County; 2) the MAC NEEL PIERCE FOUNDATION, with student scholarships; 3) CSUF faculty research and travel grants; and 4) donations from project interviewees and their families.
Almost from its outset, project holdings and personnel have been consulted by a variety of researchers, from affiliates of local historical societies and agencies, both within and outside of the Japanese American community, through writers of doctoral dissertations and scholarly studies. In 1993, the National Park Service contracted the project to consulting on the historical interpretation of the Manzanar War Relocation Center. The media have also turned to the project for assistance on a regular basis, extending from area newspapers through network television
California State University, Fullerton
1994
Introduction
Almost from its beginning in 1972, the Japanese American Project of the Oral History Program at California State University, Fullerton (CSUF), has been interested in and benefitted from the work of those individuals who experienced the Japanese American Evacuation firsthand and converted their "fieldwork" into interpretive studies of that cataclysmic historical event. This part of the Japanese American World War II Evacuation Oral History Project bears testimony to this particular Japanese American Project focus. Included in it are interviews done with two categories of "analysts"—novelists (Georgia Day Robertson and George Nakagawa) and social scientists (Togo Tanaka, Robert Spencer, and James Sakoda).
It is fitting that the lead interviews in the two sections of this volume should be those with Robertson and Tanaka. Shortly after Betty Mitson and myself launched the Japanese American Project over two decades ago, she informed me that the Special Collections section of our university library contained the manuscript of an unpublished novel written in 1946 by Georgia Day Robertson, a former mathematics teacher at the Poston War Relocation Center in southwestern Arizona. That the novel was grounded in her experiences at the Poston center made it especially intriguing to us. This was because the prewar Nikkei (Japanese American) community in Orange County (some 2,000 people) had been detained there, adjacent to the Colorado River. Once we read the manuscript, we realized that it possessed more merit than simply being connected to our university's region of service in southern California. We instantly recognized that, quite apart from its documentary subject matter, Robertson's manuscript—then entitled "Harvest of Hate"—possessed considerable literary value. However, it was not until five years later that we were able to locate Robertson, who was then, at ninety-one years of age, living alone in a mobile park in the south Orange County town of Costa Mesa. She readily accepted the project's offer to find a commercial publisher for her epic novel, and failing in that regard, for the project to publish "Harvest of Hate." As it turned out, both of these "scenarios" were enacted: in 1986, under the slightly revised title of The Harvest of Hate, the Japanese American Project (with funding assistance from the Japanese American Council of Orange County) published a limited clothbound edition of Robertson's novel coincident with the author's centennial birthday; then, three years later, Lynx Books of New York City produced a handsome paperback version of The Harvest of Hate for mass distribution. Portions of my 1973 interview with Robertson, which appears in this volume in its entirety, were included in the Afterword to both editions of her novel. Although she died shortly after the Lynx paperback was released, Georgia Day Robertson had lived long enough to lay her literary claim on posterity.
Within two years after the discovery of Robertson's manuscript, the personnel of the Japanese American Project made another discovery—Togo Tanaka, who participated in a lecture series I coordinated on the topic of the Evacuation at the University of California, Irvine, in 1974. A political science honors graduate in the mid-1930s from the University of California, Tanaka had served as the prewar editor of the English-language section of an influential Japanese vernacular newspaper, the Rafu Shimpo, in Los Angeles's "Little Tokyo." After being evicted from the West Coast, Tanaka was interned in the Manzanar War Relocation Center in eastern California's Owens Valley. There he became connected with the camp's Reports Office as a documentary historian, writing almost daily reports about virtually every facet of concentration camp life. When the political currents swirling in the Manzanar center created the storm of the infamous Manzanar Riot of December 6, 1942, Tanaka and other Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) leaders first had their lives threatened by angry opponents of the allegedly "collaborationist" JACL and then, in the wake of the riot, were placed in protective custody in an abandoned Civilian Conservation Corps camp in Death Valley. While there for a few months, Tanaka was contacted by the Evacuation and Resettlement Study (ERS), a University of California, Berkeley, research project spearheaded by the sociologist Dorothy Swaine Thomas. Persuaded by Dr. Thomas's assistant, the political scientist Morton Grodzins, to write a series of in-depth reports about such topics as the Manzanar Riot, the prewar Japanese American press, and the JACL, Tanaka continued his affiliation with ERS even after leaving Death Valley and resettling in Chicago. The two 1974 interviews with him that are represented in this volume take a different yet complementary tack: the first, by Betty Mitson and David Hacker, is a "life review"; the second, by me, pivots on Tanaka's wartime assessment of the causes of the Manzanar Riot (a topic that Hacker and I were then immersed in researching and writing up for publication).
Because of our joint work on the Manzanar Riot and our separate interviews with Togo Tanaka, Hacker and I became very interested in the role played by social scientists during the Evacuation. One person who we contacted about being interviewed by us for the Japanese American Project on his World War II work was the eminent applied anthropologist, Dr. Edward Spicer of the University of Arizona. Spicer had been affiliated with two social-scientific teams that had studied the Evacuation. Initially, he was an assistant at the Poston War Relocation Center to Dr. Alexander Leighton—an anthropologist, psychiatrist, and U.S. Navy officer—who headed up the Bureau of Sociological Research. Later, he replaced Dr. John Embree, another noted anthropologist, as the head of the Community Analysis Section of the War Relocation Authority (WRA). Unfortunately, Spicer's failing health prevented Hacker and me from interviewing him. But we did find out from Spicer that the anthropologist who had worked under his direction as the community analyst at the Manzanar center, Dr. Morris Opler, was in excellent health and likely would be amenable to our interviewing him. A double emeritus professor from Cornell University and the University of Oklahoma, Opler reluctantly agreed to be interviewed by us in June 1978 at his home in Norman, Oklahoma. The transcript of that interview shimmers with the brilliance of the commentary that Hacker and I were privileged to listen to and record for three days. Sadly, however, Opler (who was then contemplating writing his autobiography) afterwards decided that he was not prepared to sign the CSUF Oral History Program's standard interviewee release form. For this reason, readers of this volume have been deprived of a precious recollective resource.
Nine years after the disappointing aftermath of the interview with Morris Opler, in the summer of 1987, I had the good fortune to interview still another distinguished anthropologist who had done fieldwork during the Japanese American Evacuation, Dr. Robert Spencer of the University of Minnesota. In 1942-1943, while still a doctoral candidate at U.C. Berkeley in his twenties, Spencer had been persuaded by one of his mentors, Dr. Robert Lowie (who along with Spencer's other major professor, Dr. Alfred Kroeber, was a world-class anthropologist), to accept employment as a field anthropologist for Dorothy Thomas's aforementioned Evacuation and Resettlement Study. When I contacted Spencer about interviewing him in relation to a manuscript I was preparing about a near riot at Gila in November 1942, he responded with alacrity. After I told him of my sad experience with Opler, he agreed to sign the interviewee release form before the interview had been conducted. That three-day interview, done simultaneous with Spencer's retirement from the University of Minnesota (where he had been since 1948), follows the ones with Togo Tanaka in the social scientists section of the present volume. What emerged from that interview was not only rich historical and ethnographic "data," but also a valued friendship (with Spencer and his family) and a professional collaboration between Spencer and myself on an anthropological history of Gila (that was tragically terminated by his death from cancer in 1992).
A few months after my 1987 interview with Spencer, I attended a superb conference that Professor Yuji Ichioka of the Asian American Studies Program at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), organized at the University of California, Berkeley, campus to evaluate the achievement of the Evacuation and Resettlement Study. There I met, for the first time, many of the social scientists who had been ERS field workers. With two of them, Charles Kikuchi and James Sakoda, I developed a close enough relationship for me to request that I be permitted to interview them for the Japanese American Project. Accordingly, in the summer of 1988 I traveled to Rhode Island where both of these retirees were living (Kikuchi as a seasonal resident of Block Island and Sakoda as a year-around citizen of Barrington). The successive multiple-day interviews I did with these two social scientists—Kikuchi a social worker, Sakoda a social psychologist—paid compound dividends. In the case of Kikuchi, who had been Spencer's research ally and boon companion at the Gila center and later studied the experiences of midwestern resettlers out of the ERS Chicago office, the interview was transacted in the interstices between family fishing expeditions, swimming parties, historical sightseeing tours, and sumptuous repasts prepared by his renowned dancer-wife, Yuriko (then assistant artistic director for the Martha Graham Dance Company). Lamentably, a month after our interview, Kikuchi was overcome with stomach cancer while on a walk for peace in the Soviet Union and, shortly after being sent home to New York, passed away. Although it was intended that his interview be included in this part of the Japanese American World War II Evacuation Oral History Project, time, space, and financial constraints have frustrated this intention. For similar reasons, the interviews I conducted in St. Louis and New York in 1990 with two other former ERS staffers, the anthropologist Dr. Rosalie Hankey Wax and the sociologist Dr. Setsuko Matsunaga Nishi, are conspicuous by their absence from this volume. Hopefully, another venue can be found for giving voice to their remarkable (and, in the case of Wax, highly controversial) narratives.
Included in this volume, however, is the interview I did with James Sakoda. Ironically, while that interview was being transacted at Brown University (from which Sakoda had recently retired) and the Sakoda home in Barrington, two events transpired: V-J Day was celebrated in Rhode Island (the only state in the Union still honoring
The final voice heard in this volume is that of the Nisei (second generation Japanese American) author George Nakagawa. Born in 1932, much later than any of the others represented here, Nakagawa experienced the Evacuation as a child—at the Pinedale Assembly Center and the Tule Lake Relocation Center in California and at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming. The novel that he wrote during the postwar years while working as a U.S. government civil service employee in Japan, Seki-Nin (Duty Bound), says very little about the Evacuation per se. Still, the psychological struggle that prevailed for Nisei when the country of their ancestry warred with the country of their nativity is, in a very profound and pervasive sense, the defining quality of the novel (which was published under the aegis of the CSUF Japanese American Project in 1989). As the two-part interview I did with him in 1988 about his life and novel makes quite clear, perhaps only a Nisei could have written so palpable a novel about the World War II Japanese American experience as Seki-Nin.
California State University, Fullerton
1994
An Interview with
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Use Restrictions
This is a slightly edited transcription of an interview conducted for the Oral History Program, sponsored by California State University, Fullerton. The reader should be aware that an oral history document portrays information as recalled by the interviewee. Because of the spontaneous nature of this kind of document, it may contain statements and impressions which are not factual
Scholars are welcome to utilize short excerpts from any of the transcriptions without obtaining permission as long as proper credit is given to the interviewee, the interviewer, and the University. Scholars must, however, obtain permission from California State University, Fullerton before making more extensive use of the transcription and related materials. None of these materials may be duplicated or reproduced by any party without permission from the Oral History Program, California State University, Fullerton, Fullerton, California, 92834-6846.
Interview
- Interviewee:
- Georgia Day Robertson
- Interviewer:
- Arthur A. Hansen
- Subject:
- "The Harvest of Hate" / Poston War Relocation Center
- Date:
- July 26, 1979 and August 21, 1979
This is an interview with Mrs. Georgia Day Robertson, 1973 Newport Boulevard, Space#28, in Costa Mesa, California. The interviewer is Arthur A. Hansen and the interview is being conducted for the Japanese American Project of the Oral History Program at California State University, Fullerton. The date is Tuesday, June 26, 1979, and the time is 10:15 a.m. Mrs.Robertson is the author of an unpublished novel, "The Harvest of Hate,"[1] which is a saga of the Japanese American Evacuation based upon the Poston War Relocation Center in Arizona where she taught during World War II.
Georgia, let me begin the interview by asking you a little about your own personal biography, beginning with your family background, and then proceeding on through your childhood into your young adulthood.
Robertson
I was born on an Iowa farm. I don't know why, but I didn't start school until I was almost eight years old. I went to a country school. In 1902 we moved to Keosauqua, the county seat, so that I could go to high school. I completed high school and went to Iowa State College.
Hansen
Let me back up a bit and ask you one or two questions. You were born when?
Robertson
October 9, 1886. [Georgia Day Robertson died in 1991.] I was the youngest of seven children. I had one brother and five sisters.
Hansen
And where was this where you were brought up in Iowa exactly?
Robertson
The southeastern part of Iowa, Van Buren County.
Hansen
What was it like there, growing up in a farm family, at that time?
Robertson
Beautiful! Oh, I had a wonderful time, wonderful time. We hunted Easter eggs at Easter time. Mother let us have all the eggs we could find outside of the chicken house for our own to sell. We could buy something we wanted. Of course, a lot of the hens laid eggs around the weeds and I found a lot of Easter eggs. One year I decided to buy some material for a new dress with my money. I went to the store at the little town of Utica, about a mile and a half from the farm. I bought the ugliest piece of calico they had in the store. It was brown, ugly brown, if you can imagine.
Hansen
Was your family quite serious about education? Did you get personal education at home or through the church?
No, I was the only one of the girls who went to college. An older sister went to kindergarten training school and taught kindergarten. My brother went to college at Ames, [Iowa], and that's the reason I went there [Iowa State College]. He brought his yearbook home. He graduated in 1900. I just went through the yearbook and I knew everybody in it. I knew every professor, I knew all the buildings; Ames was my school.
Hansen
Were you a prolific reader when you were a young girl?
Robertson
Yes.
Hansen
What types of things did you read?
Robertson
Well, everything you wanted to read at that time.
Hansen
Can you recall any books that stood out in your mind, important books to you?
Robertson
Oh, what was that book that always broke my heart, my first novel? I wept over it. My mother had to take it away from me.
Hansen
You don't remember it though? Was it by an American author or a British author?
Robertson
An American author. Gosh, I don't remember the name of it. East Lynne [Or, The Earl's Daughter] was a play, wasn't it?
Hansen
No, it was a novel [written by Mrs. Henry Wood (1814-1887)].
Robertson
That was another thing I wept over. When I graduated from high school, we gave our orations then. You know, everybody had to get up and give theirs, and I wrote on spring. When we were ready to go to commencement that night, Father said, "Have you got your copy of your oration so somebody can prompt you?" I said, "No, I know it. I don't need any prompting." So he took it, but he sat way up in the gallery so I don't know how he expected to prompt me.
Hansen
How big of a school was it, when you attended?
Robertson
Oh, well there were only ten of us in the graduating class. It was a small school.
Hansen
Did you find that you had good instruction from your teachers?
Robertson
Very good!
Hansen
I know you later went on and did work in mathematics. Did you show a proclivity toward mathematics when you were young?
Robertson
Yes, but our high school was not accredited so I had to take examinations in mathematics before I went to college.
Hansen
What hobbies did you have when you were growing up, prior to going to college? What types of things did you like to do? Were you a tomboy?
Robertson
Oh, very much so. I wanted to have my hair cut, wanted short hair. So later in the years when the girls began to bob their hair, by that time I was a white-haired woman. I guess that I was the first older woman to bob her hair. I've had short hair ever since. Oh, just the usual things kids do on a farm, you know, slide down the hill in the winter on a sled, and then we had to walk a mile and a half to school. We went every day, no matter how deep the snow was. If it was too bad, Father would take us in the bobsled. Nowadays, if you get a couple of inches of snow on the ground they don't have school, you know. We went regardless of the weather. I had a neighbor boy, a little younger than I, and we used to get into a lot of things. We
Hansen
Were there any people of different ethnic backgrounds in Iowa who were the object of any kind of ridicule or discrimination, whether Irish or Scandinavian or German?
Robertson
Well, after I went to high school, there were a lot of black people there. Of course, they were sort of the servants in the community, but there was no racial hatred of them or anything like that.
Hansen
Where was that?
Robertson
In southern Iowa, where I went to high school. I'd be walking home alone at night and there was all tree-bordered streets, you know, and it was pretty dark. I'd hear someone behind me, and I'd look back and if I'd see it was a black man, I'd feel perfectly safe. They kind of looked after the white people.
Hansen
How were they treated back there as a whole, would you say?
Robertson
They were treated very well. They had them as students in high school, no different from anyone else.
Hansen
So the school that you went to that only had ten students was your grammar school?
Robertson
Ten graduates in my high school class. There were about one hundred students in the high school. The town was Keosauqua, an Indian name.
Hansen
Oh, from your high school class.
Robertson
Yes.
Hansen
You went to a grammar school first, didn't you?
Robertson
I went to a country school. Don't tell me they don't teach you how to read and write in a country school.
Hansen
So you got a good education in the country school?
Robertson
I think so. I got a better education in the country school than they get in the Los Angeles, [California], schools today, much better.
Hansen
What do you think the key was to that?
Robertson
Of course, they didn't have all those extra things. All we did was learn to read and learn to spell and learn arithmetic. That's about it.
Hansen
Was there a teacher in the grammar school who was especially important to you?
Robertson
Well, I had just one teacher in the country school.
Hansen
For all the years?
Robertson
No, each year. I had a different teacher each year. In the rural school, the teacher taught all the grades.
Hansen
Was any particular teacher very special to you, then?
Robertson
Well, I had a lot of different ones. None of them stand out.
What about in high school? You had more than one teacher there, didn't you? Did anybody encourage you in high school to go on to college?
Robertson
No.
Hansen
Was it because you were a woman that they didn't encourage you?
Robertson
I don't think they ever thought about it. We didn't get any counseling in school in those days.
Hansen
So the main inspiration you had for going on to college was the fact that your brother went to the college at Ames?
Robertson
No, the reason I went to Ames was my brother, but I would have gone to college anyway. That was in my own mind, I was college-bound.
Hansen
How did you get that idea in your mind?
Robertson
Don't ask me, I have no idea. I just knew that when I got through high school, I was going to college. When we moved to Keosauqua to go to high school—that was 1902—I was sixteen years old.
Hansen
How far away were you from Ames when you went away to school?
Robertson
Oh, something over a hundred miles. Ames is north of Des Moines, twenty-five miles.
Hansen
So you had to go move to Ames and live there on campus?
Robertson
Yes, in the girls' dormitory.
Hansen
Was it easy for your parents to afford to send you away to college?
Robertson
They didn't pay a cent of my expenses.
Hansen
Well, how did you manage that?
Robertson
It didn't cost us much to go to college in those days. The first year my brother gave me two hundred dollars. That was all I needed.
Hansen
Was this the brother who was already in college?
Robertson
Yes. And the second year I worked for professors' wives. I waxed floors and washed windows. That was a wonderful experience. I got acquainted with these professors' wives and later, when I lived in Ames, it was very nice to have them for my friends. And then the third year they let me teach a class in math—algebra—for students who had to take it to make it up. And I was treasurer of the Reading Club, so that paid my expenses. My last year I borrowed five hundred dollars, because I wanted to be free my senior year to really get the most out of it.
Hansen
You borrowed it from the bank?
Robertson
Yes, I borrowed five hundred dollars. My brother-in-law was the cashier of a bank, and he loaned me five hundred dollars. So that's how I got through college. It never cost my folks a cent.
Hansen
How about the course work that you were taking at college. What was your field of study?
Robertson
Mathematics.
Right from the start?
Robertson
Yes. I took the science course: mathematics, physics, zoology, biology, geology—all the ologies. (laughter)
Hansen
So it didn't matter if it were an earth science or a biological science or a physical science, or whatever—it was science, right?
Robertson
Physics was my minor. Of course, everything I learned in physics is out of date now. We had a botany professor who never failed anybody. He said that if you liked botany, you'd study it hard enough to pass, and if you didn't like it, it would be a shame to make you take it again. Now that's a good idea for you as a professor—you remember that.
Hansen
I will. (laughter) Did you, while you were at school, also take courses which would allow you to become a teacher?
Robertson
No, they didn't have any. They didn't have courses like that then.
Hansen
What was your intention when you went to school? What were you planning on doing with a Bachelor of Science?
Robertson
Teach mathematics.
Hansen
Oh, you planned on teaching from the start?
Robertson
Yes. Then I got this idea that I was being called by God to go to China, to go to a mission field. So I joined the student volunteers in college. That was a group that would go to foreign fields.
Hansen
Were you active in the church prior to going to college?
Robertson
Oh yes, even when I was a kid in high school, I'd teach in Sunday school class.
Hansen
Which church was that?
Robertson
Methodist.
Hansen
Was your family in the Methodist church?
Robertson
No, my mother was Presbyterian and she got the surprise of her life when she... the Presbyterians in Keosauqua didn't have a service at night, so we would all go to the Methodist church, and that's where I went because all the young people went there, you know. One night when the preacher asked for people who wanted to join the church to come forward, I got up and I went to the altar. I never said a word to my mother, and she was completely surprised.
Hansen
Did you ever have any difficulty while you were in college being a science student and also being a religionist?
Robertson
No.
Hansen
You didn't? How did you reconcile the two positions?
Robertson
I didn't feel a need to reconcile them.
Hansen
Why not?
Robertson
Why should I?
Well, it's just that oftentimes, especially around the turn of the century, there were a lot of crises that individuals were going through because the claims of science were opposed—in some cases—to the claims of religion. So I just think it's ironic that you didn't have any qualms at all over reconciling the two. But you never did? One was in the area of faith and the other was in the area of logic?
Robertson
I had no conflict whatever.
Hansen
Was the coloration of the college religious?
Robertson
No, it was a state college.
Hansen
But was there a religious atmosphere within the college?
Robertson
We had a very strong YWCA [Young Women's Christian Association], but no, I wouldn't say there was any religious atmosphere.
Hansen
But you had decided for some reason or another that you felt a stirring that you wanted to go into missionary work? So what was the year you graduated from college?
Robertson
1909. While in college, I was very active in the YWCA, athletics—I won my letter in tennis and field hockey—and in Literary Society activities. I was also a member of the Pi chapter of Alpha Delta Pi [social sorority] at Iowa State University.
Hansen
So tell me a little about the beginnings of your missionary work, where you rendezvoused in order to get an orientation, and how you were sent out to China.
Robertson
It's just a disgrace the way they used to send out these young missionaries with no preparation concerning the country they were going to. I was only twenty-four, and I got this appointment that sent me to Chengtu [Ch'eng-tu], China. I had a year to study the language. And this is the way I studied it.
Hansen
This is before you went to China?
Robertson
No.
Hansen
Oh, once you got there.
Robertson
Yes, I got to my station. It took me six or eight weeks to get up there from China because we had to go up the Yangtze River in a houseboat to Chungking [Ch'ung-ch'ing]. And then from Chungking to Chengtu in a sedan chair. It was a ten-day journey. Well, we finally got there. I took out a book—a Chinese primer—and they got a teacher for me, a Chinese teacher. He sat on one side of the table and I sat on the other, and there was the textbook. He didn't speak a word of English; I didn't speak a word of Chinese.
Hansen
He was a Christian, though, wasn't he?
Robertson
I don't know, probably not.
Hansen
You don't know if he was a Christianized Chinese?
Robertson
No, I don't know. And you know, they have the tones in China. A word has its meaning by the tone as well as the pronunciation. So we started "Foo." That was on the first page of the primer, "foo." And he said "foo," in a low tone and I said "foo."
Hansen
"Foo"?
Robertson
I repeated it in the same tone as before, raising my voice like a question. Well, we gave up on that one and
Hansen
During that year when you were learning the language, were you also getting an introduction into the Chinese culture?
Robertson
Well, what do you mean by Chinese culture?
Hansen
Well, the way of life, the family life, the social customs.
Robertson
Well, there wasn't much of family life as I was in this boarding school with about seventy or eighty girls. I was living in this boarding school and, of course, I'd talk to the schoolgirls and that helped a lot in my learning conversation.
Hansen
This was a boarding school for Chinese?
Robertson
Yes, Chinese girls. Practically every night in summer we'd spend sitting out on campus and then I'd be talking Chinese with these girls. Naturally I didn't learn the official language, but I learned the language of the schoolgirls.
Hansen
What was your mission, so to speak, in terms of its objectives?
Robertson
The same as all missions: evangelization and education. Well, the first year I studied the language and the next year they did a very unfair thing to me. They gave me the principalship of the girls' boarding school.
Hansen
Of the same boarding school you were in?
Robertson
Right off the bat.
Hansen
This was a Chinese school—it was a Christian school?
Robertson
Oh, yes.
Hansen
A Methodist-run school, then.
Robertson
A senior missionary at Chungking who had been out there several years and should have taken the principalship wouldn't come to Chengtu because she wouldn't live with Miss Collier, the teacher who nobody could get along with. And so they gave it to me, just out there one year and one year of language, and then all of a sudden I'm principal of the school, responsible for the lives of seventy or eighty girls—buy all their food, hire the teachers, run the school, buy the cloth and hire the tailor to make their [the schoolgirls'] garments. It was an awful load.
Hansen
Who did you have for teachers there? You talked about how you had to hire teachers. Did you hire Chinese teachers?
Robertson
Well, I had one other missionary who taught, and then all the rest were Chinese teachers. I had about ten or twelve Chinese teachers.
Hansen
How long did you handle the principal's role in the school?
Robertson
Well, I handled it until I got married.
And when was that?
Robertson
That was in 1914, the year the war broke out in Europe.
Hansen
You got married and then came back to the United States?
Robertson
Well, we stayed on in China for a couple of years. When my husband proposed to me, I said, "My life belongs to China." He was out there teaching mining engineering in a government school. And he said, "Well, I think I'd like to stay in China, too." And then I wasn't principal of the school anymore, but I still taught. I taught while the baby was coming, I taught while I kept getting bigger and bigger. I taught as long as I could get in between the desk and wall. That was just about a month before the baby was born. And then before he was a month old, I was back to teaching again.
Hansen
Well you were out in China during a very tumultuous period in Chinese history. Could you tell us a little about that, and how it affected your own personal job at the school?
Robertson
What do you mean?
Hansen
Well, there was a revolution of sorts going on in China at the time.
Robertson
Oh, I was out there during the revolution against the Manchus.
Hansen
Right, that's what I wanted you to talk a little about, and how it affected the running of the school.
Robertson
It had a very drastic effect on the school. All the missionaries were driven, not only out of Chengtu, but out of the whole [Szechwan] province. During those years there was a strong anti-foreign feeling in China which always came to the surface at times when the government was weak. When the revolution against the Manchus broke out, the Manchu government, already weak since the death of the Empress Dowager a couple of years earlier [1908], could give us no protection. Our lives were threatened; we fled from one place to another and finally wound up in Shanghai, which at that time was run by foreigners. That is where the international settlement was, and it was the real Shanghai.
Hansen
When did you start feeling this?
Robertson
Another missionary and I went to Omei, the sacred mountain [for Buddhists] of West China, for the summer of 1911, and on our way back to Chengtu in our sedan chairs we were met by a messenger from Chengtu saying that there was a riot going on there and not to come back. So then we turned and went to Kiating [Lo-shan], on the Min River, and lived with some Baptist missionaries there, and we were harassed the whole time we were there. The Chinese pastor had a plan if they came after us. He was going to hide us up in the garret of his house. Finally there came a time when they had, oh, just thousands of anti-foreign Chinese surrounding the walls of Kiating and they were going to kill all of the foreigners. Then we had to get out.
Hansen
How did you get out?
Robertson
Well, we spent the whole night getting food cooked up because we didn't know where we'd be able to buy it. And then, of course, the cities were all walled, and they always locked the gates at sundown and did not open them until sunup the next morning. We wanted to leave before dawn, so we asked for the key from the Yamen—that's the official city headquarters including the mayor's office—and they opened the gates about four o'clock and we went out before anyone was up. We started down the river and went to Chungking. They had a French and a British gunboat at Chungking.
Hansen
Were you pregnant at the time?
Robertson
No, I wasn't married yet then.
Oh, you weren't married yet.
Robertson
So we stayed at Chungking and finally things got so bad there that we had to leave. One night they were going to kill all the foreigners and all the people who worked for foreigners. You know when the Chinese get frightened they don't get white, they get pea green. Our table boy came to serve us that night, and his face was really green—scared to death, afraid we were all going to get killed that night. Of course, a lot of us were down there at Chungking at the mission and it was just overloaded because people from all over the province had had to flee and get out of their stations. So some of us were sleeping out on the porch. The mission home at Chungking had a two-story veranda that went clear around the house and we were sleeping right out on the veranda, easy prey if anybody wanted to kill us. We went to bed, like nothing was special going on and then, when it began to rain, we knew we were safe because the Chinese wouldn't go out in the rain to do anything. They had pigtails then, and they didn't want to get their pigtails wet. So we knew we were safe. The American consulate had given us a Tibetan dog to protect us and it was the biggest dog I've ever seen in my life; it was as big as a half-grown cow. I was more afraid of that dog than I was of the Chinese. One of his favorite sports was at night when we were all asleep to come up the back steps to the veranda and run around there; and he'd just sort of shake the whole veranda. Well, finally we had to leave Chungking and the British gunboat accompanied the houseboats down the river. We were fired on a few times and finally got to Shanghai.
While I was at Shanghai, we stayed at the mission which was the Methodist home where all the missionaries stayed when in Shanghai. Dr. Lacy had the Methodist Publishing House there. At this time Bishop Bashford was also there, and Dr. [?] of Boxer Rebellion fame in Peking [Peiping] who had done a lot to save the people. That was a wonderful experience there for me, because I was just a country girl from an Iowa farm and here were all these great people. I sat right next to the bishop at the table. He said to me, "Miss Day, you're a mathematics major, aren't you?" And I said, "Yes," wondering how in the world he knew that, the great bishop. And he said, "Well, Dr. So-and-So is teaching mathematics at Nanking Men's University and he wants to do some famine work; I want you to go to Nanking and take his place. Women never taught at men's universities. But I went, and the president of the university said, "Now, if they don't rise and bow when you go into the room, you won't be able to teach, because that would be an insult." Chinese students always stood and bowed to teachers when they went into the room. So I had butterflies in my stomach when I went into that first class—it was trigonometry. As soon as I got inside the door, the whole class came to their feet, and as I took my place behind the teacher's desk, we bowed solemnly to each other. Their great regard for teaching was stronger than their contempt for a woman's mental abilities. Everything went fine.
Hansen
How long did you teach at the college?
Robertson
I taught there a year, and then I went back to West China. It was after I went back to Chengtu that I met the man I married, John Thompson Robertson. He was a Canadian. A few years after we came home he died. He was only thirty-six.
Hansen
You had one child...
Robertson
I had two sons [Angus and David]. They were four and seven years old when their father died.
Hansen
And one of them was born in China?
Robertson
Yes, Angus, the older one, was born in China.
Hansen
What was the precipitating reason for your leaving China?
Robertson
I had promised my parents I would come home at the end of five years. The next year, my husband came home. The war and everything had so depleted the treasury that the government schools couldn't pay the high salaries they were paying the foreign teachers. So they let him out and he came home.
And so where was home when you came back to the United States? Was it Iowa for both of you? Did you come home to Iowa or did you go up to Canada?
Robertson
No, he came to Iowa to get me and then took me up to Canada to meet his relatives. Then he got a position in Fredericktown, Missouri, as a mining engineer at a cobalt mine. They opened up this cobalt mine during World War I because of the demand for cobalt. So we lived in Missouri. That's where my second son, David, was born. Then my husband felt guilty because I had said that my life belonged to China, so he felt he had to try to get back. He went back—I don't remember what year it was—after the war was over. He went back to a mining company in Yunnan Province and I was waiting for them to build a bungalow for his family so he could bring us out. Then the government changed their mind and gave the mining company no protection whatever, so they just gave it up and he came home.
Hansen
So you were back in Missouri?
Robertson
Yes, but not the same place; we were in Flat River this time. That's where he died.
Hansen
In Flat River?
Robertson
Well, he died in New York, but that's where he got sick.
Hansen
He died a natural death, then?
Robertson
He died of cancer.
Hansen
And he was very young. So there you were with the two boys...
Robertson
Just two strong boys, so [there was] nothing to do but go back to teaching. That's when I got my two master's degrees, in the 1920s.
Hansen
Did you stay in Missouri and go to school there?
Robertson
No, I went back to Ames. I went to Ames and then I took a summer semester at USC [the University of Southern California] in Los Angeles. I received a master's degree in economic history in 1924. My second master's degree was in education. I could have gotten it at USC if I had wanted to, but I just had the idea that they would be harder on the exam—the thesis exam. I'd rather be back at Ames where I felt more at home.
Hansen
Let me see if I can get this straight now. When you went back to Ames, you were going to school but you were also teaching at the same time?
Robertson
Well, I was on a teaching fellowship. I also went to Teacher's College, Columbia University [New York City], for a brief period, and I tell you, it was great in those years—I don't know anything about it now. Almost in a month there, you get an education.
Hansen
How'd you do all this? Were you teaching at a high school in Ames, too, while you were going to school?
Robertson
No.
Hansen
What was your main job when you were taking these degrees?
Robertson
My teaching in the college at Ames. Like I say, I was teaching on a fellowship.
Hansen
Oh, I see. You weren't a graduate assistant or anything, you were on a teaching fellowship. When you went away in the summers—this was at the same time, like to USC and to Columbia—you would be going to summer school?
No, I was at USC one summer and then I was out here one semester in 1927—the second semester, February to May of 1927—taking graduate work.
Hansen
Who took care of your kids then? Did they come with you to California?
Robertson
Sure.
Hansen
So when you were out at USC, was this your first trip to California? Or had you come here enroute to China?
Robertson
Yes, I went to China from San Francisco.
Hansen
So what did you think of southern California?
Robertson
I liked it. I wanted to teach out here, but somebody said nobody with white hair can get a position in California. After receiving my Master's in Education in August 1927, one of the professors in Education at Iowa State died. The head of the department, Dr. Lanslot, called me over and asked me to take his position temporarily because it was under the Agricultural Department, Vocational Education. You had to have a degree in agriculture to hold a permanent job. So I took it temporarily while they found someone else. Dr. Lanslot was so pleased with my work that he kept me the whole year and gave me two terms of summer school. Do you have summer school at [California State University at] Fullerton?
Hansen
Yes, we do.
Robertson
Do the teachers like to get the jobs?
Hansen
Love it.
Robertson
Well, it was the same way at Ames, so you know the head of the department must have thought I was doing pretty good work, because I never even asked for it. I had never even planned on coming to California for the summer.
Hansen
What did you do, come at the end of the summer?
Robertson
The end of the summer I went to Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, a Methodist college, and taught a couple of years.
Hansen
How'd you like it in comparison to your old job at Ames?
Robertson
Oh, Ames was the most beautiful year I ever had professionally. That was tops—to be a professional teacher at Ames—to have a desk in the Education office along with the professors I had gone to school to. That was great. I wish I could have stayed.
Hansen
So you went from one of your nicest experiences ever in teaching to one of the worst?
Robertson
Yes, one of the worst. I stayed at Simpson two years. I got fired.
Hansen
Oh, you got fired—for what?
Robertson
I don't know. They never tell you why they fire teachers; they never tell. A friend of mine who was also fired said if you could sue a certain person on the faculty for slander and collect, you wouldn't have to work for the rest of your life. So I don't know what kind of a tale they got out about it. The students came to my home at night because they knew I was someone they could talk to. One time they came and brought a little jug of alcohol and we had something to drink. One of them drank most of the alcohol before the others had barely gotten the ginger ale—or whatever they were going to put in it—ready. So he got kind of drunk and I kept him after the others left because I was afraid if he went home drunk the college would
Hansen
You just wanted to be out of it?
Robertson
I didn't care.
Hansen
Where did you go from there?
Robertson
I got a fine recommendation from the president who fired me. I went to Morehead State Teachers College in Kentucky, quite a school now; it was just new then, didn't even have all the buildings built. I went there as a teacher trainer in the teacher training school. I trained math teachers how to teach math and also demonstrated. When I'd be teaching, I'd look up and there would be a whole row of people from some college—a prof and his students—watching. Then we had a room where I took a class to teach before college classes in education. They had seats just like bleachers in the back of the room. The prof would bring his education class down and I'd take my little junior high class in arithmetic down and teach—show the students how to teach—oh, I hated it. I called it the delivery room. Then one day a prof had his students there and I had a student put up a problem on the board—it was a real long problem—she made a mistake at the beginning and I didn't see it. She went through that whole process and then when she got to the end, she had the wrong answer, so she had to go back over it. After the class, the college prof who had his students there said, "My, that was a wonderful thing you did. There are not many teachers who would have had the patience to let that girl go on after she had made that mistake." He never dreamed I hadn't seen it. (laughter)
Hansen
Made you sound real magnanimous.
Robertson
Yes, he thought that was a wonderful thing.
Hansen
How long did you stay at Morehead?
Robertson
Two years, then I got fired there.
Hansen
What was that for? Did they tell you this time?
Robertson
Well, they're very provincial in Kentucky, and the same year I went there, they brought in two other teachers from outside the state. That was quite an innovation, to bring anybody in from outside the state. They brought a Mrs. Wilson from California, a wonderful English teacher; they brought Miss Shepherd from Ohio, a marvelous foreign languages teacher; and they brought me from Simpson College. They fired Wilson the first year and the second year they fired the other two of us.
Hansen
So this anti-foreign thing had been following you around from China, huh?
Robertson
We were just like foreigners to them. It was then that I moved to California.
Hansen
What year was that?
Robertson
It was 1933.
Hansen
The time [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt was first taking office [as the president of the United States].
Robertson
Yes, I remember. When we came to California, we lived in Midway City [an unincorporated community in Orange County], but it was in August, after Roosevelt had gotten inaugurated, in August of 1933. People were still talking about the earthquake, you know; it had happened in March. Then the next eight years—from 1933 to 1941—by selling short stories and teaching at a Santa Ana [county seat of Orange County]
Hansen
So you didn't have a regular teaching job out here, did you?
Robertson
I didn't have a teaching job in California until 1947.
Hansen
I see. So you were selling short stories and raising chickens; what was the other thing?
Robertson
Teaching at Santa Ana Evening High School.
Hansen
What town were you living in at that time?
Robertson
Midway City.
Hansen
How big was that at the time?
Robertson
Oh, they had maybe a thousand people then. When they opened the oil fields in Huntington Beach [Orange County], they had to move a lot of houses out. So they moved them to Midway City, and that's what started Midway City.
Hansen
How did you travel to Santa Ana to do your teaching?
Robertson
I had a car.
Hansen
How did you go from Midway City to Santa Ana at that time?
Robertson
Oh, Midway City is about seven miles straight west of Santa Ana. You could go out on Bolsa Avenue or Seventeenth Street. I did that until 1941. Then I entered the University of Southern California to work for my doctorate.
Robertson
After about a month I was offered a position at the USO [United Service Organization] in San Diego, [California]. All during the Depression, no jobs—I thought money was more important than a doctorate. I just loved that month at USC working for my doctorate; but a job was more important than a doctorate and I could get that later. So I took the job and I was down in San Diego working at the USO. Then my next stop was Poston [War Relocation Center in southwestern Arizona].
Hansen
Let me back up just a little. When you were living here in Orange County, that was quite a while actually, about seven years, right? You were living in Midway City most of the time?
Robertson
I've lived in Orange County ever since I've been out here.
Hansen
When you were living in Midway City, did you have contact with members of the Japanese American community?
Robertson
Oh sure, they were all around.
Hansen
What were they mostly doing here at the time?
Robertson
They were ranchers [farmers] and they had their little wayside road stands, where we went and bought vegetables. Then, as I said, my son Dave's two best friends were Nisei [citizen-generation Japanese Americans] and we had very close contact with them. There was a Nisei family that lived right in Midway City that had a fish farm, goldfish for aquariums. They were nice people, lovely people.
Did you ever learn any Japanese, by any chance, having a background in Chinese?
Robertson
Well, that was just after World War II.
Hansen
Oh, later on you did?
Robertson
Yes, before I went to Japan in 1950, I got some records and tried to learn from them, but I didn't learn very much.
Hansen
So most of your contact with Japanese Americans before the war was through your children and then you knew a few families in Midway City. Did you have Japanese American students at night at Santa Ana when you were teaching there?
Robertson
No, I don't think I had any Japanese students.
Hansen
But you were conscious of them being around in the area?
Robertson
Oh, very much so.
Hansen
Did you feel at that particular time that they were discriminated against in Orange County?
Robertson
Well, I just really didn't know. They just had their businesses and they seemed to be very prosperous. They owned all the strawberries in the county.
Hansen
But you didn't see any anti-Japanese behavior?
Robertson
I didn't see it, no.
Hansen
So anyway, then, we were talking about your going down to San Diego—I'm sorry for backtracking—to work for the USO at the time that the Pearl Harbor news of the Japanese attack came through. Were you alone then or was one of your boys still with you?
Robertson
I was alone there. Angus was up north someplace by that time—in Alaska or Washington—and David was working for Douglas [Aircraft Company]. He got a room and went and left Midway City. He had to get a room someplace else.
Hansen
So how long were you down in San Diego before Pearl Harbor?
Robertson
I went down about the first of October, so about two months.
Hansen
What was your job with the USO?
Robertson
I was in charge of entertainment. The USO I worked for was operated by the Salvation Army and we couldn't have dances. Boy, it was hard to get girls to come to parties! (laughter) The YWCA also had a USO unit and I talked with that girl who was the daughter of a very famous professor at the University of Iowa [in Iowa City,Iowa]—I can't think of his name—and she didn't have any trouble because they could dance over there and get all the girls they wanted. But I had a very hard time getting the girls to come to the parties.
Hansen
Did you ever have any contact with Japanese Americans in San Diego when you were down there? Through the USO at all? Any Nisei soldiers?
Robertson
No.
Hansen
Where was the USO located?
Oh, it was on the upper floor of a building right in the downtown area.
Hansen
Because it was a military town, was San Diego especially panic-struck by the Pearl Harbor attack? Was the whole town pretty much in a state of anxiety?
Robertson
No, not the whole town, just individuals. Of course, we had a blackout that night. There was a line of streetcars just standing out there on the tracks not moving, no lights on them, no street lights or nothing. I couldn't get back to my room. I had to go across the street to a hotel. The lobby was loaded with people who couldn't get to their homes—some people who lived just off the coast over on Coronado [Island]. There was no bridge at that time, I believe.
Hansen
No, there wasn't. They only put it in a few years back. It was a ferry system up until the 1960s.
Robertson
Nothing was running. I stayed in that hotel overnight, and this woman with whom I was rooming out on Mission Hill—she was one of the hysterical ones—loaded up her car and said, "Would you like to move out? I'm going down there, we're going to be bombed." Away she went to Arizona. I went back to the hotel and got a room and stayed in that hotel the rest of the time I was in San Diego.
Hansen
How long did it take for people to regain some semblance of "business as usual" in San Diego?
Robertson
I don't know, because I didn't know much about that side—I was too busy in USO.
Hansen
Well, how did it change your job at the USO?
Robertson
Well, there was quite a different attitude on the part of the men. One day they were there and the next day they were gone. It was pretty sad.
Hansen
I would have thought they would have relaxed the ordinance against dancing, too. Did they?
Robertson
No.
Hansen
They didn't?
Robertson
Never.
Hansen
So how long were you down in San Diego at the USO?
Robertson
I wasn't down there too long, three or four months.
Hansen
What did you do after that, since that only took you into about early 1942, didn't it?
Robertson
Well, I came home for the summer and looked for a job for the fall. Along in August, I still hadn't found anything, so I went into the California Teacher Association's Placement Bureau in Los Angeles. They didn't have anything. Just as I was leaving—I had my hand on the doorknob, I was in a hurry to open the door, I guess—and the secretary called to me and said, "Would you be willing to teach Japanese?" I said, "Why not?" Then she told me about Poston. She gave me Dr. Miles Carey's address and said, "He's looking for teachers, write to him."
Hansen
Had you heard anything at all about the [Japanese American] Evacuation up to that point?
Robertson
Oh, I knew the Japanese had been evacuated, but I am ashamed that I didn't protest against it. There were so many things happening then. So I wrote to Dr. Carey and asked for a job in math. He wrote back and said that all the Nisei were going to teach the math in the high school and could I teach social science. I wrote back and said yes. I never had, but sure, I could teach it. Then I never heard a word from him. It got to the last day of September and I'd rented my house and I thought, "Gee, I wonder what's the matter;
Hansen
Oh, so they gave you a math job actually?
Robertson
Yes. They wrote and told me I would be the head of the Mathematics Department and supervisor of teachers.
Hansen
Who was the head of the school at Poston that you mentioned? What was his name again?
Robertson
Dr. Miles Carey—a wonderful fellow.
Hansen
So you had to get down there to Arizona over the weekend?
Robertson
Yes, I had to pack up that night and I went down that same night. A friend took me because I didn't have any tires for my car. You know how it was in those days. I didn't have a spare, so I was afraid to drive. My friend took me down and we drove all night. We got to Poston in the morning, dead tired and hot—it was hot! We had breakfast in one of the mess halls. My friend had gone down to visit one of her Nisei friends from Westminster [Orange County].
Hansen
This was like in early October of 1942?
Robertson
Yes. So she went right to the block of her friend, and that was the only time while I was down there that I ate in one of the Japanese mess halls. You know what we had for breakfast? We had cold pancakes and syrup and hot coffee. And that was my breakfast. I don't know if it ever got better after that or not.
Hansen
Where did you live after that?
Robertson
They put us in the barracks, just like the Japanese had, only better furnished.
Hansen
But you didn't live with the Japanese?
Robertson
No. There was a school block, a block set aside for the school. The Caucasian teachers occupied two rows of barracks in that block.
Hansen
Did all the teachers who were at Poston stay at Poston III?
Robertson
Oh no, in Poston I, Poston II, and Poston III [the three camps that together comprised the Poston War Relocation Center].
Hansen
Didn't you only have one high school for all of Poston?
Robertson
No.
Hansen
Oh, you had Poston I High School, Poston II High School, and Poston III High School?
Robertson
Right, the same with the junior high and the grade schools. Each camp had its own schools and principals.
Hansen
So you were the head of the Mathematics Department for...
Robertson
For all three high schools at Poston.
Oh, for all three of them, I see. So you had to meet regularly with the heads of the other two schools. I mean, you met with the other Math teachers at Poston I and Poston II.
Robertson
Yes. All of the math teachers in the high school were men—Nisei men—and they all had at least one year of university. It was from them that I got a lot of material which is in my novel [The Harvest of Hate ]. Mel Finley was the head of the Social Services for the Administration. She appointed me to counsel with the Nisei men in our Poston III camp who had fathers in prison camps. Some of them had real mental troubles and what they needed was a psychiatrist. At least I could listen to them. They would tell their stories. They were having a hard time handling the situation, because they knew their fathers had never done anything wrong, and there was no reason why they had to put them in prison camps. They just couldn't take it, you know. Then there was the problem that they were putting up a camp someplace—it seems to me it was in Texas—you probably know, where the men in the camps could have their families with them?
Hansen
Yes, in Crystal City, Texas.
Robertson
These fellows had to decide whether they'd stay at Poston or go with their families to these prison camps. They had a lot of problems. And I also learned just gobs of information from them about before their evacuation.
Hansen
You weren't at Poston very long before they had a pretty considerable strike [November 1942] in the Poston camps. That must have been one of your first memories, isn't it?
Robertson
Well, it amounted to so little that it didn't make much impression on me. I was up in Poston I that day of the strike and I was right in the midst of it. It wasn't very exciting. They just had built a platform and they had a fellow up there on the microphone and he was stirring on the crowd and they were listening and yelling and that was about all there was to it[2].
Hansen
And you didn't feel any fear at all?
Robertson
No, I went right in back of the crowd; I was close enough so that I could have touched them. I was right behind the crowd. See, I visited all these math teachers regularly and then we had all those teachers' meetings and we always wound up talking about the Evacuation.
Hansen
Really? How did you evaluate the teaching staff over there?
Robertson
Good.
Hansen
Both from the point of view of the Anglos who were in there teaching, like yourself, and the Nisei?
Robertson
Oh, I thought you meant the Japanese American teachers.
Hansen
I meant both really.
Robertson
Oh, there were some of the Caucasian teachers who had no business to be there. One of them even called the kids "Japs" right in class. There were others who didn't use much judgment. Some of the missionaries were overly sentimental and sympathized with the evacuees too much. Although I was head of Mathematics, the Education Department still didn't have their full faculty at the beginning so I had to teach a class in the social sciences. And I'll never forget that first morning when I went into the classroom—bare barracks and no seats even, and a little table for the teacher and a little chair and, back up on the wall, her own little blackboard. And that's all there was in the room. No textbooks, no seats. The kids came in carrying their little stools their fathers had made for them out of mesquite. Those high school boys were mad as hornets. I would say that the high school age were the mad ones and the college age were the hurt ones. Oh, were they mad! They were just there to break up the whole thing. They were used to the California school buildings and the big libraries and gymnasium and all that sort of thing—and now this bare barrack. I said to them, "I won't say I know how you feel, because that would be impossible, it wouldn't be true.
Hansen
Did they get down to business?
Robertson
Yes, I had a nice time with them.
Hansen
Did you find it one of your better teaching experiences?
Robertson
I just taught that class a month, and then they got another Caucasian teacher in and he took it—Louie Marquette, a Jew from Brooklyn. We had a lot of fun with him and we loved him! But he said one day, "I'm sure getting tired of hearing the class talking about how Mrs. Robertson did it." (laughter) He'd hear that every day, "Mrs. Robertson did this; Mrs. Robertson did that."
Hansen
Why did they take you out of the classroom?
Robertson
Well, I wasn't supposed to be teaching because I was the department head.
Hansen
Oh, so the department head didn't teach there?
Robertson
No, I wasn't supposed to be teaching, but I had to take this class because they didn't have a full faculty yet.
Hansen
So your total classroom teaching experience down there consisted, really, of one month, right?
Robertson
No, after the government began to allow the Nisei to go out and relocate—you know, go east and finish their education or get jobs or something like that—some of our Nisei teachers left. I had to take classes then. Most of the time, after the first year, I was teaching at least one class. That gave me contact with the high school as well as the college age.
Hansen
How long did you stay at Poston, until it closed up?
Robertson
No, I left in the spring at graduation.
Hansen
Which year?
Robertson
In 1945. And they closed up sometime that summer, I guess.
Hansen
You left in 1946?
Robertson
No, in 1945. Yes, Poston closed up in the fall [November] of 1945.
Hansen
And so you were there pretty close to the end then. Altogether you were there from 1942 to 1945, almost three years.
Georgia, let's now talk about the contacts you had with people within Poston, the Japanese Americans. You've already mentioned a couple of instances of people to whom you talked, but do you recall having long conversations about their experiences prior to the war and at the time of evacuation and subsequent to that, regarding their families and the like?
Robertson
Oh, I had numerous conversations. I couldn't pick out anyone special, because they are just continual—they wanted to talk about it.
Hansen
The people you were talking to is really what I'm getting at—not individuals so much as groups of people.
Robertson
I spoke both to individuals and to groups of people, outside of the classroom.
Hansen
Now I don't mean you speaking to them as a group, but I mean speaking to members of certain groups in the camp. Do you remember having any friends among the Issei generation, the older people in the camp?
Robertson
No. My contact with Issei was very little, I just saw them. The gardener who looked after the lawn and planted flowers and things around our barracks and the janitors at the school—of course, they didn't speak much English, the people in that group. So I had very little contact with the Issei. I don't know if the woman who organized the teachers' group was a Nisei or not—she came from Los Angeles—a very lovely woman. She spoke very good English. But, of course, there are a lot of Issei who speak English well. My contact with Issei was just about nil, my personal contact with them.
Hansen
What about with the Kibei, the Nisei who were educated in Japan and had spent some time there? Did you have any contact with them?
Robertson
Just the one in the book. And he's imaginary. No, I don't remember knowing any Kibei.
Hansen
So most of your intimate contacts were with the Nisei teachers who worked under your supervision, right? Were they an interesting group of individuals?
Robertson
Yes, marvelous, and all different. But they're just as American as the Caucasians, just as American. You can't classify them, you can't stereotype them, they were just as different individually as the Caucasian teachers were.
Hansen
Do any of those teachers stand out in your memory as ones with whom you developed a close personal friendship, and have even, say, exchanged Christmas cards with in the years since the war, or whatever?
Robertson
No. This Gil Marada—I think he's represented in my novel—was one of my teachers who I liked very much, and then this teacher who was the one depicted in the novel as the artist's son, I remember him. No, I didn't correspond with any of them. Of course, the Orange County group I didn't know because they were in camps II and III. One Orange County family I knew was in Camp III. I don't know why. The son is about the only Orange County person I know of who lived there; and, of course, I've had contact with him ever since I've been home. That was Hitoshi Nitta [see O.H. 3]. He married at Poston, and his wife, Mary [see O.H. 1127a,b], was also a close friend.
Hansen
Where in California had most of the people in Poston III lived before being evacuated?
Robertson
San Diego County and San Joaquin Valley.
Hansen
So most of your teachers were representative of that area.
Robertson
My teachers, of course, were in all three camps. I visited all the camps.
Hansen
So you had teachers from Orange County as well?
Robertson
Oh, yes. I had teachers from Orange County. Then, of course, I've kept in touch with them ever since I came from Poston. Every once in awhile the Nisei in this county used to get together and talk over Poston days, and once in awhile they would stop and take me with them. I was just sort of one of them, you know. I remember one night one of the fellows said—we had been talking about our experiences down there at Poston—and he said, "Well, I'm certainly glad I had that experience. I sure wouldn't want to go through that again, but I think I really got a lot out of it." I thought that was really interesting.
When you went to that camp you probably didn't have a very strong feeling about the Evacuation because, as you said, you had heard about it and you knew it was going on. Once you got there and you were involved within the camp, did you start to develop some feeling that this was a terrible thing, or did that ever occur?
Robertson
Definitely.
Hansen
How fast did that come about?
Robertson
Well, it didn't take long, I can tell you. Just a barren desert and those ugly barracks. There wasn't even a green blade of grass or leaf or anything. Bulldozers had scraped off mesquite, everything off the desert, before the barracks were built. When I went there, there was nothing but these black tar paper buildings and, of course, the administration buildings were wood and painted grey and white and they had a little group of them and most of them were in Camp I. We had small groups of administration buildings in Camps II and III. When I saw these Issei there sitting with idle hands, just sitting, sitting, sitting and looking down at the ground. Oh, the things I saw! It didn't take long for me to decide that this was a shameful thing, a tragedy, just a tragedy.
Hansen
Do you think that the administration at Poston was pretty much of a similar mind as you were, that they realized that this was an American tragedy?
Robertson
Oh, I think that that was recognized clear up to the federal government. I think they had no longer accomplished the evacuation of the people then they realized they had made a colossal blunder, because it was so soon that they began to make arrangements to let the people out to go east. I kept wondering where Eleanor [Roosevelt] was when [President Franklin] Roosevelt was signing the proclamation [Executive Order 9066]. She kept pretty good track of what he was doing and if she had known about that, I think she would have objected.
Hansen
Do you remember her visiting the camps?
Robertson
No, I don't remember a thing about it. I wonder if it's true.
Hansen
Well, she did visit [in spring 1943] the Gila [War Relocation] Center [in southcentral Arizona], but I'm not sure that she visited Poston.
Robertson
She certainly didn't visit when I was there. Some of the prominent visitors when I was there—and I wish they would put it in a book—was the Congressional [sub]committee [headed by Senator A. B. "Happy" Chandler] that conducted that investigation [in spring 1943]. They took the word of that fellow [a WRA employee at Poston] who had been dismissed [from his duties by the camp administration] and he lied to them. When we read the morning Los Angeles Times, we just couldn't believe our eyes. I don't know what the committee was, but they were the congressional committee that investigated Poston because there had been so many things said—the evacuees were getting better food and they were storing food for the Japanese when they came over, and were poisoning the water in the dam way up there above Parker, [Arizona, on the Colorado River]. There we were down several miles below Parker and how could poisoning the water down there get clear up to the dam? No one could figure that out. They never let up. The Los Angeles Times never let up on the Japanese, even after they came back home.
Hansen
Is that the paper you were getting down there at Poston, the Los Angeles Times?
Robertson
Well, the Times was what practically everyone was getting; that's what they sold at the canteen. All of the newspapers were lambasting them [Japanese Americans]. Norman Chandler was the owner and editor at that time and I got so disgusted I finally wrote a letter and invited him down [to Poston]. I said, "I just wanted to give you an invitation to come down and meet some of these fine Japanese Americans and find out what good citizens they are and how patriotic they are." Then I thought, here, I've invited the owner and editor of the Times down and never even said a word about it to the administration. I think I'd better tell them. I told the administration about it and they said, "That's okay, I hope he comes." Well, I had a letter from
Hansen
Do you still have it?
Robertson
No, because he didn't say a word about the invitation and he didn't say a word about the Nisei. All he told me about was that several years before he had planned to get a large tract of land down in Mexico, and he was bringing over Japanese to farm it. And how glad he was now that he hadn't done it, because then he would have had a Japanese enemy and a Japanese army right here on our border.
Hansen
When you came back from Poston, where did you move? Where did you settle in California, or did you settle in California?
Robertson
I still lived in Midway City; I had my home there.
Hansen
Did you go back to teaching when you came back? Or did you go back to selling eggs and writing short stories?
Robertson
No, I didn't get a teaching job because I came home in the spring of 1945.
Hansen
Well, the WRA supposedly had a responsibility to try and place the people who had worked for them during the war. You didn't get any assistance in having them help place you in a job?
Robertson
I didn't ask for it. Some of the folks did and some of the folks didn't.
Hansen
So then what did you do for an income?
Robertson
Oh my, I lived on what I had made down at Poston. I probably sold my bonds—it was an order by the government to buy bonds every month—so I had several bonds. And, of course, I was alone then because David had gone to war and Angus was in the Merchant Marine. So I was alone and it didn't cost much to live.
Hansen
So how long was it before you felt some indignation sufficiently to decide you wanted to launch your novel, "The Harvest of Hate"? Can you remember the conditions surrounding your decision to write that book? I'm sure you do.
Robertson
Well, it wasn't until 1946 that I decided to write it. I can't remember what I did in 1945. I don't know whether I ever told you or not, but I needed a setting that had to be San Diego County. I knew that I'd have to have the locale of the book down there because it was from the San Diego County people that I had gotten so much of my information and although it probably would have been the same all over before the Evacuation, I still wanted to write from the place where I got the information. So I went down to Chula Vista, south of San Diego—they had a lot of Japanese ranchers down there. I had a friend in Chula Vista who I stayed with and we drove out to these Japanese ranches and looked them over and they were very accommodating and stopped their work and I told them what I was going to do. They showed me their land and their equipment and what they were growing and their buildings and showed me how they grew their different crops and told me what they grew in the summer and in the winter, and so I got a firsthand idea of ranching. That was very valuable.
Hansen
Before we get into those details, what prompted you to write The Harvest of Hate?
Robertson
It's pretty hard to say after so many years, but I think perhaps as I told you [off tape], the [postwar] trip to Iowa might have had something to do with it, to find the utter ignorance of the people, and even after I talked to them about their indifference, they just looked upon it as a local problem. It didn't make any difference to them and they didn't do anything about it. Anyway, there came a time in early 1946 one night when I said to myself, "Someone has to write a book." Since I had done quite a bit of writing, it didn't seem like such a big task, so I decided that I would do it.
What had you written up to that point?
Robertson
Oh, I had written two or three books on China. Also, I had written a book about World War II concerning a woman who was very patriotic and thought her husband ought to go to war—and he didn't care to go to war. So she went to war herself, with the Red Cross.
Hansen
Were these novels that you wrote?
Robertson
I've never written anything but fiction.
Hansen
Had any of these novels been published or not?
Robertson
No.
Hansen
Now, you were saying that you were writing some short stories to subsidize your family and everything, so obviously some of your short stories were published.
Robertson
Oh, I sold around twenty of them.
Hansen
Who did you sell those to?
Robertson
They were stories for young people. There was a church magazine, for instance, that published short stories for youngsters.
Hansen
When did you start writing the stories?
Robertson
After I quit teaching in 1932, after I got fired from Morehead. I had probably written little things before that. Then it was the Depression and there wasn't anything to do and I liked to write. I think if my English teachers had given me a little encouragement in college, I would have started writing right away and if I'd really put a lot into it, I'd be a successful writer.
Hansen
Did you write anything during World War II during the time you were at Poston? Had you written any short stories or essays or sketches?
Robertson
While I was at Poston, no. There wasn't much time for writing while I was down there.
Hansen
Did you keep a diary at Poston?
Robertson
No, they say only an introvert keeps a diary.
Hansen
Aren't you an introvert?
Robertson
I don't know. (laughter)
Hansen
But you didn't keep a diary or a journal when you were down there?
Robertson
No.
Hansen
Did you do any other kind of writing at Poston other than that angry letter you wrote to Norman Chandler? Did you do any other writing, like for the camp newspaper [ Poston Chronicle]?
Robertson
No, I don't think so. Did you read that article from the Poston Chronicle that I read into my interview [with Mary Skavdahl in 1978; see O.H. 1753a]?
Hansen
Right, right.
Wasn't that something?
Hansen
The one dealing with Parker? Yes, we're going to get into that next time. I'd just like to thank you right now and we'll pick up the interview dealing with your novel, "The Harvest of Hate" in our next interviewing session and talk about that.
Hansen
This is a continuation of the interview with Georgia Day Robertson by Arthur A. Hansen that was begun on June 26, 1979. It concerns her manuscript, "The Harvest of Hate." The date is August 21, 1979, and the time is roughly 11:30 a.m. This session of the interview is also being conducted in Mrs. Robertson's home in Costa Mesa, California.
Georgia, let's drop the formality and get into what is our biggest interest right now, and that is your novel. One thing that impressed me about "The Harvest of Hate" the first time I read it impressed me even more during my second reading. I'm not talking now about the novelistic qualities of the manuscript—the fact that you have developed some memorable characters and that you have a sturdy plot structure. But rather that, as a historian, I was really quite amazed at the sociological grasp you had over events that transpired in Poston. So I want to ask you right off here if, at the time you were writing this novel, you had any assistance in the way of documents that were made available to you from the Bureau of Sociological Research at Poston? I know there were a couple of studies available at the time you wrote the novel—they came out in 1945 and 1946. One of them was by Alexander Leighton, who was the head of the Bureau of Sociological Research at Poston and it's called The Governing of Men. [3] There was another book published by the University of California Press that was coauthored by Dorothy Swaine Thomas and Richard Nishimoto called The Spoilage. [4] Now did you either have access to those two studies or did you have access to documents that were available at the camp or did you just read the Poston Chronicle and rely on your own memory, or just how did you construct this novel in a historical and a sociological sense?
Robertson
No, I didn't have those [two] books, although later I did read The Governing of Men. It was just mostly memory. It made a deep impression; you know, you don't forget things like that. When you go through something like that, you don't forget it.
Hansen
So most of the situations you described there [in "The Harvest of Hate" manuscript] were things that you picked up either yourself or in conversation with some of these Nisei who were working under you in the Mathematics Departments of the three Poston high schools, right? So there's not too much in your novel that's "bookish," in the sense that it comes from a book—somebody else's observation; it mostly comes from you and your conversations.
Robertson
Yes, I think so. I didn't limit my contact down there [Poston] with the Mathematics Department, because I had very close contact with all the teachers; we had teachers teaching all different subjects. We had teachers' meetings and we had contact with all of them. So my contacts were very large.
Hansen
Okay. Now let me ask you some more questions about the novel. The Sato family [the fictional family at the Poston War Relocation Center around which "The Harvest of Hate" revolves]—is that literally a family that you had as a living model or is it a composite invention in the sense that you created the Sato family if not out of whole cloth, certainly out of your observations, and then you as a novelist put your assorted observations together as a family rather than simply observing a specific family?
Robertson
No, it wasn't a specific family. I chose my characters so that I could represent the different things down there. For the Nisei, Tad [Sato] was the one who resented and fought the government at every inch of the way and Tom [Sato] the one who tried to cooperate; then there was Mari [Sato] to represent the young women and Yoshi [Sato] to represent the children. And, of course, Father and Mother Sato represented the Issei.
Hansen
Why did you rivet upon an agricultural as against an urban family—what was the deciding factor there?
I suppose that's because all the Japanese I'd ever known here in Orange County were ranchers. I just never thought of them as city people. I've known Japanese in Ornage County ever since I've been out here, but I've never known any of them that lived in town—they were all ranchers.
Hansen
So why did you choose the San Diego area as opposed to Orange County since you were living in Orange County several years prior to the Evacuation?
Robertson
Well, that's very simple. The people in Poston were from San Diego, and that's where I got my information: from San Diego people.
Hansen
You mean the people at Poston III, where you lived, were largely from San Diego?
Robertson
Yes.
Hansen
You said during our last session that you had taken a couple of trips down to San Diego—or at least one trip—to familiarize yourself with Japanese American farm life, right?
Robertson
Yes.
Hansen
Where precisely in the San Diego area did you go on that trip? Can you refresh my memory on that point?
Robertson
Well, I had a friend in Chula Vista and I went down to see her. I stayed with her and then we drove out [to the surrounding area]. There were a lot of Japanese ranches around Chula Vista. We drove out to three, I think.
Hansen
Did you also feel rather comfortable with a farm family because you were from a farm family yourself?
Robertson
Oh, I don't know that that made a difference. It had been a long time since I'd been on a farm. Yes, I suppose, but I never thought of that.
Hansen
It seemed to me when I read your novel that there were a lot of things in it that corresponded with your own background. There was, first of all, a farm family. You had a choice to make the Satos either Buddhists or Christians, and you made them Christians. You dealt with the San Diego experience. I know last time I interviewed you, you talked about yourself being employed by the USO in San Diego. So you did have some working knowledge of three central parts of the Sato family's lives. Then also in the novel...it doesn't figure in every chapter, but in a couple of key chapters you take up the experience of the school system down there at Poston, which again you would have had personal contact with as a result of your position as a teacher and administrator. So I think all those things helped to impart authenticity to your novel. It speaks to readers in a very commanding voice, perhaps because of those factors.
Did you feel that you had a good grasp of San Diego or was San Diego a shadowy place for you? I mean, I know you worked for the USO there for a short while, but would you say you had a good knowledge of San Diego and the Japanese American community in the San Diego area?
Robertson
I knew nothing of the Japanese in San Diego while I was down there. I was working for the USO and had no contact with the Japanese.
Hansen
So most of your knowledge of the San Diego Japanese American community came about after you arrived at Poston?
Robertson
Yes, Poston III.
Hansen
What characters in the book correspond pretty closely to specific people that you knew in Poston, either before or after?
I don't think any of them do.
Hansen
How about yourself? Do you figure in the novel? Are you a character in the novel?
Robertson
No. Miss Brown did the things I would have done, but no, I'm not in it.
Hansen
What about Miss Carlson? Carlson is a name like Robertson and Miss Carlson is referred to as a former missionary in Japan? Were there other missionaries in Japan or China aside from yourself in the camp?
Robertson
Oh yes, there were several missionaries from Japan.
Hansen
Who were teaching in the Poston school system?
Robertson
Yes, and I think there were some in the administration.
Hansen
But you can't think of any character in the novel who corresponds to somebody of your acquaintance. For example, Peter Vandenhuval, the benevolent Dutchman—was he somebody who...
Robertson
I have no idea where he came from or where I got his name. I'm sure I didn't make it up.
Hansen
What about members of the Sato family? I know the family, as you say, is a creation to illustrate certain points of behavior. You mentioned before we started this interviewing session that perhaps two of your favorite characters were Tad and Yoshi Sato. Do they correspond closely with individuals who you knew at camp?
Robertson
No.
Hansen
And none of the Nisei math teachers who worked under you found their way into the Sato family in recognizable form?
Robertson
No.
Hansen
How about the fox terrier, Malt? Is that, too, just a creation?
Robertson
Just a creation.
Hansen
Why did you make the dog a fox terrier?
Robertson
I have no idea.
Hansen
I was just wondering if you had a fox terrier yourself.
Robertson
I never had one. I can't even think of the kind of dog I had now.
Hansen
Did you have anybody in mind for the Sullivan family, especially the kids, Allen and Peg?
Robertson
No.
Hansen
One of the characters in the story who I think I liked least because he seems too stereotypical and stagy is the Maestro. Where did you come up with that character? Were you basing him on anything?
Robertson
I suppose I came up with him from books I'd read, from my reading.
Hansen
This character, then, just stood for a famous musical teacher, somebody who was a respected musician?
I'm sure that I had read books with a maestro in them.
Hansen
How happy were you with the character of the Maestro? Before we started taping, you said that you were never too happy about the relationship between Tom and Yuri. On second blush, are you happy with the character of the Maestro?
Robertson
Oh, I think so. You thought he was stereotyped.
Hansen
That's how he struck me—as kind of a stereotype in the novel. Somehow or other I, as a reader, would have preferred it if the Maestro had been given a specific a name and wasn't so...it's almost like saying the duke or something like that. But the Maestro is not a character whom you have a strong vested interest in maintaining as such?
Robertson
I don't even know what nationality he was.
Hansen
Mari Sato was a student at Poston at the high school and her principal was a man whom you call Mr. Benton. Now you obviously worked under a principal yourself at Poston. Does Mr. Benton correspond to the principal you worked under?
Robertson
Mr. Benton?
Hansen
Mr. Benton, Mari's high school principal.
Robertson
I don't remember anything about that.
Hansen
You characterized him in the novel as being a rather dogmatic man. Some of the school teachers at Poston who had worked in schools prior to the war were not as taken aback by his sense of authority—or some would say authoritarianism—but some of the Nisei teachers were. They found him dictatorial. You just mentioned that point in passing in your novel.
Robertson
I don't remember a thing about that being in the book.
Hansen
I can't recall the page, so I'll bring it to your attention later on.
Robertson
Every time I read it, I find something I didn't know was there.
Hansen
One of the things that you emphasize in the novel is the resistance mounted by certain elements within the camp population. You have Tad participating with the camp resisters for a while, but they're there in the novel as an undercurrent all the time. Where did you derive that feeling that there were people who really were against what the government was doing and that almost all authority at Poston was being undermined by this group? Where did you get that feeling?
Robertson
Oh, we knew what was going on in the camp, we knew pretty well what was going on. There were these resisters and a lot of them were sympathetic to Japan. A lot of them were just disgruntled like Tad was. You don't live in a camp and not know about these things.
Hansen
You felt this resistance a lot, then?
Robertson
It was the grapevine.
Hansen
But it comes across in something that should be closer to home to you than just the grapevine. It comes across in the attitudes of some of the students and some of the teachers in the school system. You have Tad, in fact, depicted as a teacher and what you basically say in the novel is that as a teacher he, in a sense, propagandized in the classroom. Did you have some models to base that portrayal upon from your direct experience, that Nisei teachers used the opportunity of being a teacher in order to make certain kinds of
Robertson
Well, I can't say definitely because I wasn't in the classroom; I don't know what they were saying, but I am very suspicious that they did.
Hansen
So it wasn't someone in particular who you had in mind, or a group of people?
Robertson
It wasn't definite information, no.
Hansen
But you had a sense that that was going on? I know you weren't in the classroom very long yourself, just at the outset right, and then you increasingly became an administrator.
Robertson
Yes. But then after the Nisei began going out—to jobs and out to finish their college, going back east—then I did quite a bit of teaching the last couple of years. I had to take their place, because classes would be left without a teacher until they got another teacher in. So I did quite a bit of teaching.
Hansen
I think I gave you some misinformation a little while ago. You were having trouble remembering who the principal was. I told you Mr. Benton and Mr. Benton was Mari's high school principal when she was at La Vista High School. The high school principal in Poston was Mr. Harrison. So maybe I can return to Mr. Harrison. You worked under a principal there at Poston—is there a close modeling of Mr. Harrison on the principal you served under?
Robertson
Who's Mr. Harrison?
Hansen
Mr. Harrison is the Poston High School principal, Miss Brown's and Miss Carlson's principal.
Robertson
What did he do, I don't remember him.
Hansen
He didn't do much; he was the one I was talking about before who was...
Robertson
I was probably thinking of...oh, maybe I'd better not say his name if this is going to be published. I think he's dead now, our principal. I don't want to give his name.
Hansen
What about Hideo Yana? He was your character in the novel who acted the role of a Kibei firebrand in camp? Did you have somebody in mind there or was the character of Hideo Yana just created to conform to the Kibei element?
Robertson
No. He was purely fictitious. However, I was familiar with Kibei and their problems even before I went to Poston.
Hansen
Mr. Takeda, Yuri's father—the artist—we talked about him before we started taping this interview and you said you couldn't recall his name as such. But didn't this character closely follow along the lines of a distinguished artist who you knew in camp?
Robertson
Well, he's real, I really used him. I said I didn't take anybody who was real down there, but he was.
Hansen
So he was, and in what context did you know him?
Robertson
Mostly through the Mojave Room. I'd go over there and he was always around and I knew him pretty well. He had a picture that I always wish I had bought.[5]
Hansen
Did he used to paint the kind of pictures of smoke trees that you described in the novel?
Robertson
Oh yes, he had this beautiful picture of a smoke tree and I wanted to buy it. I asked him what he wanted for it and he wouldn't put a price on it. He said, "What do you want to give?" And I didn't know what to give to a well-known artist—whether to offer $30 or $50. Fifty dollars was about as much as I could
Hansen
I sure wish you could remember his name.
Robertson
He didn't put prices on his things and none of the artists did who had work in there. They had beautiful carvings. They'd go out in the mountains and get the ironwood—these Issei—and bring that in and make beautiful carvings. Oh, that Mojave Room was a place of beauty! Wood carvings, paintings...what else did they have in there? I don't remember.
Hansen
Did you have much contact with the agricultural unit at the camp? Since Tom Sato is depicted as working for the Ag unit at Poston, did you have very much contact with that group of people?
Robertson
Oh, I didn't have any personal contact with them. I just saw what they were doing.
Hansen
Did you used to read the Poston Chronicle?
Robertson
Oh, everybody read the Poston Chronicle! That was our newspaper.
Hansen
Did you read it again after the war before you wrote your novel? I noticed when you donated your novel to the university, you also donated some copies of the Poston Chronicle. I was wondering if you had kept your copies so you could read them and have something to use as background for your novel.
Robertson
I don't think I had very many copies.
Hansen
You just kept selected ones.
Robertson
Well, I'll tell you, the university has a prize in all those clippings. Magazine and newspaper clippings are very valuable.
Hansen
Those are the ones that you kept and donated, right?
Robertson
Yes. People sent them to me and some I clipped myself. I had a whole bunch of them.
Hansen
Is it fair, then, to describe you as writing this novel by sitting down at a table or sitting down on a sofa, without doing much historical research except recollecting things through memory?
Robertson
I just sat at the table and wrote it.
Hansen
So it wasn't something you ran to the library to get information for, or contacted other people about or anything else?
Robertson
No, I started the novel up in [the state of] Washington at my son's. Angus had a little ranch up there.
Hansen
What were some of the things about the novel that worried you, like some problems in the novel that you had to wrestle with and that caused you a great deal of anxiety or just a lot of hard work to try to unravel or solve?
Robertson
Well, I can't think of any right now. You create your characters and they just sort of take off. That's the reason I like writing fiction.
Hansen
We alluded to your favorite characters in the novel, Tad and Yoshi Sato, but maybe we ought to explore that point a little further.
Robertson
Well, they're not outstanding favorites, but I like them a little better than I do the others.
Do you think that preference has something to do, again, with your own personal background? Last time we talked, I think you communicated the idea that there's an outspoken rebel in yourself, and at a number of places where you taught you were quite forthright. Do you think that these two characters speak to that portion of your personality? They stand up on their hind legs and let people know what they stand for?
Robertson
I don't know, I had just lived half of my life before somebody told me I was a non-conformist. That explained a lot of things I hadn't understood before.
Hansen
Who in the family that you created in your novel do you like least? Which one of your characters in the Sato family do you find least satisfactory to you? The one, I mean, who seems to be the least full-bodied...
Robertson
Probably Mari, I don't know—they're all interesting.
Hansen
What troubles you about Mari?
Robertson
I loved them all. I wish I could have gotten Mari married off or at least some prospects before the book ended.
Hansen
But you killed off Willie, and that was going to be her prospect, right?
Robertson
Willie died.
Hansen
That's what I mean, you had Willie die and that was going to be Mari's prospect. Then, of course, we've taken care of Yuri's prospect, too, although it is implied that she'll have plenty of offers, won't she? It seemed likely that she would become wealthy and live in San Francisco after the war. She would, it seemed, probably become an art connoisseur, also.
Robertson
I don't think that artist at Poston had any daughter.
Hansen
So that relationship was more an imaginative creation?
Robertson
Yes, he had a son who taught mathematics.
Hansen
Oh, so he did have a son at Poston then?
Robertson
Yes, and he stayed down there about a year and then he went to St. Louis, [Missouri], and entered Washington University to continue his education. He was a very fine fellow.
Hansen
But as far as you can recall, Mr. Takeda is the only sort of person in your novel who really closely parallels somebody you knew at Poston?
Robertson
I think so.
Hansen
Did any of the math teachers who gave you information become one of the characters, more or less, in your novel?
Robertson
Well, this Bill Lucudo—his father had this tuna fleet of fishermen down in San Diego—he was real. He was a good friend of Tad's, you know. He was real. I don't remember what his real name was.
Hansen
How about Mother Sato?
Robertson
She was just a kind of conglomerate of all these Japanese women whom I had been buying vegetables from at roadside stands since I had lived in California.
How about the father? In your novel, of course, you have him interned in a Department of Justice camp for suspected enemy aliens.
Robertson
I really didn't know any Issei men except in Midway City we had a—I can't think of his name—but we had an Issei and his wife who were very lovely people who had a fish hatchery. I was living in Midway City when I first came to California and I knew them—I used to be in their home. They were very lovely people. Practically all of the Orange County people went to Poston I. So I didn't get acquainted with as many of the Orange County Issei, except through the schools.
Hansen
You write in the novel about the experience of Mrs. Sato going to the Poston I hospital. Tad goes over to visit her and finds that, in spite of all the rumors that he'd heard about the hospital, it appeared to be a pretty good hospital. Did you have any firsthand experience with that hospital so that you could validate the observation you impute to Tad?
Robertson
At first it was terrible and they said that babies died there because of the heat and the lack of moisture they had in the atmosphere. But it got better as time went on and they got competent doctors in there—it was difficult to get doctors from outside as it was during the war, because the army was taking them. It improved, and by the time Tad was up there, it was a pretty good hospital. Nothing was right down there at Poston to Tad, you know.
Hansen
You use a number of occasions in the book to make some fairly ugly commentary about the town of Parker, Arizona.[6] Each time you mention Parker, it's in an unfavorable light—in fact there seems to be...
Robertson
Nothing good to say about it.
Hansen
What was your experience with Parker? What was your contact with Parker?
Robertson
Well, that was our nearest town. That's where we went to do our shopping. There in the hot summer days, the drugstore was always cool and we'd go in there and have ice cream. Then we sometimes went in for dinner; there were two nice eating places there.
Hansen
Now you're talking about nice things, ice cream and good places to eat, and yet your book doesn't talk about those nice kinds of things. What did you sense in Parker that caused you to characterize it in such negative terms?
Robertson
Its relation to the Japanese.
Hansen
What did you pick up, what kind of comments? Were people in the town calling you a "Jap lover"?
Robertson
Well, signs on the doors "Keep out Japs, You Rats." You'd see that on many doors in town.[7]
Hansen
Did you have any unpleasant contacts in Parker with individuals who railed against the Japanese being out there at Poston or you spending your time with the Japanese?
Robertson
No. I had no personal conversations with anyone in Parker. Just a buyer-seller relationship. I did have an argument with the owner of the drugstore because he wouldn't serve black people. During the second and third year we had several black nurses and teachers at Poston.
Hansen
I didn't know that.
Robertson
There was a woman who lived right next to me in the barracks—Mrs. Cook—a beautiful woman and a teacher. I wanted to take her into Parker and have something cool in the drugstore on a hot day. But I wasn't going to have her insulted, so I spoke to the owner of the drugstore and I said, "I have a very good friend down at Poston, but she's colored. I'd like to bring her in sometime for a treat." And he said, "Well, I'm awfully sorry, but we can't serve her." And I said, "Well, you're serving all these Indians, why can't you
Hansen
What about the schoolteachers at Poston? Your comment in the novel is that some were basically good and some were bad. When you step outside the novel, do you still maintain the same position?
Robertson
Oh, some of the teachers called the kids "Japs" right in class and, of course, that was the worst insult you could call them. Some didn't like them.
Hansen
Were they good teachers generally? Did things improve or get worse?
Robertson
Well, I don't know, we had some pretty funny people down there. I remember one time, we had a woman there that Dr. Carey wanted to get rid of. She was a stout person and when the hot weather came, she was dismissed. I said to Dr. Carey, "What did Mrs. So-and-So do? Why was she dismissed?" And he said, "High blood pressure." And I said, "Whose?" That was the only time when I saw Dr. Carey a little bit angry. He just flared up and said, "Well, it wasn't mine."
Hansen
You made quite a point in the novel about the salary that the Nisei teachers had as against what the Caucasians—and I guess blacks had, if the blacks moved into the same housing that the Caucasian teachers had—did they move into the same housing?
Robertson
Well, they lived with the rest of us, and got the same salary as we did.
Hansen
You also made a point about the salary for teachers hired from the outside being in excess of $200 and then having better living arrangements altogether than the interned Japanese American teachers, and that this could have caused some problems. But you noted that the Nisei teachers had a remarkable degree of forbearance and didn't really comment upon this discrepancy too much—at least not openly. Was it something that a lot of people felt guilty about—this arrangement for teachers?
Robertson
Yes. I had a very fine Nisei teacher—I don't know what she was teaching, but she was a lovely girl—and she was trying to earn money to go to college. Well, you can't save much money on—I think the Nisei teachers got $19 a month as the top salary. And here I was—I wasn't getting a lot, maybe $300 a month— and I offered to split my salary with her because we were doing the same work. She wouldn't consider it.
Hansen
She said nothing doing, huh?
Robertson
I would gladly have done it. Yes, I felt guilty. I don't know if anybody else did, but I did terribly. It wasn't fair. Nineteen dollars a month! And the farm workers got $14 and somebody got $16—I don't know who they were. Nineteen was the outside.
Hansen
Would you say the character of Yoshi—for his age group, which you had some contact with... I think he's depicted as being about in the eighth grade when you introduce him to readers, right?
Robertson
Well, he's eleven.
Hansen
Well, he probably would have been in the sixth or seventh grade then. I know that at one point in the novel you mention he's going into the eighth grade because you've got him there at camp for a few years. Would you say that his behavior was something that you saw a lot of in kids his age?
Robertson
Oh, I don't know if I have it in the book or not, but when the parents tried to discipline their children, they said, "The government is supporting us, you don't have anything to say." You just can't imagine these Japanese youngsters saying that to their parents.
The same sort of breakdown that you have in the mess halls, too, where the families aren't eating as much together.
Robertson
The kids ate together and Father Sato was very shocked about that when he came [to rejoin his family at Poston from the Department of Justice camp].
Hansen
You mention a number of times in the story, too, that there was a lot of pressure brought to bear on people like Tad, or Tom at another point, to make certain decisions, that there was coercion; for example, if they didn't say "No" in the loyalty questionnaire, they were liable to be beaten up. And you talk about beatings that went on in camp. This was not just at the outset of the camp, but later on you have this occurring. Signing up for the selective service was another case. Was that a pretty common occurrence that was communicated to you by the math teachers who worked for you—that they had to watch themselves, that they couldn't talk, or if they were overheard they'd be beaten up if they didn't say the right thing? Was that a pretty common thing?
Robertson
Well, the night Tom was lost in the woods and Tad was very much worried, because he thought that Tom had been beaten up because he wanted to volunteer for the army and was going to sign "Yes" to the loyalty oath or something. Tad was very worried and was up and awake when Tom got home after daylight.
Hansen
You have such a really good feeling for that situation—I mean it comes across in your novel. Your empathy is so powerful here that I'm wondering how it got communicated to you. That's not something you're writing about second-removed very much. Were you yourself ever intimidated?
Robertson
No, no we just lived with it. You can't live in an atmosphere like that and not know about it. We lived in the camp right with the Japanese. We lived in barracks right with the Japanese around us.
Hansen
But did anyone ever come to you with this very idea, "Look, I can't be seen talking to you, you represent a Caucasian, you represent the administration here, and if I'm seen talking to you, that makes my reputation suspect and I might be beaten up." Did people ever tell you that, or did you feel shunned by people because you were, so to speak, the enemy?
Robertson
I can't remember such instances, but I suppose that a lot of the teachers who did come and talk to me told me about these things that were going on in camp. That's the way I knew about them.
Hansen
Were you able to enter into many close relationships with Japanese Americans? I mean, would you feel free to go over to their barracks and eat a meal with them? Or would you invite them over to your place for a game of cards? Or in those days, did you play solitaire, too?
Robertson
Do you mean now?
Hansen
No, I mean in camp while you were at Poston. Did you feel free to intermingle with them?
Robertson
Well, sure. There was always somebody coming to my room.
Hansen
And you didn't see any reluctance on their part to do something like that?
Robertson
No.
Hansen
Now was that more true of the teachers than of other people? You called the schools a great stabilizing force in the camps—that's what you say in the novel. Do you think that other administrators could have had that same access to the Japanese people as you did as a teacher, or not?
Robertson
No, I don't think the Japanese ever really trusted the administration.
Hansen
So teachers weren't really counted as being part of the administration?
No.
Hansen
So there were the administrators and there were the schoolteachers and then the resident population. You were granted something of an exception even though you were a Caucasian because you were a teacher.
Robertson
Oh, they were so happy that the teachers were willing to come down. They thought at first that nobody would come to live under those kinds of circumstances. So they were very happy that we came.
Hansen
Were there any times during your whole stay in camp that you felt endangered because you were Caucasian? I mean when the camp had reached fever pitch to the point where you could be perceived as an enemy?
Robertson
I never had the slightest fear. But then when I was in Japan in 1950 during the [American] Occupation, I would go out at night and walk halfway across the city by myself. And that was in Japan soon after the war. The church was about a mile from our mission and I'd walk over there by myself at night.
Hansen
When they had the strike in Poston in November of 1942—that was an event a lot of people have commented on—was that mostly a Camp I phenomenon?
Robertson
The strike was in Camp I.
Hansen
So it didn't affect Camp III?
Robertson
No. Is that in the book?
Hansen
No, but the strike does figure in the background. When you depicted internees coming out by the fires—it was during that point, the first winter before the stoves had come into camp for the Japanese Americans. People would gather around the fires and I know at Camp I they started to make up flags and things that they would put up by their campfires and they started to develop lots of factions and things were stirring up and there was a lot of resistance at that point. I was just wondering if that went on in Camp III, too?
Robertson
It was pretty peaceful down there. As far as open riots or anything like that, there weren't any. One exciting night was before they built the fence around the park and the wild horses went through the camp—a whole herd of them. Boy, didn't they make a noise and didn't they tramp up everything.
Hansen
Was that a real incident you described in the novel where a Japanese man was found hanging from a mesquite tree? Was that a true incident?
Robertson
Yes, I think may be that's the reason I wrote that chapter. That's one of the chapters I don't especially like—the teachers starting out and seeing Tad bringing in the flag. Then they go on and hear about the man. I thought that chapter was kind of corny—I never did like it very well. But I guess the reason I wrote it was because it happened. There was a young man who was bitter like Tad was, and he never missed it if that flag was left out. The janitors in the school were Issei and all they thought about was getting the rooms swept out and getting home in time for the dinner gong. They often left the flag out, and this young fellow would always see it and take it in.
Hansen
I think that incident of him bringing the flag in sort of sticks in my craw a little bit, also. It just seems that, although it is consistent with the idea that he was an American patriot—after all, he had volunteered for the army... and he comes around toward the end of the novel with that same sort of disposition. At the point that you have him bringing in the American flag, it seems that it would have been too dangerous for him. Once in your novel you described the way in which people observed things that were going on—like you noted that to say something in Poston would be to publish it—and I think what you meant was that it would get into the grapevine and people would know about it. It seems that that was publishing it, too, to walk out there every day with such a flagrant solicitude—to go out and take that flag down and put it away and everything—it just seemed like it was a very dangerous thing for him to do. When I read it, I just thought to myself, "I think he would have been smart enough not to do something like that. However
Robertson
Tad would do anything that he wanted to do. You couldn't intimidate him. Anyway, the bad guys weren't interested in little things like that. They were after people who reported to the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] and that type of action.
Hansen
Well, you talk about intimidation a few times and there are times where Tad goes and does what he wants, but usually it's because of some family loyalty, not loyalty to country as much. When his mother said she was going to go out to work or something like that, he right away decided that he was going to go out and relocate—or his dad was going to go out and get a job and he decided no, he'd go out and do it rather than to go to Tule Lake. So he has to go in and clear his name again so that he is eligible for resettlement, so he can go out and get a job, because he doesn't want his own father working or maybe his mother working, too, he said. I think I know him in that story pretty well, but it just seems to me that he wouldn't have done that at that point. I mean he might have at some point made a decision and said yes, I'm going to do whatever I want—I'll take that flag in—but that's a regular thing that you have him doing, day after day after day. It just seems to me that he wouldn't have been able to retain his friendship with the people that you have him running around with. I mean, that's not something they would have put up with. They would have ostracized him if they didn't beat him up. It just seems that way to me, that the group dynamic you portray was very powerful.
Robertson
Take it out, take it out.
Hansen
Okay. Well, I think I'll end this interview right now. I don't have anything more to ask you. I thought maybe more of your characters would have been based on real live people. I think your treatment of the fox terrier—the change of ownership—was very strategic.
Robertson
Change of ownership?
Hansen
Yes, you have Malt being kept for the Sato family by Jerry [a neighboring Caucasian boy] during the war, and then at the end you have Yoshi saying, "Well, why doesn't Jerry keep him?" I thought that was a real logical sort of thing. It was not only true to a dog's loyalty, but I think what it also did was to say that the three years had a lot of people going through a lot of changes.
Robertson
That was characteristic of Yoshi, too, because he got to be such a smarty down at Poston. If you wondered why he never felt so bad about leaving him—well, he was going to get himself a retriever or something. He was really a smarty when he came home.
Hansen
Well, once at camp you also had him choose his bicycle over the dog, so that was consistent. Then when he came back, he saw a lot of the things that he had identified with himself in the prewar years and they now seemed too young for him. So again, the dog comes along. I think the thing with the dog is kind of like the ending there with Yuri. Yuri and Tom's love affair seemed very important at the time, just like the ownership of Malt seemed very important at the time. Once you took away the strange context, it didn't seem as important. Yoshi can release Malt, and Yuri can release Tom—and, really, Tom can release Yuri, also. Their relationship was situation specific, so once you took away the intensity of the wartime situation, they could deal with matters in a normal perspective and make decisions accordingly. So I thought those two aspects of your novel resonated real well together.
Let me ask you about one more character, this Peter Vandenhuval. I'm not altogether happy with him, and maybe we should explore why you were so content to leave Peter Vandenhuval intact as you did in the novel. Didn't Peter Vandenhuval ever bother you as being rather stereotyped? There aren't too many stereotypes in your book, but you do have a few. One is Jose Gonzalez, the Sato farmhand, another is the Maestro, and still a third one is Peter Vandenhuval.
Robertson
Why do you think Vandenhuval is stereotyped?
He's so nauseously good and benevolent. I know that you build up the idea of reciprocity.
Robertson
He probably owed the Satos all that he ever gave them because he didn't give them money—he loaned them money.
Hansen
He's just there all the time. I mean, he almost seems to be ubiquitous in times of great crisis and he's there with a check or he's there with advice—at one point his friendly pick-up truck is right there to be of service to the Satos—and he just seems like the benevolent Santa Claus figure.
Robertson
It's not such a strange thing in such a little town that when Tom was at the bank, Vandenhuval was also.
Hansen
No, except he had to be in there at just the right time, didn't he? I mean it's like in some of those novels by Thomas Hardy where all of a sudden people meet right at the point when they're needed. It's almost like a trumpet has called them forth and they march in to service the situation.
Robertson
And then he went out to say good-by to the Satos before they left. I think that was perfectly natural.
Hansen
And he took care of the letters of recommendation for them and then he came back at the end to provide five thousand dollars for them.
Robertson
Mrs. Sullivan took care of the letters of recommendation. For Father Sato, you mean?
Hansen
But then Vandenhuval wrote one for him, right?
Robertson
Well, he may have written one, but it was really Mrs. Sullivan who provided the letters that got Mr. Sato out of prison camp.
Hansen
I guess it's just that Vandenhuval seems altogether too good, like a stock figure.
Robertson
Well, I thought of him as an old man with a lot of money who liked to buy friends. Haven't you seen an old man like that?
Hansen
He doesn't come across that way in the book.
Robertson
He does these things for people to buy friends.
Hansen
If he came across that way, I could believe in his acts a little more, but the trouble is he seems to behave out of unmitigated benevolence. He seems like an unmixed good. There is not the human roughage in him of the sort, say, that is in you and me and most of the other characters in your novel. It seems that something has got to pass through his mind that the reader can come across which will give him believability as a character so that the reader doesn't see him solely as a series of functions.
Robertson
Well, do something to him.
Hansen
Yes, I'll think about that and maybe you can think about it, too.
Robertson
I just figured out that Sato probably worked for Vandenhuval for years for practically nothing. I figured he was just getting what was coming to him.
Hansen
Maybe we can underscore that a little bit somehow by suggestion, because that will help.
Robertson
Well, we know he never made very much because he didn't have enough money to go back to Japan.
Hansen
Right. We've got to make him feel that somehow or other this isn't just, "I owe him this and a lot more," the way it comes across in the novel, but there's even a sense of guilt in there—somehow that he had
Robertson
I think I've known one or two people like that who were just pure generous.
Hansen
Not too many people who got rich.
Robertson
No.
Hansen
I mean, I think more of the ones you know that way are people who never made very much because they were doing that for a long time. Well, just like your situation, not too many people are going to want to share their salary. I can see myself doing it and I can see a few other people doing it, like when you were at Poston. But this fellow Vandenhuval had gone through a whole life and had amassed quite a substantial fortune. Most people who amass fortunes like that do it by being a little bit sharpey about things.
Robertson
That's right, but now he's old and he's lonely.
Hansen
All right, so we've just got to establish the fact that at one point in his life he was a little that way, and then later on, maybe we can edge that loneliness a bit and edge the mercenary side of him earlier. Maybe that'll do it. A turning of the screw here and a turning of the screw there and I think we've got him as a character.
Robertson
Do anything you want to it.
Hansen
Okay, thank you. Is there anything more you want to add about your novel?
Robertson
No.
Hansen
It's ready to sail into the seas of public approval or disapproval or whatever?
Robertson
That's right.
Hansen
One final question: You originally titled this novel "A Harvest of Hate." You later retitled it "The Harvest of Hate."
Robertson
No, you're wrong. I originally titled it "Harvest of Hate."
Hansen
Okay, so you didn't use an article at all. Now you've called it "The Harvest of Hate". Why the change?
Robertson
I thought that would put the emphasis on the harvest and I thought it sounded a little better, like The Grapes of Wrath. The Grapes of Wrath sounds better than Grapes of Wrath.
Hansen
Was Steinbeck's novel something of a working model for you?
Robertson
No, never thought of it.
Hansen
Had you read it?
Robertson
Oh, sure. Who didn't? When was it written?
Hansen
It was published in 1940.
Robertson
Oh, sure, I had read it.
Early in the novel, you have one inner chapter employing a God-like voice much like the chapters that Steinbeck employed in The Grapes of Wrath, but then you dropped that device. What he does is he runs the story of the Joads' odyssey from Oklahoma to California and then he has more cosmic kind of concerns—philosophical concerns, religious concerns—put into chapters interlaced between the ones that carry the story itself. You do that early on when you start talking about forces at work and things like that, and then you drop it. I started to think maybe you were modeling your novel after The Grapes of Wrath, but then I realized you, in fact, weren't doing so.
Okay, that's it. On behalf of the Japanese American Project of the Oral History Program at California State University, Fullerton, I want to thank you very much for this interview. All of us in the project and the program look forward to the future publication of your novel.
Notes
In 1986, this manuscript was published as "The Harvest of Hate," in a hardbound edition, by the Japanese American Project of the Oral History Program at California State University, Fullerton, in conjunction with the Japanese American Council of the Historical and Cultural Foundation of Orange County (California). The published novel, released coincident with the author's 100th birthday, includes forewords by two former Poston internees, Moto Asakawa and Hiroshi Kamei, and selected portions of the present interview with Georgia Day Robertson. In 1989, Lynx Books published The Harvest of Hate in a softbound edition, using the identical format as the hardbound version.
In addition to the original manuscript of "Harvest of Hate," the Japanese American Project of the Oral History Program at California State University, Fullerton, has other relevant material archived in its collection such as correspondence with Robertson and her family and friends, photographs of her, and two of her unpublished manuscripts (one an autobiography, the other a novel based upon her missionary experience in China).
2. The really quite spectacular Poston Strike of November 18-24, 1942 (its causes, dynamics, and consequences) is treated in two book-length studies of the Poston War Relocation Center: Alexander Leighton, The Governing of Men: General Principles and Recommendations Based on Experience at a Japanese Relocation Center (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1946) and Paul Bailey, City in the Sun: The Japanese Concentration Camp at Poston, Arizona (Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1974). Two other pertinent sources are: Gary Y. Okihiro, "Japanese Resistance in America's Concentration Camps: A Re-evaluation," Amerasia Journal 2 (Fall 1973): 20-34, and Lane Ryo Hirabayashi and James Hirabayashi, "The `Credible ` Witness: The Central Role of Richard S. Nishimoto on JERS," in Yuji Ichioka, ed., Views From Within: The Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study (Los Angeles: Asian American Studies Center, UCLA, 1989), 65-94. For a listing of the key primary documentation compiled by Alexander Leighton and his Bureau of Sociological Research at the Poston center, see Deborah Gesensway, Mindy Roseman, and Geri Solomon, comps., Guide to the Japanese American Relocation Center Records, 1935-1953 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Department of Manuscripts and University Archives, Cornell University Libraries, 1981). For an account of the Poston Strike by one of its principal figures, see the interviews with George Fujii (O.H. 1479a,b) in the Japanese American Project of the Oral History Program at California State University, Fullerton.
3. As cited in fn. 2 above.
4. See Dorothy S. Thomas and Richard Nishimoto, The Spoilage: Japanese-American Evacuation and Resettlement During World War II (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1946).
5. For an overview of the artistic work done by Japanese Americans detained in the War Relocation Authority camps during World War II, see Deborah Gesensway and Mindy Roseman, Beyond Words: Images from America's Concentration Camps (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987). See also my review of this volume, Representations of an Imprisoned Poston Past, Journal of Orange County Studies 3/4 (Fall 1989/Spring 1990): 102-108, for a discussion centered specifically upon the artists at the Poston center.
See, in particular, Chapter 12 for the author's most extended and unflattering portrait of Parker. At first mention, for example, she writes: "Parker, gateway to the camp at Poston, sat on the open desert, halfway between Phoenix and Indio. Sat there beside the Colorado in the empty desert like a creature who had lost his way and had squatted in the barren sands near water, the accumulation of his living scattered in heaps of rubbish about him. In its isolation, it had become suspicious and crafty and inclined to show its ugly teeth to strangers.
"When the government moved in to construct the camp for Japanese evacuees on the Indian reservation some twenty miles below the town, the place worked itself into a frenzy of suspicion and hate. Some businessmen hurried to paint large signs on their doors warning, `Japs keep out,' and the barber's was the largest of all. Did he not have three sons in the service? His patriotism knew no bounds. `Keep out Japs, you rats,' his sign read."
7. However, according to the taped recollections of wartime residents of Parker, Arizona, only one business proprietor in town, the barber Andy Hale, flaunted such a sign at his establishment. See Arthur A. Hansen and Nora M. Jesch, eds., Japanese American World War II Evacuation Project: Part V: Guards and Townspeople (Munich, Germany: K. G. Saur, 1993).
Index
- African Americans, 5, 32
- Alpha Delta Pi Sorority, 8
- Bashford, Bishop, 11
- Bureau of Sociological Research, 25
- Carey, Dr. Miles, 17, 18, 33
- Chandler, A. B. "Happy," 22
- Chandler, Norman, 22-23, 24
- Chinese language, 10-11
- Chinese Revolution, 9-10
- Chula Vista, Calif., 23, 26
- Columbia University, 12
- Cook, Mrs., 32
- Crystal City, Texas, 19
- Depression, 15, 23
- East Lynne (Wood), 6
- Education. See Schools and Schooling
- Evacuation. See Japanese American Evacuation
- Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 35
- Gila War Relocation Center, Ariz., 22
- Governing of Men, The (Leighton), 25
- Grapes of Wrath, The (Steinbeck), 38
- Hairstyles, 4
- Harrison, Mr., 29
- "Harvest of Hate, The" (Robertson)
- Iowa State College, 3, 4, 8, 13
- Issei, 21, 23
- Japanese Americans. See also Issei
- Japanese American Evacuation, See also specific war relocation centers 17, 19-21.
- Keosauqua, Iowa, 3, 5, 6, 7
- Lacy, Bishop, 11
- Leighton, Alexander, 25
- Los Angeles Times, 22
- Loyalty oath, 34
- Marada, Gil, 21
- Marquette, Louie, 21
- Methodist Church, 7, 9
- Midway City, Calif., 15, 16, 31
- Missionaries, 8-10
- Morehead State Teachers College, 14, 24
- Nishimoto, Richard, 25
- Nitta, Hitoshi, 21
- Nitta, Mary, 21
- Orange County, Calif., 16
- Parker, Ariz., 32, 39-40n6, 40n7
- Pearl Harbor bombing, 16, 17
- Poston War Relocation Center, Arizona
- administration, 22, 34
- artists at, 29-30, 39n4
- barracks, 18, 22, 33
- closure, 20
- congressional investigation of, 22
- description of, 22
- family life at, 33
- food at, 18, 22
- hospital, 32
- newspaper, 24, 25, 29
- non-Japanese at, 18, 33, 34-35
- origin of population, 20, 26, 32
- public response to, 22, 32
- resistance at, 28, 34, 35-36
- salaries paid at, 33
- schools and faculty, 18-20, 21, 27, 28, 33
- strike, 19, 35, 39n2
- studies of, 25
- suicides at, 35
- visitors to, 22-23
― 42 ― - Poston Chronicle, 24, 25, 30
- Robertson, Georgia Day
- birth, 3
- childhood, 3, 4-5
- children, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 23
- death, 3
- education, 3-5, 5-7, 12-13, 15
- employment (nonteaching), 6, 14-15, 16-17, 23
- family background, 3-4, 7
- fiction writing, See also Harvest of Hate, The 3-4, 39n1
- husband, 10, 11, 12
- influences upon, 5, 6
- and Japanese Americans, 15, 16, 17, 20-21, 22, 26, 31-32
- marriage, 9-11
- missionary work in China, 7, 8-11
- move to California, 14-15
- at Poston War Relocation Center, 17-23, 28-29
- reading interests, 4
- religion, 7-8
- teaching positions, 10, 11, 12-14, 15
- widowing, 11, 12
- Robertson, John Thompson, 10, 11, 12
- Roosevelt, Eleanor, 22
- Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 14, 22
- Schools and schooling, See also specific institutions 3, 5-6
- Simpson College, 13-14
- Spoilage, The (Nishimoto & Thomas), 25
- Steinbeck, John, 38
- Thomas, Dorothy Swaine, 25
- United Service Organization (USO), 15, 16-17
- University of Southern California (USC), 12, 13, 14
- Wood, Mrs. Henry, 4
- World War I, 10
- Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), 8
An Interview with
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Use Restrictions
This is a slightly edited transcription of an interview conducted for the Oral History Program, sponsored by California State University, Fullerton. The reader should be aware that an oral history document portrays information as recalled by the interviewee. Because of the spontaneous nature of this kind of document, it may contain statements and impressions which are not factual
Scholars are welcome to utilize short excerpts from any of the transcriptions without obtaining permission as long as proper credit is given to the interviewee, the interviewer, and the University. Scholars must, however, obtain permission from California State University, Fullerton before making more extensive use of the transcription and related materials. None of these materials may be duplicated or reproduced by any party without permission from the Oral History Program, California State University, Fullerton, Fullerton, California, 92834-6846.
Interview
- Interviewee:
- George Nakagawa
- Interviewer:
- Arthur A. Hansen
- Subject:
- Nisei Experience / "Seki-Nin"
- Date:
- January 26, 1988 and June 23, 1988
Part 1
HansenThis is an interview with George Nakagawa by Arthur A. Hansen, for the Japanese American Project of the Oral History Program [OHP] at California State University, Fullerton [CSUF]. Mr. Nakagawa is the author of an unpublished novel, "Seki-Nin," which treats a dimension of the World War II Japanese American Evacuation and is scheduled to be published by the CSUF-OHP Japanese American Project.[1] The date is January 26, 1988. The interview is being held at Mr. Nakagawa's home, 15404 South Catalina Avenue in Gardena, California.
Mr. Nakagawa, our interview will be divided into two parts—the first consisting of a review of your life, and the second a discussion of your fictional manuscript, "Seki-Nin." Let's start today's session by having you fill us in a bit on what you know about your own family's background, both in Japan and in the United States.
Nakagawa
Okay. My dad emigrated [from Japan] about the turn of the century, and after several years in the United States, he earned enough money to return [to Japan] and then marry my mother. It was an arranged marriage. I don't know much of the specifics, except that they were both born and raised in the same village in Hiroshima Prefecture.
Hansen
What was your father's name?
Nakagawa
His name was Genichi Nakagawa.
Hansen
And what about your mom?
Nakagawa
My mother's name was Itsuyo Yamasaki Nakagawa.
Hansen
This village in Hiroshima, what was its name?
Nakagawa
It was Ibaramura, but the name had changed. It was originally, when they immigrated, Ibaraichi. So they used to call it Ibaraichi. But when I visited [the village], I found out that there was no such place; it had changed to Ibaramura.
Hansen
When did you visit Ibaramura?
I visited initially in December 1952. I was in the service in Korea. I was in Japan on R and R [rest and recreation] and at that time I had two older brothers who were also in the U.S. Army. Fortunately, they were both stationed in Japan, so one of my brothers, Kaz, and I visited the relatives. And that's when I visited the Tanaka [actual surname withheld at request of interviewee] family, who was the basis for my novel.[2]
Hansen
Mr. Nakagawa, in talking to your parents about their village, and then in visiting it yourself a half-century later, what can you deduce were the significant changes in the village, aside from the name?
Nakagawa
Almost none. When I visited in 1952, I think the village was almost unchanged, except possibly they had electricity, which they probably didn't have when my parents originally immigrated. But it was almost unchanged. It was a narrow, single-track railroad that went right through the valley. It was a very narrow valley, probably at the widest point maybe less than a mile. It was a long, narrow valley that went from Hiroshima City to Miyoshi City. And in 1952, there were no vehicles to speak of. There was a bus, I think, that went part of the way through that valley, but it was, I'm sure, almost unchanged from the time that my parents left. In 1964, when I visited with my parents, it had changed quite a bit. There were motorcycles, and television, and a lot of other things. But in 1952, I believe that my parents would have had no difficulty recognizing the village.
Hansen
I take it, then, that your parents were from an agricultural background?
Nakagawa
Yes. They were both children of tenant farmers. My dad didn't talk very much, but he was the oldest of several sons. Interestingly enough, one of his younger brothers was a merchant seaman. My dad was very short, about 5'1", but a couple of his brothers were very tall, by Japanese standards, 5'6", 5'7". I later became a merchant seaman. But one of my uncles had been a merchant seaman and died in Osaka of unknown causes. My mother told me at one time that it was suspected that he had died of VD [venereal disease].
Hansen
Which is not uncommon among merchant seamen.
Nakagawa
No, it wasn't.
Hansen
Do you know anything about the conditions surrounding your parents' decision to leave Japan? First, your father's, then, your mother's?
Nakagawa
I only know that my father borrowed money from relatives to come to the [United] States. Believe it or not, I always thought that he had immigrated directly to Washington state, and worked in the sawmills. But in 1975, when I was living in Hawaii, he visited me. I was taking him from Honolulu to Hilo, to visit relatives. And we were flying over Maui, and he said, "That's Maui. That's the first point that I lived in in the United States." And I was very surprised, because I'd never known that he had originally immigrated to Hawaii.
Hansen
He was on a plantation in Maui?
Nakagawa
Yes. He immigrated originally as a contract laborer to Hawaii. And I asked him why he left, and he said at the time the Japanese in Hawaii were living like pigs. It was filthy, and conditions were atrocious, so he said that he just left. I think he probably walked out on a contract or jumped ship or something like that, but he never talked much and never told me the specifics.
Hansen
So actually, you not finding out about this until 1975 is a good illustration of the reticence of your father [in talking] about his own personal experiences?
Nakagawa
I think to a large extent my dad never told me about his life because he never had the time. With twelve kids, he just never sat down and talked to me. My mother did, but she never mentioned that he originally lived in Hawaii. I knew that my aunt, who was my father's younger sister, had married somebody who had
Hansen
Did he tell you how long he'd been in Maui? You said he came to the United States around 1900. I assume you meant the mainland United States, and that maybe he had been in the Territory of Hawaii at that time or a bit earlier.
Nakagawa
I don't know. I don't recall. I think he told me he'd been in Hawaii only a short while—a few months, a year, or something like that. He never told me how he got to Seattle, [Washington], but I know he worked for a long time in the sawmills around Port Townsend, [Washington].
Hansen
Did he tell you where in Maui he lived?
Nakagawa
He never even mentioned it. He was out in a plantation.
Hansen
Okay. So you don't know which end of the island.
Nakagawa
No. I don't have any idea.
Hansen
He was a contract laborer in Hawaii. Then he found the conditions in Hawaii not to his liking, and decided to come to Washington. I think you intimated that he started to work for a sawmill?
Nakagawa
Yes.
Hansen
Now, where was this?
Nakagawa
Port Townsend, in that area.
Hansen
Do you have any recollections of him working at the sawmill? Or, by the time you were born, was he already out of that and doing something else?
Nakagawa
He left the sawmill long before I was born. I understand that he once tried some business in Seattle, but failed. But I was the tenth child, and by the time I was born, my dad could no longer support that number of dependents on a job. So then he turned to farming. He actually went out into the forest, and cleared land, and started to farm. I was born in a converted chicken coop.
Hansen
Where was this that he was clearing land?
Nakagawa
In the hills east of Kent, Washington, which is about twenty-five miles south of Seattle.
Hansen
He was on the outskirts of Kent, then.
Nakagawa
It was not the outskirts; it was actually in the hills, about five, six miles.
Hansen
He actually went in and cleared out stumps and things like that?
Nakagawa
Yes.
Hansen
So he prepared the land for agriculture.
Nakagawa
Yes.
Hansen
And what kinds of things did he grow there?
Nakagawa
Beans, peas, lettuce, cauliflower, tomatoes—most of the common [farm] vegetables that are grown in that area.
Was there a Japanese American settlement around that area?
Nakagawa
Not in that area. Kent, Washington, before the war, I believe was one-quarter Japanese. But where we were, there were very few Japanese. As a matter of fact, there were very few people. Because we were way out in the country. We didn't have electricity or running water.
Hansen
Insofar as you had neighbors there, would they be hakujin [Caucasians] or would they be Nikkei [Japanese Americans] or what?
Nakagawa
Mostly they were Caucasians, but there were a few Japanese farmers in that area. But it was not good farmland. It was too cold, and the growing season started too late. Up in the hills, you get frost until late in the year and early in the fall, so it was not good farmland. So we left in 1938.
Hansen
Had your dad moved there before or after he got married?
Nakagawa
Oh, long after.
Hansen
So I take it that he worked at the sawmill, and usually that was a bachelor's occupation.
Nakagawa
Yes, it was.
Hansen
So, when he got married and before he moved over by Kent, what other things was he doing? He tried to start a business?
Nakagawa
I understand that he had some sort of a business in Seattle for awhile, up until several years before I was born. I never asked him what type of business, but he simply was not a businessman.
Hansen
In your novel, which we'll be talking about in detail during our next interview session, you have the family in there, the Toyotas, running a hotel in Skid Row. Did your father have any connection with that [hotel management], since that was a common occupation for immigrant Japanese?
Nakagawa
I don't know if he had any experience in that line of business. But the Tanaka family, upon whom I based my novel, definitely did run a hotel, because I remember. I was ten years old when the war started, but I remember my parents constantly referring to them. I think they were childhood friends.
Hansen
So you think that your father at one time lived in the Jackson Street area.
Nakagawa
Yes, in Seattle.
Hansen
But in any event, by the time you came along, he was ensconced there in the Kent area.
Nakagawa
Yes. In the hills.
Hansen
And about a fourth of the population of Kent was Japanese American?
Nakagawa
At the time of Pearl Harbor [December 7, 1941], yes.
Hansen
What are we talking about, in terms of the size of Kent?
Nakagawa
Oh, the town itself had a population of about 2,000 in the incorporated limits. Most of the Japanese Americans still lived outside the limits of the city, in the rural area, because they were farmers.
Hansen
You possess, I'm sure, familiarity with Kent. Probably you went to school in Kent, didn't you?
Nakagawa
Yes, I did.
Tell me a little about Kent, not only as a town as such, but from a personal vantage point. How did you experience that town in terms of your own ethnic background?
Nakagawa
The spring before I started first grade, my family moved from the hills of Kent in closer to the city. And we lived very close to the city, so I was attending Kent Elementary School, which was the school for the town people. Most of the Japanese Americans were out in the rural areas, maybe four or five miles out in the country. So the school that I attended only had about, I'd say, 5 to 10 percent Japanese Americans. The schools in the rural areas had a much higher percentage. I attended the first through the fourth grades at Kent Elementary. I recall that my classmates were always the same kids, simply because there were two first grades. "A" through "L" was in one class and "M" through "Z" was in another class, so I went to school with basically the same kids for four years. So I got to know those kids pretty well. We only had four teachers, and I recall fairly well all of them—their names, anyway, and basically what they looked like. But strangely enough, the principal of our school, a Mr. Phipps, was the son of a missionary, and he spoke excellent Japanese, much better than I did.
Hansen
So you were brought up having an Anglo principal, but one who had Japanese language facility, then?
Nakagawa
But I never really got to know him, except that he was friendly to us and once in awhile he'd talk to us and joke with us in Japanese.
Hansen
Was that an accident or was that a deliberate placement of him in that area?
Nakagawa
I think it was an accident, because if it was deliberate, they'd have probably put him in one of the rural schools, where it was predominately Japanese Americans.
Hansen
Let's talk about that for a little while, because as I've studied camp life during World War II, a lot of reports that I've read by anthropologists and other social scientists talk about the differences between a more Americanized Japanese American population and a more Japanized one, and they customarily describe the Japanized sector as being largely comprised of people with rural origins. So it was very significant, then, when you moved closer to Kent to start school. Had you gone to a school on the periphery of Kent or out in the country, your experience might have been quite different. Is that correct?
Nakagawa
Yes, I think definitely [it would have been].
Hansen
If you were to go to school in the rural area, would you find that when kids came to school the only language they had initially was Japanese?
Nakagawa
No, I don't think so. Because I'm one of the younger Nisei, and almost all of my peers in the Japanese American community were the fifth through the tenth children in their families. When I started school, I spoke English quite well.
Hansen
Okay. But that [language facility in English] linked through your older siblings, then.
Nakagawa
Yes, that's right.
Hansen
Your older siblings, when they went to school, they probably just spoke [Japanese].
Nakagawa
That would be the difference, yes. But for me, I don't think it would have made too much of a difference whether I went to an elementary school that was predominantly Japanese American or the school that I happened to go to.
Hansen
Except that the school might have been better in a bigger town, as opposed to in the country, is that right? I mean, was it better for you to go to Kent, to the school there, as opposed to a village school or a country school?
Nakagawa
You mean academically?
Yes.
Nakagawa
No, I don't think so. Not in the lower grades of elementary school. I don't think it made much difference.
Hansen
Of course, the town of Kent was not that huge anyway, was it?
Nakagawa
No. It was a small town. There was only two classes in each grade, so you're probably talking about fifty to sixty kids in each grade. That's a pretty small school.
Hansen
What precipitated the move of your family [from the hills outside of Kent] closer into town?
Nakagawa
I think economics. Although my dad had cleared the land, I don't think he was able to support the family out there. Out in the hills, we were basically a subsistence family. About all we bought, I believe, was rice and shoyu [soy sauce], because we had no electricity or running water.
Hansen
What did your father do when you came closer to town? Was he still in farming?
Nakagawa
Yes. My dad leased a small farm about a mile from downtown Kent, which was a very small town. And we farmed it, I guess, from the summer of 1938 through 1941. Then we were evacuated in May of 1942.
Hansen
Before we get into legal and extralegal discrimination against Japanese people in that area and in Washington state as a whole, and even on the West Coast, maybe we could explore what it was like for a Japanese American to be brought up at that particular time. Your parents were an immigrant generation [Issei]. What constellation of activities did you have, in terms of educational, cultural, or just plain recreational things? What was the world of a young Nisei [U. S. born citizen of Japanese ancestry] like, insofar as that young Nisei had a window [from which] to observe what the world of the Issei, his parents' generation, was like at that time? What was it like in a place like Kent?
Nakagawa
Basically, I think I was living on the fringe of two societies. In school, I recall that there were only two other Nisei boys in my class, and one Nisei girl. So in school I mingled with Caucasians. There were no blacks, no Filipinos or Chinese, just Caucasians and Nisei. I think I mingled fairly well. I had a lot of friends and enjoyed it. But, socially, my life was centered in the Japanese American community. I started Japanese school in the fall of 1941.
Hansen
In Kent?
Nakagawa
Yes. I was in the fourth grade already in English school, but I was only in the first grade in Japanese school. I think, to a large extent, because my dad couldn't afford it. I had an older brother, Henry, who was one year older than me, and he was three or four grades ahead of me in Japanese school. But we only went to school on Saturdays. I remember that when I learned that Japanese school had been closed in December of 1941, I was relieved, because I was going to have to take part in a New Year's play. There was a huge barn right outside Kent that we used to call Katayama Hall. It was sort of a community hall for the Japanese American community, and we were going to have a play there. They used to show Japanese movies there, but we were going to have this play, and I was going to have to participate in it, and I was scared to death.
Hansen
Was Katayama Hall named after Sen Katayama?[3]
Nakagawa
I don't know. We used to call it Katayama Hall. It was right on the edge of Kent, less than a mile from our house. I remember I used to go over there and we used to see samurai movies, and we used to have a great time running around.
I went to that Japanese school one day a week for only a few weeks. On occasion I used to attend Sunday school, which was run by Maryknoll missionaries. I remember that because they used to give us candy. I think that's the reason why I went; candy was hard to come by in those days.
But as far as playing, I used to swim in the river with my older brothers and a bunch of Japanese kids in the neighborhood. Well, it was a neighborhood, but they were actually farmers. It wasn't a cluster of houses or anything. We used to fish in the river, and also in the creek. We used to poach game. We used to play softball in the pastures. The dairy farmers were mostly Caucasians, but we used to play softball in their pastures, and the neighbors didn't mind. Kids were kids, I guess that was it. School was in a mixed society, and the rest of my life was in the Japanese community.
Hansen
How was the situation different for you and your older siblings? There must have been a spread of fifteen or twenty years between you and your oldest sibling.
Nakagawa
Yes. My oldest brother, Itsuki, graduated from high school a year before I started school. But I had two older sisters, Toshiko and Masako, older than him. One of them, Masako, never came to the [United] States because of the Oriental Exclusion Law of 1924. My mother had gone back to Japan to take care of her mother. My mother was the oldest child. And my sister was born in Japan and couldn't be brought back to the States. So I never met her. She died, I believe of childbirth, in 1942. And my niece, Seiko, who is still in Japan, has children who are considerably older than my own. Well, the only close relatives I have in Japan now are my niece, who I first met in 1952, and an aunt, Shizue, who is my mother's younger sister.
Hansen
You mentioned how many kids there were in your immediate family. How many did you say?
Nakagawa
Twelve.
Hansen
How many of them were born in Japan and how many in the United States?
Nakagawa
Two were born in Japan.
Hansen
Okay. And the first one that was born here was born about what year?
Nakagawa
Oh, I would say she's probably sixteen years older than me, so about 1915 or 1916.
Hansen
And then the last one who was born was born about what year?
Nakagawa
Nineteen thirty-five. I'm the tenth of twelve [children].
Hansen
And your year of birth was?
Nakagawa
[Nineteen] thirty-two.
Hansen
Okay. What could you, as a youngster, glean about your parents' prewar world, the world of the Issei? I mean, what round of activities did your father participate in, and what about your mother? Because I think sometimes we find out about the public world of the men, but we don't understand the sometimes less public world of the women. As a younger child, you probably had a lot of chance to observe your mother's way of life. Oftentimes, for example, men, because they came here first and had to deal with the outside community, developed a greater facility in English than their wives, but maybe that was not the case with your family.
Nakagawa
Yes, it was definitely the case.
Hansen
Okay, why don't you tell me a little about your dad and your mom in terms of their lifestyle.
Nakagawa
My dad was able to speak some English, but not fluently. He surprised me because he was able to read a little bit, although I don't think he ever had any formal training in English, not even in camp [during World War II]. My mother never spoke any English at all, except just simple greetings. My mother was a housewife, pure and simple. She had no apparent interests or qualifications; she just never had a chance to acquire any. When she came over, she didn't speak any English. And with twelve kids, she simply didn't
Hansen
Was he a gambler, too?
Nakagawa
Yes. My dad was a gambler and a drinker. He didn't do either well. (laughter) But of eight sons, I'm the only one who acquired any facility for drinking. I learned that in the [U.S.] Navy, on the merchant ships. But my mom used to tell me, used to tell all of us, "Stay away from liquor, because it's the devil and it will imprison you." She thought of alcohol as modern-day people think of cocaine or hard drugs. She thought that if you started doing it, there was no escaping it. So I almost never drank in front of my mother. I'd drink a beer or so. Once in awhile, when I was an adult, my dad would be drinking beer and he'd offer me one, and I'd drink one with him. I'd never do any drinking in front of my mother, however, because I didn't want her to worry.
Hansen
Did your mom's attitude toward drinking come from her Christian background?
Nakagawa
No. My mom was not a Christian. She was always a Buddhist, but she did mention to me at times about considering Christianity. To the best of my knowledge, my dad had no religion. He was a member of the Buddhist church and attended funerals and a few weddings; that's about it.
Hansen
Did your father's drinking and gambling lead to constricted circumstances for the family's economy, and was your mother reflecting, in part, the actual situation that the family was short of money because of your father's habits?
Nakagawa
I don't think so. My dad was a poor gambler. I don't remember before the war because I was too young; I wouldn't have been involved in it anyway. But after the war, on one occasion, an Issei man came over to our house when we were farming to collect some gambling debts from my dad. But you can't squeeze blood from a turnip. My dad never had any money. The only time he had money was after he pretty much retired on social security. Then he was living on a farm that we owned, so he had no expenses. He was raising a few head of cattle, because we converted the land to pasture and he was just grazing a few head of cattle. I think that's the first time he had any spending money in his pocket that I knew of.
Hansen
Did your father participate in any kind of civic or cultural groups? I mean, was he in, like, the Japanese Association, or did he participate in a prefectural organization? Was he a board member for a [Japanese] language school or anything like that?
Nakagawa
No. If anything, he might have paid lip service and donated a few bucks, if he had it. But he was definitely not a doer, in that sense. He used to make sake and beer, and when we were in camp [Heart Mountain War Relocation Center in Wyoming during World War II]—how he got it, I'll never know—he used to get hold of dried prunes and grapes and ferment wine. My mother used to complain because the house was always so crowded with his friends drinking up and raising Cain. But I remember the closet in camp would be splattered with juice. (laughter)
Hansen
So the profile of your father that you're presenting here is such that I would suspect that at the time of the roundup after Pearl Harbor he wasn't somebody who was picked up by the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation].
Nakagawa
Definitely not. He'd have been about the last Issei to get picked up.
Hansen
So he didn't have a high profile in the community.
Nakagawa
No, he did not. Definitely not. My mother used to say that my dad was looked upon by his peers as a great guy: "If you need a drink, go see Nakagawa." There was always a lot of people in our house drinking. Even after we left camp, in the 1950s and 1960s, the neighbors—not Japanese but Caucasians—would come over and they'd be drinking beer or some of his home-brewed sake and having a good time.
Your dad sounds like a fun-loving guy.
Nakagawa
Yes. Yes, he was. All the Issei, and even some of the Caucasian neighbors, even prior to the war, used to come over to our house, and they used to call him "Gene, good old Gene." He was a drinking partner.
Hansen
What did your mom think about that, since she voiced concern that you might drink and that a drink would be almost addictive and that it would lead you down the wrong path? How did she feel about that situation with your father and the moveable feast of his parties?
Nakagawa
She didn't like it, but she didn't rebel. It was one of those shikataganai [there's nothing you can do] things.
Hansen
Do you think your parents were very much in love? I mean, I know theirs was an arranged marriage, but that doesn't preclude love, obviously.
Nakagawa
I don't think so, not in the sense that most Americans think of it. My father was very Japanese; he had very little respect for women. I had a younger sister, Kiku, one year younger than me. I think I was one of the few kids in my family who argued with my dad. I thought he treated her badly, and I would object. If I didn't like what he was doing, I would say so. And I remember as a kid—this was after World War II, junior high and high school days—there were a few times when he'd get so mad he'd run me out of the house. I'd get out of the house and stay out for an hour or two, and when I came back in, he wouldn't say a word. It was forgotten. He never harbored a grudge. But later, when I became an adult and I became a merchant seaman and started to sail back and forth to Japan, I would bring my parents records. I bought them a shortwave radio so they could get shortwave reception. It didn't work very well.
But later, my dad never harbored any grudges against me. He didn't love me less because I had been rebellious, but I was probably more rebellious than the others. Most of my brothers and sisters were much more inclined to shrug their shoulders and say, "What the hell. It's the old man. You can't change him."
Hansen
I've talked to a lot of Nisei who experienced, as a lot of people in Japan do even today, a strong attachment to their mom and kind of a distance from their father which, as time went on, mellowed into a bit more understanding and appreciation, even love. You've been describing a situation with your dad as a bit of a clash but not something that threatened your mutual love, but there's still some tension. What about with your mom? Was there that bonding of closeness with your mom?
Nakagawa
Technically, yes. I don't recall my mom ever getting mad at me and raising the roof with me. Neither did my dad. He just got mad. You know, he just ran me out of the house. But my mom, I don't recall her ever seriously dressing me down. Because I was one of the rebellious kids, my mom often pleaded with me and said, not with tears—I used to kid her about it years later—"Please be nice to me, because I don't have long to live." (laughter) She said that from the time I was in grade school. Thirty years later, I would kid her about it.
Hansen
When she'd say that to you, would she say it in English or Japanese?
Nakagawa
Japanese, always Japanese. We always spoke Japanese.
Hansen
You made an invidious comparison earlier between your principal's Japanese and your own. But was your Japanese sufficient to be able to have, not only effective communication with your mom, but affective communication, too, where it was emotional? Could you communicate with your mom with a sense of intimacy?
Nakagawa
No, not really. I don't think there was ever any serious misunderstanding, but I believe that probably the most obvious of the effects of the [Japanese American] Evacuation on me personally was that I lost the ability to fully communicate with my parents. Because when I went into camp, I was ten years old, and for three and a half years I really had little intimate contact with my parents. I'd go to them, mostly my mom, and say, "I need a pair of shoes," or "I need a dime to go see a movie." But I don't recall ever eating
Hansen
You were about nine years old when you were evacuated, right?
Nakagawa
I was ten when I went into camp.
Hansen
You were born in 1932 and you went to camp, then, in 1942.
Nakagawa
Yes.
Hansen
You've been alluding to not only camp but a specific camp. Before the interview started, you were talking to me about the Heart Mountain camp. A prominent Nisei writer, Bill Hosokawa,[4] ended up at Heart Mountain, but he had been transferred there from the Minidoka [War Relocation Center in Idaho] camp. I'm wondering how you also ended up in Heart Mountain. That [being interned at the Heart Mountain center] wasn't very common for people from Washington, was it?
Nakagawa
No, it wasn't.
Hansen
They [Japanese Americans who had resided in Washington prior to World War II] usually went to either Minidoka or Tule Lake [War Relocation Center in California], I guess, initially. Those who had lived on Bainbridge Island [an island off the coast from Seattle, Washington] originally were sent to Manzanar [War Relocation Center in eastern California], I know that.
Nakagawa
Yes. Most of the people in my town, Kent, went to the Pinedale Assembly Center [in Pinedale, California], which we did, and then they went to Tule Lake. We went to Tule Lake and we were there for a little over a year, and then, because of the segregation thing,[5] we went to Heart Mountain. Now, I believe my dad wanted to go to Minidoka, but we couldn't get there.
Hansen
Mostevacuees went to Puyallup [Assembly Center in Washington], and then to Minidoka, right?
Nakagawa
Seattle people went to Puyallup and then to Minidoka. The Kent people went to Pinedale and then to Tule Lake, and from Tule Lake, they scattered.
Hansen
Let me now go back to Kent in the prewar period. To what extent did you have a relationship with the Seattle and Tacoma area? Did your family go there on occasions, and if so, what were those occasions? Shopping? What brought you into, really, the largest urban area around there? You weren't that many miles away from Seattle. There must have been many more things to do there, and you probably had friends or family living in the greater Seattle area, also.
Nakagawa
My parents had lots of friends in Seattle, because many of the people who were in the sawmills eventually relocated to Seattle. Of course, my parents lived in Seattle for a few years before I was born. So my parents had a lot of friends in Seattle. On occasion, they would visit us. Once in a while, we would visit them. But I don't recall ever visiting friends in Seattle with my parents. For one thing, there was no car that was near big enough.
Hansen
You were only ten years old, too.
Nakagawa
I was ten years old, but, see, I had many older brothers, and we could fill up that Model A pretty easy. So, in the prewar period, I remember going to Seattle only one time. Well, only one time strictly for recreation, social reasons. That was in July of 1941. Our whole family went to a Chinese restaurant in Seattle, and we had a great meal.
Hansen
Was this following a funeral or a wedding?
No. This was purely celebration, the Fourth of July 1941. We went to Seattle—I was nine, I guess—to this Golden Pheasant Restaurant, which is still there. And we had a great Chinese meal. Then, after the meal, we were going to go over the newly completed floating bridge which went from Seattle to Mercer Island. And we went over to Mercer Island on this bridge, which was a toll bridge, and we were going around the island. There was a bridge on the other side of the island that went over to the other side of the lake, and my dad was trying to find that, because he was too cheap to pay toll fees to go back, and we got lost on the island. I remember that very clearly. Other than that, the only time I went to Seattle that I can recall was to visit one of my older brothers, who had, I think, tuberculosis and was in the sanitarium there.
Hansen
Did any of your older siblings participate in any of the athletic leagues or anything that would take them over to Seattle for competition?
Nakagawa
No, they didn't.
Hansen
Was there a host of things going on, even in a small area like Kent, for younger people to participate in? Sports leagues and the like.
Nakagawa
Yes, there were. I don't know about basketball; there definitely was in baseball. I recall that the various Japanese communities there used to have baseball teams, and they used to have a Japanese baseball league. The various communities would have teams, like Tacoma and White River, which was in Kent Valley. They used to have, I understand, pretty good baseball teams. But my brothers didn't play in that. A couple of them played school sports in this small Kent High School.
But my earliest recollection of my brothers participating in sports was when I was a first-grader. My second brother, Giro, was playing football for the Kent High School team. We had just moved from the hills closer into Kent. But prior to that, he used to turn out for football, and he would ride the bus in in the morning. But in the afternoon he'd have to, after football practice, walk about three and a half miles home. Kids did that in those days because nobody had a bike.
Hansen
When did you start working around the family property?
Nakagawa
I started working prior to school.
Hansen
You were four years old or something?
Nakagawa
Four or five years. I would help. I don't know if it amounted to much. When we were picking peas or beans or things like that, I would pick on one side and one of my older brothers would pick on the other side, and that's how we were paired up. Because when I was in the first grade, I had a brother who was a senior in high school, one who was a junior, and one who was in about the ninth grade. So I was paired up with one of the boys who was a junior or senior in high school. Between the two of us, I guess we did a pretty adequate job of picking a row of beans or peas or whatever.
Hansen
You didn't have any Kibei [Nisei educated in Japan] in your family, then.
Nakagawa
No.
Hansen
And was the reason because you already had somebody in your family in Japan? The explanation I hear frequently for why Nisei went to Japan for an education is that, when their Issei parents eventually retired, they would have somebody familiar with Japanese culture and society to take care of them. But you had, actually, some siblings who were born in Japan.
Nakagawa
Two siblings were born in Japan: my second sister, the second child in our family, who I never met; and my fourth brother, who would have been the sixth child. But my brother Kaz, who was born in Japan, was able to return to the [United] States. I don't know how that was possible. Let's see, he's seven years older
Hansen
What sort of difference in Japanese language facility is there among your siblings and how does that situation reflect age differences?
Nakagawa
I guess the older the kid was, the better he or she spoke Japanese. I was near the low end of the totem pole, so I spoke very little. I was able to understand what my parents were saying, but I never had the ability to discuss anything in real depth. And that was very unfortunate.
Hansen
The story of the Evacuation has been told quite frequently in recent years, but I always maintain that the Evacuation happened to individuals, and that each individual experienced it in a quite different way. I'm particularly interested in the way that you perceived it, being a sensitive person, a writer, and also at the time being a child. Maybe you could communicate what sort of anticipation you might have had about the Evacuation as a result of hearing your family talk about the worsening situation between United States and Japan, or the Sino-Japanese War, or whatever else. Was there some kind of incremental preparation for Pearl Harbor as a result of just hearing that things were intensifying, things appearing in the [Japanese] language press, and your parents or your siblings conversing about it? Or was Pearl Harbor a total surprise to you?
Nakagawa
I have no personal recollection, other than the day that Pearl Harbor happened, I remember one of my brothers, Itsuki, telling my mother about it. My dad wasn't in the house. I don't know where he was. He was probably out fishing or something like that, because in December there's no farm work to do. He was probably out doing something. But, having been only nine years old at that time, I really had little knowledge of world affairs. I was very much conscious, though, of the fact that I was a Japanese American, because there was a noticeable discrimination that was obvious even to a nine-year-old. I knew we were different. As I mentioned earlier, there were two other Nisei boys and one Nisei girl in my class. One boy was my neighbor and one was the son of a man who ran the Japanese country store—only it was in town. But I have no recollection of teachers at school or anybody picking on me as such, but some of the kids would conk me once in awhile. But I don't think it had anything to do with the fact that I was a Japanese American. But it wasn't anything serious; it was something we accepted.
As far as the actual evacuation, I didn't give it any serious thought. At least I don't recall. I was aware that we had to go, and that was it. I knew we were going to camp. I remember the weekend before we were evacuated, though, that we had one splurge. We went to the town of Auburn, [Washington], which was south of us, to see a movie. It was a Wallace Beery movie. I recall thinking it was unfortunate that we lived south of a river. We were in the town of Kent, but we lived south of the Green River. All the people who lived north of the Green River were in one group, and we were in the group with the people from the next town, who I didn't know. So when we got to Tule Lake, then, all of my friends from my town, those who I had gone to Japanese school with, were way in the 70s block of Tule Lake, and we were in the 50s, diagonally across the whole damn camp. I recall I was unhappy about the fact that we were going to be with a bunch of strangers.
Hansen
But didn't you go to the Pinedale Assembly Center first?
Nakagawa
Yes, we did. We went to Pinedale. But then from Pinedale we went to Tule Lake. How it happened, I don't know, but at Tule Lake we were somewhat separated from the rest of the Kent people.
Hansen
Tell me a little about Pinedale, what you can recollect of that experience.
I remember that we were right in the middle of a fig grove. One thing I recall is the extreme heat. When you're from Seattle, it's cool even in the dead of the summer. Except for maybe half a dozen days of the year, it's cool. It might get to 80, 85 [degrees]. But in Pinedale it was extremely hot. Must have been way over 100 degrees, and no wind. I also recall the public toilets, you know, the outdoor privies. But we had those on our farm, so that wasn't a serious problem for me. Other than that, I remember they used to have what they call oyatsu [snack] for kids. Ten o'clock in the morning or sometime thereabouts, in mid-morning, mid-afternoon, they would give milk and saltine crackers to the kids. I think it was for kids ten years old or under. I just qualified. If I hadn't been qualified, I'd have lied anyway. But we used to go from one mess hall to the next just to get double shares. In Pinedale—we weren't there very long—they rapidly organized activities. I think we were there from about May to August [1942] or thereabouts. But I remember right away they organized softball leagues, even for us kids.
Hansen
How did your parents handle being evacuated? What do you recall about the conditions? I know your dad wasn't part of the government's roundup of community leaders, but certainly the authority figures in the house must have experienced being evacuated in a very dramatic way. What do you recollect happening around your house with your parents and older siblings? Did some of your family evacuate to one place and some to another because of marital relationships and the like?
Nakagawa
No, we were all evacuated together. At that time there were eleven kids at home. My one sister was in Japan. My oldest sister, Toshiko, was working as a maid in Seattle and she came home so that we could all be evacuated together. I had an older brother, Giro, who was working the oysters. He had graduated from high school. He was working the oysters in South Bend, Washington, which is on the coast. And I had this other brother, Itsuki, who had been up in Alaska working in the salmon canneries or something like that. But they all came back, and we all evacuated together as a family. So we went to Pinedale. I think that's the last time our whole family was ever together, in May of 1942. We went to Pinedale, and we were there, I think, about three months.
Hansen
Do you remember the emotional climate in your family at the time of this evacuation? Was it, again, the shikataganai thing?
Nakagawa
Yes, I think it was largely that. I don't recall it firsthand, but I believe that it was largely that. "Well, we've got to go." So we did. I remember they assigned us a family number, and we put tags on everything. I think I recall that our family number was 16786. They had these cargo tags. I don't know how we got there, but we went to Auburn [Washington]. We were actually from the town of Kent. We went to the Auburn train station to be evacuated, and that's why we wound up with a bunch of strangers. You know, not our group, really, when we got to Tule Lake. My parents were used to hardship. I don't think that they suffered a great deal emotionally. I don't think that my brothers and sisters did, either. They were conditioned to discrimination to the extent where they could accept it, at least on the surface.
Hansen
None of them were old enough to be married?
Nakagawa
No, none were. Well, they were old enough to be married, but they weren't. My oldest sister, Toshiko, then must have been in the mid to late twenties. But people weren't getting married early in those days.
Hansen
What concern did the family express about the one sibling who was in Japan during this time?
Nakagawa
I remember my mother was worried about it. She used to mention it in the same way that you would expect any mother to. But she wouldn't discuss it much with me. You have to remember, I'm the tenth. (laughter) There were other siblings who she could express her concerns with more readily. And my dad, I don't recall him ever saying anything. He was too busy trying to figure out where to get the ingredients to set up his still.
Hansen
It's interesting that one of the things that you remember very vividly—and I don't think that people who haven't gone through this can fully appreciate it—is that you're thrown in with strangers, in a sense. It makes the uprooting more vivid in that you're not only being taken from Kent and put into Pinedale, but
Nakagawa
I don't think there was any significant difference. It's just that, as a kid, I wanted to be with kids that I knew. In Pinedale the camp was quite a bit smaller, and we were there only a short time. We didn't go to school, so it wasn't noticeable to me, although I recall that before being evacuated I was concerned. I didn't want to go to camp with these guys from Auburn because I didn't even know them. And I was only ten years old, just turned ten. Naturally, if you go camping or on an outing, you want to go with your friends, and it was that same concern. But, basically, the people, I think, in that area, the whole White River valley, all farmers, were basically the same. There was no vast difference in loyalties or anything like that.
Hansen
Well, was there a difference as to place of origin in Japan, like for your parents?
Nakagawa
No.
Hansen
There were a lot of Hiroshima Prefecture people in that area?
Nakagawa
Yes. No, there was no significant difference in the people. As a matter of fact, I think it turned out better for me in the long run, because when we got to Tule Lake we were in with all of these other people. My block in Tule Lake had more kids than any block around.
Hansen
What do you recollect about the transfer from Pinedale to Tule Lake?
Nakagawa
I only recall the train ride. We went by train from Pinedale to Tule Lake, and then from Tule Lake to Heart Mountain.
Hansen
But you were a year in Tule Lake.
Nakagawa
Yes, I was a year in Tule Lake. But when we went from Auburn, Washington, to Pinedale, we had a very nice train. We had a commercial dining room. It was great. I remember the blacks [African Americans] with their white dinner coats.
Hansen
Porters?
Nakagawa
Yes. It was great. Hey, I'd never had such good food before. But the other trains were kind of dumpy.
Hansen
You went by train, you say, from Pinedale to Tule Lake, too, right?
Nakagawa
Yes.
Hansen
At Pinedale, did you run up against the sentries and the barbed wire and things?
Nakagawa
Oh, yes, definitely. You know, when we went on the train from Auburn to Pinedale, we had an armed guard in the car with us. And there was a family, a young couple, a Kibei man and a Nisei wife, with three infant daughters. They later became friends of ours. But I didn't think of it at the time, but it just seems that it must have been such a hardship for them. Three infants. I mean, they were just babies. But as far as I was concerned, I was ten. My youngest brother, Ben, must have been seven. It was no hardship physically for us, except it was hot. Boy, it was really hot for people from around Seattle.
You must have experienced some hardship as regards the housing, though. Of course, you were probably crowded in the place you were living in before the war, also.
Nakagawa
Yes. We were living in a crowded house. Before the war, we used to sleep four into a double bed. It's easy to do when it's head to foot. You know, two guys with heads on this side, two guys with heads on that side.
Hansen
I realize that one can't factor out the trauma and sense of shame that's involved with discrimination and the Evacuation. But if you could factor that out—which I realize, of course, that in truth you cannot!— simply look at the objective living situation, would you say that your standard of living went up or down when you moved from Kent into the camps in terms of just the food that you ate, the facilities that you lived in, the plumbing that you had, the medical care you received, and all those kinds of things?
Nakagawa
As far as the physical aspects of camp, I don't think that as a ten-year-old I suffered. Except it was so damn hot. And I didn't have the freedom to run around. You know, we were fishing. We had this little creek and we used to poach fish, trout and things, before it was in season. As far as camp is concerned, the physical changes in the environment—food and all of that—I don't think I suffered. To be perfectly honest, a lot of people did, but we were very poor. I got sick and tired of some of the food in Tule Lake. It seemed like we lived on lamb curry stew and Columbia River smelts. I'll never forget that. (laughter) I can't stand lamb to this day. But we constantly had Columbia River smelts and lamb curry stew. And red beets. I hate red beets.
Hansen
How did your family make a living while you were in camp? Did your dad and mom both work, or just your dad?
Nakagawa
No, my mom never worked. My mom used to make a lot of our clothes for us in camp. She did quite well. She would make shirts. And there were plenty of people to make clothes for. But my dad worked on the farm. He was a chimney sweeper [for all of the barracks]. He was working all the time. My older brothers and sisters left camp about as soon as they could.
Hansen
Left from Tule Lake?
Nakagawa
Three of them left from Pinedale as soon as we got there. As soon as they could, they went to Ogden, Utah. Then the others, as they graduated from high school, they went out to the railroad in Montana or wherever. They didn't hang around the camp.
Hansen
So they took advantage of the [WRA's] leave clearance policy and got out of camp.
Nakagawa
Yes, they got out.
Hansen
After the sorting out at Tule Lake and Tule Lake became a segregation center, and the people who had said yes on these questions [in the "loyalty" registration administered in early 1943]—questions twenty-seven and twenty-eight[7]—were actually sent out of Tule Lake for the most part, and the people in other camps who had said no, no, to these questions ended up at Tule Lake, your family moved to Heart Mountain. By the time you got to Heart Mountain, about how many were left of your family to live together there?
Nakagawa
Let's see. Parents and six kids. Maybe it was more than that, but I think the others left before we got to Heart Mountain. About as fast as they got out of high school, they were gone.
Hansen
So it was basically your parents and the younger kids who were left.
Nakagawa
Yes.
Hansen
What about your sisters? Did they stay in camp with the family or did they go out, too?
My oldest sister, the oldest of my siblings, left very early. She was working in Utah somewhere, in an ammunition plant or something like that.
Hansen
Of course, a lot has been written about Tule Lake before and after the segregation.[8] But even before the time of the registration that I was just alluding to there was a great deal of intimidation on the part of different people to try to get other people in the camp to answer the questions in a certain way. Was your family in any way involved in that, or were you aware of it, or were you just oblivious to what was happening because of your age?
Nakagawa
I was aware of it, because I recall when I was there...I don't even remember what month...In one block, I think it was [comprised largely of people who originated from] the Sacramento-Placer County area [in central California], there was some sort of agitation, and so they sent troops in. And we were watching, I recall. These troops came in with fixed bayonets and gas masks. I don't know what they were doing, but we went over to watch. I was aware of what was going on, although I didn't understand the significance. My gang, the kids in my block, grade school age kids, we used to refer to the people as "the pro-Japs" and "the anti-Japs." (laughter) And we were saying, "Hey, these guys got to go in and get the pro-Japs." But I think that was an effort to make the people register for the draft. But I do recall the troops came in.
Hansen
What was your block and barrack number in Tule Lake, do you remember that?
Nakagawa
Block 54, barrack 4. Strangely enough, I'm living now here in Gardena in a house whose number is 15404, and my barrack in Tule Lake was 5404. We had the whole middle of the barrack. There was one family in the end, we had the whole middle, and there was another family in the end apartment.
Hansen
You have that imprinted indelibly in your brain. I wonder if I could test your recollection as to what your residence number was at Pinedale. Do you remember that?
Nakagawa
I don't recall. I think we lived in Block A, but in Tule Lake I remember it vividly.
Hansen
And then at Heart Mountain, where did you live?
Nakagawa
Block 12, barrack 17.
Hansen
And then did you have a particular apartment in barrack 17?
Nakagawa
We also lived in the middle of the barrack. "B," "C," or something like that. But we had two or three.
Hansen
That's right, because you were a family of a sufficient size.
Nakagawa
I have a much better recollection of Tule Lake than Heart Mountain.
Hansen
You do?
Nakagawa
Oh, yes.
Hansen
And yet you stayed in Heart Mountain longer.
Nakagawa
Yes. See, because in Heart Mountain... We used to go ice skating. They had a swimming pool. It wasn't a swimming pool; it was an irrigation ditch that had been dammed up and was really a swimming hole. We used to go out to the Shoshone River and wade. We used to go hiking. But it wasn't fun. It wasn't fun because there were very few kids in my block. In Tule Lake we had a gang. You know, oh, gee, there must have been forty kids approximately my age, and we used to have gang fights. We used to steal food from the mess hall and go out to the irrigation ditch to swim. We used to sneak up in the rafters of the community shower and peek down into the girls' showers. We just had a hell of a time.
You were about a sixth-grader, weren't you?
Nakagawa
Fifth grade.
Hansen
Fifth grade at Tule Lake. When you went to Heart Mountain, did your father continue working in agriculture?
Nakagawa
He worked mostly on the farm. But my dad had no skills. He was a lumberjack, a failure at some business, cleared land, worked on a farm. In Tule Lake, I recall he was a chimney sweeper. He used to come home all black from soot. My dad was a hard worker. You give him a job to do and, boy, he'd do it. But as far as skills, he had none.
Hansen
I have seen a lot of pictures of Heart Mountain and Tule Lake, and both of them have memorable landscape features, ones that readily identify the respective camps. Are those distinctive features in your mind at all?
Nakagawa
Very vividly. I never went hiking up to Heart Mountain; it was too far. We always went the other way, across the highway to the Shoshone River. In Tule Lake we used to—for the short time that we were there and we were free to go, because we were confined at first—go hiking up on Castle Rock and out on Rimrock Mountain, which we used to call "Horse Cock Mountain." (laughter) And I recall, when we started school there—the school was in Block 50, kitty-corner across from Block 54—we were going to have a contest to name the school. I was in the fifth grade, and I was not a really, really bad kid, but sort of a mischievous one. And me and a couple of other guys, we wanted to call the school "Concentration Camp School," and they said, "No way." So then we were going to call it "Horse Cock Mountain School." (laughter) They finally compromised and called it "Rimrock School." But we had a blast. I had a blast in Tule Lake.
Hansen
Do you think that the students at Tule Lake got rowdier, in a way? Now, when you were in school before camp, there were only three other Nisei kids in your class. At Tule Lake, I know there was, among the high school students, a lot more truancy and just talking out in class and doing mischievous things such as writing on the bathrooms walls. Did you find in Tule Lake that the climate of the classroom was a little more "troublesome?"
Nakagawa
Yes. Less discipline, yes, definitely. But I'm not sure what the reasons were. I never really thought about that. But when I was a kid in Kent Elementary School, the kids, probably twenty-five Caucasians and four Japanese Americans, we were very docile and attentive.
Hansen
Who's "we"?
Nakagawa
All of us.
Hansen
Not just the Nisei.
Nakagawa
It was a well-run school. I mean, to my recollection, we respected and loved our teachers. When I got to Tule Lake, I don't know whether it was because of peer reinforcement... Because, you know, if some guy has a tendency to screw around, then he knows his peers are thinking the same thing. There's peer reinforcement. I don't know whether it was that, or whether it was because the kids had this pent-up, anti-Caucasian sentiment building in them. But there was definitely more rebelliousness. Now, I don't know. Because the bulk of the kids at that Rimrock School in the fifth grade were from Placer County, and the Placer County kids were less disciplined. We used to call them yogores [delinquents]. I don't know whether that was the reason, whether it was this peer reinforcement of the rebelliousness that's natural, I think, in kids, or whether it was a pent-up, anti-white people feeling, because our teacher was white. But our teacher in Tule Lake was a Mrs. Hannon. She was a very kindly, plump, probably middle-aged, gentle person. And she had a Japanese assistant. But I remember, she used to make us us sing constantly. We used to sing "[I Dream of] Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair," "Juanita." You know that song?
Hansen
Yes.
I can still sing that song from those days. The kids, though, in Tule Lake, and to a large extent at Heart Mountain Junior High in the seventh grade, were more rebellious. But maybe it was because seventhgraders have a greater degree of independence than the lower elementary school, I don't know.
Hansen
I was reading a book not too long ago by this educational historian named Thomas James, and it's called Exile Within [:The Schooling of Japanese Americans, 1942-1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987)]. It's about education in the World War II Japanese American camps, and one of the things James notes is that, when the WRA first started the school, which would have been your first year at Tule Lake, they adopted a curriculum that was developed by a professor named Hanna from the Department of Education at Stanford [University in northern California]. It was a progressive form of education designed to get the children in the camp into seeing democracy at work in their community, and so everything in the curriculum was geared to studying institutions and developments in the community. But the anomaly of it, of course, was that such a curriculum showcased to the Japanese American students a community structure and dynamic that was authoritarian and totalitarian. I mean, they were living in a community that was in fact a concentration camp. Do you remember that situation, where the camp curriculum was based in the community, wherein you and your classmates would, say, visit the fire department or police department, or go see how the community government worked? They [the WRA] scrapped this curriculum pretty much after the first year because it was such an abysmal failure, but I was just wondering if you had any recollection of that?
Nakagawa
No, I don't recall. In Tule Lake, we didn't visit the fire department or the hospital, anything like that, I'm quite sure. I think our school year must have been fairly short, because I think we probably didn't start the school until late in September or early October. But I enjoyed the fifth grade. A lot of my classmates are in Seattle now. I met them and talked to them. As a matter of fact, my second cousin, from Penryn, California, was my classmate. I didn't get to know him very well because, although a classmate, he was very different than me. He was the youngest child in his family by about ten years, and he was very much a mama's boy; and I was with a gang, and I didn't want to have much to do with him. He was much bigger than me. We never fought or anything. He was just a second cousin, and I had really nothing to do with him.
Hansen
You were plugged into different worlds.
Nakagawa
Yes.
Hansen
This book [Exile Within] that I was alluding to a little while ago, the author [Thomas James] mentions that the quality of education, as the war went on, went down—for several reasons. A lot of the hakujin teachers ended up leaving. There was a huge turnover of teachers. And then, the better Nisei teachers who, like your older siblings, were teaching assistants, resettled and went to work elsewhere in the United States. So the camp schools were left with a lot of teachers, whether Anglos or Japanese Americans, who were not real well qualified in the classroom. Did you notice that when you went to Heart Mountain that, even though the facilities for the schools got better, that the quality of the teaching itself diminished, or not?
Nakagawa
No, I didn't. As a matter of fact, I think that the same teachers who started in the fall of 1944 continued on through the end of the 1944-1945 school year. I don't recall any change in teachers at Heart Mountain. In the sixth grade I had only one teacher, a Mr. Jennings. He had a broken leg. He's living in Seattle. I read in the Pacific Citizen [the official newspaper of the Japanese American Citizens League] that he's now retired and living in Seattle. I might go call him when I get up there. He won't remember me, but...
Hansen
Do you remember good things about your teachers, then?
Nakagawa
Yes.
Hansen
Both the Anglo and the Nisei teachers you had?
Nakagawa
I don't have an unfavorable recollection of any teacher. There's only one teacher who I thought was somewhat incompetent, but as far as a negative attitude, I have no negative attitude. I have a very positive
Hansen
Would you like to talk about some of them who you have a positive attitude toward, and what subjects you found interesting and why?
Nakagawa
Okay. The first teacher that I have a very positive attitude toward is my teacher at Rimrock Elementary School. Her name was Mrs. Hannon. I'm quite sure it was Hannon; Hannon, Hanna, something like that. And she lived a short distance outside of the camp, because she told us. She was middle-aged, plump, and somewhat auburn-haired, as I recall. Reddish-brown hair, freckles. A very kindly, sympathetic teacher. She didn't preach to us kids because we were only fifth-graders. But I recall she used to make us sing those songs, and we thought it was sissy to sing. But then, after you learned to sing the songs, even though you as a "tough" kid didn't admit it, there was beauty there. Especially "Juanita." "Soft o'er the fountains..." You know, hey, to a gang kid who thinks he's tough, with a tough gang, and you want to portray toughness. (laughter) She used to take us out to the firebreak for PE [physical education]. Her assistant was Miss Shiratsuki, who was on the same train as me when we went to Heart Mountain.
Hansen
Can you tell me a little more about Miss Shiratsuki.
Nakagawa
She was a very small woman.
Hansen
Nisei?
Nakagawa
Yes. Except that she and Mrs. Hannon worked hand in hand, and they seemed to be...There was a very cordial relationship between all of us. We used to give Mrs. Hannon some trouble, kids' way, mischievous stuff. I remember, though, when we suggested "Concentration Camp School," it was a joke. You know, she took it seriously, because I'm sure...I didn't realize it at the time, but I take it that she realized that that was not the right attitude to instill in kids in that camp. But I definitely recall her very vividly.
Hansen
Were there other teachers at Tule Lake who you recall?
Nakagawa
They were the only two teachers I had. I had only one class.
Hansen
Because you were only at elementary school at that time, right? Just had the same teachers all through the day. You were in the fifth grade at Tule Lake. Then, by the time you got to Heart Mountain, you were in the sixth grade. And again the situation was that you had what, a teacher and an assistant?
Nakagawa
Just one teacher.
Hansen
Tell me what you recall about that teacher.
Nakagawa
His name was Jennings. I think he was Ted Jennings. But I recall that he had a broken leg, which was in a cast all the time that he was my teacher. He was sort of a gangling, thirty-five-year-old man. Most of the kids didn't like him because he was too stern.
Hansen
He's somebody who would have been [given a military classification of] 4-F because of his leg, though?
Nakagawa
I don't know whether that was the case or whether he had just recently broken it. I learned quite recently through the Pacific Citizen that after leaving Heart Mountain he taught in western Washington and recently retired and now lives in Seattle. I thought maybe I'd like to visit him just to say hello. Because he had mentioned that he would like to have visitors.
Hansen
Why would you visit him, though? Is there a bond between you at some level, or do you feel indebted to him for imparting some special kind of either wisdom or compassion to you?
Nakagawa
Not particularly. But I recall him, and I just remember him as a teacher who was...well, let's face it.
Hansen
Was he the first male teacher you ever had?
Nakagawa
No. The first male teacher I had was in the fourth grade. His name was Mr. Weeks. He was my penmanship teacher. I had a homeroom teacher who taught everything except penmanship.
Hansen
At Kent?
Nakagawa
Yes, in Kent. In the fourth grade. Mr. Weeks. By coincidence, in 1946-1947, in south Seattle, he became my youngest brother's teacher. And I learned that, although I never talked to him, he had gone in the navy and been a flyer during the war. But Mr. Jennings was the first male teacher that I had who I really got to know, because in penmanship it's only one hour.
Hansen
What about your next year at Heart Mountain, when you were in junior high?
Nakagawa
Now, in junior high school I was in what they called 7-3. They had four classes in seventh grade, and we were segregated according to academic accomplishment. The smart kids were in 7-1, the dumb ones were in 7-4. I was in 7-3, right where I wanted to be. Because I didn't want to be in 7-1, because for one thing I wasn't qualified, but also because all of my friends were in 7-3. You know, my friends were in 7-3 and 7-4 and, of course, you want to be with your friends. Seven-one is where the sissies and the girls were. You know, in those days we didn't think about academics. At least, I didn't. My parents didn't preach to me about studying. So, in 7-3 we had a different teacher for every class. I think the teacher I recall most vividly is Mrs. Rudolph, who was my music teacher. Her husband was teaching in the high school, and he taught...I forgot what course, but he was the JV [junior varsity] football coach. But all the teachers that I had in my camp years were, to my recollection, very nice, professional, and competent, as far as I could tell, as a kid can tell.
Hansen
A kid who didn't care that much about academics.
Nakagawa
No, I didn't, really. But they were nice people. They managed to maintain some sort of discipline. That was my only contact, I guess, with—I didn't consider myself an American, frankly—with Americans. They were my only contact. I think I recall them and have certain pleasant memories of them because they were nice. I mean, I was reading in the papers, [hearing] over the radio, [seeing] in the newsreels at the movies, about the Japs this, the Japs that, and I think my contact with these teachers in some way—although I certainly didn't realize it then—gave me a somewhat more balanced perception of what American society was. So I think that may be the reason why I have especially fond memories of my teachers. If not fond, at least pleasant.
Hansen
Not negative, for sure.
Nakagawa
Yes. Definitely not negative.
Hansen
In your classes, do you recall, number one, either being asked to think critically about the situation of the Evacuation and of the existence of places like Tule Lake or Heart Mountain, or number two, do you remember attempts to obscure the actuality of the Evacuation and the camps through your teachers adopting a patriotic or Americanization orientation? Do you remember either of those two things occurring in your classes at school?
Nakagawa
No. But I remember very vividly—it must have been at the time of the [loyalty] questionnaire [February 1943]—that among us kids in Tule Lake there was a lot of, if not joking, horseplay about the pro-Japs and
Hansen
Is that a Tule Lake reunion book you're looking at?
Nakagawa
Yes [Tule Lake Relocation/Segregation Center, Newell California ]. But anyway, I remember that one time we used to have teams, the pro-Japs and the anti-Japs. We would have this chicken fight until one team knocked the other team down. You knocked each other down or bumped each other until they let loose of their legs.
Hansen
This book on Tule Lake with this photograph is a good book to have. I see it was originally published in 1955 and was reissued in 1987. Where did you pick it up?
Nakagawa
I saw it advertised in the Pacific Citizen, so I wrote in.
Hansen
It's got some wonderful photographs in it.
Nakagawa
Yes, it does.
Hansen
You mentioned something that I think jostles a pervasive stereotype among non-Japanese Americans as they think about Japanese Americans: the attitudes of the families and kids toward education. According to the stereotype, Japanese American parents put an awful lot of pressure on their kids to excel in school, for they regard school as a passport to future success. And this is something that is true not only in the United States, but apparently had been true in Japan after the Meiji Period. One would think that this situation would have been compounded in camp, because then, instead of having a few Japanese Americans, you had all these competitive kids in the same classroom, with a lot of intensified family pressure, community pressure, to succeed. And yet what you've said was that actually your parents didn't put a lot of pressure on you. Was your situation atypical, or is the stereotype just off, as far as you can read it?
Nakagawa
I was from a family of twelve kids. A neighbor family had almost the same number of kids. I don't recall that among this group—the Japanese farm families in my immediate neighborhood—that very many kids went to college. My brothers and sisters did. Well, not my sisters, only my brothers. Let's see, all but two of my brothers, which would make it six out of eight, are college graduates. My sisters did not go to college. But I think probably to a certain extent I didn't plan to go to college because I didn't think there was much use in it. When I was growing up in the 1940s in Seattle, right after the war, there was really no economic opportunity for the Nisei yet. It hadn't really started opening up. In 1946-1947, Boeing [Aircraft Company] didn't have any Nisei. As I recall, there were no Nisei in the Seattle public school systems. It was sort of the talk of the Japanese community, at least among the people who were in this housing project in south Seattle, when one of the Nisei older guys got into Kenworth Truck, which is a small company in Seattle. He got in there, and, hey, that was great. In the Japanese community, people who got a job with the post office were considered well-off. It was steady work. I didn't really discuss it with my parents, but I really didn't plan to go to college. Because I think, as I recall, I just didn't have the incentive. Maybe I'm rationalizing, but I didn't really see any sense in going through the hardship of going to college to get a college degree. I mean, I think the Nisei are a very practical-minded people, and I think probably about the time that I was growing up, a lot of them felt there's really not much use in it. That's not the attitude that seems to have been prevalent among the Nisei who were getting back from the war, but among my age group. I think it might be interesting if somebody made a study and found out, of those Nisei kids who were getting out of high school in the late 1940s and the early 1950s, if there wasn't a significant dropout rate. Because it might be interesting; it might show something.
Hansen
It might even show something about the quality of the education they were receiving at camp, I don't know.
Nakagawa
I know I didn't plan to go to college, and I had an older brother, Henry, a year older than me, who wasn't
Hansen
You were at Heart Mountain right to the end [November 1945], just about?
Nakagawa
Yes.
Hansen
Was your family one of the last groups to leave the camp?
Nakagawa
Yes, we were.
Hansen
There was an interesting [master's] thesis written at [the University of California,] Berkeley about twenty years ago [1965], by Matthew [Richard] Speier ["Japanese American Relocation Camp Colonization and Resistance to Resettlement: A Study in the Social Psychology of Ethnic Identity under Stress"]. It documents that there were, in many of the WRA camps, families who simply, at the war's winding down and the opening of the West Coast, resisted leaving whatever camp they were in, not because they loved the camp so much, but just because they had finally developed a certain amount of security and they didn't have anyplace else to go. And, according to the author of this thesis [Matthew Speier], insofar as they got news about their prewar homes on the West Coast, there was a lot of resistance in those communities to the return of their former Japanese Americans residents. Finally, after the government ordered these camps closed, there were still some people who wouldn't leave, and so they [the WRA camp authorities] literally had to march them out of the camp at bayonet point and put them on the train. Was your family part of the very last group that left Heart Mountain?
Nakagawa
Yes, I think so. We left camp in October 1945. We got into Seattle just before Halloween. We were among the last families to leave Heart Mountain. My dad was not one of the active resisters, but I recall that my parents, neither of them, had any inkling of what to do. We didn't own anything. We had nowhere to go and nothing to go back to. My dad was a tenant farmer, and what are you going to do in the fall if you go back to Seattle? There's nothing you can do. You've got no place to live. There's no work to do. So I believe we were one of the farmers who were thrown out of camp. We were pulled into camp, and then thrown out. As I said, my dad was not an active resister; he was just a follower. He did resist leaving camp, but he didn't know where to go. My older brothers and sisters had all left. At the time, in 1945, I had an older brother, Henry, a younger brother, Ben, and two sisters, Setsuko and Kiku, left in the camp with us. Three of my brothers were in the army. My oldest sister had since gotten married and settled in Utah temporarily. I believe it was Utah. Anyway, my older siblings were scattered throughout the country, and my dad and mom simply didn't know what to do. So finally we were sort of removed from the camp, and we were put into a housing project in south Seattle. I recall very clearly, it was just before Halloween because right after we got out of camp I got sick. And I didn't start my eight grade year until the week before Christmas. I remember that very clearly because I was afraid I was going to flunk and be in the same grade as my sister, which would have been a humiliation.
Hansen
Not too long ago I ran across a real interesting article ["Japanese American Internees Return, 1945: Readjustment and Social Amnesia," Phylon 41 (Summer 1981): 107-15] by a professor up at the University of Washington, Tetsuden Kashima. He argues in this article that, in studying the wartime situation of Japanese Americans, most researchers have stopped their study too soon; they assume that when the Evacuation ended, the problems for the Japanese American community ended, and that they went back to their prewar communities and then moved on into positions of educational and occupational success in the mainstream society that a lot of people today customarily identify Japanese Americans with holding. But he pointed out that researchers really needed to take a look at the ten years from 1945 to 1955, that for a lot of Japanese Americans those years were almost more harrowing than the camp years, because the fight still had to be made for getting Issei citizenship rights, and the people in the Japanese American community had to get reconstituted in jobs and homes, and they even had to take back their neighborhoods from wartime residents, usually blacks [African Americans]. In Los Angeles, for example, the blacks took over Little Tokyo, renamed it "Bronzeville," and converted it from a largely commercial to a preponderantly residential area. And the same situation was true in San Francisco, Seattle, and other major West Coast cities where Japanese Americans had developed elaborated communities during the prewar years.
Nakagawa
In the case of my family, yes, because from 1945 to 1948 we were living in this housing project. It had been built on a golf course to house World War II shipyard and factory workers. And by the late 1940s, the project had deteriorated to a welfare housing. That's what we were—on welfare. My dad worked at various odd jobs. He was a dishwasher in a hotel and did various other odd jobs. Mostly he was a transient farm worker. Not "transient" in the sense that the family moved, but he worked as jobs were available from farm to farm. The owners of the farms would usually come and pick him up, pick up some of the Issei and some of the Nisei kids in the summertime. So I worked on the farms, too, in the summertime. But we were mostly supported then by help from my older siblings and, for part of the time, welfare.
Hansen
What did your older siblings do to help?
Nakagawa
They had army allotments. My brothers didn't smoke, so they used to send in their cigarette rations. I remember my dad used to get a whole bunch of them, and I used to steal some from him once in awhile.
Hansen
What about your sister Toshiko, who was working in the [Tooele, Utah] munitions factory?
Nakagawa
She got married and she was living in Bainbridge Island. We used to help there, too, on a strawberry farm. But we were struggling along. Then, in 1948, my dad moved us out to work on a sharecrop basis on a farm outside Seattle, in Renton. We did that for just two years. Then, in 1950, when I was a senior in high school, one of my older brothers finally bought a piece of land in Kent, and we moved out to Kent onto a farm which my dad lived on until about 1974. So for twenty-some years he lived on this farm that my older brother had bought for him. It was a small piece of land with a small house that we fixed up. By then, though, 1950, he would have been sixty-two years old. My younger brother and I and my younger sister helped him on the farm. But he was really too old to farm by himself by then.
Hansen
Didn't your mom help on the farm?
Nakagawa
Oh, yes. But she was not in the best of health. She helped but just taking care of the house.
Hansen
She didn't do field work at all?
Nakagawa
A little bit. She would pick beans and things, whatever. But not a great deal. My dad farmed for only five, six years after the war on his own land. And then he was eligible for social security. One of my brothers, Giro, who bought this farm, this land for my dad, definitely had some foresight, because my dad wasn't legally the farmer; my brother was. And he hired my dad, so my dad qualified for social security.
Hansen
Your dad, as an alien ineligible for citizenship, still couldn't actually buy land up until 1952, right?
Nakagawa
That's true. But he could be the entrepreneur. That's how my dad got qualified for social security. Otherwise he wouldn't have been, because hourly farm workers weren't qualified for social security.
Hansen
While this was happening, you actually were experiencing discontinuity, then, in terms of the schools you were attending, weren't you?
Nakagawa
Oh, yes, yes. I attended four high schools in four years.
Hansen
Why don't you walk us through those schools and tell us a little about the makeup of each school. I'm particularly interested in the Nisei who were your classmates at these schools.
Nakagawa
Okay. When we came out of camp, I was in the eighth grade. I started at Highline Junior/Senior High
Hansen
When you say "the kids," are you talking about non-Japanese Americans?
Nakagawa
Yes. None of the Japanese kids returned to the valley. None of them. As a matter of fact, in Kent, in the White River Valley, which consists basically of Kent and Auburn, Washington, I think less than 10 percent of the Japanese farmers returned. It's very different in California, because economically it was not nearly as promising as California. You can only farm up there a few months out of the year.
Hansen
Was it also a case like in the Hood River, Oregon, area, where there was a lot of resistance to the Japanese coming back?
Nakagawa
I don't think there was a great deal of resistance to them coming back. There was some. At least when we went back to Kent we didn't find any problems; I didn't have any problems. In 1945, when the first ones came back, I think there were some problems, but I think that that discrimination angle is somewhat overplayed. I mean, the angle that discrimination had a significant part in the fact that very few of the farmers went back to the Pacific Northwest. I think it's primarily economics, because having gone to the camp, most of the people from that area, farmers, who were industrious and wanted to go, they left camp—having been in Minidoka, primarily—early and were already farming in the Ontario, Oregon, area, or in Idaho. Those who were still in camp could see that California offered better possibilities for making a living.
Hansen
So you actually had a lot of movement, then, of Washingtonians into California after the war.
Nakagawa
Not to California so much, but a lot of the farmers, people who I knew prior to the end of the war, had already relocated into Oregon and Idaho, and farmed there. Now, some of them went to the San Jose, [California], area to farm; some came down to the Los Angeles area. But a fairly good number, either directly from camps or by way of eastern Oregon, came to California. Some of them came to Los Angeles and became gardeners. You know, whatever. Whatever was available. Probably they went into farming, but I know of a few families who—not a great deal, because I didn't follow it that closely—but of the families who were farming in the Seattle area prior to World War II, quite a few of them are in [the] eastern Oregon-Idaho area. They're scattered. Some are in the Bay Area, working, last I heard, in the shipyards or at Fisher Body in Oakland or in San Jose.
Hansen
But there was an incredible demographic reshuffling after the war, people going to other places.
Nakagawa
Yes. From the White River Valley, probably because economic prospects were not good up there. Very few families returned to farming in the area, so few that they had difficulty even sustaining a Buddhist church.
What year was it that you went to Bainbridge Island and did some work there on the strawberry farms?
Nakagawa
My sister was farming there [with] her husband, so I worked on the strawberries there through a good part of the late 1940s.
Hansen
I've interviewed several people who were from Bainbridge Island before the war. One of them [James Matsumoto Omura; see O.H. 1765] ended up in Denver [during the war] and another person [Ikuko Amatatsu Watanabe; see O.H. 1363] ended up in Manzanar. But I'm curious as to whether that community got reconstituted. Or was it similarly affected like the area you're describing around Seattle and the White River Valley?
Nakagawa
Very few families returned to Bainbridge Island to farm, very few. In the late 1940s, I believe there were only eight to ten Japanese families farming on Bainbridge, almost all of them berries—strawberries and bush berries.
Hansen
So, when your sister was farming over there, she was part of a new group that was going into Bainbridge?
Nakagawa
No, her husband was originally from Bainbridge Island. They owned some land there.
Hansen
What was his family name?
Nakagawa
Katayama. As a matter of fact, my two sisters married brothers, both from Bainbridge Island. But it was sort of a coincidence, because my oldest [sister] met her husband, Yoshio, in Utah, I believe it was, and years later my brother-in-law's younger brother, Mitsuo, had served in the army with my second brother in Japan and Korea, and he met my sister in Chicago several years later. So it wasn't arranged, either American- or Japanese-style. It was more or less a coincidence.
Hansen
You still have relatives on the island?
Nakagawa
None. I believe they all left. I don't think there's any Japanese farming on Bainbridge now, frankly. There's a couple of families there.
Hansen
I stayed there on the island with a couple, the Amatatsu family, about four or five years ago.
Nakagawa
Are they farming?
Hansen
No. They were at that point retired. The children have since left Bainbridge Island.
Nakagawa
I know there were quite a few families there who had been farming on Bainbridge who now live in Seattle. The Japanese simply didn't go back to farming in western Washington. I guess prospects just weren't good enough.
Hansen
How was the situation for you after the war on Bainbridge Island? How did the island receive you?
Nakagawa
I was only working there in the summertime, so I don't know.
Hansen
But in the summertime were you welcome on the island?
Nakagawa
Oh, sure.
Hansen
They're having a lot of coverage, of course, for this publisher and his wife [Walt and Millie Woodward] who had stood up [in their newspaper, the Bainbridge Review ] for the Japanese Americans at the time they were being evacuated from the island to Manzanar in 1942.[9]
Nakagawa
Yes. As a matter of fact, fairly recently, my niece, Kathy Katayama Roberts, who teaches school on
Hansen
Sure.
Nakagawa
Although a lot of people would say that the discrimination in Kent, the anti-Jap attitude of the thirties and early forties, had something to do with the fact that very few returned, I don't think it was really it. I think it was economics. Because nobody got rich farming up there, as far as I know.
Hansen
You were at the high school in Renton for awhile.
Nakagawa
Yes.
Hansen
How did you find that high school, as far as the teaching and the general quality of your education? You were among strangers again, like you say, because for shame or whatever other emotion you felt, you didn't want to go back to where you were, so here you were at Renton.
Nakagawa
No, that's not the case. I moved from Highline to Renton, and then after I moved out of Renton, then I had the opportunity. I should have been going back to Kent High School. But I went instead to Auburn High School.
Hansen
And what was Auburn like, as far as the high school? Was there a Japanese population there?
Nakagawa
No. See, Auburn and Kent are the two towns in the White River Valley where almost all of the Japanese farmers in that area lived. In my senior class of 109, I think there were 3 or 4 other Nisei. And of those, only 2 of them were from farm families. One was running a pottery plant there. But there was no anti-Japanese discrimination among the kids at school that I noticed, in any of the schools.
Hansen
How did you feel about being in what amounted to a segregated school when you were in camp. The population was rather homogeneous. You might have had a WRA administrator's kid or two in your class.
Nakagawa
We did. They were in 7-1.
Hansen
Right. So you had a token hakujin or so in class. But then, after the war, you got into another situation where you were a decided minority, like you had been at Kent. You were going back and forth between not only schools but between ethnic populations. How did that experience affect you?
Nakagawa
I was very scared, I guess. When you're in junior high school, that's a very sensitive age. I came out of camp late in the year, and then I got sick and couldn't start school until December. The school wasn't within walking distance; we had to take a bus. I was very apprehensive. I didn't know how I was going to be received. Strangely enough, I was very surprised that, hey, these people didn't even realize we had been in camp. (laughter) Suddenly there were a few Japanese kids showing up in school, and nobody even noticed. I mean, the people didn't notice, most of the people.
Hansen
Ignorance can be a dangerous thing, but sometimes it's a welcome commodity, too, right?
Nakagawa
Yes. I mean, people didn't know, even around Seattle. People don't read the newspapers. School kids certainly don't. I have to get on my kids to read the newspaper.
Hansen
So it's not only that people back in Iowa didn't know about the Evacuation; a lot of the people on the West Coast didn't know, either.
Nakagawa
Oh, no. Even the adults, a lot of them, didn't know. A lot of the people in the camps didn't know. This
Hansen
In the Northwest, did non-Japanese people—particularly whites and blacks—seem to have difficulty in being able to make distinctions between, say, somebody of Chinese ancestry or somebody who was Native American or Filipino? Did you notice that situation, or were they able to identify clearly, say, those of Japanese ancestry? Living in such a polyethnic social environment, were they able to make those sorts of ethnic distinctions?
Nakagawa
I believe that of those people who lived in the housing project right after the war, most would not have known the difference between a Japanese American and a Chinese American. They didn't know where Korea was. As a matter of fact, when the Korean War started, people didn't know where Korea was. But most of the people in the housing project, my neighbors, were from the South. They were either from the middle South—around Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia—or they were from the deep South. A lot of them were blacks. Most of them had come up during the war to work in Boeing and the shipyards.
Hansen
This is when the housing was so impacted they had to throw together these communities.
Nakagawa
Yes. They built this project on a golf course. They were fairly decent units.
Hansen
But you don't think that the people in the housing tract could even draw distinctions between different ethnic groups. To them, for example, the Japanese were just people who lived there.
Nakagawa
See, there were so many different people. There were American Indians; there were blacks. Not very many Filipinos. At that time there were no Koreans or Chinese, because they were settled. These were transient people who had just come up during the war.
Hansen
And there were whites living in there, too?
Nakagawa
Oh, yes. I would say probably 60 to 70 percent were white. Maybe 20 percent were blacks. The rest, whatever.
Hansen
When you went to Auburn, you must have been about what, a senior in high school?
Nakagawa
I went in the last half of my senior year at Auburn.
Hansen
But you graduated from Auburn High School?
Nakagawa
Yes.
Hansen
Probably you didn't have much identity at all with the graduating class, did you?
Nakagawa
I didn't. As a matter of fact, I didn't know very many of the seniors, because when I transferred from Renton High School to Auburn, most of my classes were with juniors. For example, I was taking Washington state history, which was a senior class at Renton, but a junior class in Auburn. So when I graduated, I didn't know very many of the kids. I knew who they were in general, because it was a small school. There were only a little over 100 seniors.
Hansen
You earlier said that you didn't have an immediate orientation toward going to college, and it is now becoming apparent why you didn't. I mean, you have reasonable recollections of your educational experience at camp, but there were, of course, powerful emotional forces surrounding that situation. And then, after you left camp, you were plunged into a totally chaotic situation as far as your education. You
Nakagawa
No, I never had a counselor in school. I don't recall. I know now they've got counselors who counsel each student. When I was in high school, I don't recall a counselor ever talking to me. I guess they didn't have them in those days. I don't know. But college was the farthest thing from my mind when I was in high school. I'm not proud to say I graduated in the lower half of my class in high school. I did better in college.
Hansen
But you didn't have a context for learning, really, in high school, did you? I mean, you hardly could get settled into a peer group. There was always the problem of friends. And there was your family situation. Where did you study? How did you get the time and the peace of mind to do that even? I mean, it must have been a very chaotic time.
Nakagawa
I didn't think of it as that way. When I was in the housing project, in my eighth, ninth, and tenth grades, none of the kids that I ran around with—they were blacks and whites, mostly; a few Nisei—did any homework. We used to have a community center in this housing project. We used to hang around there. We used to play basketball, softball, and run around.
Hansen
So you were developing more street smarts than school smarts.
Nakagawa
Street smarts, but not the vicious type of street smarts you find today.
Hansen
What you mean by that, I suppose, is that there wasn't a lot of drugs and vandalism and things like that. Is that what you are alluding to?
Nakagawa
I am alluding to the fact that there was no destructiveness of property or of people. We were engaged in such things as drinking beer when we could get hold of it, smoking cigarettes, skipping school, sneaking into the movies. You know, you'd have one kid buy the ticket for one of these skid row movies that were all over Seattle's skid row. One kid would go in. He'd look eighteen or so, so he'd buy a ticket. In the middle of the afternoon, when nobody was looking, he'd open a side door and six kids would go rushing in there. That type of stuff. We weren't beating up people or breaking into homes, you know, doing anything vicious. It was just screwing around, raising Cain, having fun. But not like a lot of stuff that goes on now, the strong-arm stuff. We wouldn't dream of hitting somebody over the head and taking his money.
Hansen
What year, again, was it that you graduated from high school?
Nakagawa
It was in 1950.
Hansen
There were, of course, a lot of Nisei who served in [the] military during the time of the Evacuation. But, from my interviewing, I've noticed a tendency on the part of many Nisei your age or a little bit older than you, who weren't old enough to get into the service during World War II, to go into the armed forces in the postwar period as soon as they could do so. Got out of high school, and then they went into the service. I've thought about that situation a bit and wondered about the reasons for that, and I came up with two basic explanations. Number one, it was kind of a compensatory sort of thing, that people like that went into the service to demonstrate their patriotism in the face of charges that they and others in their communities were "suspect" Americans. The other reason was that force which has served to fill the armed forces today with largely people from ethnic minorities—that the service represents a break from the family and also an opportunity to get education and job training. Nowadays it's Chicanos and blacks who are enlisting for military service. At that time, following World War II, probably the situation was ripe for Japanese Americans, because [of] all the conditions that you were earlier describing. I've thought about that, and maybe my thinking on it's been wrong and maybe there were a lot of other factors at work, so maybe you could trace your own thinking, reflecting back upon why you might have joined the navy and how also your peers might have got into the service.
I never considered joining the service, because when I graduated from high school [in] 1950, the Korean War started, and right away Boeing was out hiring every warm body they could get their hands on. I couldn't go to work for Boeing until September, late September, after the crops were pretty much finished. But I went to work for Boeing, and right away I was working seven days a week. And I worked it for about six months. I worked a twelve-hour shift Monday through Friday. Saturday and Sunday, eight hours each. I was making plenty of money. But if I had graduated from high school in 1950 and the war had not started and I couldn't get a job, then I think I would definitely have considered the military, just like a lot of minority people are doing now. Because I would certainly have rather been in the army than working my dad's farm, because, hey, we weren't making any money, maybe two bits an hour at that time, and we were putting in long hours in the summertime. There was no doubt that I wasn't going to be a farmer. I wasn't going to be a gardener, because in high school, when I was a senior, after the crops were in—or early in the spring—I tried gardening on weekends, and, hey, I couldn't cut that. These guys were packing two lunches. You know, they would start at the break of day and they would eat their lunch and then their supper, and then still work until it got dark. I couldn't do that. So I don't really know what I would have done. I didn't plan to go to college. I didn't have any plans to learn a trade. I sure as hell wasn't going to be a farmhand or a gardener. What was there? You know, it kind of scares me to think [about it] now.
Hansen
So what were you doing at Boeing? What was your job there?
Nakagawa
I was an assembly mechanic, which is a term for a general mechanical assembler. But I was very lucky. I got in there right at the peak of things, and I was promoted very quickly. So I was happy at Boeing until I went into the service. But I didn't volunteer for the service. The draft was getting hot on me, so I joined the naval reserve. And then I got called in for two years of active duty. It was very fortunate, because I enjoyed the navy. I wasn't going to re-enlist, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. I guess I should mention that of my seven brothers, they were all in the U.S. Army, and I was the only one who didn't join the army.
Hansen
Even your youngest brother went into the army, right?
Nakagawa
Yes. He was a tail-end Korean War vet. He got in, I think it was 1955; you were still technically a Korean War vet. And he was drifting, as I would have been. I think it was 1954 or 1955. I talked him into volunteering for early call-up so that he could get in and do something.
Hansen
Tell me a little about your navy years, your experience.
Nakagawa
Okay. I joined the naval reserve in, I think it was, February 1951, because the draft was getting on me. And I used to report for training one night a week at the Naval Reserve Armory in Seattle. In the summer of 1951, I went on a two-week training trip to [the] Naval Training Center. In March of 1952, I was called to active duty for two years. I served most of my time on a carrier, the [USS] Kearsarge. I was a fire control technician, which is not fighting fires but operating and maintaining the gunfire control systems, the radar gunfire systems. It was a very fortunate break for me, because with bad eyesight I couldn't be outside; I had to be an operator indoors. So when I was in Korea, in that cold winter of 1952 to 1953, I spent all my watches indoors, because the gun director could be operated either manually from outside or by radar inside. And since I couldn't see outside because of the mist that comes off the ocean, I had to be indoors.
Hansen
But you're talking about your being on a ship.
Nakagawa
Yes, I was on a ship.
Hansen
So how long were you stationed over in Korea?
Nakagawa
Well, I was only there for one tour, which was about eight months. What we would do is the carriers would take a trip to Korea and they would get an air group out of Miramar Air Station. We'd take a trip to Korea. After about eight months, the air group got pretty well worn out, and we were ready for rotation. So we'd come back. The ship was getting ready to go back to Korea in the spring of 1953, but I was one month short to make the trip. In other words, my twenty-four months would have been up before the ship got back. So,
Hansen
Where was that?
Nakagawa
At Miramar. But I was scheduled for separation in March 1954, but the personnel officer in my squadron could see that they didn't need me. I was just being wasted. So he sent me to the separation center in early December, because he figured, quite frankly, that they would let me out before Christmas. So, on the twenty-third of December, I got separated, three months early.
Hansen
To the extent that you were part of a tradition, when did Nisei start getting involved in the navy? How far back does that go?
Nakagawa
I think the first Nisei joined the navy shortly after World War II. I know during the war they didn't accept Nisei. As a matter of fact, one of my brothers, Giro, I believe, tried to join the air corps to be a flyer during the war, and he was rejected. But he was later drafted. Another one, Sam, tried to join the merchant marines, and he wasn't accepted. They were both drafted, eventually.
Hansen
I know there were a few [Japanese American] language teachers down at the Naval Training Center, like in Boulder, Colorado, which was a naval facility. And even Filipinos were [in the navy] serving as mess boys and in such capacities as that.
Nakagawa
Yes. They were very limited, yes.
Hansen
So when you went in, do you recall other Nisei being in the navy?
Nakagawa
On my carrier, of 3,500 [men] there were only two other Nisei on the ship. One was a marine buck sergeant. He was from Hilo, Hawaii. I got to know him, and I asked him if he knew my relatives in Hilo, but he didn't. Another was a Nisei kid from El Centro, [California] or somewhere, and he was in naval air. On our carrier, of 3,500 there was only one minority officer. He was a black ensign in the engine department. I remember him very clearly, because people used to make a point: "the black officer."
Hansen
You weren't facing any discrimination in the navy, were you?
Nakagawa
Not officially. None whatsoever. My boss was a navy lieutenant. He was boss of the gunfire control people. He used to give me breaks. He gave me a leave when we were in Hawaii for only a short stopover en route to Korea. He gave me a weekend seventy-two-hour pass so I could go to Hilo and visit my relatives. But the leading petty officer, he was a little Italian guy, he used to give me some hard times. But officially, no. My treatment in the navy was quite good. The personnel officer in the squadron sent me to the separation center to get separated. He couldn't do it, he couldn't separate me. But he said, "Hey, I'll send you to the separation [center] and maybe they'll let you out."
Hansen
Historically, even continuing down to today, there's a lot of strong feelings between people of Japanese and Korean ancestry. How did that translate itself in terms of the Korean War for somebody like yourself? I mean, you were brought up in a Japanese community. Now, that's certainly not the same as Japan, but still there must have existed within the community some of those antithetical feelings toward Korea found in the old country. I don't know if you thought about it at the time. I'm asking you to, really, I guess, kind of reconstruct what feelings you had at that time toward people of Korean ancestry.
Nakagawa
I had no feelings whatsoever. I never knew a Korean prior to the time I went into the service. I might have met some who were using Japanese names, but to the best of my knowledge I didn't know any Koreans prior to the time I went into the service. As far as going to Korea, hey, it was a great adventure. It was an opportunity to see the world and visit Japan and Hawaii.
And you did get into Japan when you were there on leave?
Nakagawa
Oh, yes. That's when I visited the Tanaka family.
Hansen
And you actually had some R and R [rest and recreation] in Korea, too.
Nakagawa
Oh, yes.
Hansen
Okay. Where were you stationed in Korea?
Nakagawa
I was on a carrier, and the carrier never docked in Korea. It was always thirty, forty miles out to sea, launching planes.
Hansen
So how did you get into Korea?
Nakagawa
I never landed in Korea during the Korean War. Only later.
Hansen
But when did you get to Japan?
Nakagawa
I first arrived in Japan in August 1952.
Hansen
That was even before you were on the carrier, then.
Nakagawa
No. I was on my carrier en route to Korea.
Hansen
And you stopped in Japan in 1952.
Nakagawa
Yes.
Hansen
And where were you there, in Yokohama?
Nakagawa
Yokosuka. That's a naval base at the mouth of Tokyo Bay.
Hansen
So you were basically in Tokyo, then, when you were on your R and R, initially?
Nakagawa
I didn't go to Tokyo until later, but I was about thirty-five miles outside of Tokyo.
Hansen
So in 1952 you stayed fairly close to where the ship was.
Nakagawa
I did go to Tokyo, but...See, when I first went to Japan in 1952, I had two brothers, Kaz and Henry, who were in the U.S. Army and stationed right outside the port where I docked.
Hansen
And so you saw them there.
Nakagawa
Yes, we visited, and they came aboard ship.
Hansen
Did you see any relatives at that time, in 1952, aside from your immediate family?
Nakagawa
Yes, in December.
Hansen
Where did you go?
Nakagawa
I went to visit my relatives in Hiroshima.
Hansen
What I'm trying to get at is your perception of Japan at that particular time, because this was still during
Nakagawa
Oh, yes.
Hansen
But it's just about close to the end. What was it like? What do you remember? Were things in Japan starting to get reconstituted so that you didn't get to see quite the poverty and the devastation of the immediate postwar period, or was that still pretty manifest?
Nakagawa
I guess there was still a great deal of poverty, because there were people who were sleeping in the train stations; there were people who were living underneath bridges and stuff. I don't mean homeless bums, but I mean families, people who had been repatriated from the mainland of Asia and from various former colonies. There was a lot of poverty there. The people were extremely poor. And the country was very backward. Of the Americans who spent time in Japan through the 1940s and the 1950s and much of the 1960s, there's two things they liked about Japan: the low prices and the fact that you didn't have to worry about getting knocked over the head, getting rolled, so to speak.
Hansen
How did you feel about going there? This was your parents' country. As far as your own citizenship went, it was also an enemy country.
Nakagawa
Yes, as far as my citizenship. I'll tell you. I wanted to go to Japan and I enjoyed it thoroughly. But I felt kind of ashamed. I felt kind of ashamed, because people then looked down on the Japanese, and they thought of me as Japanese. You know, I guess I really didn't begin to feel that I was an American until probably about [the] 1960s.
Hansen
You said people looked down. You mean people in the service, is that what you're talking about?
Nakagawa
Americans.
Hansen
Okay. What I was alluding to, first off, was how the Japanese looked at you as a Japanese American. Did they see an American or did they see a Japanese, or did they see a lesser Japanese? How did you feel about that situation?
Nakagawa
I never felt that those Japanese that I worked with or met in Japan looked down on me or harbored any animosity toward me because I was a Japanese American. I lived in Japan for twelve years, through the 1960s and the 1970s, and I worked with a lot of Japanese. I had a very good relationship with the Japanese employees, I thought. We used to play volleyball after work. I used to go on outings with these guys. Ski trips. I mean, I made it a point not to flash my money, especially in the 1960s when the Japanese...For example, we'd go skiing out of Tokyo. We would take the local train out of Tokyo on Friday night so that we wouldn't have to pay for a hotel on Friday night. We'd get up to the slope on Saturday morning and we'd ski all day Saturday, sleep in a small inn on Saturday night, ski Sunday, and then catch an express train on Sundays back. If you're going to get along with them, you've got to be like them. You can't flash your money.
Hansen
It's ironic. You're saying two things simultaneously here. One is that, if you're going to be like them, you have to sort of behave like them. And yet, just before that you had said it wasn't until the 1960s that you got an acute sense of being an American.
Nakagawa
Yes, that's right.
Hansen
You started to feel like an American when you were actually most like the Japanese, in terms of your lifestyle. (laughter)
Nakagawa
You know, that's true, by God. You know why I started to feel like an American? Because I think my peers started to treat me like an American. When I went to Japan in 1963 to work for an American government agency, I was looked upon as an American. The Japanese treated me as an American, although because
Hansen
Did you have any sense of ethnicity among Caucasians, to the point that they would be seen by you as less American, too? Or was color—white—the thing that defined what you would use the term "American" for? Like, say, an Italian or a Portuguese or whatever. Did you have a sense of those differences, other than just black, Chinese, Mexican, Japanese, et cetera? Did you also see gradations among whites, like Jews or Italians?
Nakagawa
Yes, to a certain limited extent. In the 1940s, when I was going to these various high schools. Yes, I think there was sort of an informal status, that certain Americans were considered, or considered themselves, or the society as a group, considered that Italian Americans, since they were largely farmers in that south Seattle area, were somewhat of a lower class: a white man, but not quite as good of a white man as these other white men. I mean, yes, I think that existed. Certainly I was aware of the fact that a lot of people looked down on Jews. And, of course, down here, the Latinos. Yes, sure. There is still that attitude among a pretty good segment of the Asian American population that some Asian Americans think they're better than others.
Hansen
Early on, you said that an older sibling you had, a sister who lived in Japan, never came to the U.S.
Nakagawa
That's right.
Hansen
You said you never saw her.
Nakagawa
You didn't even see her when you were there in 1952?
Nakagawa
She died in 1942. I did see her only child, who is my niece, in 1952.
Hansen
This was when you got your first glimpse of the village where your parents were brought up.
Nakagawa
Yes.
Hansen
Now, did you see friends of your parents at that time?
Nakagawa
Yes. We visited the Tanakas, who formed the basis for my novel, yes. Lots of "left-field" relatives. You know, people dropped by because, to a large extent, they were living in that area.
Hansen
What did you do on your pilgrimage—really, that's what it was—to your ancestral home?
Nakagawa
Okay. We lived with my uncle. My father's younger brother was married to my mother's younger sister, and they were childless. They adopted my second oldest sibling. She died in 1942. And my only niece was then adopted by that same uncle and aunt. And when I visited in 1952, I stayed with my uncle and my aunt, both blood relatives, and my niece, who was about ten years old.
Hansen
Did your sister die in childbirth?
Nakagawa
I think so. I'm not sure. But it happened during the war, and we found out through the Red Cross. It was so long ago that I don't recall. But my niece's mother and father passed away not knowing that the other
Hansen
Did you visit the village graveyard or not?
Nakagawa
Yes, I did. That's where I got much of my ideas [for my novel].
Hansen
Now, how far was this village from the city of Hiroshima?
Nakagawa
It must have been twenty, twenty-five miles.
Hansen
And was it affected by the A-bomb or not?
Nakagawa
Not at all.
Hansen
Did you have people who were living out there in 1952 who had moved out there from the city?
Nakagawa
No.
Hansen
So being there, there was no way of visibly being able to understand what had happened in 1945.
Nakagawa
No. They did tell me that the people came through the village, all that sort of stuff. But, no. The impact of the bombing of Hiroshima on that little village—it's just a collection of houses and a train station—was very slight, I think. Some of the people in the village had relatives in the city at the time.
Hansen
Or themselves had to go there on occasion for one reason or another.
Nakagawa
Might have, yes.
Hansen
Certainly they saw the mushroom [created by the A-bomb].
Nakagawa
I don't recall that they talked about it. I remember my aunt, who was then in her late forties, told my brother and I that she'd only been to Hiroshima a few times in her life. She told us something like, "The last time I was in Hiroshima was in 1944," or something like that. I said, "What? What, are you kidding?" I mean, I couldn't believe it.
Hansen
But the village is that provincial, though. They stay where they are, right?
Nakagawa
Yes.
Hansen
But then again, you were talking pretty much the same kind of way about the situation around Kent. I mean, Seattle wasn't that far away, and yet there were not a lot of trips to Seattle, were there?
Nakagawa
Not that I made. Maybe my parents made drinking trips in the winter (laughter), but I didn't.
Hansen
Did you go over to the city of Hiroshima?
Nakagawa
Oh, yes. Yes, we did.
Hansen
At that time, 1952?
Yes.
Hansen
What did you see and what did you feel?
Nakagawa
There were no significant feelings on my part. The city was starting to build up. There were little shops. But my brother and I took our niece, and we had dinner there. My uncle was ill. He passed away a few years after that. And my aunt just wasn't interested in going. She just had a "What do I want to go to Hiroshima for?" type of attitude. So we took my niece. And we took a lot of pictures. It was a day's outing in the city, that's all.
Hansen
So what did it look like at that time? You say shops were starting to appear again, but there must have been still a lot of devastation.
Nakagawa
Oh, yes. But we didn't spend any significant time looking around. You could see that the city had been laid flat, because there were a lot of little buildings there. I mean, after the war, I guess, they had very little building material in Japan, and most of the buildings that were built there around the train station were just small wooden structures.
Hansen
What did you see in people's bodies, faces, things like that? Was it [the devastation] visible there, too?
Nakagawa
No.
Hansen
So if you were a man from Mars and you stepped into the town of Hiroshima in 1952, aside from the fact that there were a lot of small buildings, you wouldn't be able to tell that you were in a different kind of situation than if you'd been in Tokyo or been in Osaka or someplace else like that?
Nakagawa
I wouldn't say that, because if you were in Japan in the early 1950s, there were a lot of walking wounded. There were a lot of people [who] looked like drifters, who were wearing old army clothes and obviously crippled. Homeless people.
Hansen
Begging?
Nakagawa
Very little begging. There were a few people playing musical instruments with a collection pan for donations, but they wouldn't come to you and say, "Hey, can you give me a quarter?" or something like that. But in 1952, Japan still looked like a war-torn country. The people and the facilities were downed. I wouldn't say that of Hiroshima. If there were people who showed the physical effects of the bombing, they were not so great as to make it specifically noticeable. But one of the first things I noticed when I went to Japan was the devastation. I mean, it was obvious there. People were living underneath bridges, in train stations in little boxes. You know, cardboard boxes. So when you went to Hiroshima you saw this destruction, and the people...
Hansen
You were already inured with that.
Nakagawa
Yes. So I wouldn't say that it was a normal environment. But it wasn't significantly different than the Yokohama-Tokyo-Yokosuka area.
Hansen
Now this was in 1952 and you were two years into your four-year tour of duty.
Nakagawa
No, I was only in for two years.
Hansen
Two years. That's it, because you were in [the] reserves. So you were out pretty soon after that, right?
Nakagawa
Yes. December 1953. It was December 1952 when I visited Hiroshima.
Hansen
Let me review something with you. You graduated from high school in June of 1950. You worked at Boeing
Nakagawa
March 1952.
Hansen
And then when did you join the naval reserve?
Nakagawa
In February 1951. I got out in December 1953.
Hansen
So you served almost two years of active duty.
Nakagawa
Yes. Twenty-one months.
Hansen
That was the only time you visited Japan, though, during the time you were in your active duty, right?
Nakagawa
I had several trips to Japan. The first time I hit Japan was August 1952. I think I had one other trip into Japan between August and December.
Hansen
But it was only during the December 1952 trip that you went over to Hiroshima?
Nakagawa
Right. Yes.
Hansen
Okay. And the other times you stayed fairly close to the Tokyo Bay area, right?
Nakagawa
Yes.
Hansen
What did you do then?
Nakagawa
I went back to Boeing for about three months.
Hansen
Were they obliged to give you back your job, or what?
Nakagawa
Yes. Returning vets had re-employment rights. You could just walk in there and say, "I'm back," and they had to put you to work, even if they had to put somebody out on the street. So I went back to Boeing in January of 1954. And then, in April 1954, I got on the merchant ships, at that time, MSTS, military sea transportation service. And I sailed merchant ships out of Seattle until the fall of 1955, when I started college.
Hansen
And how did you happen to do that? I know you had a G.I. Bill [of Rights, the Servicemen's Readjustment Act], for one thing.
Nakagawa
How did I go to college?
Hansen
Yes. How did you happen to go to college?
Nakagawa
I didn't want to, because I was having lots of fun and making money. (laughter) But at that time, when I was separated from [the] service, I was told that if you didn't start your G.I. Bill within two years after separation, you'd lose it. So the longest I could stay out was the fall of 1955. So in the fall of 1955 I started at the University of Washington, with great reluctance. And then, in the summer of 1956, after my freshman year...
Hansen
Did you have good enough grades to go right into the University of Washington?
Nakagawa
Oh, yes. I had 2.4 grade point average; I had slightly above a "C" average.
Hansen
Oh, you didn't need a 3.5 to be accepted?
No, not in those days. In those days, if you were a state resident and a graduate of high school, that got you in. You might have to take remedial English and maybe make up a foreign language, but you could get in. The problem was staying in. I started out in engineering, and they used to weed them out real quick. But in April of 1954 I started [in] the merchant marines, and I sailed about a year and a half. Then, after my freshman year in college, I was going to quit college. And I went back to the merchant ships. I sailed the merchant ships for six months. And then I started school again in January of 1957.
Hansen
And were you living by yourself then?
Nakagawa
No. I was living in the Nisei students' house.
Hansen
You had long since left living at home and everything, right?
Nakagawa
Yes.
Hansen
You never went back to living at home after you got out of the service.
Nakagawa
Only for the few months that I worked at Boeing. But I was staying at the Nisei students' house. I was in school for six months, and then in the summer of 1957 I went to New York and sailed out of New York.
Hansen
Could you tell me a little about this Nisei students' house? I know they had a lot of student housing for Nisei at places like Berkeley and [the] University of Washington before the war, but after the war I didn't know that those places still existed. I lived in a housing cooperative [Cloyne Court] at Berkeley in 1957, and it was probably 40 or 50 percent Japanese Americans at that time. But it wasn't called a Nisei house because it was multiethnic. It was near the engineering school. Most people living there were engineering or pharmacy students, and it was, to a large extent, a Nisei/Sansei house at that time. That was spring of 1957, just when you're talking about. But this Nisei students' house, can you tell me a little about that? Was that a holdover from the prewar days?
Nakagawa
Yes. The Nisei students' house at the University of Washington was owned by the Japanese community. It was built, I think, in the 1920s. When I went there in 1955, it was run by the students. The students appointed the student manager, who ran the house. We used to hire an Issei woman to come in and cook the evening meals. But other than that, the students ran it. I ran the house for a couple of years as a student manager.
Hansen
So it was pretty much like a cooperative?
Nakagawa
Yes. It was a cooperative. It was a student cooperative house, but it wasn't recognized as such by the university. It was run by the Japanese community. It was later renamed "Synkoa" in honor of various graduates who were killed in World War II. But the house was since disbanded. We couldn't compete with the new dorms that were set up. The dorms had much better facilities, better chow.
Hansen
When was it disbanded?
Nakagawa
It was disbanded in the 1960s, shortly after I left.
Hansen
Okay. But while you were there, it was obviously still intact.
Nakagawa
Yes, yes. We were running the place. But it was getting run-down.
Hansen
So you lived there once, then went in the merchant marines, came back, and lived there again, right?
Nakagawa
Yes. I lived there until 1960, when I quit. I was actually living there, working at Boeing, and going to graduate school. And in 1960, I left Seattle to accept a civil service job in Korea. And I haven't lived in Seattle since then. I visited many times.
How did you hear about this civil service job in Korea?
Nakagawa
Well, what happened is, after I graduated from college, I took the federal service entrance exam. I wanted to find a job in Japan, a civil service job; that's about all there was. So I took the federal service entrance exam and I indicated that I would accept employment only in Japan. But they offered me other jobs, because civil service pay was so low at that time. They would offer me all kinds of jobs—in San Francisco, Washington, D.C. Finally, one came for Korea, and I was aware that, because U.S. forces in Japan were cutting back very drastically, it was going to be tough to find something in Japan. So I thought that if I accepted the job with the government in Korea, I could get my foot in the door and then transfer to Japan. When I got to Korea in the fall of 1960, I found that almost all of those guys had been in Japan but got kicked out because of a reduction of forces in Japan, so they went to Korea. I was in Korea for three years. The government sent me to a management seminar at Camp Zama, Japan, and I was looking through the Japan Times want ads, and there was an ad for a job in Japan, Tokyo. So I applied for it, and that's how I got to Japan in the fall of 1963.
Hansen
What was your main incentive for going to Japan?
Nakagawa
Fun.
Hansen
Was it partly, too, because of your recollections of it from when you were there in the 1950s?
Nakagawa
Yes. But as a bachelor, it was primarily good times that I was looking for.
Hansen
You weren't looking for a wife, though, were you, at the time?
Nakagawa
No. In those days, no. I was looking for good times.
Hansen
So marriage wasn't in the back of your mind ever.
Nakagawa
No, no.
Hansen
The furthest thing from your mind?
Nakagawa
Not exactly the furthest thing, but my primary concern was good times, where can I have the most fun. And having been on the merchant ships and seen parts of Europe, North Africa, and much of the United States, I knew that for a Nisei guy there was no place for good times like Japan in the 1950s and 1960s. Because even a G.I., economically he was well-off in Japan.
Hansen
By going to Japan, were you liberated from certain kinds of constraints that you would have faced—you mentioned "as a Nisei"—say, in the Seattle area or even in California?
Nakagawa
No, I don't think so. I wasn't the type of guy who would do anything that would need to be restrained, I don't think. No, I was just interested in the good life.
Hansen
But what is it? I guess what I'm getting at is, you say "the good life in Japan," and you have to juxtapose that against a less good life somewhere else. And so what is the thing that constitutes that goodness about Japan as opposed to staying in, say, [the] Washington area, getting a job there, and living your life there?
Nakagawa
(laughter) You're talking to an ex-merchant seaman. No, but seriously, in Japan, if you, for example, in the 1950s and early 1960s, had an income of $300 a month, you could live "high on the hog." You could buy food in the commissary, the PX [post exchange]. You know, cameras and things—whatever you wanted was cheap. Not only that, life was casual. You could have a maid. There was plenty of nightlife.
Hansen
Was some of it six? I mean, I know a lot of Nisei girls were raised very strictly.
Nakagawa
Sure. It has to do with everything. It has to do with the availability of nightlife. It has to do with the
Hansen
So what was the nature of your job this time when you got transferred from Korea to Japan?
Nakagawa
I went over as the chief accountant for the Pacific Division of the Army and Air Force Motion Picture Service. That is a non-appropriated fund, which means that it's a self-sustaining government agency. From the receipts of the movie theaters, we paid all of our expenses—salaries, et cetera. And we were a government agency.
Hansen
And you had how many people working under you?
Nakagawa
At first, about five people.
Hansen
And they were all Japanese nationals?
Nakagawa
Yes. So I went over there as the chief accountant, which was a GS-9. No big thing, but at that time I think my salary was around, oh, $500, $550 a month, which was about ten times what the highest paid Japanese in my office was making. Plus, I had tax-free gas, food, free housing.
Hansen
Were you able to save anything during that time, or did you spend most of it?
Nakagawa
Yes. Well, I spent a large part of it. But I would take trips, excursion trips to wherever.
Hansen
But you got to see Japan at that time, a lot.
Nakagawa
I had the opportunity. I didn't avail myself.
Hansen
You were talking about skiing. Was that later, or was it there?
Nakagawa
Yes. Oh, yes, I did things like that. But I mean, I didn't tour. I wasn't a tourist. I went out to the beaches, mostly with co-workers, and stuff like that.
Hansen
But you were a bachelor. You were a young guy at that time.
Nakagawa
Sure. But I didn't go on too many excursions. When I went on excursions, I would go to Taipei [Taiwan] or Bangkok [Thailand].
Hansen
Did you get back up to Hiroshima?
Nakagawa
Only in 1964.
Hansen
And what was the occasion of that?
Nakagawa
My parents came, and so I went to visit them.
Hansen
Oh, did they take you around at all and connect you with places that were important to them in their youth?
Nakagawa
Very little, because it was all right there in the village, and I'd already been there. By then, my parents were quite old. This was in 1964, so my dad was seventy-six.
How did they seem to you? Did they seem at home, or did they seem strangers in a strange world at that point?
Nakagawa
They went back to Japan because they were contemplating retiring there. But after spending one summer there, it was obvious to them that life in Japan wasn't to their liking.
Hansen
What do you think the difference was? Had they become spoiled by certain conveniences?
Nakagawa
No. I think it was partly cultural and partly the fact that their old childhood friends were gone.
Hansen
Dead.
Nakagawa
Yes. I mean, they were gone. They didn't know anybody in the village. You know, when they were kids, they probably went down to the village of five, six houses and a few farmhouses, and there were their friends. But there was nobody there except my aunt, who is my mother's youngest sister. A couple of "left-field cousins," but they were all old. And there was just nothing there. They were living in a little sort of apartment house, and I stayed with them in that apartment house because they were renting with the idea of retiring back there. But then they stopped and thought, "Hey, wait a minute. All of our kids are back in the States, our grandchildren. And who's over here, except one niece?" And they were living in this little apartment house. They were going to the village every day to do their shopping. But pretty soon they were going to be so old they would have to be taken care of. Who was going to take care of them?
Hansen
In listening to your parents and your relatives talk—the ones who never came to the United States but who had lived there in Japan from the time they were born—did you notice a different vocabulary pool that they had? Did you notice that, after having spent nearly half a century in the United States, your parents seemed to speak almost a different language from your relatives?
Nakagawa
No. I don't think my parents changed much and I don't think the people up there did. As a matter of fact, one of the first things that struck me when I visited the village was that I was more fluent in the Japanese language than I thought I was. Because they were using these old, pre-twentieth-century terms that if you used them in Tokyo, people would laugh at you.
Hansen
But not in Hiroshima.
Nakagawa
No. They were still using those old terms. Funny terms. It probably wouldn't mean anything to you, but okanei in Japanese is "money." But in the country, they used to say zini. Nobody says zini in Tokyo.
Hansen
But your parents used to use that term when they were here?
Nakagawa
Yes. But they were starting to use the more standard terminology. But when they went back to the village, to use that old terminology was normal. At least I felt more fluent when I went out to the country among my type of people, country people.
Hansen
So as you said earlier in our interview, there had been very little change in that village from the time that your parents were there and the time that you first visited it.
Nakagawa
I would say yes, very little change.
Hansen
Yet, twenty miles away, the city of Hiroshima—not as a result of the atomic blast but before that... why it became a target—had undergone a tremendous transformation. I mean, Hiroshima City had incorporated towns around it and had grown into a substantial urban center. But twenty miles away, you still had villages coexisting that were almost in a time warp, that were existing...
Nakagawa
Yes, that's right. As a matter of fact, the house that my uncle and aunt were living in was the house that my dad had built way back. Maybe it was a fairly impressive house, two-story. Yet, I think the village even
Hansen
But then things started to change pretty dramatically by then, right?
Nakagawa
Yes. By 1964, sure. By 1964, there wasn't anybody going hungry in Japan. They were starting to buy motorcycles. As a matter of fact, there were even Japanese employees in my company who were starting to buy cars.
Hansen
You actually were there during a time when a big transformation came about and probably was visible to you. You were talking earlier about the disproportionate salary that you had relative to your employees, who were Japanese nationals. By the time you were coming back here, you probably started to see a lot of Japanese nationals having the experience that you've just been describing. Your niece and her husband were beginning to reach parity and comparability in terms of salary and lifestyle and everything else. I mean, that was occurring just in a short interval.
Nakagawa
Sure.
Hansen
But when you first got there, how did it make you feel? You were not just an "ugly American" over there; you were a Japanese American. And yet you did have this disparity in terms of income and everything else. Did it engender any guilt feelings within you?
Nakagawa
No, not guilt. I think the feeling I had was, "Jesus Christ, these poor people will never make it." I thought that their economic situation was hopeless. Of course, I was just a high school graduate. I thought, "Gee, on a crowded little island, no resources, and a lot of homeless people." I guess like most people who visited Japan, I thought, "Jesus Christ, these people will never make it."
Hansen
Even most people who didn't visit Japan felt that way, right?
Nakagawa
Yes. I was living there from 1963 to 1974. I'd been in and out of there since 1952. From 1952 to 1956 I was in and out on ships, and then from 1963 to 1974 I lived there. But between 1960 and 1963, I was also in there because I was working in Korea and went on R and R. So I'd been in and out of Japan since 1952. The big changes in Japan from what I could see was in the 1960s, right about the time of the Olympics [1964]. Because by the time I left Japan in 1974, even the lower graded employees in my company were starting to buy small cars. The richer ones were buying [Toyota] Corollas and cars like I was driving.
Hansen
Did you get married over there?
Nakagawa
Yes.
Hansen
Did you marry a Japanese national?
Nakagawa
Yes.
Hansen
What year did you get married?
Nakagawa
In 1968.
Hansen
So about half of your time over there was unmarried and half of it was married.
Yes.
Hansen
And you had kids over there?
Nakagawa
Yes. All three of my kids were born there.
Hansen
Of course, they got American citizenship as a result of your own citizenship status.
Nakagawa
Oh, yes.
Hansen
Is it because of your kids that you finally came back to the United States?
Nakagawa
No. I came back to the States because I got thrown out of Japan. They closed so many bases. They finally closed the base out from under me, and I had to go to Hawaii, because the headquarters that I was working for transferred to Hawaii.
Hansen
Do you think you might have just stayed there indefinitely?
Nakagawa
I would not have retired there.
Hansen
But you might have lived out your working life there.
Nakagawa
Yes, I think so. Sure. You get free housing. You get to buy tax-free goods at the commissary and the PX. Sure. I'm lazy; I like the good life. (laughter)
Hansen
How was your situation over there different from the situation of, say, the Kibei, who ended up going back to Japan to live after World War II? I mean, they'd been educated in Japan, came back to the States, went through the Evacuation, and then a lot of them who had gotten involved in the postwar years in international businesses went to live in Japan. What I have heard from some of the people I've interviewed is that such Kibei almost formed a self-encapsulated subculture in Japan, in the sense that they tended to frequent the same bars and always behaved pretty much as Americans abroad do. There was always, so to speak, a Japanese American curtain around them. How was your situation different from that? Because from what I was picking up, you had a lot more outreach to other people in the general population over in Japan who you went skiing with and did this, that, and the other thing with.
Nakagawa
I didn't belong to social enclaves of any sort. I went to work. I was with predominantly Japanese. About 95 percent of the people were Japanese. There were a few Americans; there were some Nisei. But most of the Nisei were women.
The one thing I noticed when I was starting to write this novel was that the Nisei [who] were standed in Japan during the war, for whateverreason, were very reluctant to talk about their experience. Because when I was starting to write this book, I knew what I wanted to write about. One of the Nisei women who worked for me had gone to Japan in the 1940s to work for this very outfit, the Motion Picture Service. And she married a Nisei who had returned to Japan just prior to the war. He was a high school graduate just returning prior to the war. He was a very good golfer. I didn't get to know them very well because they kind of kept to themselves. But when I would see them at company Christmas parties or stuff like that, I would talk to them. Me being a very talkative person, I would just inquire about what went on during the war and what they were doing and how they got back. I'm not reluctant to tell them about what I did and why. So I noticed that those people, as well as a couple of other Nisei who returned before the war, were very reluctant to talk. I got the impression that they had something to hide, or felt that they did. I think maybe they didn't want to talk about the fact that they helped in the war effort, either by serving in the military or working for it. Of course, they were forced into it; they had no real choice. But I think they did feel guilty. I think you'll find that attitude quite common among those Japanese who went back.
Hansen
Did you meet any people who, as a result of the situation up at Tule Lake, went through the repatriation,
Nakagawa
No. No, most of those people were ten years older than me. There's one person who I was fairly close to in Tule Lake who went back to Japan, and my older brother—a year older than me—who was stationed in Japan, visited him. At that time, they were in their early twenties. My brother told me that this guy was planning to come back to the States. Because he was a minor. He never renounced his citizenship, so he did return, and he's now in Seattle. I never looked him up, but I'm planning to next summer, because we were pretty close friends. He runs a travel agency now. But I think most of the Nisei, including those in the United States, the "no-no boys," are very reluctant to talk about it. I noticed that, because in Kent, when I was—this was in the early 1950s—working on the farms, helping my dad, I talked to some of those guys. They were very closemouthed about the questionnaire. I guess it was because they were ostracized by the Nisei community, too.
Hansen
You were at Heart Mountain. Of course, they had the draft resistance movement at Heart Mountain, which was quite celebrated and has been written about.[10] Your brothers all went into the army, and so they...
Nakagawa
They must have been among the "yes-yes" boys.
Hansen
But even the Heart Mountain resistance group were "yes-yes" boys. They just resisted being drafted without restoration of their citizenship rights or fair play, right?
Nakagawa
Yes.
Hansen
Did that ever touch your family in any way? Or do you recall that at all?
Nakagawa
No, not that I know, because my older brothers who were drafted out of high school were already out of camp. So they were not in the camp. The last of my brothers, Harry, who went into the army during World War II, was graduated from high school in February 1945, and he immediately went out to Montana to work on the railroad.
Hansen
So it's a blank in your mind as far as that whole Fair Play Committee thing goes.
Nakagawa
I remember because in Heart Mountain it [the resumption of the draft for Americans of Japanese ancestry and the resistance to it spearheaded by the Fair Play Committee] was a subject of conversation, just like in Tule Lake with the anti-Japs and the pro-Japs.
Hansen
That's what I was getting at. You do recall.
Nakagawa
Yes. I recall, but I don't remember what the significance of it was. I know in Tule Lake what I remember from my personal recollection about what it was about, because there were some people who were pro-Japan, wanted Japan to win. I didn't think of it as being anti-American or pro-American. I thought of it as those who wanted Japan to win and those who wanted the United States to win.
Hansen
Did you see the film on Heart Mountain that was done a couple of years ago?[11]
Nakagawa
No.
Hansen
This fellow named "Bacon" Sakatani, a former evacuee at Heart Mountain who now lives in southern California, has served as kind of the unofficial chronicler of Heart Mountain. He's been the keeper of a lot of different kinds of camp memorabilia, and then, apparently, he acted as an adviser for that film. But you haven't seen that. I'll see if I can bring the videotape next time I come over here to interview you, because I really think that you'd like to take a look at it. Now then, you came back to the United States after having spent this thirteen-year stint in Japan, right?
Yes.
Hansen
And did you settle here in Gardena when you came back?
Nakagawa
No, we went to Hawaii. In 1974, we went to Hawaii because the headquarters of the Pacific Motion Picture Service was transferred from Tokyo to Hawaii.
Hansen
Did you go to Hilo this time?
Nakagawa
Yes, I went to Hilo a couple of times.
Hansen
I meant to live. Or did you live in Honolulu?
Nakagawa
Honolulu. I visited relatives in Hilo. But, no, we were at Honolulu, and I lived in Pearl City.
Hansen
Okay. How long did you stay in Hawaii?
Nakagawa
Seven and a half years.
Hansen
So you've been only here now for about six years.
Nakagawa
No, only about three years. Because from Honolulu I was transferred to Dallas, Texas, and I lived there for two and a half years. And then I moved over here in June of 1984 when I retired.
Hansen
You've lived in Japan, you've lived in Hawaii, and you've lived in Gardena; in all of these places there were many other Japanese people. However, you probably were not around too many Japanese people in Dallas, were you?
Nakagawa
No. That's right. There were very few Japanese living there.
Hansen
You have three kids?
Nakagawa
Yes.
Hansen
And what grades are they in right now?
Nakagawa
Freshman, sophomore, and senior in high school.
Hansen
So, they're all in high school. How has your life been here in Gardena? Has it been a good place to live for you and your family?
Nakagawa
I never lived in a place that I was unhappy with. Yes, I like it.
Hansen
I thought you were going to say "until Gardena."
Nakagawa
No. I like it here. Crime's too high; it's a little too congested. But, hey, you can't have everything. I don't have to get up and scrape ice off my windshield anymore. I like it here, yes. I liked Dallas; I liked Honolulu; I loved Japan. I even liked Korea, which is an exception. Most people don't like Korea. But I enjoyed it.
Hansen
And what are you doing here?
Nakagawa
Well, I'm semi-retired. I retired from the Exchange Service, and I got a small retirement annuity. And I got a paid-up health and life insurance. I work as an accountant here in town, between twenty and twentyfive hours a week.
And then your wife works, too, right?
Nakagawa
Yes.
Hansen
You're going to have some pretty big expenses when your kids start going to college.
Nakagawa
I don't think so. My kids are pretty bright. Those are their trophies. (gestures to fireplace mantle) They were on the academic pentathlon team in junior high. The two girls are straight "A" students. I tell them, "Hey, if you want to go to Harvard, fine. Get a scholarship, because I ain't going to pay your way. If you want to go to [California State University] Dominguez Hills, I'll pay your tuition and you can live here."
Hansen
They have a pretty good crack at scholarships, then, do they?
Nakagawa
Oh, I don't know. It's that same attitude again. I don't feel that I have an obligation to send them to Harvard or Yale or Stanford. If they want to go to college, and if they want to do it themselves, that's fine. I'll give them all the help I can reasonably give them. But I'm not going to bust my butt trying to send them to Harvard or Yale. Nobody did it for me. It's not that I have the attitude that "Nobody did it for me, so I don't have to do it for you." It's the attitude that there's plenty of opportunity for them. If they want to go to Dominguez Hills or UCLA or USC and if they want to live at home, fine.
Hansen
It's a pretty healthy attitude, actually. I mean, too many parents make large sacrifices for their children, ones that often have the effect of plunging them into a perennial state of crisis and anxiety. Their kids too often end up going off to college and then launch careers while remaining oblivious to what their parents have sacrificed for them. And sometimes the parents, drained by their largesse, are left with very little in the way of resources to carry them through their old age.
Nakagawa
Hey, I've seen that. I've seen that among the kids who I went to college with. Their parents had struggled and sweated to send their kids to college and then, say, to dental school, and then the kids flunk out of dental school because they're too damn lazy. I've seen plenty of that.
Hansen
Let me ask you one final question, because it's a transition to our next session. You alluded to this earlier, but maybe you could just talk about it a bit more. Your novel, "Seki-nin," or "Duty Bound," you said that you launched it when you were still living in Japan?
Nakagawa
Yes.
Hansen
Tell me a little about the circumstances of your starting the novel and then what's happened since that time. It's now, obviously, a completed manuscript—soon to be a best seller, we hope.
Nakagawa
Okay. In the late 1960s, I was the controller for the Pacific Motion Picture Services. I had been promoted a couple of times, and I was now the head of the accounting office. I had a staff of about twenty-five, mostly Japanese. Highly qualified people. I didn't have to do anything but write a few letters and sign a few instructions to the theaters. So I had so much spare time that I thought, "Why, hell, I'll start writing." I'd never considered writing these things, but I thought about this Tanaka family for a long time.
Hansen
Going way back from the 1952 visit?
Nakagawa
Prior to that, actually.
Hansen
Oh, really?
Nakagawa
Because in 1946, one of my older brothers, who'd been in Japan, came back to the States, and he was telling my parents about this, about how—they were my parents' childhood friends, the father and mother—distraught and grief-stricken they were because they felt they'd killed their only son. And here my brother was one of four kids who served in the U.S. Army during the war, and not a scratch. But my brother was
Hansen
Did you ever know the Tanaka son?
Nakagawa
I met the Tanakas only because they visited us a couple of times.
Hansen
So you met the son?
Nakagawa
I probably met him, but I don't recall him personally. I remember that my parents would talk and, occasionally. they'd mention the Tanaka family. They were close friends, having been brought up in the village together.
Hansen
But then they lived in Seattle.
Nakagawa
Yes.
Hansen
So you didn't see them very much from Kent.
Nakagawa
No, because they were close to my family before I was born, because my parents were also in Seattle. Having been from the same village in Japan and then living in Seattle.
Hansen
So it's something you heard your family talking about more than actually seeing directly.
Nakagawa
Yes, that's true. Because the boy was much older than me. That's true.
Hansen
So then in 1952, when you were in the Hiroshima area, you visited the Tanaka family, right?
Nakagawa
Yes.
Hansen
Okay. And, of course, the protagonist for your novel was at that time deceased. But you talked to the Tanaka family. You didn't talk to them at all, however, about the situation, or did you?
Nakagawa
No. No, not at all. I just made a courtesy visit, and they did mention, "Gee, you know..." They were obviously still affected by that. They thought of me as one of the long line of Nakagawa kids, and I was visiting them with my older brother, who was seven years older. They remembered my older brother quite well. They knew him. I was just one of the littler kids who happened to be in the family.
Hansen
Did the Tanakas, as you characterize the situation in your novel, actually adopt a child?
Nakagawa
No, they never did. I got the impression that they just couldn't bring themselves to do it. Nothing could replace this kid. If they had adopted, I think the tragedy would not have been so great.
Hansen
So in your novel you provided them with an alternative to pursue.
Nakagawa
Oh, yes, because I didn't want the story to end so tragically. Another thing: the son was not a football star. Also, he did not die in China; he died of malaria in New Guinea somewhere. In 1942, I think it was. So when I visited his parents, it was almost ten years after he had died.
Hansen
Let's see, you were talking about having had some free time, and this incident was on your mind and everything. So you sat down and started your novel. What confidence did you have that you could write a novel? Had you done some writing?
Nakagawa
None, absolutely none. I'd never written anything other than business correspondence.
No kidding. No creative writing or anything?
Nakagawa
No. I guess I just thought, "Hey, this is a story that really needs to be told."
Hansen
Did you nature the thought "there but for the grace of God go I," or my brothers, or something like that in your mind?
Nakagawa
No. I just thought of the incident as a great human tragedy that these poor people were the victims of. The Tanakas were probably not the only family that suffered this tragedy, but nobody's given it a thought. There are all kinds of tragedies, and certainly this is one of the great ones. Because in Japan, people live for the kids. They do. Not so much now, but in those days they lived, the Tanakas lived, to better themselves. And not just for their physical comfort, but for the generations to follow. The tanaka family became fairly well-to-do, because they only had this one kid and they obviously had some business sense. They struggled and worked in that skid row hotel and made a few bucks. I don't know how much, but they had a pretty substantial amount of money. Of course, they lost all but a little stretch of land after World War II, because it was confiscated.
I didn't know the Tanakas. I didn't have a personal relationship with any members of the family, but I feel that I knew the family because my parents talked about them and their tragedy. I remembered them talking about it.
Hansen
There's probably a world that all of us have that is outside of our immediate province, but because it's part and parcel of family conversation, the people in this world sometimes become more real than people we actually know. Because we're so intrigued by it, we fill in the outlines with our own fancies and fantasies. You must have done this to a considerable degree.
Nakagawa
Well, this idea was in my mind. I recall very vividly the first time I thought about writing the novel. It was late in 1959. My brother, who had been in Japan and had visited the Tanakas in 1946, was now married. He got married in 1958, very late, twenty years after high school. His wife was having their first child, and I was taking my mother out there in the country to help them. They run oysters out on the coast of Washington. And when we were on the drive from Seattle—I call Kent "Seattle" because it's now a suburb of Seattle. When I was driving my mother out there to stay with them a couple of weeks, the subject turned to the Tanakas. For some reason, I don't know why. That's when I thought, "Hey, I ought to write a novel." I was in grad school, working for Boeing, having a great time. Shortly thereafter, going to Korea. It never occurred to me to start until about 1968 when I was a controller in Tokyo and had tons of time. I finally started it, very sporadically. But that's when I really thought, "I've got to write this damn thing." Then I forgot it for almost ten years.
Hansen
How did you happen to stop writing it? You were writing it, and then what caused you to stop?
Nakagawa
I had a detached retina. I was in St. Louis. On a business meeting in St. Louis, I had a detached retina. I was flown back to Tokyo and had an eye operation. My vision, even with glasses, is not 20/20. I was so depressed—and having difficulty doing my job, because I was a controller working with figures—that I just dropped it, forget it for six years or so.
Hansen
Then what called forth your resuming your writing of the novel again?
Nakagawa
Then I got to Hawaii and I got this job as chief of Admin[istrative] Services for the Pacific Headquarters of the Army and Air Force Exchange Service, which had absorbed the Motion Picture Service. The Exchange Service runs all the PXs. So I was in this job in Honolulu, and again I had nothing to do. This is not the work of a dedicated writer. (laughter) I've always done things as time permits. But I had so much time on my hands I started to write it, and I had it just about finished when I got transferred to Dallas. I finished it in Dallas.
Hansen
And when was that? In 1982?
Yes.
Hansen
So you've had the manuscript completed now for six years?
Nakagawa
Yes, but I changed it. Once. I had to put the prologue into the novel to juice it up. So the final form as you see it now was completed about four years ago, give or take a few months.
Hansen
I guess we can call it quits for this session of our interview. In our next session we will concentrate upon your novel, okay?
Nakagawa
Fine.
Part 2
HansenThis is the second part of an interview with Mr. George Nakagawa by Arthur A. Hansen for the Japanese American Project of the Oral History Program at California State University, Fullerton. This interview is being conducted on June 23, 1988, at Mr. Nakagawa's home in Gardena, California.
George, today I'd like to talk with you explicitly about your novel "Seki-Nin." First, let's talk about the degree to which this novel represents a reflection of reality—the reality of the Tanaka family, the reality of the Japanese American experience, the reality of the war in China, and the like. So could we talk about your novel, then, as a historical document, as a reflection of historical reality, before we start dealing with it as imaginative literature? In a literal sense, what do you see as the novel's historicity, its historical nature? Often at the beginning of a novel it says something to the effect of "none of the characters or situations in this novel are based upon historical fact." If you were to write a disclaimer note such as this for your novel, what would it say?
Nakagawa
I think I would say that the novel is based on a true tragedy but the characters and the incidents are fictitious. Because I didn't have intimate knowledge of the Tanaka family before the war, so I don't know what the father and the mother and the son were like personally. I knew of them. I undoubtedly met them.
Hansen
You say you "undoubtedly met them." Why do you put it that way? Can't you recall meeting the Tanakas before the war?
Nakagawa
No. I know they had been over to our house because they visited us from time to time before the war. But I was so young then that I don't recall them, because we had lots of visitors.
Hansen
Were they an important family in terms of family lore? Was the plight of that particular family something that was talked about a lot in your family so that it was in your consciousness? Was the son who was lost during the wartime, the one who you've made into Jiro in the novel—the protagonist—was he an intimate friend of your older brother?
Nakagawa
Not an intimate friend. They were in the same age group. Actually, the Tanaka son was the same age as one of my older brothers, the one who is eleven years older than me, I believe. So they were friends but they were not intimate friends, because I think as they were growing up, the Tanaka family was living in Seattle. They were relatively well-to-do. And we were way out in the country and quite poor. So they were friends but not buddies, so to speak. But Mr. and Mrs. Tanaka had been close childhood friends of my parents. I know this to be true because my parents talked about it from time to time.
Hansen
So it's literally the case, then, that they were from the same village as your parents?
Nakagawa
Yes.
Hansen
They were all from the very small village in Japan that you later visited in 1952 for the first time.
Well, they were from the immediate vicinity, because in Japan the rural villages didn't have defined village limits. They were within close walking distance of each other.
Hansen
Then, when you, in 1952, went from Korea to Japan and you visited the Tanakas with your brother Kaz, how much time did you get to spend with the Tanakas, to observe the village scene there and to observe them as people? Was it just an afternoon that you spent with them?
Nakagawa
Yes, just a short time. We visited them; it was sort of a mandatory courtesy call. We visited them and we had tea and lunch, the usual, casual visit. But they didn't do much talking to me. Very little. Because they didn't know me. They knew and remembered my older brother but they only remembered me as one of the many younger Nakagawa kids. And, of course, we were both in our uniforms because in those days U.S. military personnel had to wear uniforms.
Hansen
To what extent did their son figure in the conversation at that particular time?
Nakagawa
I don't recall that they even mentioned him. They asked about my older brothers because I had six older brothers. But I don't recall them ever mentioning Henry Tanaka, except that they mentioned the military. And by then, they seemed to have recovered emotionally. But you could still kind of sense the tragedy. That kind of tragedy never leaves you, I think.
Hansen
So the Tanakas' real son's name was Henry?
Nakagawa
Yes.
Hansen
Was he an only child.
Nakagawa
Yes.
Hansen
And he was not really killed, as you have it in the novel, in China in 1945, but rather somewhere in New Guinea because of malaria, right?
Nakagawa
I don't recall the nature of the illness, but I'm quite sure it was malaria. I'm not sure it was in New Guinea, but it was in the South Pacific.
Hansen
And it was in the early stages rather than the latter stages of the war, correct?
Nakagawa
The early stages of the war, yes.
Hansen
Peeling back the layers of time and thinking about that visit to the Tanakas in 1952, was the situation of Henry and of the Tanaka family uppermost in your mind on that occasion? I mean, later on you would write a novel about this situation. The seeds of the novel were planted, perhaps, back in 1946, when one of your brothers came back from Japan and related this information about Henry and the Tanakas to your family, with you, as an impressionable youngster, hearing this. In 1952 were not so young, though maybe still impressionable. To what extent did this 1952 visit make a deepened impression on you? Did you have some sort of feeling that "something should be written about this" or "this is a tragedy of epic proportions"? Or didn't you even think about the matter then?
Nakagawa
I didn't visit the Tanakas with the idea of writing a novel or anything. I don't think the thought had really germinated yet. But I think the visit did strengthen a sense way back within me somewhere that something ought to be written about this, because I recall much more clearly hearing my brother telling my parents about it in 1946 than I recall anything in 1952. But I recall clearly that, in the fall of 1959 when I was driving out to visit my brother with my mother, how we got to talking about this. My mother was a very gentle, sensitive person, and I think it was her telling me about it that really planted the seed firmly in my mind to write this. That's the first I can recall of actually thinking, "Gee, I really should write this." Maybe it wasn't a firm commitment, but I do recall thinking, "Gee, I really should write this."
Back in 1952, though, when you talked with the Tanakas, how did they strike you? Because the mother and father of Henry, who becomes Jiro, became important figures in your novel. What I would like to find out is, what correspondence exists between the actual Tanaka family—mother and father—and their counterparts in the novel. Did you have an opportunity to get a reading of them so that you could actually develop characters, or do the characterizations of Jiro's parents in the novel come out of someplace else—your own parents, other Issei parents you knew, or just generalized fictional types?
Nakagawa
I don't have a good recollection of the mister. As I recall, he must have been about in his early sixties when I visited the Tanakas in 1952. I have little recollection of him. He was just another man. But the missus did impress me. She was a good-sized, attractive woman. She must have been in her fifties by then, but you could still see that she was an attractive woman, a very proper, somewhat refined woman. I didn't base my characters in the novel on them, no. I think the characters in my novel are composites of people who I had met, people who I knew. So they're not based on the actual characters but they're based on a composite of people who I knew. I don't know if that answers the question.
Hansen
Well, you're now being comprehensive. I'm asking you specifically about Jiro's parents, and you're talking about all of your characters as composites. Is that the case? Is Jiro, then, too, a composite?
Nakagawa
Yes, definitely he is. Jiro is definitely a composite of a lot of people that I knew, both physically and in terms of personality and character.
Hansen
What about the correspondence between the historical person Henry Tanaka and the fictional character Jiro Toyota?
Nakagawa
As far as my character in the novel, Jiro, I think the only thing about him that corresponds to what I know about Henry is his sense of responsibility and duty, something that almost all of the older Nisei—my older brothers and their friends—were brought up with. That was a Japanese characteristic. But as far as personality, I don't know anything about Henry's personality. I don't know whether he was easygoing, for example. I understand he was studious. But as far as sports, no, Henry was not athletic like Jiro.
Hansen
So would it be fair to say, then, that while you had some loose knowledge about the Tanaka family that was deepened a bit by the 1952 visit, you had an awful lot of room in your depictions of this family for poetic license, for pretty much creating the Toyotas out of whole cloth?
Nakagawa
Yes. In other words, my novel is purely fiction. The characters are purely fiction. The tragedy is not. I think that pretty well summarizes the situation.
Hansen
Okay. That leads me to my next question, and that is for you to discuss why the tragedy so much impressed itself upon you as a tragedy. What is it about this story that you've told that is so tragic? Is it something that's tied to a cultural situation peculiar to the Japanese American experience or Japanese culture, or is it a tragedy in a larger sense than just a subcultural situation?
Nakagawa
I think the tragedy here really has little to do with culture; it's a human tragedy. It's a tragedy of people conscientiously and religiously doing what they think is right and what is best and then having it all just tumble down. Because I know that, especially the Japanese immigrant families, they lived and worked for their children. And the Tanaka family, I know, did what they thought was best for their son. They worked hard; they saved money. They, in effect, forced Henry to return to Japan because they knew in their mind that that was what was best for him and the family. And then, after a lifetime of work and dedication, they lost, really, everything. They didn't, in fact, lose their wealth. But to them, wealth wasn't important; it was their son. And I think that's the tragedy. It's not a Japanese tragedy. I don't think of it as such.
Hansen
Except when you say the culture has little to do with the tragedy and it's a human tragedy, you then go on to explain some things that deepen the tragedy in terms of culture. Number one, there is the strong sense of duty that the son feels. He feels impelled to be able to follow the dictates of parents even against his own preferences. And then the second part of the equation is the way in which the parents have loaded so much
Nakagawa
Oh, yes, definitely. It's true that it's a Japanese American tragedy, yes, but that's really not the gist of it. It's a tragedy like any other human tragedy. It's true it was a Japanese American family, but I think this is a tragedy that could be understood if you get beyond the prejudices, because I wrote this draft and it was typed for me by a lady in Texas. She was somewhat upset because she thought that the novel was anti-American. I didn't think it was anti-American at all. I think some Japanese would read it to be anti-Japanese. I think a lot of people who may read this, if they're not familiar with Japanese culture and the Japanese American experience, may get the impression that this is anti-American. But I don't think that, objectively, there is anything "anti" in this novel at all. It's just anti-tragedy; it's antiwar; it's anti-compulsion.
Hansen
But isn't it the case that the tragedy would not have transpired if there hadn't been the historical circumstances vis-à-vis people of Japanese ancestry? Would Americans of non-Japanese ancestry have had to make a choice such as the family in your novel makes, to take a successful high school graduate like Jiro, and rather than permit him to realize his success on his native soil, to send him instead to the parents' native country of Japan so that he could attend a Japanese university and stand a chance for later success in life? Was that the case, say, for Italians or for Germans or for Norwegians, and other nationalities? Isn't that really a situation that comes out of the Nisei experience, the Nisei dilemma of being marginalized as a result of discrimination that existed in the 1930s and in the early 1940s, at the time that this action is transpiring in your novel?
Nakagawa
I think it's true that if there had not been the rather extreme anti-Japanese discrimination on the West Coast in the 1930s that the Tanaka family probably would not have gone back to Japan. They might have. Some of the Japanese came here strictly with the idea of making money and going back to Japan. But I don't think that objective was firm in most Japanese immigrants, because if it had been, they would not have gotten married and started raising large families here, because that economically eliminated the possibility of returning to Japan. So I think it's probably true that the discrimination factor in this case was the ultimately determining factor in returning to Japan. Because the overwhelming majority of Nisei kids did not want to go to Japan after graduating from high school in the United States. I think the Tanakas, had it not been for the discrimination factor, would have yielded to the desires of their son Henry and remained in the United States. So in that sense the novel is a Japanese American tragedy, yes.
Hansen
Lots of Japanese American families were involved in the same type of debate as the Tanakas were, as to whether they should send their kids or even go themselves back to Japan. I mean, with the war clouds starting to appear on the horizon and things starting to be tense, well before Pearl Harbor a lot of people made these kinds of deliberations and acted on them. It was going on, I think, if I read historical documentation correctly, in many, many households. Not only before the war, but once they got to the camps, there were people who made decisions about repatriating or expatriating, and there was a lot of family strife. Once Tule Lake became a segregation center, there were lots of people who renounced their citizenship, and some of this was driven by family pressures and family desires. Did you, as a child, get a palpable sense of this dilemma, this debate that was going on about whither goest the Japanese American family in those years before the war as a result of your own family discussions or friends of your family discussing it? And did this early exposure to this dilemma and debate sensitize you to the tragic dimensions of what would happen when it was acted out for another Nisei? Not yourself or your brothers, but another Nisei, like Henry Tanaka. Is that what gives a strong feeling to your novel, do you think, that in some ways you're involved with that? It's more immediate than it seems. It's not just Henry, but it's you as Henry.
Nakagawa
I don't recall that it was ever debated within our family, because with a dozen kids and being very poor, there was no possibility that we could return to Japan. I mean, our family couldn't. I don't recall when I was first aware of it, but as far back as I can remember, I was well aware that there were divergent opinions among the Japanese Americans about the future—our future in the United States, and whether our future was with the United States or Japan. I was well aware of that. But within my family, I don't recall it ever
Hansen
In Minidoka?
Nakagawa
Yes. Because, see, my family had lived in Seattle, and Minidoka was largely [comprised of] Seattle people.
Hansen
But if it wasn't your family that had the debates and the deliberations over this possibility of going to Japan at that time, was it something that you were aware of through other families? Neighbors, friends, whatever.
Nakagawa
I don't really recall why I was aware of this. I think it might have stemmed from the period even prior to World War II. I was aware that there was some doubt within the Japanese American community as to our future in the United States. I think it started before World War II, but I'm not sure. But it was always with me.
Hansen
You said in our last interview session that it wasn't until the 1960s, when you were over in Japan, that you really felt for the first time that you were fully an American.
Nakagawa
Yes, that's true.
Hansen
And it seems to me, in reading this novel of your, that this apprehension, this doubt about your Americanism, somehow or other gets insinuated into the story. Because here is a person who carries all the credentials, as you've depicted Jiro Toyota in the novel, as a Jack Armstrong figure, almost, a full-blooded American—football star,athelete, valedictorian—who, in spite of all this, is consigned, on the basis of a cultural mandate, filial piety, to go against his own will and go to Japan. And there he ends up, really, as a sacrifice on the altar of a war, fighting on a side for which he lacked empathy and nationalistic commitment. Of course, as you depicted Jiro's situation, he developed a feeling for his fellow human beings, the Japanese soldiers who were involved with him in fighting the war, but ideologically he did not have a commitment to the cause of Japan in this war. So it just seems to me that, if you had these kinds of concerns about your status and your identity, then the creation of this character Jiro is, leastwise in part, a projection of your anxieties about your own very tenuous situation? That here you were, in the United States, but weren't really considered even by yourself as fully an American. Is that something, do you suppose, that energizes the creation of Jiro as a character?
Nakagawa
Yes, I think so, definitely. I think that there must have been very few Nisei who really felt that "I'm an American" at an early stage in their lives. I think it was typical of them to feel that way in the environment that we were brought up in. Not to blame society; it's just the way it was. I was brought up in a Japanese American community where I went to school with white kids, and they were my friends. But after school, I was in a different society. I remember in grade school, before World War II, my friends were talking about birthday parties. I never had a birthday party; we didn't do those things. We couldn't afford it anyway. But the kids were talking about birthday parties, and they were my friends. I was never invited. I mean, it didn't occur to them. I don't think it's that they didn't invite me because I was Japanese; it's just that it was their society and I was in a different society. But I didn't feel any, or certainly very little, personal discrimination among my class. Ten percent, I guess, were Nisei, and the rest were white kids. But I was aware that I was living in a different society, in a different culture.
Hansen
In our last interview session, you alluded to the fact that, if anything, in terms of the family, you were kind of rebellious.
Yes.
Hansen
You chafed against authority, and your father ultimately didn't hold that against you, but it probably was nettlesome to him just to have you disagreeing. It's interesting that a person who rebels, who takes this kind of semi-adversarial position vis-à-vis the authority figure in the family—the father—should write a novel about somebody who was duty bound, who accepted what the father wanted with very little question.
Nakagawa
With reluctance. Yes, I think most of the Nisei accepted their parents' views, but with reluctance, with reservations. Certainly reservations. I was the same way, I think. I may have been a little more vocal than my brothers, most of them anyway. But I think we were all brought up pretty much with the same values.
Hansen
Had these values become attenuated, though, by the time your particular coming of age came about, however? I mean, had they thinned out a bit, become diluted as a result of the passage of time and even the end of the Evacuation? I mean, you're a younger Nisei. Your generation is not quite the same as Jiro's. Like, for example, now a Yonsei [fourth-generation Japanese American] might feel this seki-nin impulse, too, but to a lesser degree.
Nakagawa
Much less, yes.
Hansen
But you were even starting to feel less of it.
Nakagawa
Yes, definitely.
Hansen
Was part of your feeling the notion that you weren't going to be sacrificed like Henry Tanaka, not going to become a cropper to family as against individual needs and individual fulfillment? In other words, there's this juxtaposition between what we think of as the American democratic ethos, where each person acts out his or her own desires, as against a more traditional Japanese situation, where you have to think of the good of the group and you have to accept the governing norms of the family hierarchy. Was some of that strain going on with you?
Nakagawa
I don't think so. Frankly, I'm not a good thinker; I never was. But I don't think that a Nisei person, brought up in the 1930s and 1940s, unless he was awfully stupid, could have been unaware of the conflicts within the Japanese American community. But I was aware that a lot of the Nisei were drifting. Now, that conflicts with the stereotypes of the Nisei of being driven, striving to excel. That's not the Nisei community I saw. Now, granted, the community I was brought up in was poor, large families, not the so to speak upper crust in the cities who had few kids and money and dreams.
Hansen
Like Jiro Toyota, your novel's protagonist.
Nakagawa
Yes, that's true.
Hansen
So in a sense you were not even writing about your social situation, your social class. Jiro was an urbanized member of a Japanese American community, and you lived out in the sticks, really, out in the country.
Nakagawa
Yes.
Hansen
When people think about a novel, they'll often say, "To what extent has the novelist written an autobiography?" So what I'm trying to establish is what your relationship is to the protagonist of your novel. And, as I'm starting to see it, he's almost the other side of the coin from you.
Nakagawa
Yes, definitely. I would say so. Because what I depict in this novel has nothing to do with my situation. I wasn't torn with a conflict of "Should I go to college or should I study this?" I don't recall giving college a serious thought until after I had been in the service and I knew I was going to get the G.I. Bill. I wasn't torn with such conflicts.
Then why were you drawn, do you think, to someone who was torn with such conflicts? What was the attraction?
Nakagawa
I don't know. As I mentioned to you, maybe I should have been a historian because I was always interested in history. I don't claim that this novel depicts history with any great degree of accuracy. I think it's plausible—the moves, the situations. But I really don't know. I think it's the tragedy that drew me into the whole thing, that really stuck with me.
Hansen
And one of the things that galvanized it for you was just the way in which your mother related this situation of the Tanakas and their son Henry. I mean, you earlier were talking about the time in 1959 that you were driving to your brother Giro's place in the country with your mom and she was talking about the Tanaka tragedy, and it was somehow the emotion that she had in her voice or in the way that she talked about this incident that prompted you to begin your novel.
Okay, why don't we turn now to the structure of the novel. You have a prologue and an epilogue, and then you have five divisions within the novel itself: "Old Japan," "The New Land," "A New Life," "Imperial Army," and "The Unthinkable." Does that particular structure for the novel grow out of the facts of Henry Tanaka's experience or did you develop it somewhat independently of his experience?
Nakagawa
It's a structure that just evolved as I was writing the novel. I originally wrote the novel without the prologue and then I thought that it started out kind of slow and dry, starting out in Japan at the turn of the century. I thought the novel needed to be juiced up a little bit, so then I put the prologue in, hoping that it would add a little interest in what this is all about. So that when people read the prologue, hopefully they would have an idea what this is about, rather than starting out with dry dialogue about what Japan was like at the turn of the century.
Hansen
So you would give it an emotional focus first and then get into a historical mode.
Nakagawa
Yes.
Hansen
The epilogue, was that written as part of the original manuscript, or is that also something that you tacked on later?
Nakagawa
That was pretty much intact with what I originally wrote in longhand at the office on scratch pads.
Hansen
And did the epilogue, when you first wrote it, include the scene at the very end where they [Jiro's parents] have adopted a twelve-year-old son?
Nakagawa
Yes, that was my thought all along. The Tanaka family did not adopt. But I had planned [it] all along because I didn't want it to end on such a tragic note. I wanted the tragedy to be there but I didn't want the novel to end on such a tragic note.
Hansen
In speaking about that epilogue and the scene that I was alluding to in the graveyard there in the village in Hiroshima, I think you mentioned that you had visited that graveyard.
Nakagawa
Yes.
Hansen
Did you actually visit Henry's grave?
Nakagawa
No, I did not. No. I visited our family ancestral grave site. There were a bunch of stones, some very old and moss covered, some very new. I described what I saw in our family's burial area.
Hansen
What year was it that you went back to visit the village?
Nakagawa
I think it was in 1964. It was in the early 1960s. My parents were there and I visited them.
So you had a chance to get a sense of that village, to help you depict it in your novel's first section on old Japan. During our last interview session you talked about when you visited Hiroshima and the village in 1952, and you said that it had probably changed very little from what you supposed it had been like when your parents and the Tanakas had been brought up there. This rural museum, so to speak, preserved a way of life for you to observe and then recreate in your novel's opening section.
Nakagawa
Yes.
Hansen
In addition, did you have your picture of old Japan infused with stories told to you by your parents and perhaps also from people who belonged to their Hiroshima kinjinkai [prefecture-based society] in Seattle, so that you had a vibrant sense of what village life was like in the period before the war?
Nakagawa
All I recall is what my mother had told me when I was young. She would tell me about what her life had been like as a child: three years of school, cutting grass for the cow alongside the rice paddies. But I think my impression of Japan is pretty much the impression I got when I went over there in 1952. It had changed little. It was almost as my mother had described it: a very narrow valley, green, dotted with rice paddies, terraced, to some extent, along the hillsides. It was just as she had described it, so I thought, "Hey, this hasn't changed in fifty years." It might not have changed.
Hansen
So what you saw corresponded with what you had heard.
Nakagawa
Yes. It was what I expected. I thought that, if my mom were to go back there, she would think she had just stepped back in time.
Hansen
And then, in the second section of the book, treating what you describe as "the new land," this is set in territory with which you were, I guess, fairly familiar. Actually, more of this section of the book is set in Seattle rather than twenty-five miles outside of Seattle, where you lived. Did you, in fact, get a sufficient opportunity to experience Seattle so that you didn't have to indulge in a lot of literary license when you were writing this section? Did you have a feeling for the Japanese American community in Seattle or not?
Nakagawa
Yes, I think I did. I had read about Seattle, Monica Sone's Nisei Daughter (Boston: Little, Brown, 1953) and John Okada's No-No Boy (Rutland, Vt.: Tuttle, 1957). I'd read about Seattle, about as much as, probably, the average Nisei. And then I did recall some of what Seattle life was like. For example, the school, Bailey Gatzert. I think my younger brother was the principal of that school in the 1960s; it's still sitting there. And I knew that that school had been built in the 1920s—I think it was the late 1920s—a little, one-story brick building. Because I used to walk by there. It was right near the Nisei Veterans Hall. So I was familiar with the territory and I knew where the Buddhist church was and, you know, all these other things; they're still pretty much in the same place as when I was there in the 1940s and 1950s.
Hansen
So you had a sense of it, but then it was reinforced by your brother's later situation at the school.
Nakagawa
Yes. And I read a few other historical things; I don't recall exactly what they were.
Hansen
Did you read the sociological study on prewar Seattle by [Shotaro] Frank Miyamoto [Social Solidarity among the Japanese in Seattle]? It was first published in 1939 [in the University of Washington Publications in the Social Sciences, Volume 11, No. 2, 57-130]. It was recently published [1984] in a new edition [by the University of Washington Press, with a detailed explanatory introduction written by Miyamoto].
Nakagawa
No, I did not.
Hansen
You didn't. I thought maybe you had because that study provides a wonderful sociological and quasiethnographic portrait of what the prewar Japanese American community in Seattle was like. I was almost certain that you had read Miyamoto's book.
No, I have never read it.
Hansen
The sections of your novel entitled "A New Life" and "The Imperial Army" must have been a little harder for you to write. Those are sections which must have derived more from books than did the first two that we've just been discussing. "A New Life" treats Jiro's college life at Keio University in Tokyo, as well as his experiences in both Hiroshima and Tokyo. Now, we've established your credentials relative to Hiroshima, but did you have a pretty good sense of Tokyo, too?
Nakagawa
Yes.
Hansen
But you weren't a college student in Tokyo. Of course, at the time you started writing your novel, you had experienced the University of Washington and college life there. I'm curious, did you also have contact with university life in Tokyo? Did you, for example, ever visit the Keio campus?
Nakagawa
No. I knew about where the various colleges were in Tokyo. I was well aware that in Japan, to a large extent, it's much tougher to get into college than it is to graduate. Once you get in there, it's pretty soft, except for the Nisei who couldn't understand Japanese too well; they had a little trouble. But I had a vague, general understanding of what college life was like [in] Tokyo, and much of it was based on what I saw in Japan in the early 1950s, when I first got there, because I was familiar with the tea rooms and the coffee shops, and I knew that this type of thing was available in Japan before the war. This section of my novel was based largely on my personal experiences in Japan. I mentioned the fleet of battleships outside Yokosuka. Well, I used to go into Yokosuka all the time when I was in the navy. I was a merchant seaman sailing out of Yokohama. Most of this section was based on my recollection of what Tokyo was like, as well as on what I picked up in casual conversations.
Hansen
What about something like the football activity you depict in your novel, with Jiro playing with a team at Keio University? It's largely Hawaiian Japanese and mainlander Nisei, like Jiro, who your novel depicts as playing in this little football league there in Japan. How did you get any insight into that situation?
Nakagawa
I don't really know. I know they did play football. I don't really recall, but I know that in the colleges they did have informal Nisei football leagues. I don't think it was limited to Nisei; there might have been some locals playing. I don't recall where I even learned about this. Much of it was based on my personal recollections, things that I'd picked up.
Hansen
But, recollections aside, what about personal feelings? After all, what you were writing about in "Seki-Nin" is somebody who was brought up in the northwestern part of the United States and who then goes to Japan and lives out his existence in a subculture there, that of overseas Americans—in this case, Japanese Americans. And that was your experience, too, when you were in Japan. So the core of this section of your novel—not just the trappings of it but the core of it—the emotional core, doesn't that really come out of your own situation? The reason I'm asking you this question is that in our last session you said that you didn't feel uncomfortable in Japan, but rather felt quite comfortable. And yet, I don't think that you depict Jiro as being altogether comfortable with his situation in Japan, even before he gets conscripted into the Japanese army. I know you were having a good time while you were in Japan, but was there a side of yourself that wasn't altogether comfortable being there?
Nakagawa
I was never uncomfortable in Japan, but I was aware that a lot of the Nisei did feel uncomfortable. They didn't feel that they were part of the Japanese society and they weren't really Americans either. Because the Japanese looked on them as sort of half-Japanese. But I was aware of it because I had Nisei friends over there and I knew a lot of people who had served over there. Quite a few of the Nisei didn't really feel comfortable. They didn't really feel like they fit in. But I never had that problem. I didn't have intimate relationships with most average Japanese there. I wasn't going to their house and playing softball with them, although in our company we used to have softball games and boys' and girls' volleyball. You know, like the Japanese do. But I was never at all uncomfortable there.
Hansen
Let me ask you a tough comparative question. When you were growing up in the northwestern United
Nakagawa
The Kent situation, period. Because there I had an economic problem, too, see? In Japan, I didn't have a lot of friends, but, hey, I didn't have a care in the world. I had money in my pocket; I had a place to sleep. I had a pretty good job. I didn't have a care in the world. That's not the situation I was in when I was in Kent, or even after the war, in Seattle. There was always an economic problem that I was aware of. Money was the least of my problems when I was in Japan.
Hansen
Is it fair to say that, when you were in Japan during that period, you were not only most comfortable with your identity as an American but also most comfortable with your Japanese ancestry, that that was a good period for you because you were able to bring those two identities together? I mean, you were affiliated with the U.S. Army, which left very little doubt as to your identity as an American. But, at the same time, you were participating in a society where, certainly, more people looked like you and had a heritage like yours. Was that, then, a real comfortable period for you because you, in a sense, had the best of both worlds?
Nakagawa
It might have contributed to it. But I think the more important factor was that I was more mature and I just didn't let little things trouble me. I was aware that a lot of the Americans that I worked with thought of me as something a little different. Not in a negative, derogatory sense of something different. I think it's understandable. But those little things didn't bother me.
Hansen
Did you act as any kind of broker for non-Japanese members of the military vis-à-vis Japanese society? Did other servicemen look to you in some instances to be a go-between, either for language or cultural purposes?
Nakagawa
By the time I got there and got settled in Japan, the language barrier was not a serious one. There were so many Japanese who could speak English well and so many Americans who spoke Japanese that my services were not really needed.
Hansen
You're talking about the 1960s period.
Nakagawa
Yes. But even during the 1950s. For example, when I was an American seaman, we used to go into Yokohama. They would have a bunch of [Japanese] yard workers, laborers, come aboard to clean up the ship's engine room and do other menial jobs. You didn't have that in the United States because it was too expensive. But those work gangs, they all had interpreters, you know, so it was not necessary for me to interpret for them.
Hansen
Now, the part of your novel that, in my estimation, would have been the toughest for you to write was not the "A New Life" section but "The Imperial Army" section, because here what you were trying to do was to understand a mentality and a set of structures and even a historical situation, all of which you were not privy to. I mean, you were, to be sure, in the United States Navy, and there was some correspondence between discipline and authority and procedures. But the United States Navy was not the Imperial Army, and the United States Navy after the war was certainly not the Imperial Army during an all-out war. So is it the case that a good portion of this chapter derives from your wide reading, or a combination of wide reading and discussions with people who were either in the Imperial Army or were very privy to that way of life?
Nakagawa
Having been a navy veteran, when I started to write this novel, I had intended to make Jiro a navy officer, a signal officer aboard the Imperial Navy battleship Yamato. But I couldn't find anything about how the Japanese navy trained their people. I knew something about ships but I couldn't find anything about how the Japanese navy operated. So then I decided I'd make him an army man. I had not read a great deal but I had read some about the Japanese army. I had read a book written by Jim Yoshida and [with the assitance
Hansen
Yes, I have. In fact, I should say that when I first read your novel, I thought about Jim Yoshida as a person who had a similar situation to that of your protagonist, Jiro Toyota. Like Jiro, he was a football star in the Seattle area.
Nakagawa
I didn't know about Jim Yoshida until the mid-1970s, when I read his book. But there was another book. It was written in tribute to Koji Ariyoshi [Hugh Deane, Remembering Koji Ariyhoshi: An American G I. in Yenan (Los Angeles: U.S.-China Peoples Friendship Association, 1978). Do you know who he is?
Hansen
Yes, I do.
Nakagawa
Now, Koji Ariyoshi [1914-1976] was in the interior of China during World War II. He was a liaison officer with the Communist Chinese army. In reading his book, which wasn't a long one—it was largely pictorial—from the pictures and from the descriptions in that book, I got much of the idea about the background, the Chinese countryside and what it was like. You know, the small-scale skirmishes rather than massive battles that they had in the western war.
Hansen
Koji Ariyoshi was a labor organizer and a communist who spent the last half of 1942 at the Manzanar War Relocation Center. He's from Hawaii originally, but he was interned at Manzanar. Then he went back to Hawaii after the war. I understand that he died just a few years ago.[12]
Nakagawa
Yes, that's right.
Hansen
But Ariyoshi's book, then, allowed you to be able to experience the situation in China through Nisei eyes—Hawaiian-Nisei eyes.
Nakagawa
Yes. And also to get an idea of what was going on in China during the war. But I had also read other things. I don't know. When you're in Japan for a dozen years and you read the Japan Times and the Mainichi Daily News, you pick up a lot of things. Maybe you don't remember where you got it. I had a general idea of how the Japanese army trained. For instance, I mentioned playing this squeaky march music on the phonograph? Well, I had heard that in the Japanese Self-defense Force. They had some Japanese Self-defense Force navy people in [the] Yokosuka and Yokohama areas. I don't remember where it was but I see in my mind these people marching around. They're playing music on this one speaker. You know, the Japanese march music in those days was very brassy—squeaky, kind of. That's where I got the idea. But I didn't do much research for this. Most of it was based on what I had read.
Hansen
Your job was connected, though, with films. Did you see a lot of films that would have helped give you a context and provide some roughage for your descriptions?
Nakagawa
None that I can recall, none at all. We were showing American movies, Western movies, for American G.I.s, and I don't recall that I derived any information or background from what I'd seen in the movies.
Hansen
But I was thinking not just of the movies that you yourself would show. During your later years in Japan was just when they were starting to be able to deal with [the] World War II situation in films, so you would have seen Japanese-made films. I was just wondering if some of those antiwar films that were coming out at that time were ones that you had seen and drawn imagery from for your novel.
Nakagawa
No. I saw very few Japanese movies when I was in Japan. But most of the Japanese war movies that were made in the 1960s and early 1970s, I believe, were very poorly made. I recall one movie called Kiska. The technical effects were absolutely horrid, very bad. Now, I know they do make some good movies. Some, like the ones by [the celebrated Japanese director, Akiro Kurosawa [1910- ], are highly technical, excellent movies. But the Japanese war movies I saw must have been made on a shoestring, for they were very poorly made.
But you did see some.
Nakagawa
I saw a few. When I was in Japan, I went to movies and baseball games and whatever.
Hansen
Had you read [Erich Maria] Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front [1929] as a kid, or not?
Nakagawa
Yes, I did.
Hansen
I thought about that novel some when I was reading your novel, also, because what you had to do, in a sense, was to jump out of your own skin as an American and put yourself into a Japanese frame of mind on perspective, through Jiro, and be able to see yourself as part of another group and not be harsh and ideological against the Japanese army and against the Japanese cause. Had you done so, it probably would have ruptured your novel. It seemed to me as though you had a basis for your equanamity, and I just thought maybe that reading the Remarque novel was what helped you a bit on that.
Nakagawa
I don't think so. not at all. I'd read the novel All Quiet on the Western Front. I'd seen the movie on television, too. I think. But I don't think that influenced me at all or affected me in any way.
Hansen
I had another reason for saying that. A lot of things that affect us do so unconsciously; you really don't know what affects you and what doesn't. But the thing that stuck in my mind was that there seemed to be a similar quality to your novel and Remarque's classic one. Both succeed in showing that, in a world war, everybody is a loser. His novel deals with World War I and yours with World War II, but neither glorifies war. Instead both show the horrific dimensions of war. I recall vividly a scene from All Quiet on the Western Front where one of the German soldiers gets killed, and a comrade of his almost immediately rivets upon the fact that the guy has a brand-new pair of boots that should be used to replace worn-out ones instead of being buried with him. Rather than seeming cold and callous, this scene expresses the brute level to which war reduces human beings.
And your novel succeeds, for me, because it also seems to get down to the question of, really, the ultimate futility of international wars. Without being stridently polemical, "Seki-Nin" nonetheless, in its own way represents a strong indictment of war. It's really, to my mind, an antiwar novel. Now, I don't know if you were trying to write an antiwar novel, but may be you were in a position, because of your Japanese American situation, to appreciate how everybody can be a loser in a war. Here, in a sense, you've got your heritage divided against your nationality at the time of World War II, and what happens is that, as a result of that over 100,000 people are evicted from their homes and incarcerated in concentration camps. The camps established for Japanese Americans only figure in your novel very briefly, but the Evacuation is in there. Even the atomic bombing of Hiroshima comes into your novel, albeit in a very oblique sort of way—and yet it's felt very powerfully by the reader. So two tragedies are lurking in the novel's background: a social policy that violates people's human and civil rights and the dropping of a bomb that kills thousands of innocent people. I think a Japanese American is in a position to be able to understand both of those events very poignantly. Not only would a Japanese American have an intimate knowledge of the Evacuation, but the prefecture that sent the largest number of people to the United States was Hiroshima. So there's more than just the historic connection; there's the emotional connection. So anyway, I thought that All Quiet on the Western Front and other books like that one might have had an impact on you.
Nakagawa
No. I would like to say, though, that I didn't start writing this with the idea of writing an "anti" anything anti-war, anti-discrimination, or anything. My thought was, I just wanted to write about a tragedy that occurred. I think that human beings have a tendency to be affected by tragedies that affect others.
Hansen
I felt that you took pains in writing your novel to avoid heavy-handed moralizing, that you let the story provide the tragedy and allowed readers to draw out its implications. I could almost feel you drawing back from indulging in philosophy, ideology, and polemics. For example, there is the way in which the Evacuation and Hiroshima are insinuated into the novel and yet are never permitted to become obtrusive. They're just there, providing emotional framing for the novel, but they don't really rupture the novel and dominate the story. I think it would have been very easy to bring in a lot more about the Evacuation and
Nakagawa
Well, I don't feel that I'm qualified to write anything scholarly or intellectual. I just wanted to write a simple, tragic tale, that's all. It's a relatively simple story. The ramifications are broad but it's a simple story, a simple tragedy. It's a story about a simple family who suffered the ultimate tragedy, I think.
Hansen
You entitle the last section of your novel "The Unthinkable." When a reader first encounters that title, they think of the A-bomb.
Nakagawa
Maybe so. But not in my case, because I'm always writing about the Tanaka family. "The unthinkable" to them was the loss of their only child, Henry, who was their whole life.
Hansen
But the fact is that the unthinkable for the Tanaka family occurs in March of 1945, and a few months thereafter, in August of 1945, very proximate to where they're living, another "unthinkable" occurs. The word "unthinkable," in the context of what you're depicting, conjures up the Hiroshima bombing. We've been [so] conditioned to the bombing through films and books that it's hard to avoid drawing that connection. As an author, you surely realize that the setting that you're dealing with during this portion of your novel carries with it connotations that go way beyond the Tanaka family.
Nakagawa
Oh, yes.
Hansen
So when you use a term like "unthinkable," dealing with something that occurs to somebody living in Hiroshima in 1945, you could see where the reader might be tempted to feel that this is a double-edged term that you're using. But apparently you weren't intending this effect.
Nakagawa
No. I used the term "the unthinkable" in that part of the book where the family is notified that Jiro had been killed. The epilogue covers the Hiroshima account of the bombing. "The Unthinkable" ends in March 1945 and then the epilogue picks up in August 1945.
Hansen
That's true. Explicitly, it is in your epilogue that the bombing of Hiroshima is mentioned. But what I'm saying is that when a reader like myself sees the title "The Unthinkable," I expect to hear next about the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
Nakagawa
That's because you're a historian. See, you're much more conscious of these things than the average person. I think you're probably much more conscious of the significance of [the] atomic bomb than I was. Although I know what you're talking about now, that thought didn't enter my mind. The unthinkable, in my mind at that time, would have been the surrender, not the atomic bombing, in the minds of the Japanese. Because, boy, there were Japanese people who weren't going to surrender, period. We could have bombed out every city and they'd have still been fighting with their damn hoe handles.
Hansen
Well, that was even true in the minds of some of the Issei in the camps—they simply couldn't believe that Japan had lost the war. They suspected that news of this result was really American propaganda and that pretty soon the Imperial Japanese Army was going to be marching into whatever the place happened to be—Minidoka or Heart Mountain or whatever other camp.
Nakagawa
I wonder how many people actually believed that. Some might have been paying lip service, but, gee, I wonder how many people actually believed that. I know, from being in Heart Mountain, people were talking; some people were saying that Japan had won the war, after the surrender. But I wonder how many people actually believed that.
Hansen
I don't know. Fantasy and the will to believe are powerful forces, more powerful sometimes than we perhaps realize. When I read about how many Issei were saying this and were saying it stridently, I found it kind of shocking that they would have had that capacity to suspend their disbelief. But war is so full of propaganda, you just never know the truth. If you're listening to shortwave broadcasts and hearing enemy propaganda, you're bound to be mixed up as to what in the heck actually happened. So what do you really
I think that we've covered pretty much everything I hoped that we would, and more, in this portion of our interview. I guess the only thing that I still need to ask you is, in writing the novel, which characters or which sections were the toughest for you to be able to get your mind around and to create? Which caused you the most agony? Which inclined you most to say on a given day, "Hell, I can't get this. I'm going to go down to the beach and look at these gals in bikinis" or whatever else?
Nakagawa
I'm sure it was the first few pages, probably the first ten or fifteen, just getting started. It took me a long time to get rolling.
Hansen
What made you think you could write a novel? You'd never done any creative writing before. How did you get the courage of your convictions to even attempt a novel?
Nakagawa
I was never confident that I could write well enough to get somebody to publish my novel, but I was confident that I had a subject that was worthy of consideration. And then, it was the time. I had ample time, the opportunity. If I were working an honest forty-hour-a-week job, I would never have been able to do this, never. For a long time, I had no more than maybe ten or fifteen hours of honest work per week.
Hansen
A lot of people, when they have leisure time, turn to something other than writing a novel. You must have nurtured some sort of generalized aspirations to be able to create something, to write something. Had you been a wide reader?
Nakagawa
Yes. I used to be an avid reader, but not so much of novels. When I was in Japan at the time that I started writing this, I used to read on a regular basis, probably three or four daily newspapers, three or four weekly magazines. The daily newspapers were the Stars and Stripes, the Japan Times, the Yomiuri, and the Mainichi Daily News.
Hansen
Is the Mainichi Daily News Tokyo-based??
Nakagawa
Yes. And then I would read The Wall Street Journal. I was an avid reader. I read quite a few books, but largely history books. Especially about World War II. Not about the camps; I wasn't reading about that. But I was always interested in World War II history. I was a history buff, I guess. So I did read a lot, but not novels. I never cared too much for literature in high school. But I do recall, when I was a senior in high school, my teacher loved [George Eliot's] Silas Marner [1861], and I can recall vividly that we used to discuss this every day. And, strangely enough, Silas Marner covered approximately the same time span, about thirty-five years or so, [as] what I wrote. So when I started to write this, the first thing I did was I went back and reread Silas Marner. Because I knew I was going to write about [the time period spanning] from the early 1900s to 1945. Silas Marner sort of served as a model, you know, to give me a general idea of how to go about writing my own novel.
Hansen
How did you know how to write dialogue? Did you just study other novels and see how their authors did it?
Nakagawa
No. I guess I just sat down and did it.
Hansen
But even punctuation for dialogue, you had to pick that skill up somewhere.
Nakagawa
Oh, well, I had college English, freshman English, same as everybody else.
Hansen
But you never had a creative writing class.
Nakagawa
No, I never had a creative writing class.
Hansen
I think, then, that this portion of our interview is now over. As I did last time, I'd like to thank you very
Notes
1. When published in 1989 by the CSUF-OHP Japanese American Project under the title of Seki-Nin (Duty Bound), the novel included an Afterword featuring selected portions of the two 1988 interview sessions with the author represented here in full.
2. In his novel, the author uses the name Toyota to represent the family in question.
3. Sen Katayama (1859-1933) was a founder both of the Communist Party of Japan and the American Communist Party. For an insightful and sympathetic assessment of Katayama's life and activities, including his role in the Japanese American community and American labor politics, see the following two sources by the Japanese American communist activist and writer Karl G. Yoneda: Ganbatte: Sixty-Year Struggle of a Kibei Worker (Los Angeles, Calif.: Asian American Studies Center, University of California, Los Angeles, 1983), passim, and "The Heritage of Sen Katayama," Political Affairs (March 1975). Interviews with Yoneda and his wife, Elaine Black Yoneda, are available in the Japanese American Project of the Oral History Program at California State University, Fullerton; see O.H. 1376a,b and 1377a,b.
4. A 1937 graduate of the University of Washington, Hosokawa was born and educated in Seattle's public schools. Between his college graduation and the onset of the World War II Japanese American Evacuation, he was employed as a journalist on English-language newspapers in Singapore and Shanghai. After being transferred from the Minidoka War Relocation Center in Idaho to the Heart Mountain War Relocation Center in Wyoming, Hosokawa became the editor of that camp's newspaper, the Heart Mountain Sentinel, and a vigorous spokesperson on behalf of the perfervid Americanist ideology and policies of the Japanese American Citizens League. During the war, with the assistance of the War Relocation Authority, he left the Heart Mountain center for residence in Iowa and employment with the Des Moines Register. In 1946, Hosokawa moved to Colorado and became affiliated with the Denver Post (for which he would eventually fill the position of editor of its editorial page). Best known within the Japanese American community for his featured column in the Pacific Citizen, the official newspaper of the Japanese American Citizens League, Hosokawa has authored two notable volumes— Nisei: The Quiet Americans (New York: Morrow, 1969) and JACL in Quest of Justice: The History of the Japanese American Citizens League (New York: Morrow, 1982)—and coauthored still two others: (with Robert A. Wilson) East to America: A History of the Japanese in the United States (New York: Quill, 1982) and (with Mike Masaoka) They Call Me Moses Masaoka: An American Saga (New York: Morrow, 1987).
5. On July 15, 1943 the War Relocation Authority announced the policy of segregating persons who "by their acts have indicated that their loyalties lie with Japan during the present hostilities or that their loyalties do not lie with the United States." Following rehearings for individuals who had answered "NO" or refused to answer a loyalty question during a registration program administered back in February 1942 at all ten WRA centers, the Tule Lake center (which numbered many alleged "disloyals") was tranformed into a segregation center, replete with a manproof fence surrounding it, a battalion of military police guarding it, and six tanks conspicuously assembled proximate to it. Beginning in fall 1943, "loyal" Tuleans were transferred to the other relocation centers, while those deemed "disloyal" in the other facilities, and their families, were sent to Tule Lake to join the more than six thousand "disloyals" retained there. According to Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1982), 208-209, this action meant that "Tule Lake now had a more diverse population than any other center. People had come from all over California, Hawaii, Washington and Oregon. They were disproportionately rural people and unmarried farm laborers. Of 18,422 evacuees at Tule Lake between September 1943 and May 1944, 68 percent were citizens. Most were there because they had requested repatriation or expatriation (39 percent), answered the loyalty questionnaire unsatisfactorily (26 percent) or were family of someone who was segregated (31 percent)."
6. The contrast between the prewar Bainbridge Island and Terminal Island populations characteristically has been seen in terms of the Washingtonians being very "Americanized" and the Californians (comprised to a large extent of fishing folk from Wakayama Prefecture) being very "Japanized." See, for example, the interview in the CSUF-OHP Japanese American Project with Ikuko Amatatsu Watanabe (O.H. 1363), who discusses in detail the experiences of her family and their Bainbridge Island neighbors at the Manzanar War Relocation Center and the rationale for their post-Manzanar Riot transfer to the Minidoka War Relocation Center.
7. Question 27 on the questionnaire asked draft-age males: "Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered?" Alternatively, others were asked if they were willing to join the Army Nurse Corps or the WACs (Women's Army Corps). Question 28, the so-called loyalty question, asked all adults, citizens and aliens alike: Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, or any other foreign government, power or organization?"
8. See, for example, the following studies: Dorothy S. Thomas and Richard Nishimoto, The Spoilage: Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement During World War II (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1946); Rosalie H. Wax, Doing Fieldwork: Warnings and Advice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 59-174; Michi Nishiura Weglyn, Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America's Concentration Camps (New York: Morrow, 1976); Gary Y. Okihiro, "Tule Lake Under Martial Law: A Study of Japanese Resistance," Journal of Ethnic Studies 5 (Fall 1977): 71-85; Donald E. Collins, Native American Aliens: Disloyalty and the Renunciation of Citizenship by Japanese Americans during World War II (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985), and Richard Drinnon, Keeper of Concentration Camps: Dillon S. Myer and American Racism (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1987). For a fictional treatment of the Tule Lake center based upon the Thomas and Nishimoto volume noted above, see Edward Miyakawa, Tule Lake (Waldport, Ore.: House By the Sea Publishing Co., 1979).
9. See, for example, the documentary film Visible Target released in the late 1980s by Cris Anderson Video Production. Produced by Cris Anderson and John de Graaf, it focused on the heroic role of the Woodwards in 1942.
10. See, in particular, Douglas Nelson, Heart Mountain: The History of an American Concentration Camp (Madison, Wis.: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1976), passim, and Frank Chin, "Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake," 63-82, in Jeffrey Paul Chan et al., The Big Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature (New York: Meridian, 1991). For a fictionalized account of the draft resistance movement at the Heart Mountain center, see Gretel Ehrlich's novel Heart Mountain (New York: Viking, 1988).
11. In addition to this film, whose production details and release date could not be ascertained for this volume, see the poignant, award-winning 1990 documentary film by Steven Okazaki centered on the Heart Mountain days of the interned Caucasian artist Estelle Ishigo, Days of Waiting.
12. Shortly before his death, the following biographical sketch of Ariyoshi appeared in Emma Gee, ed., Counterpoint: Perspectives on Asian America (Los Angles: Asian American Studies Center, University of California at Los Angeles, 1976), 589: "Koji Ariyoshi was born and reared on a tenant coffee farm in Kona, Hawaii. His immigrant parents came to Hawaii as plantation contract laborers. He has been a leading labor figure in Hawaii since the 1930s. Mr. Ariyoshi was editor and publisher of the pro-labor Honolulu Record for ten years. He is presently an occasional lecturer at the University of Hawaii in ethnic studies, president of the U.S.-China Peoples Friendship Association of Hawaii, member of the National Steering Committee of the U.S.-China Peoples Friendship Association, and a frequent visitor to the People's Republic of China." See also, in this same volume, the article authored by Ariyoshi, "Plantation Struggles in Hawaii," 380-92.
Index
- African Americans, 58, 66, 71 72
- Agriculture. See Farms and farming
- Alcoholism, 52-53
- All Quiet on the Western Front (Remarque), 103
- Amatatsu family, 69
- Ariyoshi, Koji, 102, 107n12
- Army and Air Force Exchange Service, 88, 91
- Arranged marriages, 45, 53, 69
- Atomic bomb, 78, 79, 103, 104
- Auburn, Wash., 68, 70
- Automobiles, 54
- Bainbridge Island, Wash., 68-70, 107n6
- Bainbridge Review, 69
- Baseball and softball, 55, 57, 100-101
- Boeing Aircraft Company, 65, 71, 73, 79-80, 81
- "Bronzeville," Los Angeles, Calif., 66
- Buddhist church, 52
- Chicanos, 72
- China, 102
- Chinese Americans, 71, 74
- Contract laborers, 46
- Deane, Hugh, 102
- Education. See Schools and schooling
- Eliot, George, 105
- Exile Within (James), 62
- Fair Play Committee, 87
- Farms and farming, 47-48, 50, 51, 55, 68, 69
- Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 52
- Filipinos, 70, 71, 74
- Films. See Movies
- Football, 100
- Gambling, 52
- Gangs, 60, 65, 72
- Gardena, Calif., 88
- G.I. Bill, 80
- Hannon, Mrs., 61, 62, 64
- Hawaii, 46, 47, 88
- Heart Mountain War Relocation Center, 54, 62, 63, 66, 87-88
- Hiroshima, Japan, 45, 78-79, 84, 103
- Hosokawa, Bill, 102, 106n4
- Ibaramura, Japan, 45, 46, 78, 83, 84, 85, 98-99
- Issei
- James, Thomas, 62
- Japan
- Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), 62
- Japanese American Evacuation. See also names of relocation centers
- Caucasian response to, 70
- and education, 62, 65
- and families, 54
- impact of, 53-54
- Japanese American response to, 57
- population distribution, 54, 56, 58
- preparation for, 56
- registration crisis during, 59, 68, 69, 87, 106n5, 107n7
- research and writing about, 65, 66
- resettlement, 66-71
- travel to centers, 58
- "Japanese American Internees Return, 1945" (Kashima), 66-67
- "Japanese American Relocation Camp Colonization and Resistance to Resettlement" (Speier), 66
- Japanese Americans. See also geogenerational groups, e.g. Issei
- in agriculture, 47-48, 50, 51, 55, 68, 69
- childrearing practices, 53-54, 65
- cultural values, 95, 97
- discrimination against, 51, 57, 70, 74, 95, 96
- in Hawaii, 46, 47
- in Japan, 100-101
- marriage practices, 49, 53
- in military, 87, 101-102
- occupational patterns, 47, 48, 66-67, 68
- and other ethnic groups, 50, 63-64, 77
- recreational activities, 50-51, 55
- repatriation of, 87, 95-96
- social activities, 52-53, 54
- on Terminal Island, 107n6
- in Washington, 47, 48, 49, 54, 56, 68, 107n6
― 110 ― - Japanese language, 49, 51-52, 56, 74, 84
- Japanese schools, 50, 77
- Jennings, Ted, 62, 63-64
- Katayama, Sen, 106n3
- Katayama, Yoshio Nakagawa, 69
- Katayama Hall, 50
- Kashima, Tetsuden, 66-67
- Kearsarge, USS, 73
- Kent, Washington, 47, 48, 49-50, 55, 67, 68, 70
- Kenworth Truck, 65
- Kibei, See also Nisei 55, 86, 100
- Kiska, 102-103
- Korean War, 46, 71, 73-75
- Korean Americans, 71, 74
- Kurosawa, Akiro, 103
- Leave Clearance Policy, 59-60
- "Little Tokyo," Los Angeles, Calif., 66
- Loyalty Oath, 59, 60, 64-65, 106n5, 107n7
- Manzanar War Relocation Center, 54, 58, 69, 102
- Maui, Hawaii, 46, 47
- Merchant seamen, 46
- Minidoka War Relocation Center, 54, 96
- Miramar Air Station, Calif., 73, 74
- Miyamoto, Shotaro Frank, 99-100
- Movies, 102-103
- Nakagawa, Ben, 58, 65, 66
- Nakagawa, Genichi
- camp experience, 57, 59, 66, 96
- description, 46
- emigration, 45, 46
- employment, 46, 47, 48, 61, 67
- family background, 45, 46-47
- farming by, 47-48, 50, 52, 67, 68
- in Hawaii, 46-47
- hometown. See Ibaramura, Japan
- language facility, 51
- marriage, 45, 48, 52-53
- resettlement, 66-67
- retirement, 67
- returns to Japan, 83-84
- social life, 52-53, 54
- Nakagawa, George
- birth, 47, 51
- camp experience, 56-66
- children, 86, 88, 89
- education, 48-50, 61-64, 65, 67-68, 70, 97-98, 71-72
- employment, 73, 79-80, 81, 82, 83, 88-89, 91
- farming by, 68-69
- father. See Nakagawa, Genichi
- friendships, 50, 51, 72
- gangs in, 60, 65, 72
- in Hawaii, 88
- in Japan, 46-47, 75-79, 80, 82-86, 100-103
- in Korea, 82
- language facility, 49, 53, 56, 77, 84
- marriage, 82, 85
- military service, 44, 66, 73-75, 79, 80
- mother. See Nakagawa, Itsuyo Yamasaki
- national identity, 76-78, 96, 100-101
- reading interests. 105
- relatives in Japan, 55-56, 77-78, 85
- retirement, 88-89
- siblings, See also individual names 51, 55-56, 57, 65, 67, 73, 77
- vision problems, 91
- writings by, See also "Seki-Nin" 90-92, 105-106
- Nakagawa, Giro, 74, 56, 57
- Nakagawa, Henry, 65, 66, 75, 87,
- Nakagawa, Itsuki, 51, 56
- Nakagawa, Itsuyo Yamasaki
- Nakagawa, Kaz, 56, 75, 93
- Nakagawa, Masako, 51
- Nakagawa, Mitsuo, 69
- Nakagawa, Sam, 74
- Nakagawa, Setsuko, 66
- Nakagawa, Toshiko, 51, 57, 59-60, 67
- Native Americans, 70, 71
- Naval Reserve, 73
- Navy, U.S., 73, 74, 101
- Nisei
- Nisei Daughter (Sone), 99
- No-No Boy (Okada), 99
- "No-No boys," See also Loyalty Oath 87, 99
- Okada, John, 99
- Omura, James Matsumoto, 69
- Oriental Exclusion Law, 51
- Pacific Citizen, 62, 63
- Pacific Motion Picture Service, 86, 88, 89
- Pearl Harbor bombing, 56
- Phipps, Mr., 49
- Pinedale Assembly Center, 54, 56-58, 59, 60
- Port Townsend, Wash., 47
- Puyallup Assembly Center, 54
- Remarque, Erich Maria, 103
- Remembering Koji Ariyoshi (Deane), 102
- Roberts, Kathy Katayama, 69
- Rudolph, Mrs., 64
- Sakatani, "Bacon," 87
- Sawmills, 47, 48
- Schools and schooling, 49-50, 61, 62-64, 65, 67, 71, 89
- Seattle, Wash., 54-55, 99
- "Seki-Nin" (Nakagawa)
- background for, 46, 78, 89, 91-92, 93-94, 99
- biographical elements in, 97-98, 100
- chapters of, 46, 48, 98, 100, 104
- characters in, 90, 92, 94, 97, 101-102, 106n2
- comparable novels, 103, 105
- epilogue, 98
- fictional aspects, 92, 94, 98
- Japanese values in, 94-95, 97
- meaning of, 94-95, 103-104
- publication of, 106n1
- research for, 101-103, 105
- setting of, 48, 92-93, 98-99, 104
- time frame of, 93, 104
- title of, 97
- Shiratsuki, Miss, 63
- Silas Marner (Eliot), 105
- Social Security, 67
- Social Solidarity among the Japanese in Seattle (Miyamoto), 99-100
- Softball. See Baseball and softball
- Sone, Monica, 99
- Speier, Matthew Richard, 66
- Tanaka, Henry [pseud.]. 48, 93, 94, 95, 97, 104
- Tanaka family [pseud.] 75, 77, 89-90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 98, 100, 104
- Terminal Island, Calif., 107n6
- Tule Lake War Relocation Center
- Tule Lake Relocation/Segregation Center, Newell, California, 65
- Two Worlds of Jim Yoshida, The (Yoshida), 102
- University of Washington, 80, 81
- Venereal disease, 46
- War Relocation Authority (WRA), 59, 62, 106n5
- Watanabe, Ikuko Amatatsu, 69
- White River Valley, Wash., 68, 70
- Woodward, Millie, 69
- Woodward, Walt, 69
- Yoshida, Jim, 102
An Interview with
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Use Restrictions
This is a slightly edited transcription of an interview conducted for the Oral History Program, sponsored by California State University, Fullerton. The reader should be aware that an oral history document portrays information as recalled by the interviewee. Because of the spontaneous nature of this kind of document, it may contain statements and impressions which are not factual
Scholars are welcome to utilize short excerpts from any of the transcriptions without obtaining permission as long as proper credit is given to the interviewee, the interviewer, and the University. Scholars must, however, obtain permission from California State University, Fullerton before making more extensive use of the transcription and related materials. None of these materials may be duplicated or reproduced by any party without permission from the Oral History Program, California State University, Fullerton, Fullerton, California, 92834-6846.
Interview
- Interviewee:
- Togo W. Tanaka
- Interviewer:
- Betty E. Mitson and David A. Hacker
- Subject:
- Nisei Experience / Japanese American Evacuation / Manzanar War Relocation Center
- Date:
- May 19, 1973
This is an interview with Mr. Togo W. Tanaka at his office at 1001 South Victoria, Los Angeles, [California], for the California State University, Fullerton, Japanese American Oral History Project. The interviewers are Betty E. Mitson and David A. Hacker. The date is May 19, 1973, at 10:00 a.m.
Mr. Tanaka, where and when were you born?
Tanaka
I was born in Portland, Oregon, on January 7, 1916—or I think I was. (laughter) My parents didn't register me when I was born, they didn't get me a birth certificate until I was ready to go to school, so this is why it is approximate.
Mitson
Do you know why they didn't register you?
Tanaka
Well, the birth took place at home with a midwife, and I guess they just weren't familiar with what the requirements were. It wasn't at a hospital. I had some difficulty in getting into elementary school, because they couldn't establish my age since I had no birth certificate. So my mother guessed at it, and in view of the fact that I had an older sister and a younger brother, they established it as January 7, 1916.
Mitson
And they had birth certificates?
Tanaka
Well, it was... I received a certified copy. Apparently my sister did have; I guess they were born when my parents had slightly different circumstances, so they did get it. I guess in my case they forgot it, so they didn't get it until I was ready to go to school.
Mitson
You weren't the first born, you say?
Tanaka
No, I was next to the last. There were six of us, and I was number five.
Mitson
Would you like to provide their names?
Tanaka
Well, I never met my oldest brother, Heihachi—he died in Japan. My oldest living brother is Minji. And I have two sisters, Ayako and Fumi, both married. I came next, and then I have a younger brother, Koto,[1] who was the last in the family.
Mitson
Were they all born in that same area?
No, the oldest was born in Japan, and the rest of us were born in the United States. My younger brother was born in Los Angeles, [California], so we were spread from Japan to Portland to Los Angeles.
Mitson
Did your parents ever discuss why they came to this country with you?
Tanaka
Yes. My father came here first, and I think he came over to make some money and then planned to return. He came over here by himself and had been unsuccessful, so after six or seven years my mother came here. Neither one ever got back to Japan. This would be the reason that I can think of, but I really don't know for sure.
Mitson
Do you know what year your father came over to the United States and whether or not it was with a labor gang?
Tanaka
No, I don't believe it was. I think he came just to find employment. He didn't come with any group. I don't know what year; I'd have to check back.
Mitson
Do you have any idea when your parents were married?
Tanaka
Yes, they were married in Japan. He was nineteen, and I believe she was eighteen.
Mitson
What year would that be, do you know?
Tanaka
Let me see. My father died in 1953 at the age of seventy-eight, so I would have to work it backwards, and my mother died at the age of seventy-eight in 1955—she died in Chicago, [Illinois]—so it would be in the latter part of the last century.
Mitson
Well, you weren't born until 1916, so they would have been married a good many years when you were born.
Tanaka
Oh, yes. Yes, they were. My father was about forty.
Mitson
Do you know what kind of work he got when he first came?
Tanaka
He did everything. That is, he worked as a farmhand, I think, and on the railroads. When my mother came over, then he and my mother were domestic servants in a large household in Portland.
Mitson
They worked together as a team?
Tanaka
Yes, they did.
Mitson
Was their port of entry Vancouver, [British Columbia, Canada]?
Tanaka
You know, I don't know that. I wouldn't be surprised if it were. It might have been Seattle, [Washington].
Mitson
Do you know how they happened to come down to southern California?
Tanaka
My father didn't care for domestic work, and I think he wanted something that would allow him to better his circumstances. So they came down here. And he wanted to—at my mother's urging—go into some kind of business. I think that's why.
Mitson
Were you old enough to remember that?
Tanaka
No, I was three months old when they moved down here from Portland. So that goes back a bit.
Mitson
I should say. You don't know, then, if he had work waiting for him when he came?
Oh, I'm sure he didn't. They just came down here.
Mitson
Did he go into farming work at that time?
Tanaka
No. As with most Japanese who moved into the city at that time, he was told that if he had any proficiency in gardening he could get jobs there. And this is what he started to do. They found a house here in Hollywood [Los Angeles County], and he went to work.
Mitson
Do you know if there was any financial assistance for him from the folks in Japan until he got established here?
Tanaka
None at all, absolutely none. He said it was largely... Apparently one of the reasons for their not having saved much money was that they were constantly sending it back to Japan. It seems to me that they came down here virtually penniless with just enough to feed themselves for about a week and to find a place. He immediately went to work and found a job. There was no commitment in advance or any assurance that he would find anything, excepting friends had told him that it wouldn't be difficult if he would get out and hustle. And this is what he did.
Mitson
Do you know if your parents stayed with friends for awhile when they first came?
Tanaka
No, I don't know that. But I would assume that they probably did.
Mitson
In his family in Japan, what brother was your father?
Tanaka
He was the oldest son. And this is rather unusual. Usually it was the younger one or someone down the line who emigrated, but he was the oldest son. He was expected to come over here, I presume, and make a small fortune and return. And I think this, too, is one reason why anything that he might have earned and saved here immediately went back there. He felt he had a responsibility to his brothers and sisters and family in Japan.
Mitson
Do you know how many brothers and sisters there were?
Tanaka
There were too many! (laughter) I think my mother had a resentment of them, so we never felt particularly close. I mean, she saw in them, you know, a competing second family in that whatever she might be able to put aside here soon disappeared and went back to Japan. I think she never really had any desire to return to Japan. He did.
Mitson
Do you think that he desired to return to establish residence there again?
Tanaka
Yes, I think he wanted to return to Japan, but somehow never could. The family had increased, and all this time my older brother Minji had been left in Japan. So there were just four of us over here and he was in Japan. I think the intention was one day to return. But they were unable to achieve any kind of economic security over here because the money went back there. So eventually they brought my older brother here. At age sixteen he came to this country, quite a total stranger to his parents, of course.
Mitson
Do you know how old your brother was when they left him originally?
Tanaka
Well, he must have been about... I think my father hadn't really seen him, or maybe he was an infant when he left. And my mother left him when he was six years old. So he was raised through his very crucial years by relatives with whom he had no particular love relationship. My older brother and I are very close. He lives in Winnetka, Illinois. He had great difficulties adjusting to family life, and I think he had a natural resentment for having been, what he regarded as, abandoned. It was a difficult time for him.
Mitson
In what area did your father's family live in Japan? Was it an agricultural area?
Yes. It was in Yamaguchi Prefecture, and this is... Gee, I don't know how to describe it. It would be the southwestern part of the main island [Honshu]. It's next to Hiroshima.
You know, it's very interesting. My oldest daughter [Jeanine] has gone to Japan—and this is interesting. She was the only one [of my children] who [during World War II] was [interned] at Manzanar [War Relocation Center in eastern California]. She was a child then, an infant. Just before the interview began, we were talking about the Sansei [third-generation Japanese Americans] and whether or not they were interested in their racial and cultural roots in Japan. All three of our children have spent time in Japan. Jeanine spoke not one single word of Japanese until she was in college. She started out here at UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles], and then decided it was too large and impersonal, so she asked if she might go to Europe. She spent three and a half months in Europe and wanted to study in Switzerland, but we persuaded her to come back. She attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. They have a work and study program, so she decided she'd like to do some work, first in Black Studies. She volunteered for some work in the ghettos of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. But somehow she got interested in the Midwest where there are Japanese and began taking conversational studies at Earlham College in [Richmond], Indiana. She would go on a Saturday by bus, you know, from Dayton, [Ohio], all the way to Earlham, and learn conversational Japanese.
Once, while doing some work at a Jewish community center in Skokie, Illinois, teaching the little girls how to cook gefilte fish (laughter), she decided she was going to Japan. There's a Christian center in the mountains above Tokyo called Kiyosato. She volunteered to work in their hospital. She had never before indicated an interest. It was like a work camp or a peace corps in Japan. From there she attended Sophia University. It's a Catholic school in Tokyo. And then [she] went to International Christian University [ICU], which is just outside of Tokyo at a place called Mitaka. She took her bachelor's at ICU. It's funny, see, she became bilingual. And here she was, writing letters in difficult Kanji Japanese to her grandparents, which neither her mother nor I could read. (laughter) She became a real nut on genealogy and tracing the history of our family. So, you know, you ask me; I don't know. I don't even know how many brothers and sisters my father had. But I'm sure Jeanine knows it all. She's gone back to the ancestral community, and she knows the origins of the family as far back as it can be traced. She was doing social work in Tokyo, and she came back here and took a master's degree in Social Welfare at UCLA. Then I tried to persuade her to take a job with the state or the county here, doing casework, because this has been her interest. She did some very fine work out at Camarillo State Hospital [in Ventura County], and she did some right after the Watts Riot [in 1965] here [in southcentral Los Angeles]. She had worked in Watts as a caseworker for the county. But she took an assignment from the Interchurch Board, which I think has some Methodist underwriting, and became a social worker in an orphanage in Tokyo. It's called Ikuseien. She had a three-year assignment there. She finished it, and she flew home to spend Christmas and New Year's with the family. We tried to persuade her to come back here. When her assignment was finished, she went to work for a publishing company back there, the John Weatherall Company, but found it was too confining and didn't interest her, so she's teaching at Aoyama Gakuin over there, teaching English. We don't know. Now, she's the only one in the family who suddenly got the idea she wanted to know about Japan. And she's quite... I think she's kind of racist in reverse, you know.
I think her sister [Christine], our second daughter, went over to Japan almost at the same time. She started also at UCLA, then went to [the University of California at] Santa Barbara. Our children were kind of like gypsies. Then our second daughter went to UC [University of California] Berkeley. You know, you mentioned your son [Brian Mitson] thinking maybe he'd like a little change of pace from school. Well, our second daughter, in the middle of her studies at Berkeley, decided she'd rather get a job. So she went to Chicago and got a job selling sweaters in the men's department at Marshall Fields [department store]. She said it was very educational. But ultimately she wanted to become an M.D. [medical doctor], she said. We didn't see how she could quite do that, but she wound up in Japan and she did the same thing that her sister did, but it didn't interest her. Instead of learning how to speak Japanese, she became very proficient in French. She has run through one marriage. She married a young Frenchman from Paris, but it didn't work out. They were divorced after two years. Then she went back to school and was a candidate for a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. And she was accepted at the University of Michigan [in Ann Arbor, Michigan]. She was going to go there two years ago, but she met a young man here at UCLA, a professor
Our son [Wesley] is just twenty-two. He took his degree at UCLA, and he's married. He was going to continue graduate studies at either the University of Colorado [in Boulder, Colorado] or the University of Washington [in Seattle, Washington], or San Francisco State [University in San Francisco, California] in physiological psychology. I've got him working for me right now. (laughter) He took a real estate license. He's very good. I mean, if he weren't my son, I'd still feel that he'd be somebody we'd try to keep, you see. He spent three months in Japan when he was about fourteen. We sent him over on a Boy Scout tour, and he didn't know any Japanese. He spent three and a half months, I think, going all over the country by himself with no knowledge of Japanese. He enjoyed it, but as far as he's concerned, Japan is just another foreign country.
We meet with my children's grandparents quite often, but the conversation is in English because my son can't communicate in Japanese. But while my other two children are not as interested as Jeanine in Japan, they very definitely are interested in its history. We share the publications we get with them. There are ceramic art shows here at the County Museum. They go there. They go to see Japanese movies. My son is married to a young lady who is from Pennsylvania. Her father is the ombudsman out at UCLA. I think her antecedents are Dutch—Hartsock.
When I think back, excepting for the fact that I was in a job that involved my having to know things that were Japanese, I think the Nisei [second-generation Japanese Americans] weren't nearly so much interested in Japanese culture and things about Japan as the Sansei generally are. This is my own observation.
Mitson
Is this young lady, your son's wife, the one who works in your office?
Tanaka
No, my son works for me.
Mitson
You mentioned in your [April 3, 1973] lecture at [the University of California at] Irvine [in a lecture series on the World War II Japanese American Evacuation][2] that you were hoping to keep the services of a young lady.
Tanaka
No, no, that was my daughter Christine!
Mitson
Your daughter is working in your office?
Tanaka
I was largely in publishing for many years, and we still do some. We publish for clients, you know. They just subsidize publications. I have one client that we've had for nearly seventeen years, the California Federal Savings and Loan Association. There's a certain amount of production and coordinating work that has to be done, and my daughter Christine is very good at it. As a matter of fact, I used to have her work with clients like Dillingham Land Corporation and Tishman Realty and Construction Company and Great Western Financial Corporation. I had difficulty keeping her because they'd keep offering her jobs and paying her more than we were willing to. But she's married now, of course, and she's a housewife, and I get her part-time to just handle the publications. She does most of it from home.
Mitson
Oh, I see.
Tanaka
But I have a problem keeping her help. (laughter)
Mitson
You mentioned grandparents. Were you speaking of your wife's parents?
Tanaka
Yes.
Is your wife [Jean Takamura Tanaka] a Nisei, also?
Tanaka
Yes, she is. She was born here in Los Angeles.
Mitson
Your daughter who is in Japan, is she married?
Tanaka
No, she's not. It's very interesting. She [Jeanine] was on the verge of getting married. I don't think she intends to, but she was dating a young man here before she went to Japan. He was an engineering graduate of Purdue University, and he was of Polish descent—a young man named Nick Kurek. We liked him very much; my wife did and her mother did. But I think when Jeanine began to feel that she was being cornered, then she took off for Antioch. We were then subsequently invited to Nick's wedding to another girl. (laughter) And we hear from him quite regularly. Then she came back from Antioch briefly, and she was dating a young man. I can't even remember his name. He was of Swedish extraction. And they were quite serious. He had proposed, and she indicated that she had other worlds to conquer. So she went off to Tokyo. He followed and went to work for a publishing company. But nothing ever came of it. He married another Japanese girl over there. It's interesting. We correspond a good deal, and Jeanine keeps sending us pictures of young men that she thinks she's going to marry. Then after about the seventh, eighth, ninth, or tenth one, you figure this is all one great big joke, and we tell her so. It's interesting that her requirements are that he be of the Japanese race.
Mitson
Now that wasn't her requirement in earlier years, was it?
Tanaka
Well, I don't really know because she never married the young men, you see.
Mitson
You're not sure.
Tanaka
My wife and I keep saying, "Well, she's out of her mind. She doesn't understand." She thinks she's native Japanese. In Japan, it's extremely unlikely, I think that... My impression is that first it's an accepted thing that people in Japan who are so—what is it?—conscious of stations in life, and the daughter of someone who is an immigrant abroad just simply isn't regarded as first-class. She feels that she's sufficiently native Japanese that she can be comfortable and at home. And we know that she can't. Because she still likes the physical comforts, the standard of living that she is accustomed to here. In Japan, it's expensive to live, and there's quite a broad range of stations. But she keeps telling us she's met someone, and we think that for her to marry someone who was raised in Japan, a male, you know, this is disaster. We share this feeling with everybody. But she thinks that she can be the exception.
Mitson
How many years has she been over there now?
Tanaka
Well, she went over originally in 1962. That makes it eleven years. But she was back here for two years. She comes back periodically.
Mitson
Do you think maybe the fact that she has worked in special areas where she might not be mingling with the local people as much as she would in other kinds of work might isolate her? In other words, do you feel that perhaps she's not really getting a clear picture, even though she's been there so many years?
Tanaka
That's possible, yes. Yes, I think so, although I really haven't been able to quite figure this one out, you know. (laughter) She has many friends, many friends. And I think generally they concur that, if she's going to find a husband, she really ought to come back to the United States. Her sister feels that way, but, you know, she has to do her thing and find it out for herself. She's competent in what she does and she's quite mature, I think, in those areas that she has trained herself in, but I think that only in this other matter she's very immature. You know, we don't develop equally in all areas.
Mitson
So then is it three children you have?
Tanaka
Three, yes. Two daughters and a son. And now we're just left alone with the parrot, just the two of us.
Mitson
In interviewing people[Japanese American], I come across instances quite often of parents who were forced to come into the country illegally. Of course, it would depend on the period. Do you happen to know if that was the case with your father, if he had to come that way?
Tanaka
No, my father didn't. My son-in-law's father did. He tells me how he had to jump ship and then ran for years and years and years, always figuring he was two steps ahead of the law. He's a fascinating man.
Mitson
Is he still living?
Tanaka
Yes.
Mitson
Does he speak English?
Tanaka
Yes, very well. He's an extremely interesting person. He's a mushroom farmer just south of San Francisco in a place called San Martin, California. He's a man who had served in the Imperial Japanese Army in Manchuria, and he was describing some of his personal experiences, you know, the incredible physical hardships. That prepared him for anything! Absolutely anything!
Mitson
When you say he jumped ship, was that a case where he came up through Mexico, do you know?
Tanaka
You know, I really—I'm trying to remember whether he came up through Mexico or just jumped off of some ship in one of the ports. But I was so entranced by his description of all the things he had gone through.
Mitson
When they jumped ship, do you suppose he had to actually dive overboard?
Tanaka
I would think so. He had to swim or climb aboard. That's how I think of jumping ship. Because you can't come through the normal way; you'd get blocked. There were many who did that. As a matter of fact, I think one of the things I used to hear about when I was editing the Rafu Shimpo [Los Angeles Daily Japanese News] was that within the Little Tokyo community [of Los Angeles]—it was one of the unfortunate things that people said—was the insecurity and the feeling that even though legally they were supposed to be permanent residents that some families, you know, had got started in this way and so they felt extremely...
Mitson
Insecure?
Tanaka
Yes, right.
Mitson
I'm interested in this point, because one lady I interviewed pointed out to me that her father was always very anxious to do anything authorities asked him to do, even after the war, up until the time he died, because he was afraid, due to this fact that he had come in illegally.
Tanaka
Yes.
Mitson
And I'm interested in your opinion about that factor as it relates to the [Japanese American] Evacuation, because it isn't mentioned in books, to my knowledge. Do you feel that was a partial factor in compliance with orders to evacuate?
Tanaka
Yes, I don't think there's any question about it. The only thing is to what degree, because no one ever counted noses and said that there were so many of them and what percentage. I used to wonder. I remember once at Salt Lake City, [Utah], Morton Grodzins[3] and I were discussing this. We shared a room when the University of California [Evacuation and Resettlement Study][4] had a meeting there. Morton had done a lot of interviewing, you know, in the camps and all; and he said to me once, "Do you know, just making a guess, I think maybe 5 percent." He said, "I have nothing to go on, except my own reactions to conversations." Because he was doing—well, he wasn't taping his oral histories—but he was interviewing
Mitson
I think the fact that if people had resisted going into camps, they faced the possibility of those who had come illegally being deported immediately, then that would have left the families just with the current generation.
Tanaka
That's right.
Mitson
And the current generation averaged twenty years of age or younger, so that would have meant...
Tanaka
Oh, in many cases families would be children in preschool and grade school and teens. I think they would be more in that category than those who were old enough to fend for themselves.
Mitson
So that even, say, a family whose parents might have come in legally, they would probably have the welfare of their friends in mind, whose parents came in illegally.
Tanaka
Oh, yes!
Mitson
It would not only have influenced the family that had that circumstance, but do you think it would have influenced other families as well?
Tanaka
Well, I think so. Frank Miyamoto used this expression that, I guess, is sociological, and that was "in-group solidarity." In the Japanese communities on the West Coast, whether it was Little Tokyo [in Los Angeles] or San Francisco or Seattle, or the farming communities, there was a close-knit feeling among the Japanese residents, simply because the non-Japanese world outside was, you know, inclined to be either hostile or threatening. You needed to close ranks and to protect one another. So what was good for you was good for all. Now I think this general feeling prevailed a great deal more than in most communities that make up our population.
Mitson
I also want to touch a little bit on the fact that at that stage, for the most part, the Issei were the leaders of the community, were they not?
Tanaka
Oh, yes. No question. Yes, they were.
Mitson
You happened to be rather in a leadership position, but you were an exception rather than the rule, weren't you?
Tanaka
Yes, well, but I was not in a leadership position, as subsequent events turned out. I don't think any of the Nisei were, in a true sense, you know, either accepted or qualified to lead this population. One, because
Mitson
So would you characterize your role just prior to the war as more of a liaison person in the sense that you were in a situation of dealing with American authorities?
Tanaka
Yes.
Mitson
Because the leadership in the community was not really in a position to do that?
Tanaka
Well, let me tell you very specifically, as I look back and analyze, what we did. I was English-language editor of the Rafu Shimpo. That was my primary job. I was one of two editors; Louise Suski, who had preceded me by ten years, was the other editor. When [the attack on] Pearl Harbor [naval base in Honolulu, Hawaii] came [on December 7, 1941], I went to jail; H. T. Komai, the publisher, went to jail; and all the other people who were running that publication were arrested and held in custody. I came out after a certain number of days and suddenly was asked to be the editor, not just of the English section, but of the entire publication. I accepted, simply because...
Mitson
Excuse me. Asked by whom?
Tanaka
By the son of the publisher [Akira Komai] because, in terms of the financial control, he now had succeeded his father, you see. And I was to run that. Well, as I look back, I remember it was really a ceretaker job until we got closed up, because I came out of custody in mid-December, or late December, and we were closed up, as I recall, at the end of March [1942]. So I had several months in which, theoretically, Akira Komai, the son of the publisher, and I were to run that. Well, I can't even read Japanese! (laughter) You apply that circumstance. How in the world, see, was I going to lead this thing? You're not a substitute. You think you are. But we were called upon in this period to kind of negotiate with those authorities who were in a position to change our lives, and we did. And often we gave the answers which really were hardly satisfactory; and even if we gave the answers that we thought were right, did they really reflect the feeling and the genuine support of the people we were supposed to be representing? And I think this is what happened at Manzanar, too. By the time we were evacuated to Manzanar, I had a feeling that was kind of ridiculous, because the so-called leadership—and I think—I identified myself in those days with the Japanese American Citizens League [JACL]...
Mitson
Were you an actual member?
Tanaka
Yes, I was. I had a national office. I was supposed to be in charge of their program of publicity at that time, and I had a small budget. We were running it from the newspaper. And we were trying to get favorable publication of articles and letters, et cetera, in all the California newspapers. We thought this was one way which, with the written word, we could communicate what our position was. But it was an impossible situation, because if you're going to lead something, you've got to have a constituency. And we had not earned it, we had inherited it in a situation where there was a great deal of fear and uneasiness and mistrust and suspicion. This is, I think, what happened, so that when the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] and the Naval Intelligence and all the other groups came in and took the leadership of this community, you know, and put them into camps, then we really didn't have a base from which you could organize any resistance or anything. You just simply had people who were fearful, uncertain, and didn't even know their legal rights. So I think this is what happened.
Mitson
So the power base was taken away.
Completely.
Mitson
The ones the people would normally look up to for advice were gone.
Tanaka
That's right.
Mitson
I'm going to mention, for the purpose of the tape, that we are skipping a considerable portion of your life and the prewar period, and I'm hoping someday we can go further into that. But for the purpose of time today, we'll go on to the Manzanar period and find out what you can tell us about that. These questions I'm going to give you are rather basic ones, and you did address yourself to them in your recent lecture at the University of California, Irvine, to a great extent, but maybe you can now elaborate upon them. Just consider them as sort of takeoff points and don't necessarily confine yourself to the question. You mentioned in your lecture that you went to Manzanar rather than Santa Anita [Assembly Center in Arcadia, California] through choice. I was wondering, what were the circumstances of that choice, since most people weren't able to choose where they could be evacuated.
Tanaka
Well, that's correct. I think people were told to be ready, and they would go according to where they lived. But in the period between Pearl Harbor and the evacuation, I had the opportunity in representing the newspaper [ Rafu Shimpo ] to visit the Santa Anita Assembly Center and the Pomona Assembly Center [at the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds in Pomona, California], as I recall. We were told that if we were to avail ourselves of the opportunity early to uproot ourselves and go, we might go to Santa Anita, because from there we would have a chance to be shipped inland. So the choice was an option early. But we elected to wait until the very end because we thought maybe they [the United States government] wouldn't do it [go through with the evacuation action].
Mitson
Was your visit to the Santa Anita center before it was actually occupied?
Tanaka
Yes. It was being made ready for occupation.
Mitson
Oh. Did the others have that opportunity?
Tanaka
No, not very many. We were on a so-called committee. There was a gentleman named Carl Cover, as I remember, who was an executive at Douglas Aircraft, and a young man named Frank Yamaguchi who was employed at Douglas. He was one of the few Nisei at that time getting jobs outside the [Japanese American] community; that was unusual. Frank was a member of a small committee that the newspapermen had gathered together. We were seeking alternative means by which groups of us might go out to inland areas away from the Western Defense Command and develop wartime self-supporting communities. Mr. Cover had indicated that he would enlist some people to help us, so we were meeting at his home in Santa Monica. This was one of the efforts that we made. And then, as I remember, this man, Isamu Noguchi,[6] had organized a group, and we met with him. He said that he could find properties in Arizona where, by getting people who had certain skills and organizing a community, we might go there. There must have been perhaps a dozen other such proposals from different people, and in the rather desperate and urgent effort to try to find ways by which we could avoid going into government camps, I think a visit to Santa Anita came about. All of these were great plans. Joe Masaoka came up with half a dozen very interesting things. As I remember, we would have wound up in Utah. Then I recall Joe Shinoda, who was a member of the editorial advisory board of the Rafu Shimpo, was very vocal about how stupid the whole thing was. He was going to fight it, and he would never go to a relocation camp. He never did. He took his family and flew to Colorado. Joe was one of the more affluent Japanese Americans. He had a very successful multimillion dollar business, and he grew San Lorenzo roses in nurseries. He had a fleet of trucks operating up and down the West Coast. He just simply felt that the whole thing was wrong and should be resisted to the very end. He had some plans that he came up with. But in the final analysis, we were unable to do much, so we just went to camp.
Mitson
Would you identify Joe Masaoka?
Yes. Joe Grant Masaoka, at that time, in prewar days, operated a successful fruit and vegetable market in the West Los Angeles area with, I think, three of his brothers—Ben and Ike and, I believe, Hank. I don't know whether his brother Tad was old enough. In any event, his business was in the produce industry, but he was very active in the Japanese American Citizens League. The JACL had what they called the Southern District Council, and I believe Joe was chairman of that council on several occasions. After the evacuation, Joe and I were at Manzanar. Then we went to apply for jobs as reporters for the Manzanar Free Press [the official camp newspaper]. We were latecomers at Manzanar, so we wound up delivering papers instead of being reporters. And then we were asked by, I think, Dr. Solon Kimball[7] and Dr. Redfield,[8] who came as a consultant from the University of Chicago, if we would become documentary historians. So this is what Joe Masaoka and I did for seven months at Manzanar. That's it.
Mitson
Was Mike Masaoka one of Joe Grant Masaoka's brothers?
Tanaka
Yes. Mike was the third of the Masaoka brothers. Mike never came to camp. He was up at Salt Lake City [as the JACL's executive secretary],[9] and we were in constant correspondence with him, getting directions from him as to how we ought to reactivate the JACL's activity inside the camp. When you look back on it, it seems kind of funny, but we were serious.
Mitson
Was Joe the oldest Masaoka brother?
Tanaka
Joe was the oldest, yes. The next one was Ben, whom I was very close to. Ben fought for the 442d [Regimental Combat Team].[10] He died in Europe. He never came back.
Mitson
How does it happen that Mike went to Salt Lake City and the other brothers did not?
Tanaka
Well, all of us had the option of not going to camp, if we just simply moved.[11]
Mitson
And he did that?
Tanaka
Well, he was regarded as too valuable by the JACL. They just moved their headquarters from San Francisco to Salt Lake City, and he went there and directed the activities of the organization from there.
Mitson
Was he the president at that time?
Tanaka
No, he was what they called the Executive Secretary. He was out there to work.
Mitson
So the national JACL set up their headquarters in Salt Lake City?
Tanaka
In Salt Lake City, yes.
Mitson
Had they had a JACL branch there before that?
Tanaka
Yes, they had, but the national staff moved there, you see.
(long interruption in the tape due to technical difficulties)
Mitson
During our break we were talking about history books. Could you please repeat what you said?
Tanaka
Well, after the war I became head of publications for the American Technical Society, a midwestern publishing firm that specialized in technical books and industrial arts education. It was largely for the junior college level and some high schools. In the early 1950s we thought we would branch out and go into the social sciences. I negotiated the purchase of some manuscripts. Well, one was a book called Psychology for Life Adjustment [Chicago: American Technical Society, 1953]. A gentleman named [Charles Richard] Foster, down at the University of Florida, was the author. Another book was United States History: The Growth of Our Land [Chicago: American Technical Society, 1953], by a Merle Burke
I, subsequently, attended many meetings of and was a member of the committee of an organization called the Chicago Book Clinic, and became exposed to what was being done at the level of teaching materials, where you begin to have some effect on what students at the secondary-school level believed, the images they had. I came back to the West Coast and was exposed, I think, to a lot of the ranting (laughter) of the young militants who feel that the way to express themselves is... Here, now, they want to clobber Earl Warren[12] and deny him a platform [to speak]. They think that they are positively and constructively accomplishing some good, because they feel better by reason of getting these emotions out. I think a lot of it is misguided. Maybe it's necessary. I'm not going to question for one moment their right to do this, because this is a part of our society. But if they're truly looking for ways by which they want to correct some of these problems, then I just don't think that this blind feeling of being anti-Warren really accomplishes something.
I'll say this. I remember the years before Morton Grodzins died [in 1964]. You know, he died as a young man in his forties of cancer, and I was quite close to him because he became chairman of the Department of Political Science of the University of Chicago, and subsequent to that he was made director of the University of Chicago Press. His office was one block from mine at the American Technical Society. And Morton, who had, I believe, interviewed Earl Warren and knew him personally, wrote a book, I think, called The Loyal and the Disloyal[: Social Boundaries of Patriotism and Treason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956)]. He had a theory. He said that much of what Earl Warren did on the Supreme Court stemmed, of course, from his feeling about what had happened in California during this period, and that whatever we may ascribe to Warren's influence in extending the area of civil rights, of which we are all beneficiaries—I don't care whether we're Asian Americans, or Black Americans, or Chicano Americans—that we have to look at the whole man and the whole career. And that for Japanese Americans to waste their energies trying to crucify this man, it was merely to take one small segment of his total career and say, "That's all that's important." While they, by the irony of history, are the beneficiaries of much that he made possible. Doesn't he get any credit at all for that? This is what makes me feel that these young people are really not looking at... You know, life is not just one narrow segment. I think that they have tunnel vision, and that they are not giving themselves an opportunity to learn and to grow, nor are they giving this man the same fairness that they demand for themselves.
Mitson
Last year, Earl Warren was invited to speak at the commencement exercises at Sacramento State University [in Sacramento, California]. There was some agitation among the students there against that, and as a result he asked to be relieved of that obligation to speak.
Tanaka
Well, you know, I probably don't represent the right generation, but I'd go to hear him talk if I knew that he was going to speak. (laughter) I think he would certainly be a very rich source of recollection. He did say—and I think this is what many people probably don't forgive him for—that the very fact that there had
Mitson
I don't believe that he has made any statements in recent years about his attitude. Probably he feels that his record speaks for itself and that he doesn't need to defend himself. Unfortunately, though, people read things in isolation. Of course, many people who later perhaps would have regretted what they said, said some very strange things back in those days.
I want to go on now to the situation when you were in Manzanar. You spoke briefly about the kind of work you were doing there. What do you think were the basic causes for the discontent that came to a head at Manzanar?
Tanaka
Do you mean specifically what caused the rioting [in December 1942]?
Mitson
Well, yes, or even before the rioting—the times when some of you knew that you were in disfavor with other members of the camp. Could you kind of outline, as best you recall it, the sort of things that, perhaps, you personally knew about that were going on, the irritating factors?
Tanaka
Gee, I would have to do a lot of looking back. It would seem to me there was the overall feeling of uncertainty and fear. Someone once told me that, if you confine ten thousand people in a one-square-mile enclosure and oblige them to live in conditions where there is lack of privacy, then you're going to get problems anyway, just out of that situation. It's communal living—people who come from so many different backgrounds, having only one thing in common, race, and being denied freedom of movement beyond those walls. But as I look back, probably one of the most aggravating and frustrating sources of this irritating thing which would contribute to unrest was that there existed a double standard, depending upon whether you belonged to one race or another. Here you had worked every day side by side with someone who probably was less competent than yourself, say, the doctors. An interned [Japanese American] doctor would get nineteen or sixteen dollars per month]. Then someone else [of non-Japanese ancestry] would be coming in on a government payroll and his salary would be many, many times that—and probably doing less work. This was pervasive throughout the camp. The economic structure was based upon a racist principle, you know. It was basically unfair. I think people were aware of this double standard, not only in how you were rewarded for what you did but also in the way you lived, and you were reminded of this every day. Evacuees were in tar paper barracks that were quite minimal, and the staff administrators lived in comfortable finished cottages. So you had the visual reminder constantly and daily of the differences. Then, also, in the early stages, I think, there was a good deal of grumbling because some of the administrators were less than—the rumor went around camp—honest with the disbursement of what the evacuees, or the people in the camp, felt belonged to them: food and whatever else the government was providing. And wherever you have this kind of thing going on, then the beginnings of discontent set in. But overall, I think, there was also a great deal of fear, since there were two different schools of thought as to who was going to win the war. The lines were drawn rather sharply there.
Mitson
What was the makeup of the people involved in those two different schools of thought?
Tanaka
Well, I think that in a very general way it was the Issei and Kibei who felt that Japan was going to win, and the Nisei felt that the United States would win. I think this is oversimplifying it, but it's as accurate as you can get.
Mitson
There was some overlapping, I suppose.
Tanaka
Oh, sure.
Mitson
For instance, there would have been some Kibei in the group that felt the United States would win?
Oh, yes, right. Well, then you have to remember this, too—you might feel that the United States would win; it might not necessarily mean that you wanted the United States to win, but you wouldn't necessarily want it. I mean, I think that it was a little more complicated than that. But I think that without recognizing it, with most people it boiled down to how you were going to behave and act and what you were going to do. I think this is what happened. I think people who said they were going to live here [in the United States] did one of several things. They had their college-age children apply for student relocation. They filled out questionnaires and answered, "Yes, we want to get out of camp." They went out on furloughs to top sugar beets. They looked for the Quakers [Society of Friends] or whoever would sponsor them to get out. They wanted to relocate. They volunteered for service in the United States Army. This type of activity went on. And then there were those who felt that there was no future in this country—whether or not at one time they desired to live here permanently—and those who weren't going to have a chance to, and those who actively said, "We don't want anymore of this country." These are the people who sat on their hands and said, "We don't want any part of this other activity. Just be quiet and we'll go whichever way we have to go." Or some felt, "Those people who were agitating to get us into the service, they're troublemakers, and let's kill them." You know, this is about how it went. I think that this is how the trouble began to develop, brewing at Manzanar and the other camps.
Mitson
We were wondering about the role that rumor might have played, especially in the early period. Things such as resettlement and going to colleges really came later, didn't it?
Tanaka
Well, rumor was a tremendous factor in what happened at these camps. I haven't read the published studies, but I knew of a discussion that took place. I think Tom Shibutani did some studies on the anatomy of rumor in relocation camps.[13] I was fascinated by how he traced the origin of a particular rumor as it spread through the camp, how quickly it was out there, and how people identified according to these rumors as to what they were or were not. This affected the role of the JACL rather dramatically in these stages. It affected everyone who was either physically assaulted or beaten or threatened. These people generally were high on the rumor list early. There was no question that numerically it wasn't too silent a majority in those days, that people felt, I think, closer to the fact that they were Japanese, first and most importantly. Whether they could be recognized ultimately as Americans of Japanese descent, it was touch and go, I think. It took a great deal of faith and influence, I think, from the outside as people reached in to reassure those of us who really had no basis for believing, excepting to say that we hoped and wished this was going to happen; because in the early months it seemed pretty dreary and dismal. There wasn't too much hope that we weren't headed on a one-way journey either to some island in the Pacific or back to Japan, no matter what we wanted or hoped. So I think that you're right. I think it was in the later stages that student relocation and resettlement became an actuality. But you see the interesting thing is that from the outset the JACL and its leaders at Salt Lake City were strenuously and actively working to bring this about. But the opportunity for most people in camp to know that or, if they were told that, to believe it, just didn't come about until long after all the rioting and upsetting things took place in the camp.
Mitson
What month was it that you went to camp?
Tanaka
The end of March or early April [1942]. I can't really remember.
Mitson
And how soon after that did you start on your historian's job?
Tanaka
Probably at the end of the month, because we didn't last very long as delivery people [for the Manzanar Free Press ]. (laughter) One, I felt that by reason of our just being there, that the Rafu Shimpo and the people I had represented had been discredited pretty much in the camp. In other words, in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo community, our paper was the largest, and we couldn't help but feel we were the respected publication. And then, by reason of things that we had attempted to do among the community, we had the feeling of both acceptance and, you know, a certain degree—if you want to call it—of leadership, although in terms of the total community, no.
Mitson
You're speaking of the Little Tokyo community?
Right, and of the Southern California Japanese community. We had a network of correspondents all through the southern California area up to Fresno. Right after I had gone to work for Mr. Komai, I had asked him for permission to organize the correspondents, so once or twice a year we would bring them in. We'd have a great evening and a banquet. We had a close-knit community; we thought we did. And it was. We instituted publications, special issues like a graduation, or commencement issue, and a holiday issue. We organized what we called the Nisei Business Bureau, which was really a promotional effort to contact representatives of large industries to find out if they would make available opportunities for the employment of Japanese Americans. In connection with that, I attended some conferences among Nisei students at Berkeley in 1940 to relate to them what we were doing here in Southern California to expand the horizon for getting jobs and getting into professions. We did that, and then we also tried to get housing. That is, I had myself experienced the almost impossible difficulty in buying a house, even if you had the money. So we thought by working with developers and banks and escrow people, people who were in the real estate industry, we could make restrictive racial housing covenants less effective.
This is one area where the Sansei give Earl Warren no credit. The very fact that the homes that they live in today—that they're able to go literally anywhere and buy without any difficulty, that they're not hemmed in, in the undesirable parts of the city, having to pay 15, 20, and 30 percent more just because the supply is limited while the demand is great—these things have changed, and Earl Warren was largely responsible for this. But then, we were doing this type of thing even in those days. I don't know whether we had any particular success or not, but the effort was all in that direction. The camp destroyed those efforts early.
You know, I had a funny experience. I don't know the new editor of the Rafu Shimpo. She's a young woman named Ellen Endo. About a month ago—I have some business interests in San Diego and San Francisco—and I was due down in San Diego to attend meetings. But I had this telephone call from Robert Vosper out at UCLA. He's the [university] librarian, and I had a call from his office saying that UCLA had completed the microfilming of the Rafu Shimpo and the Kashu Mainichi [Japan-California Daily News], and would I come and give a talk at the dedication? I said, "What for?" He said that Akira Komai, the present publisher, had said he wouldn't, and it was suggested that I go in his place. I said, "Well, I'm not about to. I worked there for a very short time, for about five or six years. And it has been about thirty years since then." But he kept calling. So I finally called Aki and asked him, "What is it?" And Akira Komai said that he didn't want to. Well, I know he's a very retiring person. He didn't want to do the talking. So it turned out that I agreed. I canceled my appointments in San Diego and San Francisco, and I went there to UCLA and gave a brief talk based on what I knew of his father and the publisher of the other paper. I don't subscribe to the Rafu, but someone sent me a copy of what Ellen Endo [the English-language editor of the Rafu Shimpo ] had written about what I had said. It was totally a misquotation, and left an impression that was completely outside... I said, "My gosh!" (laughter)
Mitson
After you'd put yourself out!
Tanaka
Right. They made a tape of what I did say, and somebody sent the transcript of it to me. Tad Uyeno, who used to write for the Rafu Shimpo —he's over in San Gabriel [Los Angeles County] and owns a nursery—he called and asked, "Well, will you tell me what you did say?" I think somebody in my office sent it [the transcript] to him. I read what I really did say and what I was purported to have said, and there is a very substantial difference. I had just simply read it from what had been prepared. But I think this is part of history. This is how history gets written or garbled. (laughter)
Mitson
And how former newspaper editors find themselves misquoted! (laughter)
Tanaka
Well, yes.
Mitson
Yes, I recall you mentioning that in your talk for the lecture series [at the University of California, Irvine].
Tanaka
Yes.
Mitson
I want to ask you if your recruitment as a historian at Manzanar was a direct result, do you think, of your
Tanaka
I think it's possible, although Joe Masaoka hadn't been. I think we just happened to be there when they needed somebody. I was so fascinated. I never even knew what anthropology meant, you know, and then I met this very distinguished Robert Redfield from the University of Chicago. I found that the meetings we had with him were quite, well, they were learning experiences. I enjoyed meeting and talking with him. He came, and suddenly in the midst of all the despair and the negative feelings we were having, I thought, "Well, this is a great opportunity to learn something that we'd never had." He convinced both Joe and me that we could do some valuable work by each of us, as accurately as possible, just simply recounting those things about camp life that we observed each day. It got to be fun. At the end of each day, we made the rounds. We went to the camouflage factory and the guayule farm, and talked to the people in the mess halls and in the laundry room and all over camp. We would go to the nurseries and the churches; Joe even went with me to services. I was baptized and confirmed in the camp by Bishop [Charles] Reifsnider, who was the former Episcopal bishop [president of Rikkyo University] of Tokyo. Mrs. Reifsnider became my godmother. I had never belonged to any church. Joe, who was of the Mormon faith at the time, came to communion because he figured that was the only place we'd get any alcohol. (laughter)
We were having a great time, we thought, until later when we discovered that we were being accused of being spies. It was quite a shock to us to learn that about the jobs that we thought we were performing simply to help compile the history of the camp. I think that what we did write and leave—and I'm sorry I never kept much of what went on—that we would just simply each day write, you know, Documentary Report Number so and so. I remember when we got into a gory triangle and a murder up at Manzanar. A young woman with an older husband and two children, I think, had an affair with a young sugar beet worker and the husband murdered her and then committed suicide. It was this type of thing. I think we tried to get as complete and as thorough a picture of everything that went on in the camp as we could. This can get you into trouble, because you get awfully nosy, you see.
Mitson
Did you go around camp with a little pad of paper and a pencil?
Tanaka
Yes. Yes. They knew what we were doing. (laughter) We were not sophisticated enough. We had no bugging devices, no electronic equipment. (laughter) We just simply went and said that we were documentary historians. This was our job. We would interview people and ask permission to quote them. Often we would quote them without their permission because this is what we said they told us. We must have gotten to be known as a couple of very nosy snoopers.
Mitson
Do you know what happened to those records?[14]
Tanaka
No, I don't.
Mitson
Was it under the University of Chicago?
Tanaka
No. This was under the War Relocation Authority at Manzanar.
Mitson
But the man who was instructing you, you said, was from the University of Chicago, right?
Tanaka
Well, no, Dr. Redfield was the man who introduced us to it. But there was another gentleman out of Washington, D.C., with the War Relocation Authority, Dr. Solon Kimball. He was in charge of it. I've lost track of him. I don't know. I have heard since of Dr. Redfield.
Mitson
Dorothy [Swaine] Thomas had nothing to do with the project, did she?
Tanaka
No. I was employed by the University of California [Evacuation and Resettlement Study, directed by Dorothy Thomas] after the riot [at Manzanar]. We were removed from Manzanar, and I was sent to [an abandonded Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp in] Death Valley. I think on the first night out at Death Valley, or the second night, Dorothy Thomas sent Morton Grodzins to meet me at Death Valley to
Mitson
Do you still have any of those old files?
Tanaka
If they are around. My brother is in Chicago, and much of what I had there I had him take. He lives in Winnetka, [Illinois], you see, and in Chicago. I had two homes. I had a home in Chicago for many years and here. It has gotten scattered now. I've had no reason for looking it up, so it must be somewhere around here.
Mitson
That would include your diary, too?
Tanaka
It probably would, yes.
Mitson
Who sent you the files?
Tanaka
I think a gentleman named Thomas Lynch. He was an attorney here who was active in the Democratic Central Committee. He was a very interesting man. He died quite a few years ago.
You know, it's very interesting. I try to recall the people with whom I corresponded from Manzanar, because I think that each letter that we received had a disproportionate significance, in that you needed to be refueled and reassured that you weren't just completely lost. This man's letters were always, "So what are you complaining about?" He was of Irish descent, and he could recall some of the things that his forebears went through in this country. I think there was a man named Clyde Shoemaker. He was an assistant city attorney here. He had made a talk before some luncheon [service] club—maybe it was the Rotary or Lions—in which he echoed what General [John] Dewitt[16] had said—that there was only one solution to the whole [Japanese American] problem: Ship them all back [to Japan], they'll never belong here. And Mr. Lynch said, "Why don't you write him [Shoemaker] a letter?" He suggested it, so I did. I got back a letter from Mr. Shoemaker. It really was something! Well, he just simply reiterated how he felt: "The kindest thing that can happen to you people is just to get lost." You see. Now I had some good friends here, too. A man named Louis Ardouin, whom I had met and used to lunch with quite frequently, was a real estate appraiser. Out of the kindness of his heart, he would write to me and say, "You know, really, for your own good, you should go back to Japan." (laughter)
Mitson
Oh, my!
Tanaka
You know, with friends like this, who needs enemies? Well, many years later, of course, I recall meeting Louis Ardouin, and he acknowledged that maybe he was wrong. But he said his motives were kind. He and I had a mutual friend, a man named George Smedley Smith, who had been active in a group called Forty-Plus. This is an organization to get jobs for people after age forty. I sent Smedley a copy of Ardouin's letter, and he wrote the most amusing and, to me, reassuring letter to Ardouin, telling him what a knucklehead he was, that he should think this way. So we go to Japan; who do we know? We don't know anybody. These people at least you knew, and I was always reminded by what Joe Shinoda frequently said: If the danger was that great to us that we were likely to be assaulted in the streets or hung on the nearest lamppost, truly, "I'd rather have it done by people who knew me than by strangers." (laughter)
Mitson
I think that at this stage I will turn this interview over to Dave Hacker, who is writing about Manzanar.[17]
You were talking a bit earlier about the riot. After you went to the CCC camp in Death Valley, you wrote a report for Dorothy Swaine Thomas. Have you read her [and Richard Nishimoto's] book, The Spoilage [Japanese-American Evacuation and Resettlement During World War II (Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 1946)], in which she cites your report?[18]
Tanaka
I have some years ago, yes.
Hacker
Do you remember it well enough to give your opinion on it as to whether she really applied what you said?
Tanaka
Well, I don't remember now. I recall that at the time it was published that I felt that it was an accurate enough representation of what I had submitted to her. Was that the book she did with Richard Nishimoto?
Hacker
Yes, it was.
Tanaka
I remember meeting Mr. Nishimoto and being at many [Evacuation and Resettlement Study] conferences with him, and I thought they did a good job.
Hacker
What were your circumstances at the time of the riot itself?
Tanaka
Oh, I was in camp, and we lived in Block 36. On the day of the riot, I was notified by several people that the rioters were going to be going after the people on their various death lists, and that it would be advisable for me not to be in my own barrack at a given time that evening, but to probably be at some other location. I was told this by neighbors on my block and on the other block, Block 35. My wife, mother-in-law, and father-in-law felt then that I ought to be with my older brother. So my question was, of course, "Perhaps we all ought to leave the area?" They said, "No, it isn't necessary." That by the nature of what was happening in camp, they were rather singular in their listing of people and there was no danger to anybody else. So I had dinner in a mess hall in another block, then spent that evening with my brother and people in his barrack when the rioting had broken out. Out of concern for what might be happening to my family, I joined the mob—I guess, the rioters—as they went by the block where I was staying and went to Block 36. So I was there when they tried to find me. But I've never been really able to figure out... In a camp of ten thousand people, where both Joe Masaoka and I were quite, I thought, reasonably well-known... Our names were better known than our faces, although people knew what we were doing. It was a very dark night, and we were all dressed alike in these Navy-issue peacoats. It was a cold night. Most people were rather warmly dressed. So I saw much of the moving about, but I saw no actual violence.
Hacker
How exactly did you go about getting the information for the report that you wrote? You see, the reason that I am inquiring is because most of the reports that have been written on the riot itself have been taken from Dorothy Swaine Thomas's book, The Spoilage, which in turn draws largely from your report.
Tanaka
Well, I was only one of many. I think Ralph Smeltzer, who drove me out of camp, provided Morton Grodzins with a good deal of information. I think Morton interviewed people who were on the police force at Manzanar and who were there when the shooting took place, but who, for reasons of their own safety, denied permission to name them or quote them. I think that much of the material that Morton gathered at the time was not hearsay. It was based on firsthand observations by people who were there. He got it from the administrative personnel and from the evacuees who were there.[19] In any event, Ralph Smeltzer came for me and said that I'd better get out of camp. He drove me to the barracks where people who had been on the death list were being kept, and then were removed to Death Valley.
Hacker
I think you mentioned before something about the beatings that happened. There was some violence and things like this.
Tanaka
Well, there was the beating of Fred Tayama. He was number one on the death list.[20]
Hacker
Before this, were there other instances of gang violence or instances where any group or the violent groups pointed you out and said that you were one of the people that they should get, or something like that? Were
Tanaka
Well, to my knowledge, we had heard some rumors a few days before, but neither Joe Masaoka nor I—and we were lumped pretty much together as the two people who were doing the same thing—could recall later that we had actually been threatened. I never had been, and he never had been. But there was no question that on that evening they were out to kill both of us as well as others on the death list. Yet, I think that I never felt apprehensive, and people whom we met and who later were identified as those who were out to get us before the riot were affable and cordial and friendly. I felt when we were debating the issue of urging young men to sign up for volunteer Army service, it was a dignified, intelligent, and friendly debate, that it was not going to wind up as, you know, "We don't like what you're saying, so we're going to knock you off." But we were given... As a matter of fact, I became so confident, and even somewhat exhilarated by the idea of matching ideas, that in the last two or three instances when Joe was with me, I volunteered and did speak in Japanese about our ideas. We felt that we had to go the second mile; that we should take this position because we didn't want to live in Japan under any circumstances; that we felt this was our home, and everything that we had stood for. I thought we communicated this. They were polite and listening—even those who sat on the other side of the table, who followed us, and said we were nitwits and that we didn't know what we were doing. They didn't indicate that they were about to murder us. So this was an experience—that they would accuse us of being dogs and informers. Had they given us an opportunity to respond, we would, of course, have attempted to set them right and tell them that this was not our function, and that we had no intention of doing it. We wouldn't knowingly perform that kind of duty; that we were there trying to defend a position that we thought we could identify with, and we felt it was for the good of most of us. But this got nowhere.
Hacker
Well, there were people who were violently against you, such as Joe Kurihara.
Tanaka
Yes, that's right.
Hacker
You mentioned Joe Kurihara and Tokie Slocum before in your [aforementioned] lecture [at the University of California, Irvine].[21] I wonder if you could expand upon that?
Tanaka
Well, you know, I had regarded both Kurihara and Slocum as personal friends before World War II. Kurihara, because he was a very pleasant, congenial, friendly, and outgoing man who used to visit me at the Rafu Shimpo. He was an older Nisei and I always enjoyed talking with people who could give me the benefit of their experiences. I knew he was active in the Commodore Perry Post of the American Legion. Tokie Slocum was a member of the editorial board of the Rafu Shimpo, so I had occasion to know his views. I liked what he stood for. I agreed with the substance of what he believed in, but I couldn't stand his methods or his style. He was an extremist in so many ways. He was dogmatic, very assertive, and not very cordial or polite. He used to try to dominate some of our discussions, but I think we had some pretty solid people on our editorial board. In other words, to me he epitomized the—I've been to a lot of American Legion rallies—people who wear their flag on their sleeve. You never know what their private thinking or their private lives are like, or the kind of people they really are, and they're often personally obnoxious. Slocum was one of these people. So I didn't like him, personally, that much. I liked Kurihara as a human being much more. But in camp, the views Slocum expressed—by a stroke of irony—represented what Joe Masaoka and I believed in. In this war, we were Americans, not Japanese, and when we had to make the choice, this was where we belonged. Kurihara took the other view. In camp, Kurihara never personally or openly expressed to me a dislike for me to the extent that I should arm myself or be equipped to defend myself against his wanting to have us put away. So this, I think, was a surprise. Before Joe Masaoka died, he and I were involved in a number of things. One was a business venture here. We used to think back and say, "You know, life is funny. Joe Kurihara was one of the last people in the world we thought would want to get us knocked off, whereas we wouldn't have put it beyond Slocum." So Manzanar was a puzzle to us. We were glad to get out of there.
Hacker
What do you think of the projects that existed at Manzanar, like the cooperative store and the camouflage net factory? What relation might they have had to the riot?
Well, camouflage nets represented something that were used in the war. I really don't know. As I try to remember, there were some people who didn't want to take part in it and others that did, and most of them thought, "Well, we get paid for it." My father-in-law [Kango Takamura] did some drawings for the guayule rubber project.[22] After all, during the war it was necessary to find substitutes for rubber which had been cut off from us by what the Japanese had done in Southeast Asia. That, too, was regarded in some light as a war project, but I don't think these had great effect one way or the other. Maybe it was a part of the total cumulative effect that anything had. "Here we are, we're stuck in here, now we've been treated like prisoners of war and they want us to help in the war effort." I think some people might have felt unfriendly to that. But by and large, I don't think it had too much to do with the riot. I don't know very much about the cooperative store, excepting that I remember it was there. I think most of the things that went on in that camp... There were so many things that people felt good about. I discovered this after we were out, in trying to get my in-laws to come out of there and they didn't want to.
Mitson
You mentioned a police force when you were talking to Dave. Were you speaking of a police force made up of people of the camp?
Tanaka
Yes, that's right.
Mitson
Do you know if they brought any police in, say, from Lone Pine or Independence?
Tanaka
As I recall, they had one non-Japanese police chief [John Gilkey], and they had an evacuee subchief [Kiyoshi Higashi]. Everyone on the force was a member of the community. That is, they were evacuees.[23]
Mitson
Did they wear uniforms?
Tanaka
No. I was trying to remember how we did identify them. I think they wore bands.
Mitson
Armbands?
Tanaka
Armbands. They might have had a hat, I'm not sure. But there was very little need for them. I think occasionally there was a family quarrel. There was no thievery. The thievery going on was with the administrative personnel and on a large scale. (laughter)
Mitson
There was evidence that that actually was going on? It wasn't just a matter of suspicion?
Tanaka
Well, I would say this: in a court of law it would be difficult to prove.
Mitson
In what sort of ways were the people aware of that, do you know?
Tanaka
In food.
Mitson
I mean, did they notice a shortage of food when there should have been more?
Tanaka
Yes. Well, meat was in great shortage and, say, someone working at the warehouse said, "Did you know that so-and-so, the assistant project director, took two sides of beef in his car and drove off the camp with it?" And that should have gone into hamburgers for us, you see. Now that rumor takes all of about fifteen seconds to get around camp. Or that we should have had chicken stew, but if twenty-five of the chickens have disappeared, then it gets to be a little bit less. People were concerned with food and with eating, and if the rumors were that food that should have come to the evacuees had disappeared down the road because of hanky-panky by people in charge, then it got to be accepted as a matter of course, but it didn't make people like it any more. Whether it was true or not, there was no opportunity for those who were allegedly the victims of this to really get to know.
Mitson
Did you personally know anyone that worked in the warehouse?
My brother. My brother was a night watchman in the mess hall. I got the impression that there was much of this going on. I think Joe Masaoka indicated to me that... Well, as a matter of fact, I think our reports would show that. We documented, quoting different people, without putting them in the position of being likely to be the victims of any kind of retaliation, that this kind of thing was going on. It was a part of the feeling of uneasiness and apprehension on the part of the evacuees.
Mitson
I don't mean to persist, but the reason I want to get into that is to establish the fact that you weren't hearing this as the tenth person in a rumor chain.
Tanaka
Oh, I see! We were talking to people.
Mitson
You were. Did you actually get some information from your brother?
Tanaka
Yes. Oh, yes. Right, as to so-and-so having loaded his car, you see. Let me see, there were other supplies, too. Let's see, they brought in a certain amount of clothing, and there were rumors that some of these were being stolen and sold off elsewhere.
Mitson
Were you able to speak to anyone who had seen that kind of thing happen?
Tanaka
We would report these and send them in. This was kind of naive. Joe and I often used to regret this. We should have had enough carbon paper and kept copies, and we'd have quite a collection of things. This must be like [the] Watergate [scandal during the U.S. presidential administration of Richard M. Nixon], you know. We're writing it but who gets it, you know? (laughter)
Mitson
So, in effect, the administration had the reports of all the rumors that were going around?
Tanaka
Well, if there were people in the administration who were guilty of this, then they must have had us on their blacklist, too, because here were these two dumb snoopers going around and writing all these things. Neither Joe nor I had had enough experience. We had neither the sophistication nor the training to know, and we just had one job: look and see, write it down. That's all we did. So this was raw data. Some of it was hearsay, of course, because we talked to someone who said he was quoting someone else. But much of it was from people who said, "I experienced this." So we wrote it, and this was a part of our report. We were to document the day-to-day living that was in that camp, and that was our job. Later, I had reason to regret it: "Gee, why didn't we save some of that? We would have this much, you know." But we didn't.[24]
Mitson
You could have written a book! (laughter) I wonder about this expression, "They were out to kill us." How did you know they were out to kill you rather than just to beat you up?
Tanaka
Oh, well, yes. We were at Death Valley, and we were getting all kinds of reports from our friends who had attended the rallies. They had beaten up Fred Tayama, and then they had jailed those who had been apprehended for the beating, and it was a demand that these people be released, as I recall. So at several of the blocks they had rallies, you see, demanding the release. The speeches at these rallies were, "Unless they're released, we're going to kill these dogs: Fred Tayama, Joe Masaoka, Togo Tanaka, Tokie Slocum, and down the list."
Mitson
How many were on the list?
Tanaka
A varied number, depending on who you were going to quote, but probably it was up to about five on the death list. After that they would beat them up, you see. So it must have run over to about ten. We didn't know whether we should feel honored or what! (laughter) But Joe and I concluded that we must have earned our place on the list by reason of our activities around the camp. Then, of course, my mother and father were at the camp, too, and they related what had been told to them by their friends and their neighbors. We were on opposite sides of the camp. They were way over in a block on the other side, and they said that we were lucky to get out of there alive. It was uncomfortable for my parents, so they moved from that camp to Utah.
Was that after you were taken out?
Tanaka
Oh, yes, right. One of the reasons is that I felt a little bit apprehensive for them, too, if it were true that I had been on the death list. The people might be a little bit unbalanced. And being concerned about their welfare, I asked if they might not be moved to a different camp. So they were, and they were willing to go, too.
Mitson
So they went to Topaz [War Relocation Center in Utah]?
Tanaka
They went to Topaz, yes. My sister and her husband and family chose to move from the camp immediately. They went on to Chicago. That is, they came to Death Valley for awhile. My other sister, also. My older brother was transferred to [the Granada War Relocation Center in] Amache, Colorado. Then my younger brother and his family were brought to Death Valley, and they subsequently went to Chicago. My wife's mother and father elected to stay in Manzanar. They didn't feel quite as apprehensive, although they were in the barrack at the time. They stayed on straight through. They kept me informed. I think, from these various sources, I concluded that I wasn't just going to be beaten up, that they had intended to do away with certain people, and I happened to be among them.
Mitson
Did Tokie Slocum have a Caucasian father? Is that the reason for the name?
Tanaka
No, I think he was adopted by a farm couple in North or South Dakota [Minot, North Dakota], as a young man. He was raised there in the Midwest by the Slocums. But his Japanese surname was Nishimura. He was Tokutaro Nishimura Slocum. He was kind of an oddball in my estimation, because our backgrounds were different. He came from a community where there were no other Japanese. He had very successfully lobbied for passage by Congress—I think it was in the 1930s—of a law which permitted Japanese American veterans to obtain citizenship. I don't remember all of the details.[25]
Mitson
Veterans of the First World War?
Tanaka
Yes, First World War. He had served in the First World War, as had Joe Kurihara. I haven't been in touch with him since then nor with Joe Kurihara, although I think they're both in this country.
Mitson
I want to refer back to your lecture wherein you referred to the fact that Joe Kurihara had appealed for a reference from you through the Red Cross. Now, in view of this situation where you were on a death list and he was involved in that, may I ask what your response was at that time?
Tanaka
Oh, I was asked merely to indicate whether or not he had been a law-abiding American citizen, loyal to the United States up to World War II, and I responded favorably. Of course, I was, at that time, on the staff of the American Friends Service Committee, and they're Quakers. For me to have done otherwise would have been a denial of what I was supposed to be doing with them. I have never borne him any personal animosity, and I can well understand why he behaved the way he did. This is why I can't understand why the militant Sansei, who have had nothing to do with it, are out to get Earl Warren! (laughter)
Mitson
Well, I certainly want to make the comment that I feel that's a prime example of turning the other cheek. Do you think, then, that he did come back? Do you think he is in this country?
Tanaka
I was told that he is, but I have no way of knowing. I don't know.
Mitson
And he made that attempt to return even before the war was over?
Tanaka
Yes.
Mitson
Then it didn't take him long to change his mind, apparently.
Tanaka
No. No, apparently not. I received word when I was with the American Friends Service Committee. It
Mitson
Did he have a family?
Tanaka
No. He was a single man.
Mitson
I wonder about the people who went on that first trip back to Japan on the Gripsholm.[26] I understand people were exchanged in Africa with people coming back from Japan. Then there may have been another trip, I believe. Do you know if there were more than two trips during the war that sent people back?
Tanaka
No, I don't. I probably have read it. I had a friend who came back from Japan on the first exchange.
Mitson
I understand Ambassador [Joseph C.] Grew was on that exchange.[27]
Tanaka
Yes.
Mitson
Was your friend a Kibei?
Tanaka
No, he was a YMCA [Young Men's Christian Association] worker from Kentucky named Paul Rusch. Paul had been teaching at Saint Paul University in Tokyo, and had started this little camp called Seisenryo up in the mountains. This is where my children subsequently went.
Mitson
The mountains of where?
Tanaka
It's just outside of Tokyo. This is a place that's called KEEP, for Kiyosato Educational Experiment Project. In the 1940s, in Chicago, I helped Paul in his organizing of the American Committee for KEEP. Subsequently, over the years, the committee raised several million dollars. KEEP started with a church, and then with a library, and a 4-H farm; and it's quite a project there now. It had done a great deal of fine work. This is where my older daughter first went to volunteer in the hospital. My other daughter and son had also gone there. Paul came back on the Gripsholm and then, subsequently, went back to Japan in the American Occupation on the Intelligence Staff of General [Douglas] MacArthur. But that was primarily so he could reorganize what he started before the war. He had done quite a tremendous job over there.
Mitson
Have you ever heard of people who may have committed suicide on the return trip to Japan?
Tanaka
I know I've heard of them. I'm not aware of the details. If I have read about them, I can't recall.
Mitson
But it is back in your memory somewhere that that may have happened?
Tanaka
Yes, it is. I believe so. One man about whom I wrote for the University of California [Evacuation and Resettlement] study was named Yamatoda. He was the kingpin of the Tokyo Club, which was the organized gambling group down here [Los Angeles] in Little Tokyo before the war. He was reported to be on the exchange ship. He went to Hiroshima, and I heard that the atom bomb finished him off. This is sad.
One of the most successful of the Japanese Issei merchants here before the war was a man named Hasuike. He owned the Three Star Produce Company, which was a rather substantial chain. I can't remember how many he had. He had quite a few of these markets. Back in the late 1930s he was doing about $3 million a year, which even in today's terms would be a very substantial business. He had several hundred employees; and it was kind of a standing joke here that, if you got a college degree at USC [University of Southern California] or UCLA, you'd wind up working for him. (laughter) Which was true. I understand he returned to Japan, I don't know where. But someone told me he had come back here. I don't know if it is so or not. I imagine that if I explored it enough I'd find quite a few people whom I had either known as acquaintances or friends who went that way and came back this way, too. I met quite a few who came
One of the things—as I discussed with some of the Sansei militants—is that their whole focus is on all the things that were wrong, the injustices that we suffered. Yet, they're not even aware of, or interested in, the tremendous outreach of goodwill and help from the people who really went to work to salvage a situation that was bad. If they spent half of the energy honoring these people as they do trying to condemn those who did this, I think that we'd see things a little bit more in balance.
Mitson
Was Esther Rhoads[28] one of those who came back on that ship?
Tanaka
I think she returned from Japan before the war began. She's another person for whom I have nothing but the highest regard, and I've visited lots of people who somehow saved the situations that could get pretty bad. (laughter)
Mitson
I met her about two weeks ago.
Tanaka
Oh, is that so?
Mitson
In Pasadena at a Friends' meeting where she gave a little talk about the things that she was involved in. I'm hoping maybe to interview her. She lives now in Pennsylvania. I'd like to ask you about another former missionary, Herbert Nicholson.[29] When you were at Death Valley, did he have occasion to visit you at that place?
Tanaka
I can't really remember because Herbert Nicholson just stands out as somebody you remember whether you've seen him in ten years or fifteen. But my memory of him is as a person who always brought, not only all the things—he must have driven truckloads of things—that the evacuees couldn't get. He would bring these things, but mostly he would bring good cheer. He would really restore the spirits of people, and refuel them, and make them have hope. To me he just stands out as one of those very rare and few people who, when people really need this kind of propping up the most, he was there. He's a very earthy and pragmatic man. He's the kind of person who pitches in and does things. He's a doer more than a person who sits back and thinks and contemplates. But I never met anyone who, having met Herbert Nicholson, didn't remember him with a smile. I think of how he was regarded by evacuees: they respected and liked many people but I think most people loved Herbert Nicholson. He's an unusual man.
Mitson
I wanted to ask you, even though your birth wasn't registered in the United States, were you registered with the Japanese consulate?
Tanaka
Yes, I was.
Mitson
Did that cause you any trouble later?
Tanaka
No, it didn't cause me any trouble except, when I became English editor of the Rafu Shimpo and became involved in editorial debates with people who were criticizing the Nisei, I went to the pains of removing my name from the Japanese Consul's office. In other words, you had to renounce your Japanese citizenship and my father had registered me as Japanese. I guess, at around the age of ninetten or twenty, I renounced it and had only one single citizenship. But it could have caused trouble. Had I gone to Japan, I would have been liable for induction in the Japanese Army. I had no intention of going to Japan. (laughter)
Mitson
Did your family as a group renounce or did you individually do that?
Tanaka
Well, at the time I did it individually. I had a younger brother who did go to Japan. He came back and I believe he renounced, too. With my sisters, who have never been to Japan, there was never an issue.
The camp you were taken to in Death Valley had been a CCC camp?[30]
Tanaka
Yes, it was. It had been used for that. It had been abandoned, and we were just taken there, cleaned it up, and stayed there.
Mitson
Had anyone prepared the camp before you came?
Tanaka
No. This was very sudden, so we had the job of cleaning it up and getting it ready.
Mitson
How did you manage the first night?
Tanaka
Oh, it was pretty miserable! (laughter) And you know, it was cold. I was amazed. We went out and got some wood to put in the stoves there. They gave us blankets and some cots. There were no facilities at all the first night. It was even more primitive than when we went to Manzanar. We were there from, I believe, December 8 until the day before Valentine's [Day] in 1943 or so—December, January, and part of February. In that period it was a very enjoyable experience under the circumstances, I think, because now we could look forward. We were assured that we were headed for Chicago or somewhere East, and I think the knowledge of that alone made a world of difference. I never realized it until I experienced it, that if you're in a situation where the future is blocked and you don't know, it does something both to the spirit and to everything. it takes a great deal to keep going and believing that it's going to come out all right. Once we were in Death Valley they said, "Well, if's just a matter of processing the papers and you'll be on your way." I'm sure that the facilities there were much poorer than at Manzanar, but we enjoyed it. We were digging ditches for a park ranger, so we went out every day and were digging. You know, though not being physical myself, I really enjoyed that work. (laughter) I look back on the Death Valley episode with pleasure. As we look at Manzanar it was a bleak experience, but Death Valley seemed to be the last step before something good was to happen, just to get out.
Mitson
Were the families of the people there also brought at the same time, or were they brought later?
Tanaka
We weren't all brought that first night. But within a couple of weeks, as I recall, all of us who were to be there were there.
Mitson
I have met Karl Yoneda at Manzanar and have read a little bit of his writing. I wonder if you could tell me what you know about Karl Yoneda.[31]
Tanaka
I remember him. I didn't know him very well. I think Joe Masaoka knew him much better. In my mind, he was a very successful leader in organized labor with the longshoremen, and he was a spokesman for that part of the Japanese community, which was generally, I think, identified politically as left of center before the war. But I remember his wife in camp more than I do him. I think her name was Elaine [Black Yoneda],[32] I'm not sure. I think Karl always spoke out pretty much and he encouraged us. He was an older person. I have the recollection that when Joe Masaoka and I volunteered to go out and try to recruit people to volunteer that Karl Yoneda was one of those who encouraged and supported the position we took. Beyond that I don't have many memories of him.
Mitson
He mentioned in a talk that he gave at UCLA on November 12, 1969 that he had participated in a petition to encourage the government to draft people in camps. Do you recall a petition for that purpose?
Tanaka
No, I don't. We might have. I mean, we were signing so many things for the Japanese American Citizens League. He might have been one of those who signed that. I'm sure he was. If there were a line with Joe Kurihara on one side and some of us on the other, Karl was friendly with us.
Mitson
I understand he went out. Actually he wasn't there at the time of your evacuation [from Manzanar to Death Valley]. He had already left the camp before that to do intelligence work with the United States Army, or some branch of the military service.[33]
Yes.
Mitson
Was the whole group at Death Valley planning to go to Chicago?
Tanaka
No,I think some were to go to Chicago; some were to go back to other relocation camps. It seems like my older brother was to go to Amache. Largely, I think, most of us were headed for Chicago. It seemed to be the one place that was prepared to receive us. I was due in Washington, D.C. They had a wartime agency called the OWI, Office of War Information, and some effort had been made to get me a job there.
Mitson
On the part of whom?
Tanaka
By people like Morton Grodzins and Dorothy Thomas. Morton had written to friends of his at... I think he had done some work for the Louisville Courier Journal. He was in correspondence with... I can't remember the name of the editor. He wrote all over to get me a job on a newspaper. And then I think I was scheduled to go on to Washington, D.C., for a final interview and the assurance of a job with OWI when we landed in Chicago, at the Quaker Hospital. I decided then to cancel going further and volunteered to work for them.
Could I get you some more tea?
Mitson
That would be nice. In fact, perhaps we should bring this interview to a close now. You have been most generous with your time, Mr. Tanaka. On behalf of Dave Hacker, myself, and the Japanese American Oral History Project at California State University, Fullerton, I would like to thank you very much for your cooperation and candor.
Notes
1. In 1992, Jack Koto Tanaka's daughter, Janet Tanaka, directed a film, Who's Going to Pay for These Donuts Anyway?, which explored the contrasting impact of the World War II Japanese American Evacuation experience on her father (a schizophrenic with paranoid tendencies unable to relate to his family) and his older brother Togo (a highly successful businessman and winner of numerous civic awards). In her perceptive review of this film for the American Historical Review 98 (October (1993), 1183, Sumiko Higashi observed: "As the two [long] estranged brothers reconcile before the camera, the filmmaker comments on their similarities rather than their differences. If Jack's angry reaction to the internment provoked institutionalization, shock treatments, and drug therapy, Togo did not internalize American values without paying a price, either. A recovering cancer patient, the eloquent former news editor had five surgeries and radiation to remove a tumor from his throat." Produced by ITVS, this 54-minute film is distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, 536 Broadway, New York, N. Y. 10012.
2. The tapes for the ten lectures in this series, coordinated by Arthur A. Hansen, are archived in the Japanese American Project collection of the Oral History Program at California State University, Fullerton. For details as to their contents, see Shirley E. Stephenson, ed., Oral History Collection: California State University Fullerton (Fullerton, Calif.: Oral History Program, 1985), 236-39. Togo Tanaka's lecture in the series, "How To Survive Racism in America's Free Society"), was later published in Arthur A. Hansen and Betty E. Mitson, eds., Voices Long Silent: An Oral Inquiry into the Japanese American Evacuation (Fullerton, Calif: Japanese American Project of the Oral History Program at California State University, Fullerton, 1974), 83-109.
3. At the outset of World War II, Morton Grodzins (1917-1964) was a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of California, Berkeley. When Dorothy Swaine Thomas, a UC Berkeley sociologist, launched the [Japanese] Evacuation and Resettlement Study (JERS), she selected Grodzins to serve as a research assistant and to act as her assistant director. He remained in this capacity for almost three years, leaving in 1945 after completing his dissertation ("Political Aspects of the Japanese Evacuation") to accept a position in Tennessee. At this point, he requested from Thomas that he be
4. For information on this social-scientific study, see the following sources: Dorothy S. Thomas and Richard Nishimoto, The Spoilage: Japanese-American Evacuation and Resettlement During World War II (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press), v-xv; Ichioka, JERS Revisited, 3-27; and Peter Suzuki, The University of California Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study: A Prolegomenon, Dialectical Anthropology 10 (1986): 189-213.
5. For information on Miyamoto, Kikuchi, Shibutani, and other social scientists affiliated with JERS, see Ichioka, Views From Within, passim, but especially 3-27. The "who else" referred to by Tanaka probably included two women members of the study connected to the JERS office in Chicago, Louise Suski and Tamie Tsuchiyama.
6. Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988), renowned as a sculptor around the world for his work in museums, gardens, and parks, was associated with progressive, internationalist causes prior to World War II and was a "voluntary" inmate for a few months in 1942 at the Poston War Relocation Center in Arizona.
7. Solon Kimball (1909-1982) was a pioneer in community studies, anthropology and education, and anthropology and modern life. After receiving his doctorate in 1936 from Harvard University, where he studied under W. Lloyd Warner, he was successively employed prior to World War II with the Soil Conservation Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (on the Navajo reservation). From 1942 to 1945, Kimball was based in Washington D.C. and worked with the Community Management section of the War Relocation Authority. From Washington, he traveled extensively to the ten WRA camps situated in the western and southeastern United States, and for a short period in 1942 he served as acting director of the Manzanar center in California's Owens Valley. According to Alexander Moore's obituary of Kimball in the American Anthropologist 86 (1984): 386-93, "Kimball was not happy with this [the World War II] phase of his career. In the seven years that I knew him at the University of Florida, he never mentioned it; and he and I talked on an almost daily basis."
8. Robert Redfield (1897-1958) was a cultural anthropologist who, after 1927, was affiliated with the University of Chicago. Married to a daughter of Robert Park, a sociologist prominently identified with the Chicago School, Redfield was an authority on cultural and social changes of a folk peasant community affected by urban influences. In 1942, while Redfield was serving as Dean of the Social Sciences Division at the University of Chicago, the War Relocation Authority hired him as a consultant. Recommended for this job by fellow anthropologist John Provinse, Chief of Community Management for the WRA, Redfield visited a number of centers (including Manzanar), participated in policy discussions, and made several recommendations. One of his recommendations was that the WRA establish a "Reporting and Information" service on each project, which led to Togo Tanaka and Joe Grant Masaoka becoming documentary historians at Manzanar; in 1943, it bore further fruit in the form of the WRA establishing a Community Analysis Section to implement a program of applied anthropology in Manzanar and the other centers.
9. Mike Masaoka (1915-1991) was born in Fresno, California, but was reared and educated as a Mormon (Church of Latter-day Saints) in Utah. At the University of Utah, he achieved recognition as a skilled debater. After graduation in 1937, he became involved in the Japanese American Citizens League and soon was catapulted into a position of national leadership in that organization. In 1941, JACL President Saburo Kido, feeling that the time was right for the organization to
After his appointment as National Secretary and Field Executive of the JACL, Masaoka became a moving spirit in and a spokesperson for the organization's post-Pearl Harbor policy of "constructive cooperation" with the United States government. Never incarcerated in a detention camp himself, Masaoka assisted in the transfer of the JACL's national office from San Francisco to Salt Lake City, then relocated to Washington D.C. and, after lobbying the government to open up the military to Japanese American volunteers, enlisted (along with four of his brothers) in the all-Nisei 442d Regimental Combat Team. After the war he represented the JACL as a full-time lobbyist until 1953 and, for twenty years thereafter, as a part-time one. Lionized by some elements of the Japanese American community, Masaoka was reviled by others, with some critics charging that he was a false Moses who had led his people, in the name of Americanism, into concentration camps. This condemnatory perspective toward Masaoka (and the JACL wartime leadership in general) should assume quintessential expression in the forthcoming study of the JACL by James M. Omura. See the 1984 interview by Arthur A. Hansen with Omura (O.H. 1765) in the CSUF Oral History Program's Japanese American Project, excerpted in the Amerasia Journal 13 (1986-87); 99-113, and published in its entirety in Part 4 ("Resisters") of this oral hisory project.
10. The 442d Regimental Combat Team was composed of volunteers from Hawaii and the mainland, many deriving directly from detention centers. The team trained in Camp Shelby, Mississippi, from October 1943 to February 1944. On June 2, 1944, the 442d landed at Naples, Italy, and then moved on to the beaches of Anzio. Thereafter they went to Rome and there the 100th Batallion, which had begun the war as part of the Hawaii National Guard, formally was merged with the 442d. The team then fought in France, before returning to Italy to battle German forces at the conclusion of the European phase of the war. According to Personal Justice Denied: Report on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (Washington D.C., U.S. Government Printing Office, 1982), 258, "In seven major campaigns, the 442nd took 9,486 casualties—more than 300 percent of its original infantry strength, including 600 killed. More than 18,000 men served with the unit.... The 442nd was one of the war's most decorated combat teams, receiving seven Presidential Distinguished Unit Citations and earning 18, 143 individual decorations, including one Congressional Medal of Honor, 47 Distinguished Service Crosses, 350 Silver Stars, 810 Bronze Stars and more than 3,600 Purple Hearts."
11. On March 2, 1942, Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, Commanding General of the Western Defense Command and Fourth Army, issued a proclamation designating military areas in the states of Washington, Oregon, California, and Arizona from which certain persons or classes of persons, as the situation might require, might be excluded. The data of this proclamation began the period known as "voluntary evacuation" for West Coast residents of Japanese ancestry, since they were permitted to evacuate their homes and businesses and move inland. Altogether, prior to the Army's termination of nonmandatory evacuation on March 29, 1942, it is estimated that only 4,889 people participated in the program, with the largest numbers migrating to Colorado and Utah. For a discussion of "voluntary evacuation," including its complexities and constraints, see Personal Justice Denied, 100-104.
12. Earl Warren (1891-1974), who later became Governor of California, an unsuccessful Republican candidate for Vice-President of the United States, and Chief Justice of the United States, was Attorney General of California and preparing to run for governor when President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942. This order laid the foundation for the evacuation of people of Japanese ancestry by authorizing the secretary of war to establish military zones "from which any or all persons may be excluded as deemed necessary or desirbale." Testifying at the hearings of the House Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration (Tolan Committee) a few days after this order was promulgated, Warren indulged in groundless insinuations and racist demagoguery to paint a picture of likely espionage and sabotage by California resident Nikkei and thereby lend credence to the necessity for their eviction. That Warren's anti-Japanese testimony continued to haunt him throughout his life, notwithstanding his exemplary judicial fight for expanded civil rights and civil liberties, became blatantly manifest in his posthumously published memoirs, The Memoirs of Chief Justice Earl Warren (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977): "I have since deeply regretted the removal order and my own testimony advocating
13. For Tamotsu Shibutani's treatment of rumors within the context of the World War II Japanese American Evacuation experience, see the following three studies produced by him: "Rumors in a Crisis Situation" (master's thesis, University of Chicago, 1944); "The Circulation of Rumors as a Form of Collective Behavior" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1948); and (to a lesser extent) The Derelicts of Company K: A Sociological Study of Demoralization (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1978). For a discussion of the nature and function of rumors in a global context that includes the wartime Evacuation experience, see Shibutani's Improvised News: A Sociological Study of Rumor (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966).
14. The reports compiled by Togo Tanaka and Joe Grant Masaoka in their capacity as Manzanar's documentary historians are archived at the University of California, Berkeley's Bancroft Library [UCB-BL], Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study [JERS], Manzanar Relocation Center [MRC], folders O10.06 and O10.08. These exceedingly valuable reports, numbered from 1 through 90 and comprised of 406 typescript pages, cover virtually every dimension of Manzanar life during the period from June to December 1942.
15. Togo Tanaka remained in protective custody at the Cow Creek Civilian Conservation Corps Camp in Death Valley, California, from early December 1942 to mid-February 1943. While there, and after being resettled in Chicago, Tanaka wrote a series of reports for the [Japanese] Evacuation and Resettlement Study—all of which are archived in UCB-BL, JERS, MRC (see endnote 14 above). Four of them relate to Manzanar: "Governmental and Administrative Actions" (7 pages); "Report on Manzanar Riot" (123 pages); "Report on Manzanar Riot: Addenda" (50 pages); and "Various Short Reports on Manzanar Citizens Federation, Doho, JACL, etc." (unpaginated); see, respectively, folders O10.10, O10.12, O10.14, and O10.16.
16. At the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, John L. DeWitt (1880-1962) was a lieutenant general in the United States Army and commander of the Western Defense Command and the Fourth Army, both headquartered at San Francisco's Presidio. When, on February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, control over enemy aliens was shifted from the Department of Justice to the War Department and authorization was given for the designation of military zones from which all persons—citizens and aliens alike—might be excluded. The very next day, Secretary of War Henry Stimson appointed DeWitt, a sixty-one-year-old career officer nearing retirement, to carry out these duties. For a critical appraisal of DeWitt and his role in the Evacuation, including his authorship of the controversial Final Report, Japanese Evacuation From the West Coast, 1942, see Peter Irons, Justice at War: The Story of the Japanese American Internment Cases (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), especially 25-74 and 206-18.
17. David A. Hacker's major contributions to the historiography of the Manzanar center are the following two works: (with Arthur A. Hansen), "The Manzanar Riot: An Ethnic Perspective," Amerasia Journal 2 (Fall 1974): 112-57; and "A Culture Resisted, A Culture Revived: The Loyalty Crisis of 1943 at the Manzanar War Relocation Center" (master's thesis, California State University at Fullerton, 1980). See also the 1978 interview conducted by Hacker (and Arthur A. Hansen) with Manzanar's community analyst, Morris Opler (O.H. 1600) in the CSUF Oral History Program's Japanese American Project.
18. Togo Tanaka's report on the Manzanar Riot is included in Thomas and Nishimoto, The Spoilage, 49-52.
19. See Morton Grodzins, "The Manzanar Shooting" (30 pages), in UCB-BL, JERS, MRC, folder O10.04.
20. For biographical information on Fred Tayama, including his role in the Manzanar Riot, see Hansen and Hacker, "Manzanar Riot," particularly 113-15 and 137-40.
21. See Tanaka, "How To Survive Racism in America's Free Society," as cited in fn. 2 above.
22. Kango Takamura, who was born in Japan in 1895 and was working as a photo retoucher for RKO Studios in Los Angeles at the time of Pearl Harbor, was interned first at an alien detention center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and then transferred to Manzanar. The artwork that he did while incarcerated at both of these sites is showcased in Deborah Gesensway and Mindy Roseman, Beyond Words: Images from America's Concentration Camps (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), 117-29; particularly see 127-28 for information on Takamura's work for the guayule project.
23. For a detailed account of the internal security setup at Manzanar from the perspective of a member of the evacuee police force, see the August 12, 1974 interview by Arthur A. Hansen with George Fukasawa (O.H. 1336) in Part 1 ("Internees"), 215-77, of this oral history project.
24. As noted above, in fn. 14, this invaluable material was preserved and is available to researchers. Perhaps what Tanaka is referring to here are the raw field notes upon which his (and Joe Grant Masaoka's) documentary history reports were based.
25. The details of Slocum's lobbying efforts are covered in Bill Hosokawa, JACL in Quest of Justice: The History of the Japanese American Citizens League (New York: Morrow, 1982), 42-44, 49-56.
26. For information pertinent to the wartime exchange of people between Japan and the United States, see P. Scott Corbett, Quiet Passages: The Exchange of Civilians between the United States and Japan during the Second World War (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1987).
27. Joseph C. Grew (1880-1965) was United States Ambassador to Japan from 1931-1941 and, during World War II, authored two books on his Japanese experiences: Reports From Tokyo (1942) and Ten Years in Japan (1944).
28. Esther Biddle Rhoads (1896-1987) lived in Japan for twenty years prior to 1941, where she taught at a Society of Friends (Quaker) school in Tokyo and was one of the few Americans there who could converse in Japanese. Home at the time of Pearl Harbor on a furlough, she went to work in February 1942 with the Quaker-sponsored American Friends Service Committee program to assist persons of Japanese ancestry (continuing in this capacity until mid-1946). For information on her wartime role, see Esther B. Rhoads, "My Experience with the Wartime Relocation of Japanese," in Hilary Conroy and T. Scott Miyakawa, eds., East Across the Pacific: Historical and Sociological Studies of Japanese Immigration and Assimilation (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC Clio Press, 1972), 127-40.
29. For information on Herbert Victor Nicholson (1892-1983), see the following sources: Herbert V. Nicholson, Treasures in Earthen Vessels: God's Love Overflows in Peace and War (Whittier, Calif.: Penn Lithographics, 1974); Herbert V. Nicholson and Margaret Wilke, Comfort All Who Mourn: The Life Story of Herbert and Madeline Nicholson (Fresno, Calif.: Bookmates International, 1982); Michi Nishiura Weglyn and Betty E. Mitson, eds., Valiant Odyssey: Herbert Nicholson in and out of America's Concentration Camps (Upland, Calif.: Bruhn's Printing, 1978); Floyd Schmoe, "Seattle's Peace Churches and Relocation," in Roger Daniels, Sandra C. Taylor, and Harry H. L. Kitano, eds., Japanese Americans: From Relocation to Redress (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1986), 119-20; and "A Friend of the American Way: An Interview [by Betty E. Mitson] with Herbert V. Nicholson," in Hansen and Mitson, Voices Long Silent, 110-42.
30. The historical background on this camp and the experience of those Japanese Americans who were removed from Manzanar and placed in protective custody there after the Manzanar Riot of December 6, 1942, are treated at length in two accounts—the one by a Manzanar and Death Valley internee, the other by the son of Manzanar's director. See, respectively, Tad Uyeno, "Point of No Return," serialized in the Rafu Shimpo 22 August-10 October 1973, and Ralph P. Merritt, Jr., Death Valley—Its Impounded Americans: The Contribution by Americans of Japanese Ancestry During World War II (Death Valley, Calif.: The Death Valley '49ers, Inc., 1987).
31. For information on Karl Goso Yoneda (1906- ), see his autobiographical account, Ganbatte: Sixty-Year Struggle of a Kibei Worker (Los Angeles: Asian American Studies Center, University of California at Los Angeles, 1983), as well as a critique of this account, Harvey Klehr, "Communists' Autobiographies," The World and I (June 1987), 613-20. See also, Betty E. Mitson, "Looking Back in Anguish: Oral History and Japanese-American Evacuation," Oral History Review 2 (1974): 42-50, and the 1974 interviews with him (O.H. 1376a,b) in the Japanese American Project of the CSUF Oral History Program.
32. For information on Elaine Black Yoneda (1906-1988), see Vivian McGuckin Raineri, The Red Angel: The Life and Times of Elaine Black Yoneda (New York: International Publishers, 1991); Mitson, "Looking Back in Anguish," 42-50; and the 1974 interviews with her (O.H. 1377a,b) in the Japanese American Project of the CSUF Oral History Program.
33. For the conditions surrounding Karl Yoneda's departure from Manzanar on December 2, 1942, and his wartime service in the Burma-China-India Theatre with the Office of War Information Psychological Wartime Team, see Chapter 8 ("Volunteer for U.S. Military Intelligence Service") of Yoneda, Ganbatte, 145-65. Yoneda's military exploits during World War II are covered also in Joseph D. Harrington, Yankee Samurai: The Secret Role of Nisei in America's Pacific Victory (Detroit: Pettigrew Enterprises, Inc., 1979), passim.
Index
- American Friends Service Committee, 136-37, 144n28
- American History (Munro), 126
- American Legion, 133
- American Technical Society, 125-26
- Americans Betrayed (Grodzins), 141n3
- Ardouin, Louis, 131
- Barnhart, Edward, 141n3
- Birth certificates, 115
- Burke, Merle, 12
- California Federal Savings and Loan, 119
- Chicago School of Sociology, 141n8
- Civilian exchange, 136-38
- Cover, Carl, 124
- Cow Creek Civilian Conservation Corps Camp, 139-40, 143
- DeWitt, John L., 131, 142n11, 143n16
- Dillingham Land Corporation, 119
- Draft, 133, 139
- Endo, Ellen, 129
- Executive Order 9066, 142n12, 143n16
- Expatriation and repatriation, 136, 137, 138
- Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 123
- Foster, Charles Richard, 126
- 442d Regimental Combat Team, 142n9, 142n10
- Gardening, 117
- Gilkey, John, 134
- Great Western Financial Corporation, 119
- Grew, Joseph C., 137, 144n27
- Gripsholm, 137
- Grodzins, Morton, 121-22, 126, 132, 140-41n3
- Hansen, Arthur A., 131
- Higashi, Kiyoshi, 134
- Illegal aliens, 121-22
- Imperial Japanese Army, 121
- Interracial marriage, 119, 120
- Issei, 121-23, 127
- Japanese Americans
- Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), 123, 125, 128, 139, 141-42n9
- Japanese American Evacuation
- alternatives to, 124, 125
- and community leaders, 123-24
- expatriation during, 136, 137-38
- films about, 140n1
- impact of, 129, 140n1
- location of camps, 124
- population distribution, 124
- rationale for, 127, 142n12
- response to, 122-23, 124, 127-28, 131, 135, 142n9, 142n11
- and resettlement, 137-38, 140
- resistance to, 123, 124, 132-34, 135
- and rumors, 128
- Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study (JERS), 130-31, 132, 137, 140-41n3, 141n5, 143n14, 143n15
- Japanese language, 118, 119
- Kashu Mainichi, 129
- Kibei, 127, 128
- Kido, Saburo, 141n9
- Kikuchi, Charlie, 122
- Kimball, Solon, 125, 130, 141n7
- Kiyosato Educational Experience Project (KEEP), 137
- Komai, Akira, 123, 129
- Komai, H. T., 123
- Kurihara, Joe, 133, 136-37, 139
- Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, Calif., 128-29, 137
- Loyal and the Disloyal, The (Grodzins), 126
- Lynch, Thomas, 131
- MacArthur, Douglas, 137
- Manzanar War Relocation Center, 119
- administration of, 134, 141n7
- camouflage net factory at, 134
- community leadership, 123
- crime at, 130
- documentary historians at, See also Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study 125, 141n8
- food shortages at, 134-35
- newspaper at 125, 128
- police at, 134
- resistance and riots at, 132-34, 135
- rumors at, 134, 135, 143n13
- and suspected informers, 130, 132, 133, 135
- Manzanar Free Press, 125, 128
- Markets, 125
- Masaoka, Ben, 125
- Masaoka, Joe Grant, 124, 125, 132, 135, 139, 141n8
- Masaoka, Hank, 125
- Masaoka, Ike, 125
- Masaoka, Mike, 125, 130, 141-42n9
- Masaoka, Tad, 125
- Matson, Floyd, 141n3
- Midwives, 115
- Miyamoto, Shotaro Frank, 122
- Munro, William Bennett, 126
- Newspapers, See also specific names 124, 125, 128-29
- Nicholson, Herbert, 138
- Nisei, 119, 123, 129
- Nishimoto, Richard, 132
- Noguchi, Isamu, 124, 141n6
- Nurseries, 124
- Office of War Information (OWI), 140
- Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, 123, 143
- Police, 134
- Pomona Assembly Center, 124
- Poston War Relocation Center, 141n6
- Provinse, John, 141
- Psychology for Life Adjustment (Foster), 125-26
- Quakers. See Society of Friends
- Rafu Shimpo, 121, 123, 124, 128, 129, 130, 138
- Redfield, Robert, 125, 130, 141n8
- Reifsnider, Charles, 130
- Redress hearings, 142n12
- Repatriation. See Expatriation and repatriation
- Rhoads, Esther Biddle, 138, 144n28
- Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 141n12, 143n16
- Rumors, 125, 128, 133, 134, 135, 143n13
- Rusch, Paul, 137
- Sansei, 118, 119, 120, 127, 129, 136, 138
- Santa Anita Assembly Center, 124
- Shibutani, Tamotsu "Tom," 122, 128, 143n13
- Shinoda, Joe, 124, 131
- Shoemaker, Clyde, 131
- Slocum, Tokutaro Nishimura "Tokie," 133, 135, 136
- Smeltzer, Ralph, 132
- Smith, George Smedley, 131
- Society of Friends, 128, 136, 137, 138
- Spoilage, The (Thomas and Nishimoto), 132
- Stimson, Henry, 143n16
- Sullivan, Robert, 126
- Suski, Louise, 123, 141n5
- Takamura, Kango, 134, 143n22
- Tanaka, Ayako, 115
- Tanaka, Christine, 118-19
- Tanaka, Fumi, 115
- Tanaka, Heihachi, 115, 117
- Tanaka, Jack Koto, 115, 140n1
- Tanaka, Janet, 140n1
- Tanaka, Jean, 120
- Tanaka, Jeanine, 118, 120
- Tanaka, Minji, 115
- Tanaka, Togo W.
- accusations against, 130, 135
- birth, 115, 116, 138
- camp experience, 125-36, 139, 143
- children, See also individual names 118-19, 120
- citizenship, 138
- as community leader, 122-23
- employment
- ethnic identity, 140n1
- father, 116, 117-18, 135-36
- health of, 140n1
- language facility, 118, 123
- lectures by, 129, 131, 133
- mother, 115-16, 117, 135-36
- organizational activities, 123
- siblings, See also individual names 115-16
- wife, 120
― 147 ― - Tanaka, Wesley, 119
- Tayama, Fred, 132, 135
- tenBroek, Jacobus, 141n3
- Thomas, Dorothy Swaine, 130, 131, 132, 140, 140-41n3
- Three Star Produce Company, 137
- Tishman Realty and Construction Company, 119
- Tokyo Club, 137
- Tolon Committee, 142n12
- Topaz War Relocation Center, 136
- Tsuchiyama, Tamie, 141n5
- United States History (Burke), 126
- University of Chicago, 122, 125, 126, 130, 141n3
- Uyeno, Tad, 129
- Vancouver, B.C, Canada, 116
- Vosper, Robert, 129
- War Relocation Authority (WRA), 130, 141n6, 141n8
- Warren, Earl, 126-27, 129, 136, 142-43n12
- Western Defense Command, 124
- Yamaguchi, Frank, 124
- Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan, 118
- Yoneda, Elaine Black, 139
- Yoneda, Karl, 139
An Interview with
|
Use Restrictions
This is a slightly edited transcription of an interview conducted for the Oral History Program, sponsored by California State University, Fullerton. The reader should be aware that an oral history document portrays information as recalled by the interviewee. Because of the spontaneous nature of this kind of document, it may contain statements and impressions which are not factual
Scholars are welcome to utilize short excerpts from any of the transcriptions without obtaining permission as long as proper credit is given to the interviewee, the interviewer, and the University. Scholars must, however, obtain permission from California State University, Fullerton before making more extensive use of the transcription and related materials. None of these materials may be duplicated or reproduced by any party without permission from the Oral History Program, California State University, Fullerton, Fullerton, California, 92834-6846.
Interview
- Interviewee:
- Togo W. Tanaka
- Interviewer:
- Arthur A. Hansen
- Subject:
- Manzanar Riot
- Date:
- August 30, 1973
This is an interview with Mr. Togo Tanaka by Arthur A. Hansen for the Japanese American Project of the Oral History Program at California State University, Fullerton. The interview is being held at 1001 S. Victoria, Los Angeles, California, on August 30, 1973, at 4:00 p.m.
Mr. Tanaka, during your earlier interview for our project [on May 19, 1973] with Betty Mitson and David Hacker [O.H. 1271a], you spoke a considerable amount about the so-called Manzanar Riot,[1] of which you were both a principal in and an historian thereof. Prior to this interviewing session, you had the opportunity to review an account of the riot which was written by you, shortly after the episode, in your capacity as Manzanar's documentary historian for the WRA [War Relocation Authority]. Herein you analyze the roles relevant to the disturbance of three internee factions: Group I—The JACL [Japanese American Citizens League] group; Group II—The Anti-JACL group; and Group III—The Anti-Administration, Anti-JACL group.[2] I would like for you today to discuss the Manzanar Riot in still greater depth than last time, and to begin by examining the personalities and policy orientations of each of the three groups you cite in your analysis.
Could you begin, therefore, by addressing yourself to the JACL group? Now, in addition to yourself and your fellow documentary historian at [the] Manzanar [War Relocation Center in eastern California], Joe Grant Masaoka, there were several others in this group. I'd like to find out a bit more about each of these people. Can you tell me about Tokie Slocum?
Tanaka
Tokie Slocum was a man I had met and knew as a member of the editorial advisory board of the English Language Section of the Rafu Shimpo [Los Angeles Japanese Daily News]. He had been a friend of George Nakamoto, who had been my predecessor as an English editor. George was, in age, more a contemporary of Slocum and had invited him to serve on the editorial board. I don't think it would be too accurate to identify Slocum as JACL. Although he was sympathetic to the JACL and had served as a lobbyist for them,[3] he stood out pretty much as a loner, as I recall. He was more an "extremist" in the direction of his so-called pro-Americanism, which he wore on his sleeve and demonstrated to everyone, even to the extent of offending most Issei and Nisei by his loud and outspoken manner.
As things got a little bit tighter, and there was the threat of war breaking out, he simply said it was his duty and everybody else's to not only inform on but "turn in" people. He was a very conspicuous target at Manzanar, and anyone who identified himself with him immediately became suspect in the eyes of most people.
Tad Uyeno, another of the so-called JACL group which I referred to in my analysis of the riot, is writing a series of articles for the Rafu Shimpo —being published now in the English section under the title, "Point of No Return"—recalling what happened at Death Valley, which is where the "JACL group" was removed after the riot[4] In "Point of No Return," Tad reminded me that when we were being held in custody by the soldiers at Manzanar—immediately after the riot and before our removal to Death Valley—clusters of us got together to help in the kitchen, and we tried to figure out what had happened in the riot. Whenever Slocum appeared on the scence, the conversation died.[5] He was not taken to Death Valley with the rest of us; if he was, he stayed a very short time. He was removed elsewhere simply because he didn't fit in with the group, even though in the riot most of the people in Manzanar identified him with us.
Hansen
I was looking for some documents concerning those people removed to Death Valley as well as those of the alleged "pro-Japan group" who were taken to Moab, Utah, and conspicuous by his absence at either of those places was Tokie Slocum. I later discovered, I think from the [Audrie] Girdner and [Anne] Loftis book, The Great Betrayal[:The Evacuation of Japanese-Americans during World War II (New York: Macmillan, 1969)], that he was taken to New Mexico. Would you say, then, that he was almost persona non grata among the JACL people?
Tanaka
Personally, I had neither any feeling of affection, warmth, or trust for the guy. You know, it's funny; I remember many years later after I had returned to Los Angeles, somebody had written a book about concentration camps—I can't remember the name of it—and there was a full-page photograph in the book where my face was pictured along with Slocum and a few others. We were appearing before the Tolan Congressional Committee,[6] and after the book was published, a letter somehow came to me from Tokie Slocum. For old time's sake, generally you would respond, but I couldn't get myself to acknowledge that letter. So I have never been in touch with him. Even when he was on the editorial advisory board of the English section, and he said things which I was writing in the English section and I agreed with him in principle, still there was something about his style that repelled me. Inevitably, he would say that in the event of war he wanted us to turn our parents in; I had parents, and he didn't. He set himself apart by this. I think that was the crux of the whole thing. All of us had parents who were "aliens ineligible for U.S. citizenship," who were technically "enemies of this country"—in wartime—and they were our parents. He was raised by a farm family in the Midwest, the Slocums. His wife was a girl from Texas, and she was different too—that is, his second wife, Sally.[7] See, he didn't have too much in common with us to begin with.
Hansen
Was his wife Caucasian?
Tanaka
His first wife was Caucasian. He was married to her for about ten years. Then he married a girl named Sally Yabumoto, of Japanese descent. They had their circle of friends, but I never regarded myself as belonging to it. I used to feel uncomfortable about being identified with him. But this is the way it goes.
Hansen
Slocum achieved a certain reputation from being a lobbyist for the JACL, and I suppose it grew out of his lobbying for one thing in particular—the restitution of the citizenship rights for the World War I veterans of Oriental ancestry.[8]
Tanaka
Yes, he had done some very good work, and there were some old-time JACL people—perhaps Saburo Kido or Tom Yatabe or the early leaders had engaged his services[9]—and they recognized his contributions; he was JACL in that sense. I think in terms of their feelings and affinity for him personally, I always figured they felt they had a bull by the tail—you couldn't control him and he was a self-styled spokesman for everybody—in his own estimation—but really only for himself.
Hansen
Is there any truth to the reputed selling of names by Slocum to the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation]? Certain reports indicate he boasted of being in the service of the FBI and receiving $25 a head for informing on "disloyal" members of the Japanese American community.
Tanaka
In my contacts with him, I have never heard him say that, and it would seem unlikely to me, but it's possible. I never heard him say he got $25 a name. I did hear him say in several of our rather heated discussions at the Rafu Shimpo editorial advisory board meetings that we had an obligation, that the meaning of being
Hansen
There is another story linked to Slocum which perhaps deserves a certain amount of exploration. Ralph [Palmer] Merritt, the project director at Manzanar, went up to the Tule Lake [Segregation] Center in 1945 and interviewed Joe Kurihara, a leader of the "pro-Japan" group at Manzanar, who was there. Kurihara told Merritt that Slocum—in order to find out what was going on in the camp prior to the riot—had gotten himself employed by the police department and worked on the graveyard shift, and had access to the administrative records. Kurihara claimed that because Slocum was afraid of him, Kurihara, he relayed all of the information he had culled from the records and gave copies of this to Kurihara, so Kurihara was privy to everything that was going on in Manzanar. As proof of this—when Merritt questioned the story's credibility—Kurihara produced a document concerning the Kibei meeting of August 8, 1942, in which Kurihara was a participant. The document was a brief report of the meeting's proceedings, which had been written by Fred Tayama from memory on the following day. This report was in the form of a confidential memorandum to the Manzanar administration, with a copy sent to the FBI. Now, he produced this document for Merritt right at Tule Lake.[10] Do you know anything about this particular story?
Tanaka
No, this is the first time I've heard it. It's curious because I lunched with Ralph Merritt frequently before he died; he used to live in Los Angeles on Westmoreland Avenue. He was active with the Southern California Rapid Transit District here and was doing an oral history for the University of California on his early days in California. We used to recall the things that happened at Manzanar, and I got very distinct impressions from him. I never asked him about Kurihara or Slocum, so this is news to me. The likelihood of Slocum as a double agent (laughter)—I didn't like him personally, but I can't imagine him doing that. It would seem more likely that Kurihara had access and was able to get documents out of the administrative files. It was no great trick, anybody could do it; Kurihara had the contacts, the organization, and the influence to do pretty much anything in camp. But I'm in no position to know.
Hansen
So he didn't have to be dependent on this kind of connection?
Tanaka
No, evacuees were on the staff personnel. From what I understood from Jo Hawes about procedures in the hospital, it wasn't a big trick to get such records. Miss Hawes was a nurse at the hospital and was assigned to the group at Death Valley.
Hansen
Do you think Kurihara was pulling Merritt's leg?
Tanaka
I would be inclined to think so, but I'm only guessing. Had I known something like this before Merritt died, I'm certain he would have shared it with me. There were many things he told me about Manzanar. My mother-in-law and father-in-law were very close to Mr. Merritt. I had great apprehension because my own parents were sent to another camp [Topaz War Relocation Center] in [southcentral] Utah.[11] I tried desperately for some time to get my wife's parents to come out. At the time, I could not understand why they did not. I had rented an apartment for them in Chicago; my wife and I made every kind of preparation to have them come. But they stayed in camp to the end. Years later I learned how Ralph Merritt had made it comfortable for them at Manzanar. My father-in-law, Kango Takamura, was painting for him.[12]
Hansen
He was happier to remain.
Tanaka
Yes, very much so. People didn't identify him with me.
Hansen
Now, I'd like to move on to another member of the "JACL group," Fred Tayama. All I know about Tayama is that he apparently owned some restaurants prior to the war, that he was about thirty-seven years old at the time of the evacuation, and president of the Southern District Council of the JACL. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about his character and what connection you had with him prior to the war.[13]
Well, I knew him as the president of the Los Angeles chapter of the JACL as well as chairman of the Southern District Council; he was also a member of our editorial advisory board of the English section of the Rafu Shimpo.
I found myself meeting with him frequently both in connection with the work of the JACL and in writing about him and the JACL in the English-language section of the Rafu Shimpo. Personally, I liked him very much and agreed with many of the things he was advocating at our English section editorial board meetings. While they coincided in substance with what Slocum was saying, Tayama seemed to have a better grasp of how you communicate certain principles to people so they would accept it. He was also very close to his father and mother, who were Issei [immigrant-generation Japanese Americans]—I knew his parents. He had many brothers and sisters; they were a very close family and successful in business. I looked up to him because of his leadership in the community. I regretted very much what happened to him—his beating on the night [of December 5, 1942] prior to the riot—in Manzanar; he was a decent person in my book.
Hansen
So he was one of the few Nisei [U.S.-born children of Issei] in the community who you would have regarded as a leader?
Tanaka
Yes, before [the attack by Japan on] Pearl Harbor [naval base in Honolulu, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941]. I think all of us who thought we were in a position of influence in Los Angeles discovered we didn't have much of a following at Manzanar.
Hansen
How do you account for the suspicions floated in Tayama's direction prior to the incarceration, during the period of evacuation? Did he, for instance, testify at the Tolan hearings?
Tanaka
Yes, I believe he did. But all of us who testified at the Tolan hearings—depending on whether you were reading the Hearst papers or the Los Angeles Times —were quoted out of context, misquoted, and misrepresented. Any effort to rectify impressions—no matter what we wrote for our own readers in the Rafu Shimpo —didn't improve our image. My own opinion is that Tayama, along with those of us in lesser roles, suffered from the group's frustration. We, as a community, were having things done to us that none of us really liked, and we had to find a scapegoat somewhere.
I think Fred was among those of us who were summoned to Governor Culbert Olson's [office in Sacramento, California] after Pearl Harbor. I recall we came back [to Los Angeles] and reported on it. The governor said, in effect, that we must cooperate and go into detention camps. In other words, it would be our contribution to the war effort. Since we were not successful in changing his mind, the presumption was that we had all caved in and yielded—we were being the nice, docile Nisei. If we had any other choice, none of us were able to find it. This was part of Tayama's problem, he was the number one JACL figure, so naturally he was going to be the target of most of the animosity. I think that's what happened to him.
Hansen
What about rumors concerning Tayama's economic activities?
Tanaka
He and his brothers ran a chain of restaurants on Main Street. There was this local bilingual weekly Japanese paper, the Doho, edited by Shuji Fujii; it was a small paper, and Communist.[14] I say so now because a staff member was a man I subsequently met and came to know. This man was a double agent, a member of the Communist party and trained in Moscow. He came over here and got his U.S. citizenship by working for our Office of War Information during the war.
Hansen
I don't think you would like to identify him, would you?
Tanaka
I don't think he objects, but then I would want to get his permission. After the war he taught out here at UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles], where I have some friends, and I regard him as a good guy; he's also writing a book. His brother in Japan is very prominent, the president of International Christian University, and this one says he was regarded as the black sheep of the family. His son, a business administration graduate from a California institution, I know very well and see very often. The father told
I wasn't aware of it if this were so because the Rafu Shimpo made all of the arrangements. My publisher sent me, and I believe that I was going only for our newspaper. But I was described in Doho by Fujii as an agent of the Japanese government. However, I used to get nice personal letters from Shuji Fujii and his wife.
If you refer to Tayama's economic posture, he was fighting a labor union. There was an effort to organize his workers and he said: "The hell with it!" and he fired them. The Doho took up the cudgel for the workers, and Fred was identified as "A goddamned, dirty, stinking capitalist who exploited his workers." I think this had some carryover into the camp. Anything he did do or didn't do, he drew attacks in Doho 's columns.[15]
Hansen
So it was a combination of that reputation as an "exploitive capitalist" and his visibility as a JACL leader?
Tanaka
Right. Also, [there was] the fact that we consorted with members of the United States Naval Intelligence at dinners, before Pearl Harbor, in an effort to secure the JACL's position with the federal government agency. This didn't help our image once we were behind barbed wire. I think this led to the accusation that we were a bunch of dogs or inu, informers.
Hansen
I'd like to know more about Roy Takeno. Did you know Roy before Manzanar?
Tanaka
Yes, I did. We worked together at the Kashu Mainichi [Japan-California Daily News]. He subsequently became the editor of it after I left to go to the Rafu Shimpo. [16] I was very friendly with Roy, but I never knew him too well.
Hansen
Was he a reporter on the Rafu Shimpo for awhile?
Tanaka
No, I think he was just on the Kashu Mainichi staff.
Hansen
Was he an active JACL member?
Tanaka
I always remember Roy as quiet, rather bland, and very proper. I thought then that he was the kind of person you would find in government civil service, because he wouldn't have to get himself hung up. That's my recollection of Roy.[17]
Hansen
So he kept a rather low profile.
Tanaka
Yes, he did. He was later the editor of the Manzanar Free Press.
You know, Joe Masaoka and I took a dislike to Bob Brown [O.H. 1375],[18] who as the reports officer at Manzanar supervised the Free Press. We fought with him and he was a pain in the neck to us. We probably were to him.[19] I never did make the staff up there, I was relegated to delivering the papers; that was about the size of it. While Roy fitted in more neatly because he had the sense to keep his mouth shut and do what he was told to do.
Hansen
What about other JACL members at camp? Wasn't Joe Blamey on the staff of the Manzanar Free Press? I believe he was threatened or may be physically assaulted a couple of times prior to the December 6, [1942], riot. Did you know Joe Blamey?
Tanaka
Joe Blamey is someone I never knew before Manzanar, and I don't remember where he came from or how he turned up at camp. I have only faint recollections of him, and they're not too impressive. I don't identify
Hansen
What other names pop into your mind when you think back upon this designated group—the JACL group—at Manzanar, besides Joe Masaoka, Tokie Slocum, Fred Tayama, and yourself?
Tanaka
Tad Uyeno was definitely JACL. Apparently he kept better records than any of us.
Tad operated and owned a plant nursery in the San Gabriel area before the war. He wrote a column called "The Lancer" for the Rafu Shimpo regularly. I often didn't write editorials simply because Tad's column was expressing a JACL point of view—in terms of our citizenship obligations. He was rather forthright and very clear-cut in the position he took. When he landed at Manzanar, Joe Masaoka, Tad, and I spent much time together. As a consequence, I felt rather badly that in the riot, while Tad wasn't a "troublemaker," he was linked to us. Well, maybe he did get himself into hot water with some of the administrators.
I took a dislike to Bob Brown and didn't think much of Ned Campbell [See O.H. 1343], [20] the assistant project director. Joe and I used to say we were probably on the "shit list" of a lot of these administrators because we were saying things we probably shouldn't have said. But we didn't actually do very much to deliberately stir up trouble. We tried to reach out of the camp to either Washington or somewhere else. Local people regarded this as troublemaking. Tad never did that, but he encouraged us. The three of us shared a great deal in the seven months we were in there. As a result, when Joe and I were on the death list, Tad was also on the death list. He had to be removed from camp to Death Valley like us.
Hansen
What about Hiro Neeno?
Tanaka
I don't remember him too well. I know he worked in the post office before the war and I think he was JACL at the camp. He didn't have to be removed as I recall. He wasn't a close associate. [21]
There was Kiyoshi Higashi, who was active in JACL but who belonged to the Terminal Islanders; they were a group unto themselves, and even though Higashi was JACL and threatened, their in-group loyalty protected him. I think he was the chief of police at Manzanar. He was definitely JACL and I think very, very close to Fred Tayama. [22]
Hansen
So he was from Terminal Island. [23] I have heard that on the night of the riot there were attempts to get Higashi, but he was protected by Terminal Islander judoists.
Tanaka
He was from Terminal Island, and they had a big judo group there. As I remember, the military police were saying they would be bringing him to join us at Death Valley. Word later came through, though, that he would stick it out [in Manzanar].
Hansen
Now, let's move to the second group, the one that you describe as the "anti-JACL group." Earlier you alluded to Bob Brown, the reports officer who was later elevated to assistant project director at Manzanar. Bob Brown indicates in a cover letter with your analysis of the riot that your mention of this group represents its first appearance in any of the analyses of the situation. [24] There is only a cursory description of the group in your analysis, however. I'm interested in the membership of it: what positions the various people included held and so on. Since you don't cite particular individuals as being in this group, who did you have in mind?
Tanaka
I understand. I describe this group as anti-JACL, which may not be an altogether accurate description, but they were people who were critical of the JACL, although to Kibei "pro-Japan" elements they were lumped together as JACLers. It was a more liberal, left-of-center, political group.
At Death Valley, there was a woman named Chiye Mori, the editor of the Manzanar Free Press. Before the war, in Little Tokyo, she was married to the son of a very famous Japanese actor, Sojin Kamiyama. Chiye, while she may not have identified herself with Shuji Fujii of Doho, had an affinity for many of the
Two others in this "anti-JACL" group were Tomomasa Yamazaki and his wife Ruth Kurata Yamazaki. If you read Tad Uyeno's Point of No Return, an account of our days at Death Valley, he points out how we gravitated into our own groups, even in our work assignments. We were given jobs to go out and dig ditches and to do work for the park rangers, and Tad's recollection was that people like Yamazaki and Chiye Mori did a lot of talking: they were articulate intellectuals. However, they weren't conspicuously present when we had to go out on the trucks to dig ditches. I can't recall all the names, but those two come to mind. [25]
Hansen
What about Karl Yoneda? [26]
Tanaka
Karl Yoneda would be in this group, and yet he was not anti-JACL in the same sense as the rioters. He was certainly supporting the JACL effort to get us to volunteer to go to the camps, but I think he would be identified more with the liberal left anti-JACL group.
Hansen
I'm going to return to your analysis for a moment. You say in it that you use the designation of "anti-JACL" to indicate this group "only for want of a better name." From what I can gather from analyzing relevant documentary materials, this designation does indeed seem to be unsatisfactory. For example, when the Manzanar Citizens Federation was established in camp to carry out the work done in the prewar years by the Japanese American Citizens League, the person you selected to head this group was Koji Ariyoshi—a close associate of Karl Yoneda's and others in the reputed anti-JACL group. And there are many other examples of close cooperation between the members of the JACL and the anti-JACL groups. In what sense, then, were those in Group II actually anti-JACL?
Tanaka
So long as the adversary was the "pro-Japan" rioters in the camp, the JACLers were one—the prewar JACL leadership group and the liberal left group that I refer to as "anti-JACL." Once removed from the ideological and physical battleground of Manzanar, the so-called "pro-American" coalition came apart at Death Valley. The JACLers, like the Tayamas, Masaokas, Tanakas, and Uyenos, looked to the JACL organization headquarters at Salt Lake City for leadership. The "anti-JACL" group like Mori, Yamazaki, and Yoneda looked elsewhere. There was close cooperation within Manzanar. I'm not aware that it survived at all outside that camp.
You mentioned Koji Ariyoshi, I didn't know him too well. I remember him as an articulate spokesman at some of the meetings and that he was JACL. I think he would be closer to Karl Yoneda than to Fred Tayama, that's just my observation. [27]
Hansen
How did this group function prior to the war? You call them something of an aka [red] group. Could you describe what aka means? Does it mean precisely Communist or what?
Tanaka
In the prewar establishment press, the Rafu Shimpo being an example, the so-called anti-JACL group was referred to as being sympathetic to the Communist party and its ideals. Aka was a term used loosely. It was also a broad brush used to smear the liberal left.
Hansen
The label might apply to Karl Yoneda, for example?
Tanaka
Right, Karl and Koji Ariyoshi—I understood they were labor organizers. Labels, like designating colors, mean all things to all people; at that time it was an easy way to describe them.
Hansen
Do you remember if in JACL discussions, at Manzanar, you ever explored the fact that this coalition was at best a rather unstable one—insofar as many of the people in this so-called aka group were rather new converts to pro-Americanism? Prior to this time their positions weren't exactly what you would call filiopietistic.
Tanaka
It was really a reflection of what was happening in the United States—the Soviet-American Friendship Society suddenly became popular with a movie, Mission to Moscow [1943], depicting Stalin as our great friend. [28]
Hansen
There is something else which comes across in your report; while there was a preoccupying concern to get out and work during the war, there was also a certain amount of in-fighting over what you described as "petty positions." You indicated that almost without exception the second group—the aka or anti-JACL group—came and took over most of the camp's positions. You used Chiye Mori as an example. She took over the position as the editor of the newspaper, and when you arrived, you took over the position of paperboy.
Tanaka
Right. Well, we gave up early. We knew we weren't in our element and it seemed that this was poetic justice. Hell, we wouldn't print her stuff before the war and I didn't think she was much of a writer. Also, it seemed like a useless battle to seek a position in camp; we weren't going to toady to somebody we didn't care for. Just let us get out.
Joe Blamey was in that group, too. The world had turned upside down in the camp; there was this infighting, but not for very long. I think that the people rose to their proper levels in that setting, and the rest of us just wanted to get the hell out of there; that's what we were concerned with.
Hansen
Other than simply commingling with this so-called anti-JACL group for political reasons, did you have much to do with them at Manzanar, or was it a clear sort of expedient cooperation?
Tanaka
There was probably none at all, except that we might pass each other along the so-called streets of Manzanar or at some meeting. We greeted one another and recognized each other, but beyond that I can't remember ever socializing with them or spending any time with them at all. There was no closeness.
Hansen
What were the affiliations of this anti-JACL group prior to the war? A name that appears from time to time in the accounts of the Japanese American prewar community is the Young Democrats. Did they have a Los Angeles chapter or was this just a San Francisco-based group?[29]
Tanaka
I really can't remember, there may have been. I belonged to a group called the Democratic Luncheon Club, which I was invited to join, but this was not Japanese.
Hansen
The Young Democrats were purported to be a group of somewhat leftist or radical elements centered largely in the San Francisco area. They had certain grievances against the JACL, which later dissolved in the wake of the evacuation.[30]
Tanaka
Tomomasa Yamazaki was from the San Francisco area, but I don't have any clear recollection of that.[31]
Hansen
Now, let's move to Group III, the group that you indicate manipulated the factionalism—seized the opportunity to utilize the in-fighting between what you call the JACL group and the anti-JACL group—and which eventually had a much broader-based support in the camp than either of the other two groups.
Tanaka
Yes, I didn't have much opportunity to observe that. It must have been a conclusion I reached after we were out of Manzanar and at Death Valley. Obviously there were individuals who were influential, who remained and spoke for a large number of the evacuees. They were people who fitted in. Names of individuals don't come to me.
In the reporting Masaoka and I did, we went from block to block throughout the camp, and we must have met, talked, and encountered many of these people there. If you use the term low-profile to mean that they
Hansen
Yes, wasn't he at the hospital?
Tanaka
Yes, he was the administrator. Chuman was JACL, but somehow he managed to stay out of trouble.[32] There was a young man named [Tom] Ozamoto, who I would include in Group III because he was bilingual and a citizen—a Kibei. In the period after the riot, many of the people regarded him as a leader in the camp.
Hansen
Maybe I've followed your analysis wrong, but it seems to me your reference to Group III is to an incendiary group rather than an ameliorating group?
Tanaka
Well, you're talking about Kurihara and [Harry Yoshio] Ueno.[33] The group I'm talking about ultimately took over after the removal of the so-called incendiary group to Tule Lake. They inherited the Manzanar Relocation Center.
Hansen
What about the people who had to leave to go to [the WRA's temporary isolation center at] Moab, [Utah][34] people not really charged with any specific acts, but regarded as potential troublemakers or who had records before leaving Manzanar? I'm talking about people like Ben Kishi.
Tanaka
I knew of him, but I never met or recall him at all.
Hansen
Some people claim in reports that Kishi—during the time the crowd was looking for you on the night of the riot and you were standing with the crowd outside the door of your apartment—was the one who led the crowd that sought to murder you. But these reports also maintain that he was the one who directed the crowd away from any beating of your family.
Tanaka
Yes, I heard that, too. I really wouldn't know if he was the person who said, "Leave them alone." I didn't know him at all at camp.
Hansen
Who do you think of as leaders in the third group? Kurihara doesn't seem to emerge as much of a leader—precisely speaking, with a following. In fact, he's rather atypical in that he was the only Nisei sent to Moab.[35] All the rest were Issei and Kibei.
Tanaka
A man named Shigetoshi Tateishi was outspoken. After one of my appearances at a mess hall to explain the desirability of joining the armed services, he was rather conspicuous by saying, in Japanese, what a stupid idea this was. There was also Genji Yamaguchi.[36] But Kurihara stands out mostly because I could have a dialogue with him; with the others, it was Japanese coming out of their mouths and English out of mine, so we never met.
Hansen
Did most of the Kibei speak in Japanese while interned at Manzanar—at least during the time you were there?
Tanaka
Japanese was easier to speak for most Kibei. They felt more at ease and could communicate better. I remember one incident at the camouflage net factory in camp. Joe Masaoka conducted our interviews with Kibei workers, with these young men, almost entirely in our poor Japanese. Before the outbreak of war, at the Rafu Shimpo, I felt very close to Kibei friends. I did at Manzanar. I probably owe my life to Kibei relatives.
Hansen
Did you have any opinion of the Kibei in the camp at all? Could you provide a general assessment of how they stood and relate something of their organizational framework within the camp?
Tanaka
If I did have any opinion of the Kibei, Art, I can't recall it. I may have indicated one in some of the documentary reports I wrote, but I don't have a copy of those reports now. I haven't read the reports in
Hansen
So you didn't know too many Kibei in the camp?
Tanaka
No. Well, Karl Yoneda's a Kibei. My older brother [Minji] was born in Japan, so he would be like a Kibei. My father-in-law's cousin, who is also a Kibei, was at Manzanar. I stayed with him and my brother shortly before the riot because some neighbors had told me to get the hell out of my quarters.
Hansen
You had a brother who worked in the mess hall, didn't you?
Tanaka
My older brother, the one who was born in Japan did.
Hansen
One of the groups that frequently appears in accounts of the Manzanar Riot is the reputed Kitchen Workers' Union, headed by Harry Ueno. Was your brother affiliated with that group? Was that possibly how you got the information of the aggressive action planned against you?
Tanaka
I was told to keep away from my barrack that evening by a neighbor, an Issei named Motooka, who lived in Block 35. We lived in a barrack on Block 36. He told me about four hours before the attack that I was on the death list. I don't recall my brother giving me any warning. I don't think he knew about it.
Hansen
This group actually didn't appear on your horizon, then, until the time of the riot, right?
Tanaka
That's correct. Except for a few of their leaders, most of that mob hardly knew me by sight. It was a cold night and all of us, it seemed, were wearing those heavy Navy-issue peacoats.
Hansen
Karl Yoneda and Koji Ariyoshi were people who volunteered for the armed forces prior to the riot, weren't they?
Tanaka
Yes, that's right.[37] It might have been because they felt the JACL group had closer ties with the FBI and other investigative agencies. In other words, they were regarded as informers, while these others were just people who volunteered.
Hansen
I think you indicated in your report that the second group wasn't as affluent as the JACL group in the prewar period—that they had worked mainly in labor organizational positions. Do you think this might have had something to do with it?
Tanaka
I think it would be more likely that you could obtain the answer from people who were on the other end, those who were drawing up the death list. I really have no way of giving a valid opinion. I really haven't given any thought to this.
Hansen
What about the popularity of Harry Ueno? Did you know Ueno prior to the [Japanese American] Evacuation?
Tanaka
I don't ever remember meeting him in camp. I might have heard him speak once, I don't know. During the riot, I wouldn't have been able to identify him; he was just a name.
Hansen
Was he somebody who became an important figure just because he was placed in jail and because of all the meetings that were held concerned with getting him removed from the jail and back to Manzanar?
Tanaka
Yes, that's about the size of it.
Hansen
Did it surprise you that so many thousands of people would appear at these meetings—either out of popularity, curiosity, or whatever? People have described Ueno as having popularity within the camp. How do you account for his following?
Well, first, I never attended any meeting where there were thousands; I can't remember attending a meeting where there were even a few hundred.
Hansen
I'm talking about the meetings on the day of the riot.
Tanaka
I didn't attend any of those. I didn't see any of them.
Hansen
There were numerous eyewitness accounts at the time which place the attendance at these meetings in the thousands. There must have been some reason why they were willing to protest Ueno's arrest. How do you explain Ueno's appeal for the internee population at large?
Tanaka
I didn't attend any of those. I did not see these gatherings. But I can understand how the long pent-up feeling of the entire camp, suffering under all the grievances of confinement behind barbed wire and watchtowers, could rally behind some incident like this. Take the matter of food—our daily meals. There was the racist policy of serving steaks, in a separate administrative dining hall, to Caucasian staff members. The evacuees, in the other section, were having wieners and apple butter. This stuck in every evacuee's craw; it certainly did in mine. There were widespread rumors about the administrative personnel stealing beef—our food going into the pockets of people who shouldn't have it. If Ueno was made to look like a hero, it was because he was expressing the frustrations and the grievances of the people of Manzanar. The vermin they wanted to get rid of had betrayed them by serving those who were exploiting the evacuees. This is what I think he was saying.
Hansen
Do you think that his leadership of the Kitchen Workers' Union—keeping in mind that the kitchen workers made up a sizeable portion of the entire work force at Manzanar—had something to do with his influence?
Tanaka
Right, it was important—this was our food, and I think he was strategically placed.
Hansen
Now, about some of the administrators. They don't figure as a group in your report, but I'm sure they figure as factors at the camp. Now you mentioned a dislike you had for Ned Campbell, a dislike that was apparently widespread. What was Ned Campbell like, and why was he summarily dismissed at the time of the riot and kicked upstairs to the WRA regional office in San Francisco and replaced by Bob Brown?
Tanaka
I don't know the real reasons why. My contact with Campbell was rather peripheral. My impression of him was that he was what Joe Masaoka uncharitably labeled as "a loudmouth" who probably was in the habit of claiming more credit than he was entitled to. We thought he was a braggart. We were tempted once to write a footnote in our documentary report: "Ned Campbell says he gave up a $20,000-a-year income to render a patriotic service by helping in the relocation camp. Our evaluation: bullshit."
Then we heard these rumors about how he helped himself to the provisions in the warehouse and the mess hall. I don't know if those were true or not, but he impressed me as the kind of a guy who would. This is prejudice, so again my feelings are indeed subjective. I imagine he must have impressed a lot of people as if he was making such a great and noble sacrifice in his condescending way. "Who in the hell needs that!" This was my reaction to it, and so I didn't like him.
Hansen
Did you tend to think of him as the project director because there was such a turnover of project directors and acting project directors?
Tanaka
He had a high profile: he was conspicuous, he was everywhere, and he gave a lot of orders. If I may use a modern expression young people use today, he gave a lot of bullshit. That was my impression of him.
Hansen
Harry Ueno was reported at the time as saying that every time Ned Campbell talks to you, it's as though you were a slave. Does that seem rather strong?
Tanaka
Maybe that was the way Ueno reacted. I just thought Campbell was a loud, obnoxious someone who, in
Hansen
Do you recall the name Ned Campbell coming up in later conversations with Ralph Merritt after the war?
Tanaka
No, with Merritt, it's funny, we talked more about the rapid transit and about the early days, but somehow we avoided Manzanar. I don't know why, but I think this was fairly typical. I liked the man, and we discussed many things because I was very much interested then about rapid transit in this area. I had started investing in southern California. Occasionally, he did bring Manzanar up.
Hansen
I guess part of the reason was because he wasn't at Manzanar very long while you were there. He was only there about a week or ten days before the riot,[38] and then you were gone to Death Valley.
Tanaka
That's right, and I thought of it as a past chapter and so it was buried; I never dreamed I would have any reason to recollect it. When he later moved out to Redlands, [California]—I have some friends and clients out in Redlands—I lost contact with him; but we did correspond.
Hansen
I want to ask you a little bit about Merritt's predecessors [as director of Manzanar], particularly Roy Nash, Harvey Coverley, and Solon Kimball.
Tanaka
Was Solon Kimball a project director?
Hansen
Yes, an acting project director. He came over from the San Francisco [WRA] office, I believe, for a couple of weeks to fill in until Merritt took over.
Tanaka
I had no contact with Roy Nash. I just saw him make a couple of speeches. He seemed to be a sort of reclusive kind of man; he was the great white father of an Indian reservation.
Harvey Coverley, you know, I can't even remember him. I'm sure that as so-called documentary historians we wrote reports on the various directors, so some of my impressions of each of these gentlemen at that time must be somewhere in the WRA records.
I remember Solon Kimball as a gentleman that I liked very much, even with the little contact I had with him. He introduced me to Robert Redfield, a University of Chicago anthropologist. Also, I was feeling like there was no place for me on the Manzanar Free Press. I think it was Solon Kimball who brought Robert Redfield in and he explained to Joe Masaoka and myself about an opportunity to make a constructive contribution to this "great federal experiment," to use whatever skills or talents we had to record—in diary form or whatever way we wanted to—the story of evacuees, as a lasting record of what was going on at Manzanar. I didn't realize he had been a project director.
Hansen
I'm sure it was just a stop-gap measure. I suspect he was the only one there [at Manzanar] who was actually an academician.
Tanaka
Well, that stands to reason; most of them came out of the Indian Service [Bureau of Indian Affairs], didn't they?
Hansen
Right, but Merritt came out of a business background. What was Roy Nash's background?
Tanaka
As I recall, I had very little contact with any of the project directors.
Hansen
How about Bob Brown? You started to talk of him in a cursory way earlier in the interview, and you indicated an initial dislike for him. What was it that annoyed you about Bob Brown?
Tanaka
I can't put my finger on it. I did engage in some correspondence with him, as recently as four or five years ago. He was in business in Arizona—and he wrote that we might get together to talk about Manzanar. The last letter I had from him said he wanted to write a book, but I haven't answered it. I really can't put my
Hansen
It's almost chemical, isn't it?
Tanaka
Yes, it is. I'm sure that he meant to be fair. I think my reaction to him may have been more my sense of frustration. I arrived late at Manzanar and the positions were all filled—he had made that very plain. So maybe I resented him because I was delivering papers, I really don't know. He literally did nothing to deserve it, but I'm sure there are some things he said or the way in which he must have said them that just simply got a negative reaction from me.
Hansen
Do you know anything about his background?
Tanaka
I'm sure he filled us in, but I can't remember.[39]
Hansen
Did he have a high profile in the camp?
Tanaka
Not as high as Ned Campbell, but he was around. If you're talking about before the riot, he was the project's reports officer or something.
Hansen
So he worked closely with the Manzanar Free Press?
Tanaka
Oh, yes, he set the Free Press up. That strikes me as being so funny, to call it the Free Press, but that's the way it was. I wish I knew more. I think if I had taken the trouble to look back into the notes and all—but I haven't, so I'm just trying to recall details over the span of thirty years.[40]
Hansen
But you had a chemical disaffinity for Bob Brown.
Tanaka
Yes, I believe so. I think Joe Masaoka and I shared it, this part stands out. We probably used descriptives of Bob that are not very flattering to him.
Hansen
How do you account for the fact that Joe Grant Masaoka didn't appear as frequently as yourself on the Manzanar blacklists and death lists, even though he was occupying a similar position, and his brother [Mike Masaoka], in fact, had a terribly high national profile because of his position as executive secretary of the JACL?
Tanaka
I wouldn't know how to account for that. I wasn't aware that that was the case. I think it's the same reason for anyone being more disliked than someone else by a group—it depends on what's going against you.
Hansen
I was wondering if it might have had something to do with the fact that he was from Utah and not really a part of the Los Angeles community?
Tanaka
Well, he was born in Riverside and he grew up in Utah, but he was very much a fixture in Los Angeles before the war and had almost as high a profile as Fred Tayama.
Hansen
What did Joe Masaoka do before the war?
Tanaka
He owned a retail fruit and vegetable market out here on the West Side. I felt very close to Joe, he was one of my closest friends, up to the time that he died in 1970.
Hansen
Did it possibly have something to do with the fact that you were associated with the Rafu Shimpo as well? I suppose you had more visibility than he did prior to the war.
Tanaka
That's possible.
Hansen
What about Margaret D'Ille, who was concerned with education or community services?
I just remember her very faintly, but not enough to comment on. I remember Velma Woods, from the schools, and Genevieve Carter, who was responsible [superintendent] for the Manzanar schools—they were two very fine ladies.
Hansen
How about Lucy Adams?[41]
Tanaka
The name is familiar, but I can't associate her with anything.
Hansen
I know it's rather difficult after three decades to remember events which probably played a very small part in your life. Obviously, events at Manzanar occupied only a period of months and were probably only peripherally related to your concerns. But I do want to get into your position as a documentary historian: who you reported to directly and exactly what you did.
Tanaka
Our job was loosely defined so as to cover anything that was happening throughout the camp. This was to give the WRA administration in Washington an idea of daily activities. We never had a manual that said what we should or shouldn't write about anything. We simply wrote about anything that was occurring of interest. If there was a triangle murder—an old man with a young wife who had a young lover, and the husband murdered the wife, leaving two young girls as orphans—we covered that in a report. The camouflage net factory work going up in the camp, we covered that; we wrote about the camp farm; we went into mess halls and interviewed the people who were there eating. My recollection is that we just trooped around the whole camp and wrote things and quoted people—I don't know whether or not we were very meticulous about getting their permission or not.
Hansen
Were your reports daily ones or were they only done occasionally?
Tanaka
They were daily; turned into the Reports Office, as I remember. I'm just sorry I didn't have carbon papers to make copies of the whole thing. I kept some, but others we didn't. Joe and I took turns, and we established a particular format; it was typed up and turned in.
Hansen
Did you turn these in to Bob Brown?
Tanaka
We probably did. We worked for Bob Brown, I can't remember anyone else.
Hansen
Did you encounter any abrasiveness or recalcitrance on the part of the internees when you were circulating among them?
Tanaka
No, we were very well received, as I remember. Joe was very friendly and I don't have any trouble meeting people. We talked with both Issei and Nisei; maybe we just didn't meet the right people.
Hansen
Since you were pivotally involved in writing the reports, did the two of you start to sense that something was building up as various things came about?
Tanaka
I'm sure we did. I'm sure we sensed it. I think if I had an opportunity to reread the reports Joe and I wrote, I could pretty well trace the genesis of the tensions that began to mount. I think it must have been reflected in my own correspondence with friends on the outside. I was getting very, very desperate to get out of that place.
Hansen
I'm sure the complete record of your reports are available—although I haven't yet seen them myself—in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.[42] So even though you didn't have carbon paper, there are copies of them available to scholars.
Tanaka
Yes, if you put in on paper, it stays. So perhaps you would get a more accurate picture of what Joe and I did from those records.
Hansen
You were a speaker at a meeting—and this will take you back awhile, too—on November 30, 1942, of the
Tanaka
We shouldn't?
Hansen
You shouldn't. They had earlier attempted to have the vote on November 9, but there was a singular disinterest on the part of the internees in registering for the vote, so they postponed it to November 30. At that meeting, everybody there agreed—with the single exception of yourself—to drop the issue. Since you were in this isolated position, do you recall it pretty vividly, as your being the one who stood out? I know you were the acting chairman of the committee, which meant that you had some commitment to the charter.
Tanaka
You know, Art, I can't remember that. When you tell me that's what I did, I have to acknowledge that it must be so, but I have no recollection of it. I don't recall the meeting. In a vague way—I remember we were meeting at that time, but no, that doesn't come back to me. Maybe with longer reflection and re-examining the record, it may come back. But I do know this: it was a part of my own experience not to hesitate whether I was outnumbered ten to one, thirty to one, or whatever. I grew up in schools where there were no Japanese students, where I might be a minority of one, so that didn't bother me. And if I was a minority of one at that time, then I must have simply been expressing what my convictions were.
Hansen
Do you recall the frustration of putting in many weeks of work on the charter and then having it torpedoed?
Tanaka
Well, no, not specifically. I just remember the overall frustration of everything in that camp life. The sooner we could somehow find a way out of there, then this would be the beginning of turning it right.
Hansen
You indicated earlier that you testified before the Tolan Committee. Did you receive a lot of community opposition as a result of your testifying?
Tanaka
At this stage, my recollection is that I felt I was misquoted in the wire services and in the Hearst papers. They had some idiot named Ray Richards who was working for the Los Angeles Examiner, a Hearst paper.
Hansen
Did you testify in Los Angeles, San Francisco, or both?
Tanaka
Los Angeles. What I said—and I can't even remember specifically what I said—was misrepresented in terms of what I intended it to mean, and it made me look like a jackass. That's my recollection of it.
Hansen
I know there was a lot of misquotation; in fact, they even reported on a meeting on a day when they didn't have any sessions.
Tanaka
Oh, yes. This was set up by the Hearst papers, in the worst tradition of journalism.
Hansen
Do you recall a proposed Kibei survey which was going to be given?[43] This was prior to the war and publicity about it incensed a lot of Kibei, causing agitation since it was identified with JACL sponsorship. Many Kibei felt as though they were being relegated to a non-citizenship capacity. Apparently the Kibei survey was never realized, only announced and then dropped. Do you recall anything about the Kibei survey?
Tanaka
No, I don't. Was that carried in the paper down here, too?
Hansen
I think it was in the San Francisco paper. I just thought you might have heard of it because frequently Kibei trace some of their later anguish at the camps back to that incident. From there Kibei resentment built as a result of other things, like the fact that they were excluded from resettlement.
Tanaka
Oh, I see.
Hansen
I was going to ask you about a couple of other personalities in the camp—though all of them don't
Tanaka
I just remember him as a name. I don't recall meeting him, although I may have.
Hansen
How about Raymond Hirai?
Tanaka
That's another name that I remember but I can't connect.
Hansen
He was supposedly an actor who had some notoriety for—and "notoriety" is the word I mean—a cameo appearance in the [pre-World War II] movie Lost Horizon, which was filmed in the same area as the Manzanar camp, the Owens Valley.
Tanaka
Oh, is that so? I haven't heard of him.
Hansen
What about Ted Akahoshi?
Tanaka
He was an active member of the Maryknoll Church [in Los Angeles], as I remember. He was widely known and respected. Wasn't he also a block leader?
Hansen
He was a chairman of the Block Leaders' Council. What about Bill Tanabe?
Tanaka
That name draws a blank for me.
Hansen
How about David Itami? He was the secretary of the Block Leaders' Council, and I think he later left Manzanar to become an interpreter for the U.S. Army.
Tanaka
The name just rings a slight—no, I don't remember him or anything about him.
Hansen
How about Itami's successor as the secretary of the Block Leaders' Council, and later secretary of the Block Managers' Council, Frank Yasuda?
Tanaka
I don't remember him either.
Hansen
Getting back to the JACL, it is reported that the JACL had—out of the total Japanese American population in Los Angeles of 20,000—about 650 members. This is prior to February 1942. Does that sound right?
Tanaka
In Los Angeles? I don't think that there were that many. Do you mean actual members?
Hansen
Yes, actual members in the Los Angeles chapter.
Tanaka
They called it the Southern District Council, and I can't remember how many chapters there were. If you included Orange County, Long Beach, West Los Angeles, and Culver City, it would be more than that, but if it were just the Los Angeles area, I think we have to define what...
Hansen
Jurisdictional boundaries we are talking about?
Tanaka
Yes, right. But even then I would be a poor source for that.
Hansen
Well, the JACL had a group in Los Angeles called the Anti-Axis Committee and I think you were involved with that. What exactly was the Anti-Axis Committee, and how did it interface with the JACL group as a whole?[44]
Tanaka
I think when you mention that—what was the word you used up at Manzanar when Group I and Group II got together?
Coalition?
Tanaka
Coalition. I think it was a coalition because it was formed right after Pearl Harbor and there were people in it who had not been so close to JACL. There were those who were JACL people, and they got together and said, "Let's make common cause to save our skins."
Hansen
Were Karl Yoneda and Chiye Mori among the group's members?
Tanaka
Yes, I'm sure. The leading individual, as I remember, the one who gave it that name, was Kay Sugahara. He had a rather early presence in the Los Angeles JACL. He was an early president of the Los Angeles JACL. He was a customs broker here, and shortly before the war—with the last trip of the Tatsuta Maru, a Japanese ship—his business went under. I was in partnership with him and two others in a commission brokerage house called Osage Produce Company. Kay named and organized what was called the United Citizens Federation. I think there were one, two, or three meetings held.
Hansen
Okay, one final question. You mentioned in your last report as a documentary historian—the one which you wrote from Death Valley—that Group I, the JACL people, almost without exception arrived later at Manzanar than the Group II personalities. Do you recall why that was?
Tanaka
I think we had less mobility because most of the people in Group I owned their own homes and had businesses, so it took longer to wind up. Maybe the people in Group II—I don't really know why—some of us were also trying not to go; so we did arrive later.
Hansen
Well, I think that's my last question. I want to thank you very much, Mr. Tanaka, on behalf of the Japanese American Project of the Oral History Program at California State University, Fullerton. Your cooperation and candor are both greatly appreciated.
Tanaka
You're most welcome. I'm delighted to have talked with you. I hope I've given the project some assistance.
Notes
1. See the revisionist article by Arthur A. Hansen and David A. Hacker, "The Manzanar Riot: An Ethnic Perspective," Amerasia Journal 2 (Fall 1974): 112-57, in which they argue that this "riot" was, in actuality, a "revolt."
2. See "An Analysis of the Manzanar Incident and Its Aftermath," in the U.S. War Relocation [Authority] Archive, Relocation Center, Manzanar, California, Collection 122, Box 16, Special Collections Department, University Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles, and in the Japanese Evacuation and Relocation Study [JERS], Folder 010.16, Bancroft Library [BL], University of California, Berkeley [UCB]. Also deposited in the JERS collection, Folder 010.12, is a related account by Tanaka entitled "A Report on the Manzanar Riot of Sunday, December 6, 1942."
3. For a discussion of Slocum's JACL lobbying experiences, see Bill Hosokawa, JACL in Quest of Justice: The History of the Japanese American Citizens League (New York: Morrow, 1982), 42-44, 49-56.
4. See Tad Uyeno, "Point of No Return," Rafu Shimpo 22 August-20 October 1973.
5. Ibid., p. 7 in the bound and paginated version of this serialized history of those Manzanarians removed from camp after the December 1942 riot and placed in protective custody. "At first," recalled Uyeno, "I couldn't understand why the conversation would stop whenever a certain individual joined us, or the topic under discussion would abruptly drift to innocuous banality. In Los Angeles I had met him now and then but never got to know him well. He had a tremendous love for America and his patriotism was beyond question. Tokutaro Slocum, or "Tokie" as some called him, was apparently avoided
6. According to Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1982), 87, "the House Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration, commonly known as the Tolan Committee, was the first official body to examine the exclusion, holding hearings on the West Coast in late February and March 1942." See this same source, 86-87, 95-99, for a discussion of the Tolan Committee's proceedings and results.
7. For biographical information about Sally Yabumoto Slocum, see the 1966 interview with her by Joe Grant Masaoka in the Japanese American Research Project, Department of Special Collections, University Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles. This interview provides interesting and useful material about the Manzanar Riot of December 5, 1942. For example, "Texas Sally" relates that, on the night of the riot, the military police set up machine guns around the Slocums' barracks apartment while she carried an axe under her blouse as a protective measure. Her interview clarifies, too, that after the riot her husband Tokie went from Manzanar to Washington D.C., where he worked for the Office of Strategic Services (in a military, not a civilian capacity) for the duration of the war.
8. See citation in fn. 3 above for details of Slocum's successful campaign to achieve citizenship rights for World War I veterans of Asian ancestry such as himself.
9. For biographical information on Saburo Kido, Tom Yatabe and other early JACL leaders, see Bill Hosokawa, Nisei: The Quiet Americans (New York: Morrow, 1969), 191-204; for Kido and Yatabe's part in facilitating Slocum's role as a lobbyist for veteran citizenship rights, see particularly 198-200.
10. For details of the 1945 meeting in Tule Lake between Ralph Merritt and Joe Kurihara see the letter dated 7 January 1946 from Merritt to M. M. Tozier (chief of the War Relocation Authority's Reports Division in Washington D.C.), in Collection 122 (Relocation Center, Manzanar, California) Box 16, Folder 8, Department of Special Collections, University Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles. For an overview of the August 1942 Kibei meeting at Manzanar, see Hansen and Hacker, "Manzanar Riot," 132-33.
11. For background on the Topaz center, see Sandra Taylor, Jewel of the Desert: Japanese American Internment at Topaz (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1993).
12. For a discussion and examples of Kango Takamura's artwork in Manzanar, see Deborah Gesensway and Mindy Roseman, Beyond Words: Images from America's Concentration Camps (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), 117-29.
13. For a biographical snapshot of Fred Tayama constructed largely from Togo Tanaka's wartime writings, see Hansen and Hacker, "Manzanar Riot," 138-39.
14. For an overview of Doho by Togo Tanaka, see his wartime report for the University of California-sponsored Evacuation and Resettlement Study: "Doho" (January 1943), UCB-BL, JERS, Folder A 1.104. For a historical analysis of this newspaper, see Ronald C. Larson's unpublished paper, " Doho : The Japanese-American `Communist' Press," in the files of the Japanese American Project of the Oral History Program at California State University, Fullerton. For two retrospective accounts of Doho by former journalists affiliated with that newspaper, see Karl Yoneda, Ganbatta: Sixty-Year Struggle of a Kibei Worker (Los Angeles: Asian American Studies Center, University of California at Los Angeles, 1983), 98-99, and James Oda, Heroic Struggles of Japanese American Partisan Fighters from America's Concentration Camps (Los Angeles: Privately printed, 1980), 258-66.
15. For Doho's attacks on Fred Tayama, see the issues of 1 March 1939, 15 July 1941, and 15 August 1941. A complete run of the English and Japanese editions of Doho is archived in the Japanese American Research Project, Department of Special Collections, University Research Library, University of California at Los Angeles.
16. For an extended discussion of both the Rafu Shimpo and the Kashu Mainichi, as well as other Los Angeles-based Japanese American newspapers, by Togo Tanaka, see his undated 56-page report entitled "Vernacular Newspapers" in UCB-BL, JERS, Folder A1.104.
17. For biographical information on Roy Takeno, see John Armor and Peter Wright, eds., Manzanar (New York: Times Books, 1988), 122-26.
18. This interview, transacted by Arthur A. Hansen in two sessions in 1973-1974, is included in Part 2 ("Administrators"), 73-135, of this oral history project.
A letter that Robert Brown sent to WRA Director Dillon S. Myer on 29 January 1943 sheds light both on Brown's reaction to Togo Tanaka's report on the Manzanar Riot and to Tanaka himself. Accordingly, it merits full reiteration here:
Attached is the last documentary report by Togo Tanaka. It was written in Death Valley and covers some of the causes of the riot as he has seen them. It is an interesting document in that it is the first time anyone has attempted to divide the loyal nisei into two groups. As one who has been on this project since the day it opened, I think he is right in many ways in grouping some of the nisei leaders into two categories but I doubt if Group II as a whole could be labeled "aka". It must always be borne in mind that Mr. Tanaka was a loyal member of the J.A.C.L. and that his writing upon occasion tended to lean toward the J.A.C.L. method of thinking.
I have never quite been able to make up my mind as to the degree of intellectual honesty manifested by Togo. He is a brilliant reporter. His documentary reports, which were truly objective, were in my estimation highly professional. His reports prior to the Manzanar incident certainly pictured the state of affairs as they actually were among the evacuees. There were occasions, however, in which I felt that his personal views were cleverly woven into the conclusions of his reports, which showed too much the results of J.A.C.L. propaganda.
However that may be, the reports section is certainly suffering a great loss with his leaving. He is going to Chicago some time next week where he will be helped by the Friends' Service Committee to secure a position. He will probably do some free lance writing, based on his experiences at Manzanar. Should there be a position in Washington that he could fill, I would heartily recommend him to you.
For the archival location of this letter, see the citation for Tanaka's "An Analysis of the Manzanar Incident and its Aftermath" in fn. 2 above.
20. The interview with Ned Campbell, by Arthur A. Hansen, was taped on August 15, 1974, and an edited transcript of it is included in Part 2 ("Administrators"), 137-72, of this oral history project.
21. As Manzanar's documentary historians, Togo Tanaka and Joe Grant Masaoka prepared a short biographical sketch of Hiroshi Neeno in their Documentary Report Number 21 dated 9 July 1942. According to that report, the twenty-six-year-old Neeno, whose prewar employment in Los Angeles was with the federal civil service, coordinated the mail delivery department at Manzanar. See UCB-BL, JERS, MRC, Folder O10.06.
22. According to Togo Tanaka, in "Report on the Manzanar Riot: Addenda," 32-35, in prewar days Higashi was second in prominence in the JACL in southern California only to Fred Tayama, whom he preceded as chairman of the Southern District JACL. Prior to the war, also, he was associated with Tayama in the Pacific Service Bureau, an agency that sold insurance and provided business services for Los Angeles Japanese Americans. An officer in the Terminal Island branch of JACL, Higashi lived with the Tayamas for several weeks in Los Angeles prior to being evacuated to Manzanar and, once in camp, his family shared a barrack room with Fred Tayama and his family." See UCB-BL, JERS, MRC, Folder O10.16.
23. In Personal Justice Denied, 108-109, there is a useful description of the Japanese American community on Terminal Island, a six-mile long and one-half-mile wide island in Los Angeles Harbor (directly across from the city of San Pedro), and their precipitous evacuation by government order in February 1942.
24. See the reference to Brown's cover letter in fn. 19 above.
25. See Uyeno, "Point of No Return," 18, 20.
26. For details about Karl Yoneda's life and his experiences at Manzanar, see his autobiography, Ganbatte, as cited in fn. 14 above.
27. For background information about Koji Ariyoshi, his role in Manzanar, and his ideological outlook and camp associates, see his three articles in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin "—The Nisei Victims of Racism," "Evacuation to Manzanar," and "Memories of Manzanar"—dated, respectively, 7, 8, 9 April 1971.
28. This whitewash of Stalin's purges in the 1930s, which starred Walter Huston and Ann Harding, was intended to quell any misgivings Americans might have about their Soviet ally. Mission to Moscow, produced by Robert Buckner and directed by Michael Curtiz, was based on the book of the same name by Joseph E. Davies (U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1936 through 1938).
29. For a discussion of the Young Democrats (both in the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas) in the context of prewar Nisei political activity, see two studies by Jerrold Haruo Takahashi: "Changing Responses to Racial Subordination: An Exploratory Study of Japanese American Political Styles" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1980), 139-57, and "Japanese American Responses to Race Relations: The Formation of Nisei Perspectives," Amerasia Journal 9 (Spring/Summer 1982): 42-48.
30. See Takahashi, "Changing Responses to Racial Subordination," 180-85.
31. For information about Tomomasa Yamazaki (1913-1946) supplied by Togo Tanaka and Joe Grant Masaoka as Manzanar's documentary historians, see their reports (numbered 14 and 28) dated 27 June and 16 July, 1942. According to the first of these reports, Yamazaki was "formerly of Los Angeles and San Francisco, assistant English Editor of Japan-California Daily News, L.A., [and] active in political organization." For Yamazaki's prewar and wartime role, as viewed from the perspective of a close friend and cohort, see Yoneda, Ganbatte, 101, 112-13, 117, 119, 130, 132, 134-35, 169. According to Yoneda, 23, Yamazaki's wife, Ruth Kurata Yamazaki (1914-1975), was "a very attractive Nisei newspaperwoman who was active [prior to World War II] in the Los Angeles Young Nisei Democratic Club." For Tomomasa Yamazaki's perspective on events in Manzanar, where he was a block leader and a staff member of the Manzanar Free Press, see his 18-page "personal and confidential" report dated August 1942 in Box 9, Collection 122, Special Collections, UCLA.
32. For biographical data on Frank Chuman derived from Togo Tanaka and Joe Grant Masaoka's Manzanar documentary reports, see those dated 20 June 1942 (number 9) and 17 September 1942 (number 64). As stated in the former: " Frank Chuman, 25, born in Santa Barbara, California, Valedictorian graduate of Los Angeles High School '34, A.B. in political science, U.C.L.A., '38, student U.S.C. Law School, prior to evacuation held job in Welfare Department of Los Angeles County Civil Service; evacuated to Manzanar with first volunteer group March 21." For retrospective information on Chuman and his activities at Manzanar, see the unpublished interviews (O.H. 1475a,b) with him by Arthur A. Hansen and Carol J. Bielmeier in the CSUF Oral History Program's Japanese American Project, as well as the published one with him by John Tateishi in And Justice For All: An Oral History of the Japanese American Detention Camps (New York: Random House, 1984), 227-38. Still further biographical information on Chuman is included in his postwar study, The Bamboo People: The Law and Japanese-Americans (Chicago: Japanese American Research Project, Japanese American Citizens League, 1981).
33. On Harry Yoshio Ueno, see Sue Kunitomi Embrey, Arthur A. Hansen, and Betty Kulberg Mitson, eds., Manzanar Martyr: An Interview with Harry Y. Ueno (Fullerton, Calif.: Japanese American Project, Oral History Program, California State University at Fullerton, 1986); Arthur A. Hansen, Betty E. Mitson, and Sue Kunitomi Embrey, "Dissident Harry Ueno Remembers Manzanar," California History 64 (Winter 1985): 16-22; Tateishi, And Justice For All, 186-207; Harry Ueno, "Hostages of War," Rikka 10 (Autumn 1985): 16-22; and Judy Tachibana, "Indefinite Isolation: The World War II Ordeal of Harry Yoshio Ueno," Rafu Shimpo, 20 December 1980.
34. For background on the Moab Isolation Center, a former Civilian Conservation Corps facility located outside of the community of Moab, Utah, and used by the War Relocation Authority to confine "troublemakers" from the ten WRA centers between January and April of 1943, see the following secondary sources: Michi Nishiura Weglyn, Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America's Concentration Camps (New York: Morrow, 1976), 125-28; Richard Drinnon, Keeper of Concentration Camps: Dillon S. Myer and American Racism (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1987), 90, 98-99, 101-102;
35. Joe Kurihara was born on the Hawaiian island of Kauai in 1895. During World War I he served in the U.S. Army. At the time of Harry Ueno's arrest and removal from Manzanar on the evening of December 5, 1942, Kurihara assumed a leading part in the proceedings of the negotiation committee assembled to have Ueno returned to the camp. The best insight into Kurihara's life and character is found in his own writings: "Autobiography," "Nisei and the Government of the United States," "Other Writings," and "Murder in Manzanar," UCB-BL, JERS, Folders R30.00 and O8.10. Other useful accounts are: Raymond Best, "Joe Kurihara, Repatriate: His Story as Told to R. R. Best, Project Director, Tule Lake Center, Newell, California," UCB-BL, JERS, Folder R30.10, and Tanaka, "Report on the Manzanar Riot," 26-32. Eileen Tamura of the University of Hawaii is preparing a full-length study of Kurihara.
36. Genji Yamaguchi, a forty-year-old Issei at the time of his evacuation to Manzanar, was educated at the University of Southern California. In camp, this prewar landscape gardening contractor was a block manager and a Spanish instructor. Shigetoshi Tateishi was a Kibei who returned to the U.S. in 1930. Also a block leader, he worked as a cook in his block's mess hall and was a member of the Harry Ueno-headed Mess Hall Workers' Union.
37. Karl Yoneda, Koji Ariyoshi and twelve others (six of them Kibei) were recruited into the Military Intelligence Service by a recruiting team who came to Manzanar on November 28, 1942. Four days later, on December 2, they left Manzanar en route to the MIS language school just outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota. See Yoneda, Ganbatte, 145-48.
38. Ralph P. Merritt assumed his duties as Manzanar's director on November 24, 1942.
39. Prior to the war, Brown had worked as a band leader, schoolteacher, and Executive Director of the Inyo-Mono Associates (an Owens Valley-wide chamber of commerce). A graduate of the Journalism School at the University of Southern California, he served successively as Manzanar's Reports Officer and Assistant Project Director. See the 1973 interview with him by Arthur A. Hansen, as cited in fn. 18 above.
40. For one account of the origins of this newspaper's name, that provided by Robert Brown, see Hansen and Hacker, "Manzanar Riot," fn. 60, 150.
41. Lucy Adams, a prewar employee with the Bureau of Indian Affairs on the Navajo reservation, served at Manzanar as an assistant director in charge of community activities. For background information on Adams, see the October 16, 1993, interview with her by Sue Kunitomi Embrey and Arthur A. Hansen for the CSUF Oral History Program's Japanese American Project (O.H. 2327).
42. For the reports compiled by Togo Tanaka and Joe Grant Masaoka in their capacity as Manzanar's documentary historians, see UCB-BL, JERS, Folders O10.06 and O10.08. Numbered from 1 through 90, these reports cover the period from June to December 1942 and comprise a total of 406 typescript pages.
43. See Hansen and Hacker, "Manzanar Riot," 125.
44. Several months prior to the outbreak of war with Japan, the Southern District Council Japanese American Citizens League, whose chairman was Fred Tayama, organized the Southern California Coordinating Committee for Defense (SCCCD). The SCCCD was chaired by Joe Grant Masaoka and charged with "making patriotism vital" by gathering information on subversive activities within the resident Japanese community and turning it over to Naval Intelligence. After Pearl Harbor, the Los Angeles JACL chapter organized the "Anti-Axis Committee" to enlarge upon the work of the SCCCD. To chair this group, Tayama chose Tokie Slocum. After scores of community leaders were rounded up and sent to alien detention centers, Tayama, Slocum, and the Anti-Axis committee became largely anathema to Japanese Americans. See Tanaka, "Report on Manzanar Riot," 8-10.
Index
- Adams, Lucy, 164, 171n41
- Aka, 157, 158
- Akahoshi, Ted, 166
- Anti-Axis Committee, 166-67, 171n44
- Ariyoshi, Koji, 157, 160, 171n37
- Bancroft Library, 164
- Blamey, Joe, 155, 158
- Block Leaders' Council, 166
- Block Managers' Council, 166
- Brown, Robert L., 155, 156, 162-63, 164, 171n39
- Campbell, Ned, 156, 161-62, 163
- Carter, Genevieve, 164
- Central Japanese Association, 155
- Chuman, Frank, 159
- Communists, 154, 157
- Coverley, Harvey, 162
- Cow Canyon Civilian Conservation Corps Camp, Death Valley, Calif., 152, 156, 157
- Democratic Luncheon Club, 158
- D'Ille, Margaret, 163-64
- Doho, 154, 155, 156
- Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI], 152, 153, 160
- Fujii, Shuji, 154-55, 156
- Girdner, Audrie, 152
- Great Betrayal, The (Girdner & Loftis), 152
- Hawes, Joe, 153
- Higashi, Kiyoshi, 156, 169n22
- Hirai, Raymond, 166
- Issei, 152, 159
- Japanese Americans
- Japanese American Citizens League. See also Manzanar War Relocation Center factions and government authorities, 154-55, 156, 160, 171n44
- Japanese language, 155
- Judo and Judoists, 156
- Kamiyama, Sojin, 156
- Kashu Mainichi, 155
- Kibei, 156, 159-60, 165
- Kido, Saburo, 152
- Kimball, Solon, 162
- Kishi, Ben, 159
- Kitchen Workers' Union, 160, 161
- Kurihara, Joe, 153, 159, 171n35
- Labor unions, 155, 157, 160, 161
- Loftis, Anne, 152
- Los Angeles Examiner, 165
- Los Angeles Times, 154
- Manzanar Citizens Federation, 157
- Manzanar Free Press, 155, 156, 162, 163
- Manzanar Riot
- Manzanar War Relocation Center
- administrators, 156, 159, 161-64
- camp government, 164-65
- death lists, 160, 163
- documentary historians, 151, 159-60, 162, 164
- factions, 151, 157
- food, 161
- informers, 151, 152-53, 155
- internees' feelings about, 158, 161, 164
- Kibei at, 159-60
- leadership of, 158, 159-60, 166, 167
- mail delivery, 169n21
- newspapers. See Manzanar Free Press
- rumors at, 161
- schools, 164
- staff, 153, 158
- threats and assaults, 154, 155, 156, 160, 163
― 174 ― - Maryknoll Church, 165
- Masaoka, Joe Grant, 155, 156, 157, 158, 161, 162, 163, 164, 171n44
- Masaoka, Mike, 163
- Merritt, Ralph Palmer, 153, 162, 171n38
- Military Intelligence Service, 171n37
- Mission to Moscow, 157, 170n28
- Moab Isolation Center, 152, 159
- Mori, Chiye, 156, 157, 158, 167
- Nakamoto, George, 151
- Nash, Roy, 162
- Neeno, Hiro, 156
- Newspapers, See individual names 154, 165
- Nisei, 154, 159, 165
- Olson, Culbert, 154
- Ozamoto, Tom, 159
- Pearl Harbor bombing, 154
- Rafu Shimpo, 151, 152, 154, 155, 156, 157, 159, 163
- Redfield, Robert, 162
- Richards, Ray, 165
- Slocum, Sally Yabumoto, 152, 168n7
- Slocum, Tokie, 151, 152-53, 156, 167n3, 168n7
- Southern California Committee for Defense, 171n44
- Soviet-American Friendship Society, 157
- Stalin, Joseph, 157, 170n28
- Sugahara, Kay, 167
- Takamura, Kango, 153
- Takeno, Roy, 155
- Tanabe, Bill, 166
- Tanaka, Togo W.
- Tateishi, Shigetoshi, 159, 171n36
- Tayama, Fred, 153-55, 156, 157, 158, 169n22, 171n44
- Terminal Island, Calif., 156, 169n23
- Tolan Congressional Committee, 152, 154, 165, 168n6
- Topaz War Relocation Center, 153
- Tule Lake Segregation Center, 153, 159
- Ueno, Harry Yoshio, 159, 160-61, 171n35
- [U.S.] Office of War Information, 154
- Uyeno, Tad, 142, 156, 157, 158
- Woods, Velma, 164
- Yamaguchi, Genji, 159, 171n36
- Yamazaki, Ruth Kurata, 157
- Yamazaki, Tomomasa, 157, 158
- Yasuda, Frank, 166
- Yatabe, Tom, 152
- Yoneda, Karl, 157, 160, 167, 171n37
- Young Democrats, 158
An Interview with
|
Use Restrictions
This is a slightly edited transcription of an interview conducted for the Oral History Program, sponsored by California State University, Fullerton. The reader should be aware that an oral history document portrays information as recalled by the interviewee. Because of the spontaneous nature of this kind of document, it may contain statements and impressions which are not factual
Scholars are welcome to utilize short excerpts from any of the transcriptions without obtaining permission as long as proper credit is given to the interviewee, the interviewer, and the University. Scholars must, however, obtain permission from California State University, Fullerton before making more extensive use of the transcription and related materials. None of these materials may be duplicated or reproduced by any party without permission from the Oral History Program, California State University, Fullerton, Fullerton, California, 92834-6846.
Interview
- Interviewee:
- Robert F. Spencer
- Interviewer:
- Arthur A. Hansen
- Subject:
- Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study / Gila War Relocation Center
- Date:
- July 15 - 17, 1987
This is an interview with Professor Robert Francis Spencer, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota, for the Japanese American Project of the Oral History Program at California State University, Fullerton. The interviewer is Arthur A. Hansen. The date is July 15, 1987; the time of the interview is approximately 10:30 a.m. The interview is being conducted at the home of Professor Spencer at 1577 Vincent Street in St. Paul, Minnesota. This is the first in a series of interview sessions [three] to be extended over the next few days.
I think we're ready to begin, Dr. Spencer. Is it okay if I call you Bob?
Spencer
Of course.
Hansen
Bob, I know quite a bit about a certain period of your life, the time that you worked as a field anthropologist in 1942-1943 for the [University of California, Berkeley-sponsored] Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study [JERS]—and for a few crucial months this fieldwork of yours is very, very well documented. But I don't know about the years that led up to this experience. So let's begin with your birth and take you on through your formative years and your education and get you situated at Berkeley, where eventually you wound up as a very young Caucasian fieldworker in a Japanese American—take your pick—"concentration camp" or "relocation center." There was some preparation for this task that you were to perform during World War II, so let's start at the beginning, okay?
Spencer
Okay. Well, I was born [on March 30, 1917] and grew up in San Francisco, [California], and educated in public schools there. I started out at [the University of California at] Berkeley in 1934 at the age of sixteen. I had the idea that, being rather, what shall I say, troubled at that time in many ways, I thought I'd like to go into the Lutheran ministry. And I'd been raised as a Missouri Synod Lutheran. My parents were divorced, so that I was raised in my grandparental household, raised speaking German and English and getting the Lutheran background as well. So, my thought was to take work leading toward seminary. And, early on, I started to get the languages which would be necessary for a clergyman, Hebrew or Greek, and a lot of Latin. And I became so fascinated by Hebrew that I then moved to Arabic, and then to a major in the Semitic languages. Meanwhile, I was taking a lot of work in German as well. But my formal major was in the Near Eastern Language Department. I think I took enough for a major in German as well. I never did work that out. It doesn't matter. By the time I reached my senior year at college, I had taken two courses in anthropology, but had never seriously considered anthropology. In fact, I was pretty well set on going to seminary, which would be Concordia in St. Louis, [Missouri]. And then I got going in this language bit, and gradually became disaffected as far as the Lutheran church was concerned, as I became
At any rate, I considered that for a time, that I really would like the ministry. But my interests were much more academic then. If I were going into the ministry at all, it would be as a philosopher-theologian, and then it had already hit me—not to have anything to do with parish work; no, that wasn't it. But I had a number of friends, a couple of whom...when...Let's see, I graduated in December 1937, and these friends and I went down to Mexico and stayed there for some months and became quite secularized, shall we say. And we were driving back from Mexico City to Berkeley, and came through Albuquerque, New Mexico; we visited Taos, [New Mexico], and a number of the other Indian pueblos. And, one of my friends who—he was killed in the war—also was an anthropologist, said, "You know what I would like to do? I'd like to go to New Mexico and study anthropology. It'd be a nice place to be." And that thought took root, as far as I was concerned. So I went. Now, I'd had a lot of languages, not much else. And my thought was, "Well, why don't I go and be God's gift to American Indian languages." The ministry by this time had faded away. So, I applied at the University of New Mexico in 1938, and went there and began a program leading toward the M.A. in anthropology. But I had all the make-up work to do in anthropology, which I did; I finished a master's in two years, having done an analysis of an Indian language in the Rio Grande Valley ["A Preliminary Sketch of Keresan Grammar"]. I'm not terribly proud of this thesis. I wasn't really tutored in linguistics. I had a lot of languages, but languages are not linguistics. In fact, I'd taken a year of Japanese at Berkeley as an undergraduate. Well, then, at New Mexico I did write a grammar of this language, and finished an M.A. in 1940. I stayed in Santa Fe until the end of 1940, six months, and continued to work on this language. And the draft intruded at that time. I wasn't sure I'd be drafted or not. But I drew a very high number; by that, I mean, I was due to be called up like at once. And I decided I'd better get back to my home surroundings, at least, and get drafted from there. Well, yeah, all right, so I was called up and then got rejected on account of eyes. I had an uncle—I'm back now in San Francisco—who had weathered the Depression and become an administrator for the WPA [Works Progress Administration] and he gave me a job. You know, in San Francisco, along the Embarcadero, down by the ferry building under the bridge, there were railroad spurs. It was known as the "Beltline Railroad," and I worked on that, in the administration in the office. Well, I did that for about a year; and, meanwhile, I was shredding at the bit to get back to anthropology. So, now it was 1941—yes, fall 1941. I went [to UC Berkeley] and presented myself to [Dr. Alfred Louis] Kroeber.[1] And he accepted me as a graduate student. Meanwhile, I met [Dr. Robert H.] Lowie.[2] I also met a number of the other Berkeley anthropologists [McCown, Edward Gifford, and Ronald Olson], and I felt very insecure. They were very formidable people. And, then... Well, I continued working for the WPA. I was able to get time off, get on the ferry, go over to Berkeley, and take seminars. And I took a fairly full load of seminars at Berkeley initially. Meanwhile, I had been accepted. I was accepted because, not only did I come with an M.A., but I was one of the very, very few who could pass the very formidable language examinations which the department then required. And they were, without exception, German and French, which one had to read and translate without a dictionary. Anyway, I passed the language examinations, and this made an impression. So I was accepted to full status as a graduate student and took seminars. And, fine, that went on; and 1941, December, comes Pearl Harbor. And meanwhile I was still taking work. And, then, Lowie meanwhile had expressed an interest in what I was doing. I had taken a seminar from Lowie in which I raised the question of law and the nature and meaning of law in comparative ethnographic contexts. Lowie, I guess, liked that. Anyway, he heard from Dorothy [Swaine] Thomas [a rural sociologist (1899-1977) at UC Berkeley during World War II and the Director of the Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study (JERS)] that she was interested in a field anthropologist to go out into the field. She was just then beginning to generate her sources of funds. She had applied to the Rockefeller Foundation. She didn't know [the results] yet, but, as I recall... Well, now, you can fill me in better on the chronology. There were immediately the blackouts and the anxieties and the hostilities directed toward the Japanese Americans. And suddenly we were confronted with this evacuation.
Hansen
Yes, and the first group of evacuated Japanese Americans went to Manzanar [War Relocation Center in eastern California], which was then an assembly center, in March 1942.
Spencer
What was the date of [President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's] proclamation [Executive Order 9066, which authorized the evacuation of "any or all persons" from designated military areas on the West Coast of the
Hansen
February 19, 1942.
Spencer
February, yes. And then she [Dorothy Swaine Thomas], having heard of this [Executive Order 9066], decided that she would apply for funds and get going on this [JERS]. Now, her mentor in all of this was her husband, W. I. Thomas.[3] And if there's any originality, any spark of genius—I'm not sure there is—in Dorothy's work, it's attributable to W. I. But, in any case, Dorothy decided to apply for funds to do studies of the Japanese [American] relocation. This ties into W. I. Thomas's interests. You know, he was the coauthor with Florian Znaniecki of The Polish Peasant in Europe and America [a five-volume study published between 1918 and 1920] in which he articulates those famous sociological propositions of the four wishes [for new experience, social recognition, mastery, and security]. I'm not sure I have my copy of it [ The Polish Peasant in Europe and America ] still. I've sold a good many of my books. In any case, I would look to W. I. Thomas as the guiding genius behind this [JERS], with Dorothy as the implementor. Well, she did get funded; and, so, she started this research in Manzanar [and two other assembly centers—Tanforan, in northern California, and Santa Anita, in southern California], against the objections of the not yet War Relocation Authority, but the...
Hansen
...WCCA [Wartime Civil Control Administration],[4] no doubt.
Spencer
Yes, yes.
Hansen
Can I go back to a couple of things, and then we'll pick up this thread again. You mentioned that you were born in San Francisco and went to school there. First of all, could you tell me about your family? Other than the fact that your parents were separated, would you amplify somewhat about your mother and father, about their background, and also about San Francisco, what it was like at that juncture. I've recently been reading the posthumously published autobiography of Ansel Adams [ Ansel Adams: An Autobiography (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1985)], who died a short while ago. Adams [1902-1984] was brought up in San Francisco about twenty years before you, and reading his autobiography has given me a real nice portrait of the city at that time, around the time of the earthquake and everything. But maybe you could tell me about the San Francisco that you remember from your youth.
Spencer
Well, my grandfather [Hans Heinrich Joachim Koepke], I'm not quite sure when he came to the United States, but he was born in 1851 and died in 1932. My grandmother was fifteen years younger. They had six children. He came to escape the draft at the time of the Franco-Prussian War [1870-1871].
Hansen
This is your paternal grandfather?
Spencer
Maternal. And he achieved some success in San Francisco. I think he started out as a coal miner in Pennsylvania, if I remember correctly, and then went into partnership. He had a little money saved, and he bought some property. And that led to an expansion. He built a hotel, and then he bought property around the city. And he was fairly well-off until April 18, 1906, when the earthquake and the fire hit, and much of his stuff was wiped out. Well, with insurance not being then what it is now, he was unable to collect very much. But, after 1906, having been remarkably successful financially, he still retained some of that, so he had no problem. He built a family house on Dusedero and Ellis Streets—it's a black neighborhood now. And, he had other properties around [the city]. And, as I say, he and my grandmother had six children; all of them are dead now. This section of the house here [the interviewee's home in St. Paul, where the interview is being transacted] was built for my mother [Elsa M. Koepke Spencer]. She was the last surviving sibling. She died three years ago, in 1984. She never wanted to live in here, but I built this room for her.
Hansen
And of the six children, where did your mother fit in?
Spencer
There were four daughters and two sons, and she was the fourth daughter. That was the age range. The boys were younger.
And, from what you've heard from people, what was your mom like growing up? What kinds of things was she interested in?
Spencer
She was deeply religious. I guess, you can see how I might have had a problem with religion. I was spoonfed religion from the time I was able to talk. She was, perhaps, more religious than her siblings. But she married my father [Frank H. Spencer]. They met in high school; and his background was entirely different. He had lost his father when he was five in Kentucky. My paternal grandfather was an attorney in Louisville, and my paternal grandmother [Teresa F. Spencer] was admitted to the bar by virtue of working in his office. And then in the 1880s sometime she took an M.A.—Which was very unusual—in mathematics, came to San Francisco, when her husband died about 1895, with four children, got a job as a teacher, and worked her way up to principal. And she was in the San Francisco public school system as a principal in one of the schools, retaining her interest in mathematics and law and literature; and she was very important, as far as my development was concerned. I think it was she more than... not the German contingent, but it was she who had a very profound influence on my own life. She was a mathematician of no little competence; although she wasn't able to instill in me an appreciation for mathematics, she was much concerned with Shakespeare and with English poetry and English literature generally. We used to read poems together and Shakespeare's plays and so on, and I had a tremendous influence from her in that respect. However, her father was Norwegian and her mother was shantytown Irish from Cork. And, of course, with the Irish influence, she was a terribly staunch Catholic. And she was very unhappy when her son, my father, chose to marry that German Lutheran. And part of their problem, I think, was the religious conflict. At any rate, my grandmother retained this deep commitment to Catholicism. At that time, I mean, you know, this is before Vatican Two. This was a...The Catholic church was a very different order from what it is now. People were very, very proper, not to prevent conception; and large families were the rule. I think of my grandmother's sister who had twelve children, and so on. But, apart from that, the whole business of papal infallibility, and the doctrine of the immaculate conception, and all that are very much... And novenas. God! Novenas up the wazoo. (laughter) So, you see, I got it coming and going. And if you find me writing a doctoral dissertation on Buddhism, I think I come by it honestly. (laughter)
Hansen
You said your parents met while they were in high school?
Spencer
I guess so.
Hansen
In San Francisco? And how long did their marriage last?
Spencer
I think they were married from about 1914 until 1920.
Hansen
And did they have several children, or just yourself?
Spencer
No, no, just me. I'm the only one.
Hansen
So, you never lived with your mom or your dad then, is that it?
Spencer
I lived with my mother, yes, because my mother then, having been divorced... And this, of course, was very shameful and unusual at the time. It didn't do her any good psychologically. I mean, she really felt that the world was against her.
Hansen
So she moved in with her parents?
Spencer
With her parents.
Hansen
And didn't remarry?
Spencer
No, she never did. She had a sister [Alma H. Koepke Jaeger] who was teaching at Long Beach Poly [Long Beach Polytechnic High School] in Long Beach, [California], and we used to go down there quite a bit. In about 1915, this sister, who had been living in San Francisco, went down and lived in Long Beach. And
Hansen
You said that your paternal grandmother had quite an influence on you. But did you continue then after the divorce to see your father?
Spencer
Oh, yes. He and I never got along; but, then, that's not too surprising.
Hansen
He stayed in the San Francisco area?
Spencer
He was a remarkably successful insurance executive.
Hansen
I see.
Spencer
He worked his way up through companies until finally he became director of the Commercial Union for the whole Pacific coast and Hawaii. And, in 1936 I went to Australia. I worked my way over. And he had told me to get in touch with the Commercial Union people in Sydney. I did. Interestingly enough, I was in Sydney last summer, and went around to the old Commercial Union and said, "Do you remember Mr. Brown who saw me fifty years ago?" (laughter) Sic, transit, gloria. At any rate, yes, and then, good heavens, when I went later to Southeast Asia, my father set up Commercial Union meetings with people, and I could stay at their houses. It worked out very well.
Hansen
What was the source of your strain with your father?
Spencer
It was just that he was a man who would not divulge feelings ever. He was cold and quite devoid of what you might call humaneness. He was... not a nice man. I mean, he did very well socially, and he would do the proper things socially and expected me to do the same thing. But he had no understanding of a child's needs or of the needs of a child like myself who was, you know, a product of divorce.
Hansen
Did he continue to help out financially with your upbringing?
Spencer
Yes, until I got an A.B. I graduated from college and, "Now, what are you going to do? A major in Arabic, for God's sake! Why didn't you take some economics?" The A.B. itself was enough. Then you're educated. Now then, go out into the world. He wanted me to go into insurance, just as he did. I'm not going into insurance. I never told him, for instance, that I had this clerical ambition. I think he would have objected. You can't make any money that way. It doesn't put bread on the table. An unpleasant man, really. Marietta [Bunzel Spencer, wife of the interviewee] and I have talked about it very often. I became sort of quite estranged from him for many years. Then when I got older, I renewed contact; I was older and more tolerant. If you tried to probe something with him—in other words, something that would reflect an opinion or feeling or whatever—he wouldn't do it. And the result is he would say, "Do this because I'm your father and I want you to do it." Well, a child like myself... We never really did get along, although he was a very, I won't say liberal provider, but he did keep it up until I graduated. And then I went to New Mexico. Actually, I went to Mexico for a long time and I'd get letters from him. "For Christ's sake, when are you coming home?"
Hansen
Was he remarried by this time?
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
And had another family, too?
Spencer
No. He married somebody, a woman fully as frigid and cold as himself. They must have had a lovely time. (laughter)
Hansen
What about San Francisco during that time when you were growing up? What was it like?
It was a marvelous place to grow up. Now, first of all, my father felt that the schools in my neighborhood...the neighborhood where my grandparental house was sort of deteriorating, even then, even in the 1920s. And my father said, "Well, he really needs the instruction that can be offered at a better school," and he made arrangements with the Board of Education for me to attend my grandmother's school, which was out in the Richmond District. And if you think that was fun, you have another think coming, because she demanded absolute perfection from me. All the other kids would say, "Oh, your grandmother is the principal. How nice." It wasn't nice at all. She would summon me into her office and read me a riot act at least once a week. "Why didn't I do better in this?" Well, what she did, she gave me a love of literature, but a hatred for mathematics. (laughter) Her technique was to say, "What's two and two?" And I would say, "Five," and she'd hit me with a ruler. She was an old-fashioned pedagogue teacher.
Hansen
Was she an effective principal and did the school reflect her leadership?
Spencer
Yes. Well, I was expected, of course, to shine. I remember the other kids would say, "Oh what a break, your grandmother's principal." (laughter) You can imagine what she did; she called me into her office every time there was a deficiency on my part and gave me what for. It was not an easy experience; she was not an easy woman to get along with.
Hansen
And you went there through the grade school?
Spencer
I went there from 1926 to 1930. She retired about 1928, I guess. I was a couple of years over that; but, at any rate, I went to that school and then I went to Lowell High School, 1930 to 1933.
Hansen
Which even then was a magnet school, wasn't it? It was sort of a special school, right?
Spencer
College preparatory.
Hansen
Yes. But I mean you were placed in that school based upon competitive examination scores, weren't you?
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
I've talked to a few people over the years about Lowell High School. Maybe you could tell me a little about the school in your day. What were its strengths and its limitations?
Spencer
I wasn't too happy in the school situation at Lowell. There was really nothing to tell. It's just that one went to classes. I started with the usual curriculum, which would be liberal arts.
Hansen
I guess what I'm getting at is this: What I've heard from some people who have gone to Lowell is that by the time they got to the university, much of what they had to take in the first year or so was somewhat repetitious because they'd had a pretty rigorous education at Lowell.
Spencer
That's true, and to avoid that, I took rather esoteric courses at Berkeley. (laughter)
Hansen
But at Lowell, did you do well as a student?
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
And this was when you were thinking about a career in the church.
Spencer
Thanks to my grandmother. Actually, I wasn't thinking about anything then. That was afterward. Well, Lowell was really very nice. You learned a lot. They had a lousy football team, and it was made up of scholars, obviously. But, one worked very hard. At the same time, I had three friends whom I had become acquainted with in grade school. They lived out in the Richmond district of San Francisco. I used to go there every day and we'd play, you know, various things, as young adolescent boys will do. And time passed pleasantly. I really have no particular thing to say about Lowell. I was interested in the things that I took,
Hansen
During the time that you were going to school, both at the grade-school level and in high school, were you learning more things in spite of rather than because of school? Would that be a fair way of characterizing your situation?
Spencer
Oh, I read a great deal, all sorts of things. And among my friends we would pass books around, some junk and some good things.
Hansen
What did you learn from just being in San Francisco?
Spencer
You know, if you're born and grow up in a place, you tend to take it for granted. Things that were even then tourist attractions, such as Chinatown or Fisherman's Wharf, or the beach and that sort of thing, are a part of everyday experience.
Hansen
What about the public library?
Spencer
Well, I really didn't use it. I used to have to go down and select novels for my grandmother from the public library, such as Hannerl und Ihren Liebhabern [The Story of Hannerl and Her Lovers]. (laughter) That was funny. She wanted romantic novels, and I was the only one in the family who knew enough German by now that I could... No, that isn't true. But at least I knew what she liked. That was it.
Hansen
You've gone into anthropology and language and linguistics and accessed different cultures and things like that. San Francisco is usually known as a cosmopolitan city.
Spencer
That's very true, but at age fourteen, fifteen, your world view hasn't extended that much. In high school I did join the Pacific Relations Club, and I did in my own neighborhood have some friends who were Nisei [citizen-generation Japanese Americans]. Their name was Sugiyama, and they were actually at Gila [River War Relocation Center in southern Arizona] when I did fieldwork there later.
Hansen
And were there some Nisei in your school class?
Spencer
Yes. We were good friends and Mas [Sugiyama] was in German classes with me later.
Hansen
What about Chinatown in San Francisco?
Spencer
We'd walk through it. Our Pacific Relations Club used to meet in Chinese restaurants.
Hansen
Did you have any Asian American students at Lowell?
Spencer
Oh yes, lots.
Hansen
Oh, you did.
Spencer
Bill Fujita was a yell leader. He just ran a trip to Japan. One of my old school friends went to Japan under his leadership. Yes, I grew up with Japanese Americans. We were right on the edge of the Japanese settlement. I never thought about it one way or the other, except that their names were sometimes a little bit tough to remember, at that time, at least.
Hansen
Was it because San Francisco was a cosmopolitan place, that there was greater tolerance?
Spencer
I expect so. I think there was no problem with tolerance, no. On that level, and perhaps on a business level. Perhaps on a formal invitation level, I wasn't involved in that. However, I did go around for a time with a Japanese girl. Now I was in college then, and I remember I took her to dinner in San Francisco. And we went to the Golden Pheasant, which is long gone. It was right at the corner of Geary and Powell
Hansen
Can you tell me something about Berkeley at the time that you got there in...
Spencer
... January 1934. Well, I didn't make very much money for Berkeley. By that I mean, money was limited or one was limited. Remember, it was in the middle of the Depression. And when my father was willing to pay more or less for my keep and for my tuition, that was really all I had.
Hansen
Did you live at home?
Spencer
Initially, yes, and commuted. A lot of kids did that. Of course, that was before the [Oakland Bay] bridge, and those ferries were always fine.
Hansen
What was Berkeley like at that time, as far as an intellectual environment?
Spencer
You know, I can't really tell you. I came at sixteen, nearly seventeen, and I wasn't conscious of intellectual environments. I sort of fumbled through as best I could. I had a number of friends. I wasn't aware of a particular academic environment. I didn't perhaps know there was such a thing.
Hansen
Was it considered an honor to get accepted at Berkeley at that particular time, or not?
Spencer
Not especially.
Hansen
Or was that just the local campus for you?
Spencer
Yes. A couple of my friends went to Stanford, but they could afford it. Tuition was very high. It must have cost about $200.
Hansen
Probably a huge percentage of Lowell graduates, even during the Depression, went to college, right?
Spencer
Oh yes.
Hansen
Did they tend to be people who went to college back East, to Ivy League schools, or not, during the Depression?
Spencer
Not during the Depression. We had a lot of Lowellites at Berkeley; but, then we were sort of swallowed up. Now, initially I had to commute. That meant that I really didn't have much chance to mingle with others.
Hansen
Was Berkeley something of a commuter campus at that time?
Spencer
I would say so. Hundreds went and commuted back to San Francisco.
Hansen
When did the light start going on for you at Berkeley as an undergraduate, in the sense, say, where you decided you'd go hear a prominent speaker who was visiting the campus? I mean, it's an intellectually high-powered place, whether students are aware of it or not. I know that during my freshman year at Berkeley I was oblivious to that sort of situation, too.
Spencer
What year was that now?
Hansen
I started there in the spring semester of 1957, and then transferred in my sophomore year to the University of California campus at Santa Barbara.
Spencer
I was a couple of years before you, really, at Berkeley.
There were a lot of Nobel Prize winners at Berkeley when I was there and I was largely oblivious to that reality.
Spencer
I was, too. I didn't realize that there was a research commitment on the part of the instructors. I thought they just taught. Just initially, and later on I became aware of it. No, I sort of gravitated to rather marginal, intellectual people. I say marginal in the sense that they were students, older students. I had a girl friend who was four years older than I, and who was graduating when I was a freshman. So that relationship lasted a couple of years, and she drew me into older students. I always wanted to be older than I was.
Hansen
In fact, you were younger than your classmates.
Spencer
I was, yes. I went out for the wrestling team, and wrestled a bit. I went into sumo, of course, after I got to the Gila camp.
Hansen
When you were an undergraduate at Berkeley, even though you were not an anthropologist taking language classes, you must have been inspired by a few professors, people who meant something to you or had an impact on you?
Spencer
Well, I tell you, you take language, but don't think of it as language per se, but rather as bodies of literature. You are moving into an intellectual domain, so that by the time I, knowing German well enough by then, quite early on moved into courses in German literature where we discussed problems of significance, I suspect, that appeared in this literature. So that the German classics and that kind of thing made me aware. I became very aware of the philosophical implication behind it. I took some philosophy, and moved into that domain.
Hansen
But you didn't move into that domain through the assistance of particular people that you remember, ones who impressed you?
Spencer
No, no. You're right, I didn't. Of course, I had this one professor [Dr. William Popper, a well known Arabist] with whom I was taking Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, and the like. But he was teaching language, and concerned with language relationships. And we had read his editions of Arabic texts and so on. No, I wouldn't say I was particularly influenced by anyone at that point.
Hansen
Now, after receiving your B.A. degree you left Berkeley and went to Mexico. Could we talk some now about what transpired in Mexico? You stayed there, you say, for an extended period. By that, you mean what? Like a half a year?
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
Yes. And you went down to Mexico with some classmates from Berkeley.
Spencer
Yes. We lived in Mexico City but I went all around the valley of Mexico, down as far as Oaxaca, to Acapulco and over to Veracruz.
Hansen
And what was your intention in going to Mexico at that time? Did you just want to explore the country, or did you want to have some fun before seeking permanent employment or more education?
Spencer
I had worked on ships in the summer. I had gone to Australia, as I said. I went to Japan, and to Hawaii a number of times on the Hawaii run. It was summer vacation and we could do it, although the general strike in San Francisco in 1934 made it difficult because there was always the fear that college students were strikebreakers. I had to assure the unions that I wasn't involved in that. But then I was going to do it again. I was waiting around in the hiring hall, and this friend of mine—his father had just died—was an orphan. He said, "Come on. I've got some money. Let's go." So we got another guy and we went in a car that he had bought. What did we do? We traveled all over Mexico is what we did, and I learned Spanish. My Spanish is so rusty now.
So you had an excuse for going down there. Part of it was real, but there were other interests that you had. Was Mexico a hedonistic alternative, too?
Spencer
Yes, it was, of course. And also it was a nice opportunity to get away from my father and his nagging at me to take a job in insurance or whatever.
Hansen
And after Mexico, you went to New Mexico. You went there because, as you related earlier, you were attracted by the idea of perhaps becoming "God's gift to American Indian languages."
Spencer
I wanted to get away from the pressure to put me in the insurance business. And, so, I did, and I worked with what was then the NYA, the National Youth Administration. I got a job there. Moreover, I got married.
Hansen
At the time you went to...
Spencer
...New Mexico.
Hansen
I didn't know that.
Spencer
My wife is not too happy about that. I had two failed marriages before I married her.
Hansen
So, you were married when you came back from Mexico?
Spencer
No, no. I came back from Mexico and then I met this girl Johanna [surname withheld by interviewee] and married her. It took me awhile to straighten things out to go to New Mexico, and I brought a wife along.
Hansen
Could you tell me about your first wife? Where you met her?
Spencer
I don't know. I just met her.
Hansen
At Berkeley?
Spencer
At Berkeley, yes. She was a student. She was from Ventura [the county seat of Ventura County in southern California].
Hansen
A town that I know very well, having been brought up in [nearby] Santa Barbara.
Spencer
Yes, of course.
Hansen
And was she in linguistics or languages?
Spencer
No, no. She was a playgirl. She was having a hell of a good time, and I enjoyed it, too. So, we decided we'd get married, just like that. And, so we went up to Sacramento [the state capital of California] and got married.
Hansen
And how old were you then? Probably twenty or twenty-one?
Spencer
Yes. And that lasted for a couple of years, until I finished my M.A.
Hansen
And when you went to New Mexico, what was the reason for going to New Mexico itself? Was it because of its reputation?
Spencer
No. I thought these friends of mine were in anthropology, and, you know, here I was majoring in Arabic, Arabic and Hebrew. Except, what can you do at that time, 1937, with a major in Arabic? Nobody had ever heard of the Middle East.
Right. Well, I guess my next question, then, is this: Why, when Berkeley had, you know, a prestigious anthropology program, did you go to New Mexico?
Spencer
To go away, to break away.
Hansen
But did you know anything about the University of New Mexico itself as a school?
Spencer
No, nothing. Only that I'd been there.
Hansen
What was it like as a school then?
Spencer
Have you ever been in Albuquerque?
Hansen
Yes.
Spencer
I was there two years ago. I never would have recognized the university.
Hansen
Well, they've got a lot of new buildings, that's for sure.
Spencer
It was out there, out on Central Avenue, and there was nothing else around then. And they built this campus with this pueblo-type architecture. I don't know. I didn't know what I was going to do. I didn't know...I hadn't really formulated any ideas as to what I might do next. I only knew that my Arabic wasn't good enough that I could do anything with it. I guess my sole focus was teaching. I wanted to teach. I did feel strongly about that. And, then, did I want...I don't know, why didn't I think of the State Department? We didn't have those experiences then to take the exam; and besides, the West Coast was then five days away from Washington, and it was out of California. So, I was, you know, in my teens.
Hansen
But when you went to New Mexico were you attracted... I mean, that area has attracted many anthropologists over the years; and, they have museums and institutes and, well, it's sort of a center for anthropological studies. Was that something that you were aware of when you chose New Mexico?
Spencer
Yes, well, as I said, these friends of mine were anthropologists, and we stopped in Albuquerque and visited anthropologists. And when I was there, the atmosphere struck me as very, very pleasant. And, as I say, I really wanted to get away from the Bay Area. So, New Mexico seemed a logical choice. Moreover, it was cheap.
Hansen
And was there somebody for you to work with—that is, study under—at New Mexico, that you recall?
Spencer
No, no. I went ahead and did this linguistic stuff all by myself. And I realized the horrendous mistakes I made, because I then became trained as a linguist later at Berkeley; and I've taught linguistics over the years, so I know linguistics. But I didn't know it then. I see what a mess I made of the master's thesis that I wrote. But they accepted it. Well, I guess, at New Mexico it was lots of fun. We were all very poor; it was Depression. And, we were living in... Well, Johanna and I paid $20 a month rent for really a very nice apartment, and she got money from home. I worked in the library and in the department... somehow or other we managed. But, then, an anthropologist by the name of Leslie Spier [1893-1961] came to the University of New Mexico in my last term there. And he had a tremendous influence on me and my thinking. Up until that time, I thought anthropology was just a bunch of facts to learn. Well, it's interesting to see Indians and it's interesting to see Japanese, et cetera, et cetera; but, I had no real awareness of what it all meant. And Spier was able to inculcate that.
Hansen
Was he a visiting professor?
Spencer
No. I have written a biography of him [ Leslie Spier 1893-1961 : A Biographical Memoir by Robert F. Spencer (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1987)] that is being published by the National Academy of Science. It's been four years in the works and it should be out now. I finally read proof on
Hansen
Was he involved in your thesis at all, or not?
Spencer
The master's.
Hansen
Yes, the master's. Did he supervise your thesis?
Spencer
He was involved. He directed it. He saw what I was doing; at least I was on the right track. And Leslie felt that I had some promise.
Hansen
Was he a young man himself, at that time?
Spencer
No, he was born in 1893.
Hansen
But he was younger than both Kroeber and Lowie?
Spencer
Kroeber was born in 1876, Lowie in 1883, and Spier in 1893; Spier, as I remember, died in 1961.
Hansen
Did Spier come out of Columbia [University] or [the University of] Chicago?
Spencer
Columbia.
Hansen
Was he, also, like Kroeber and Lowie, a [Franz] Boas[5] student.
Spencer
He was from the Boas school. And very close to Kroeber and Lowie. And when I finished my M.A., I thought...All right, Spier was the guiding influence. He was my mentor, really, in anthropology. He was the one that put me, as it were, on the right track. That relativistic point of view that he promulgated is something that has never left me. And, of course, I've had trouble with my colleagues and with students because I preach a doctrine of cultural relativism, and it comes out...May I digress for just a second?
Hansen
Sure.
Spencer
It comes out in something like the Peter Suzuki[6] article ["The University of California Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study: A Prolegomenon," Dialectical Anthropology 10 (1986): 189-213] and my reactions to it. It comes out in my rather negative reactions toward the desire of [Yuji] Ichioka[7] to put this [a two-day conference held at UC Berkeley on September 19-20, 1987, treating the constitutional aspects of the World War II Japanese American Evacuation and the work of the Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study] as a constitutional issue. In my letters to you [correspondence between the interviewer and the interviewee commenced in the summer of 1985], perhaps it also comes through because I say, "Well, okay, that's the way it was. These things happen." And I'm not going to get all exercised about it. And the people that get all exercised about it have some kind of missionary desire to convert, to draw people over to their point of view. And I've never been drawn to points of view. The point is an important one when you want to understand where I'm coming from.
Hansen
Was Spier a person who was approachable as a human being?
Spencer
Highly.
Was he something of a father figure to you at that time?
Spencer
No, no, I wouldn't say that. No, I had no father figures then. But, no, I got along very well with Leslie. And he would not tolerate fools. You'd come to him and say you don't like this, you don't like that, and he wants to know why. And, if you couldn't answer him why, he was done with you.
Hansen
Were there any other graduate students working with him at that time, who have later gone on and achieved distinction in the discipline of anthropology?
Spencer
Yes. Let's see, who was? Oh, the wife of Elman Service. Do you know Elman?
Hansen
No, I don't.
Spencer
At the University of California, Santa Barbara?
Hansen
I don't, no.
Spencer
I think he must be retired; but, he went to Santa Barbara after Columbia, and his wife [Ellen Stevenson] was influenced by Spier. She wrote her M.A. with Spier. Who else? Oh, gosh. There was James Spuhler, the physical anthropologist who worked in genetics; he finished his doctorate at Harvard and then was given a chair at the University of New Mexico. And there was also Ed Dozier, a half-Santa Clara Indian, who made a very significant reputation for himself as an ethnologist; not only did he write up Santa Clara, his own people, but also worked with Fred Eggan of the University of Chicago on Eggan's Philippine project. I think Fred took his degree at Chicago, but I'm not totally sure of that. These names may not be familiar to you.
Hansen
Was the University of New Mexico an intellectually interesting place for you?
Spencer
Yes, extremely.
Hansen
Was it mostly because of Spier and his circle?
Spencer
No, there were other people there. There was Donald Brand, a geographer who wound up at the University of Texas and died a couple of years ago. But, Brand was a student of [Carl Ortwin] Sauer [1889-1975], whose name you may know.
Hansen
Yes, I've heard of him.[8]
Spencer
And, I very nearly went into geography because Brand was an anthropogeographer. He created this anthropogeographical climate, and the way in which Sauer dealt with things. And, then, when I got back to Berkeley, I took seminars with Sauer. I myself just taught a seminar [at the University of Minnesota] on Sauer, in fact. I still have this geographical bent. But, let me put it this way, Brand was terribly concerned with substantive issues. He gave you facts, and he gave you facts, and facts, and facts. And he expected you to remember them. Well, I have a good memory, and I did remember them. And I had come from a rather esoteric background, as opposed to most of my confreres in anthropology, in that I'd had this Middle Eastern training and Japanese and so on. And, I'd read so widely in geography and ethnology, even then, before I ever became an anthropologist. You asked what we read in high school, these kinds of things. So, I did extremely well with Brand because I knew the difference between Sunni and Shiite in Islam, and I knew about the different types of nomadism, and stuff like that, where many of these students in his classes had never heard of that. And, of course, I've had the experience myself of hearing people talking about the Middle East as though it was located in Greenland, like [U.S. President] Ronald Reagan. (laughter)
Hansen
Was Spier at that time doing a lot of fieldwork himself?
Spencer
Yes. Well, oh, I know. He went to [the University of] Washington, in Seattle, and was married to Erna
Hansen
So you had contact with him, actually, a total of one year there at New Mexico, each spring a half a year.
Spencer
He came to New Mexico in 1940, the first time. That's when I finished my thesis. And, in that brief period, from January to June, why, he influenced me. And then I asked him, I said, "Well, I would like to go to Yale because of the presence of Ralph Linton [1893-1953],[10] who impressed me as an anthropologist.
Hansen
Had he already published The Tree of Culture by then, or was that later?
Spencer
Oh, that came out much later [1956]. He had just moved with Abram Kardiner into these studies of culture and personality [ The Cultural Background of Personality and The Psychological Frontiers of Society ]. But Spier, when I told him I wanted to go to Yale, he blew his stack. (laughter) He had very bitter feelings, and he let me in on some of those feelings, so I decided quite peremptorily that I would not go to Yale. He said, "Go back to California and work with Kroeber and Lowie." And it was Spier's influence that brought me back. I thought I'd like to live in some other part of the country for awhile, Harvard, Yale, Chicago. But, nonetheless, I went back to Berkeley and have been very glad I did.
Hansen
Was it his influence that sent you on this project in the Rio Grande Valley that you were working on [investigating Pueblo Indian languages]? You got a research grant in 1940 from the Museum of New Mexico...
Spencer
No, that's...No, I did that on my own. He was not concerned with the Museum of New Mexico. No, that was a continuation of the fieldwork that I had done with my M.A. in linguistics.
Hansen
So, it was about this time that your first marriage ended, too. Is that right, before you went back to Berkeley?
Spencer
I went back to Berkeley in 1940 and I worked at the Embarcadero Railroad, and then I went...No, wait. I came back in December of 1940, and in 1941 I worked for the railroad and was able to take seminars. I was then single, divorced.
Hansen
And you said you met Kroeber, and you met Lowie, and both of them were rather formidable at the time. Could you tell me a bit about your first meeting with Kroeber, because I take it you met him before you met Lowie.
Spencer
Well, Kroeber was chairman of the department.
Hansen
You came armed with a letter of recommendation from Spier, correct?
Spencer
And my transcript, yes. And, then Kroeber was interested that I had taken an undergraduate degree at
Hansen
Right.
Spencer
But, this is not yet wartime. This is still the Depression psychosis: "We're going to make it just as hard for would-be graduate students as we can, and they will have to pass German and French. And until they pass German and French, and a background examination in geography or geology, history, and biology, until they pass that, they cannot be admitted to seminars. And, obviously, you have no step on a degree until you have taken the required number of seminars." So, the upshot of that was that I passed my German and French the first go.
Hansen
And you already had some geography, right?
Spencer
Yes, I'd had some geography; and I've always considered myself wedded to history.
Hansen
Like Kroeber himself, right?
Spencer
Exactly.
Hansen
In fact, he has a son [Clifford] who is a historian [at Occidental College in Los Angeles, specializing in the field of Latin American history].
Spencer
Exactly. And, so the biology was no problem. So, I passed everything and was admitted to seminars. I did not have to take the introductory seminar which Kroeber offered and required of everybody coming in with an A.B. only. I came in with an M.A., so I was fine. I took seminars right away; and, once you got into seminars, it was no problem.
Hansen
Who were you having for seminars at that time?
Spencer
Lowie and Kroeber.
Hansen
Oh, so you did have Kroeber for a seminar.
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
Not the introductory one, but a subsequent one.
Spencer
No, no, Peruvian archaeology. I was just cleaning out my office [at the University of Minnesota] the other day and found the paper that I wrote for that seminar. And he made things rather hard, I must say. He created a real paranoid configuration. But, then, Lowie was a very different person. Lowie accepted me
Hansen
Lowie was from Germany.
Spencer
Well, he was an Austrian of Jewish background. He was horrified by the excesses of the Nazis; and, indeed, my wife comes out of the same background. That's another thing that endeared me to Lowie, the fact that I married a girl from Vienna whose great, great-uncle, or something—I never did figure out the relationship—was a rather well-known social philosopher, and a member of the Vienna circle. And Lowie was much taken, always, with his own Viennese background, and Germany, and German language, German literature. You see, I had that background; that helped a great deal.
Hansen
When you're talking about Lowie being much different from Kroeber, what are the things that you have in mind? Temperament or orientation?
Spencer
Oh, gosh, yes! Well, Lowie was very formal, very formal. You see, Kroeber would say, "What the hell do you want? Don't bother me!" Whereas,Lowie,you'd knock on his door and he'd say, "Yes,Mr. Spencer, what may I do for you?" And, he kept up this emphasis on title and the like, that you were "mister" until you got your degree, and then you were "doctor." And he meticulously observed that.
Hansen
That kind of helps to explain something. In one of the letters that Dorothy Thomas sent to you while you were working for JERS at the Gila camp, she said that Lowie was actually now ending his telephone calls to her by saying, "Bye, bye, Dorothy," which, she explained, was the first time that he had used her first name in their conversations.
Spencer
That's interesting. I didn't know their relationship had gone to that intimacy. (laughter) But it happened to me. Let's see, when was that, 1954...no, 1956. I went to some meetings in Copenhagen, [Denmark], and I got on the train in Hamburg, [Germany], and ran smack into Lowie, and he said, "For God's sake! Bob Spencer." I knew I'd made it. It was just eight years after my degree. (laughter)
Hansen
So, all the while you were at Gila and everything, you were still Mr. Spencer to him?
Spencer
Yes. Whereas, Kroeber never called you anything, unless it was just a surname like Spencer.
Hansen
There's an interesting juxtaposition between those two, Kroeber and Lowie, in terms of their attitude toward women. Apparently, Kroeber—and this point has been denied by some people—was something of a sexist, whereas Lowie wasn't.[12] Is that a fair assessment or an unfair assessment?
Spencer
No, I don't think it is. I don't think either one of them was sexist. Because, when you consider that Cora Dubois and Anna Gayton, and, God, I've got a list as long as your arm of women who took their degrees at Berkeley, and they worked both with Kroeber and with Lowie, and just neither of them would accept nonsense. If the commitment was there and could be demonstrated, you were accepted regardless of sex. Anna, as I said, married Leslie Spier and did the Yokuts-Mono study. Cora got an appointment at Radcliffe [in Cambridge, Massachusetts] and she was one who, under the influence of Kardiner and Linton, went to the island of Alor and did some of the first studies of projective tests among people of an essentially alien culture. Tamie Tsuchiyama, at Poston [War Relocation Center in Arizona], became quite paranoid about it, and she said that Kroeber had it in for her. Well, that becomes ridiculous. I told her it was ridiculous. But, nonetheless, that's the way she viewed it, and she brooded on it. Of course, there were many failed women. Rosalie Hankey [Wax, who replaced Robert Spencer as the JERS field researcher at the Gila River War Relocation Center in 1943] was one, in the sense that she disagreed with Kroeber. At least she left Berkeley and went to Chicago. Perhaps this was under the influence of Dorothy Thomas, but I don't know why Rosalie left the Berkeley department. She was doing all right, I think; she was a bit prickly, I must say.
Hansen
Now, Rosalie Hankey was actually sent down by Kroeber to Gila, so he took a chance on a woman in that context.
Well, he really didn't. He had hired me away from Dorothy Thomas.
Hansen
Right.
Spencer
And then he felt a kind of moral obligation to send someone, and Hankey was available.
Hansen
So he sent her.
Spencer
But he didn't care much for her either. If you ever met her, you wouldn't care much for her either. (laughter) I think she mellowed a little bit.
Hansen
What was the difference in intellectual style between Kroeber and Lowie?
Spencer
Total difference of interest, really, as to what they wanted to accomplish.
Hansen
And, yet, they came out of the same context at Columbia, and it was Kroeber who brought Lowie out to Berkeley, right?
Spencer
Kroeber came to Berkeley and was permitted to develop a department. He had worked for a number of years over in San Francisco at what was then the Museum of the Academy of Sciences, and subsidized by Phoebe Apperson Hearst. And, after the World's Fair of 1915, well, he spent a year as a practicing psychoanalyst, and then gave that up. And then he was given a position at Berkeley with the carte blanche to develop a department. He hired two people. He hired Paul Radin [1883-1959][13] and he hired Robert Lowie. Radin taught anthropology briefly at UC Berkeley in 1921. He was very, very brilliant; I knew him quite well. Yes. Radin would meet his class, and then he'd hear the Indians up on the Gila River were having a powwow or something, and he wanted to go up and see it. He'd just pack up and go, not tell anybody, and so on. And then he'd go down to Oakland to order some clothes from a Jewish tailor. I say Jewish because it fits in. And the man would make him the clothes and then Radin would fail to pay him. So the man would come to class—this happened several times—and just barge into the class and start talking to Radin in Yiddish. And, you know, Yiddish is a tremendously colorful and vituperative language, and they would scream at each other
Hansen
Right in the classroom? (laughter)
Spencer
Right in the classroom, in front of the whole interested class. (laughter) Well, that just didn't work out, so Radin was let go and Lowie stayed.
Hansen
And, so you were talking about the intellectual differences between Lowie and Kroeber.
Spencer
Well, I think there's a difference in focus and interest. Kroeber's interest was culture and the development of the idea of culture. His very famous 1917 paper, "The Superorganic" [ American Anthropologist, n.s., 19(2): 163-213)], defines culture from the point of view of anthropology; and, I think it's still must reading for any anthropologist. Lowie wrote a book, An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology [New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1934], I think he called it that, and he has written on culture several times. His perception of culture is very, very different. He doesn't differentiate culture from society, whereas Kroeber is indifferent to society and is talking about culture, culture process, historic process. Lowie is not disinterested in process, but, nonetheless, he comes at it through the avenue of structure and organization.
Hansen
So, he'd be closer to British social anthropology than to American cultural anthropology.
Spencer
Right, yes.
Hansen
But, how did they get along? What were the social dynamics between Lowie and Kroeber?
Spencer
They didn't interact much. They were not friends. They would converse; and, when I was teaching for
Hansen
That's interesting. These two books I was showing you, before we started the interview, this one by Julian Stewart on Kroeber [ Alfred Kroeber (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973)] and the one by Robert [F.] Murphy on Lowie [ Robert H.Lowie (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972)]. You're mentioned in the Murphy one [33], in the sense that he's talking about anthropologists who were influenced by Lowie. It seems like you would be more influenced, from what you were saying before, by Kroeber than by Lowie.
Spencer
Oh, I am more influenced by Kroeber. But, remember, I got this job with Dorothy Thomas. And Lowie was involved in JERS. It was Lowie who, on hearing that I'd had a year of Japanese and fieldwork, tied me into Dorothy Thomas, and I got the job with JERS through that.
Hansen
Was it more through the instrumentality of him just making a contact with you, rather than what he was teaching?
Spencer
That's right. Right. I hadn't had any work...No, I'll take that back. I'd had a seminar from Lowie, not a very inspiring seminar; whereas, Kroeber could take something like Peruvian pottery and make it exciting. Lowie couldn't. I remember I had a course where we reviewed political systems in Africa, and it was dull as dishwater. And Lowie was so charming. You never could say that Kroeber was charming. And, yet, Lowie was sort of a hands-off approach. Now, that raises a question which you will undoubtedly want to come to: "What was I supposed to do in the Japanese relocation center?"
Hansen
I do want to raise that question for a considerable length of time, but I want first to ask you about your dissertation committee. Who were the people on your committee?
Spencer
I'll tell you about Berkeley dissertations. You know that "Japanese Buddhism in the United States" was my dissertation. I think it's for the birds, and I think it's the dumbest thing I could have done. I'm very much ashamed of it. And, yet, I don't know how I could have done it differently. Yes, the fad in anthropology at the time was acculturation studies. Well, that was legitimate. That was what [Peter] Suzuki misses when he talks about it [in "Anthropologists in the Wartime Camps for Japanese Americans: A Documentary Study," Dialectical Anthropology 6 (August 1981): 37-8]. That was legitimate, but, the thing that counted toward the degree, in Kroeber and Lowie's estimation—and they were agreed on this—your success in passing the written prelim. And you were given a reading list as long as your arm. I sat down for a year and read through it, and did absolutely nothing else. Okay. When you passed that, they agreed that you passed it, you were in. You had it made. And, you were then given, of course, your qualifying oral. That wasn't very traumatic; although they began to flunk some people out about the time that I came out, and I was scared as a result. But, after that, you would go ahead and develop your thesis, and there was no defense. I don't even know who the committee was.
Hansen
So the thesis was almost anticlimactic then.
Spencer
Yes. And the thought was, and I agree with this, by the way, that a thesis is a traumatic experience and that people who get through everything can look forward to a productive career. And that was certainly the criteria which Kroeber and Lowie both used. If you showed some promise, well throw your thesis away! Forget it! You may think it's God's gift to scholarship, but they don't think so. Do you have any promise? When I completed my book on the Eskimo [ The North Alaskan Eskimo : A Study in Ecology and Society (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution, 1959)], Kroeber had read it. And he wrote me a very, very nice letter, and indicated that, as far as he was concerned, I had fulfilled that promise.
Hansen
It sounded to me almost as though the thesis topic for you was a matter of convenience, insofar as you were going to be working in JERS for Dorothy Swaine Thomas, and you were going to be in an environment in which you could do the necessary fieldwork.
No. I finished my degree in 1946, and I wrote my dissertation between 1945 and 1946.
Hansen
When did you do the fieldwork?
Spencer
The fieldwork was done in 1942 and 1943.
Hansen
But that's when you were with Dorothy Swaine Thomas?
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
When did you pass your qualifying exams?
Spencer
In December of 1945.
Hansen
Oh, I see. Okay, so when you were at Gila you were still right at the beginning of graduate work, almost, or in midstream.
Spencer
In midstream, right.
Hansen
I see. So, you hadn't even taken your exams yet. So, when at Gila you were writing papers for Lowie, on Buddhism in the camp...
Spencer
Well, that's an interesting story. I'll have to tell you about Mrs. Lowie.
Hansen
Okay.
Spencer
Mrs.Lowie, Luella Cole, a very well-known child psychologist, was married to a psychologist named Cole. And Lowie had never married until very late in his life, in the late 1930s [1933, when Lowie was fifty years old]. He used to go away on different summer vacations, either with friends or by himself. He went to Tahiti because he wanted to see it. He went to South America because he wanted to see it, by himself. He went on vacation with Professor and Mrs. Cole, and at the end of the vacation they came back and Luella Cole divorced Cole and married Lowie. Well, that gets tied up with Lowie's mother and Lowie's sister Resa, because while his mother was alive he wouldn't consider marriage. And there were a lot of women around who would have liked to have married him. Catherine Holt, who became a well known anthropologist, admired Lowie tremendously. He was fun. He was lots of fun. You'd never say of Kroeber that he was fun. You'd get two glasses of wine into Lowie, and he'd sit down at the piano and you'd get to singing German songs and things like that.
Hansen
He was formal, but fun, right.
Spencer
Yes, but he was a bon vivant, in a way. And then he married this woman, Mrs. Lowie, who was Luella Cole. She was the absolute antithesis. She wore blue jeans before they ever appeared on the horizon. I came over one time to Lowie's house. She sent for me, and I had to help her move the bathtub, because she was doing the plumbing. (laughter) And Lowie would stand around, and he would say, "Are you ready with it, my dear?" And she would say, "For Christ's sake, Robert, look at all these fucking pipes!" (laughter) Oh, and then she tried to teach him to drive. And they were starting off on a trip...I don't know where I got this story. I don't know how apocryphal it is, but she said, "Oh, we'd better check the water. I want to see if the water level's up before we start." "Oh, you can't fool me, my dear. I know a car runs on gasoline." (laughter)
Hansen
Well, when you were with JERS, you kept being told in letters from Dorothy Thomas about a trip that Lowie was going to make to Gila—a trip you were adamantly against, because the camp was in a state of disarray and you were under a lot of stress. Anyway, you kept being told by Thomas, "Don't worry Lowie with details." Thomas wanted you to know that he could not handle practical matters, that he knew nothing of these things. What you're saying now seems to corroborate this situation.
It's true. Now, a Japanese American student, a Nisei, lived in the house with the Lowies, and he was their help. I won't say he was a houseboy. He wasn't. She became very close to him. In fact, I thought rather dangerously close, given the atmosphere. His name was George Matsuura.
Hansen
You mention him in some of your correspondence as being at Gila, right?
Spencer
Right. They went to Gila, and that was why the two wanted to go down to Gila. She wanted to see George.
Hansen
Didn't she have some interest in sending him on to an art school or something of that nature?
Spencer
Yes, yes, yes. And his sister married Kanmo Imamura, a Buddhist priest, and he was my principal informant.
Hansen
Oh, really. Wasn't there also a Bishop Ochi at Gila who you used as an informant?
Spencer
I used him, also, and Dorothy [Thomas] got kind of furious at me because in my field notes I used his name, when he'd been screwing the wife of the other priest.[14]
Hansen
Yes, that was Suzuki. Ochi lived with the Suzukis at Gila. (laughter) And Ochi later [in fall 1943] got booted out of the camp. I've looked at a couple of [JERS] documents that detail this incident.[15]
Spencer
Imamura later got a job at the Museum of Anthropology [at UC Berkeley], thanks to me. So after the war he ran a Buddhist church in Berkeley and he worked as a curator in the museum.
Hansen
Oh, and that's how you ended up doing your dissertation ["Japanese Buddhism in the United States, 1940-46" (University of California, Berkeley, 1946)] on that particular congregation.
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
I see.
Hansen
Okay, I think we're now ready to tackle your involvement with JERS. Exactly how did your participation come about?
Spencer
Well, as I mentioned a bit earlier, Lowie sent me over to her [Dorothy Swaine Thomas]. I was interviewed by her. I had had this year of Japanese, I had West Coast experience, I had been in Japan, and so on. Well, so I guess I was a natural for the JERS appointment, especially since they wanted a field anthropologist. So I went on over to Giannini Hall [on the UC Berkeley campus, where the JERS project was housed] one morning and was interviewed by Dorothy Thomas.
Hansen
What were your first impressions of Dorothy Thomas?
Spencer
I was rather struck by her. She wore her hair like a man and wore very mannish clothes; she always wore a plaid skirt and golf shoes. She and W. I., I think, played golf every morning and she continued that always; she was an avid golfer. I find it rather difficult to describe this rather nondescript quality about her. You never quite knew whether she was angry or pleased or what because she kind of held back on all close contact or intimacy or whatever; she remained aloof and apart from her staff and even from W. I. Thomas. That W. I. Thomas relationship was something that bothered all of us; we never quite understood it. Here was a man thirty-five years older than she was—they had collaborated on that book, The Child in America [ :Behavior Problems and Programs (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928)] years earlier at a time when W. I. Thomas was interesting himself in contemporary sociological issues and getting away from the tradition of theoretical, philosophical sociology that prevailed in Europe. I know that he was influenced by Robert [E.] Park; at least there was a play between them. And he kept up that contact with Park, [Edwin] Sutherland, and Kimball Young, I think, at [the University of] Chicago, even though he, of course, had lost his post at Chicago. He was a father figure, it seems to me. I know he had a reputation as a womanizer,
Hansen
Do you think that Dorothy Thomas was involved in this [studying the Japanese American Evacuation] largely out of intellectual interest?
Spencer
Intellectual interest almost exclusively, I would say. In fact, she regretted the Evacuation, as we all did. Not that, you know, we were relativistic to the point of absolutely losing humanity. I don't mean that. But, if anything, she tended to be more objective than I became, because I wrote back a couple of times and I said, "My God, I really feel like I'm an evacuee, living in this situation." She wrote back and said, "You're no evacuee. You can move in or out as you wish. Think of the poor devils who are stuck there." I remember saying that I developed the evacuee psychosis or whatever, and she came back with both feet: "Forget it! You're there to do a job of objective reporting." And I think I remained fairly faithful to objectivity. But, no, she attempted to be objective, I think, no question.
Hansen
Was she connected with that community [the Japanese American] in any way that would jostle her objectivity? She had fieldworkers who were of Japanese American ancestry, so to speak, but did she have, you know... Here's Lowie, you know, one of the Gilaites there at the center is one of his former "houseboys," really. And I noticed in one of the letters, I think, referring to one of your [JERS] fieldworkers [at the Gila center], Earle Yusa, is it? Earle Yusa's parents used to do the washing for somebody.
Spencer
For [Leroy] Bennett [who became project director at Gila in December 1942].
Hansen
For Bennett, right, Yes, the project director. And so there is this kind of strange connection.
Spencer
Well, let me digress for just a second. Yes, Early Yusa's mother used to take in laundry for Bennett, when Bennett lived, I think, in Berkeley and was head of an automobile agency on Venice Avenue in San Francisco. I went to Bennett to introduce myself and make my presence known. I felt I owed him that much. I wasn't too enthusiastic about taking an automobile salesman and making him project director. And he gave me a long song and dance about how well he was in with these people, because Earle Yusa's mother used to do his washing for him. And it just became clear what his whole attitude was. These were second-class citizens and they were "Japs." He was a son of a bitch, really. I was troubled by the Evacuation. I was part of it, and I could understand the bitter tears that people wept over the tragedy and uselessness of it. That was a tremendous pity, but you ran into that bureaucratic anti-Japanese attitude so often, and that was not shared by anybody on the [JERS] project, obviously. We all felt... Well, I'll give you an example. Charlie [Kikuchi] was hired by Lou [Luther] Hoffman, who was the internal something resources chief [head of community services for Gila's two camps, Canal and Butte]; I believe he was a man trained in social work. And Charlie was put on as a caseworker, and he worked through these various difficulties with various families. And he, of course, recorded the details in his diary, but like a good caseworker should, he wrote up the case. Then he brought the cases to his barrack. We read them and discussed them. And Hoffman called me in and he gave me hell. How could I let Charlie—he didn't know I had read them—take case records away from the social work department? I said, "Look, don't talk to me. I'm not his boss." "Yes, but you're the Caucasian representative."
Hansen
And that got Charlie burned up.
Spencer
What?
Hansen
I remember that got Charlie burned up. In your letters to Dorothy Thomas, you talk about how burned up Kikuchi was about the fact that he'd have to go through you.
Yes, you've got all this. But that made an impression on me; and I realized that a whole Japanese American population was consigned to an inferior status.
Hansen
But I think this is the question that I was getting at with Dorothy Swaine Thomas: Was JERS merely of clinical interest to her? It's one thing to maintain objectivity when doing social research, to make sure that you can proceed with your work, but quite another thing to...
Spencer
I understand, I understand. I'm not sure I can answer that question. I really don't know. You see, I never got to know Dorothy too well. I knew her best when I drove her and W. I. up to Tule Lake once. Neither could drive, so we rented a university car and I drove them up to Tule Lake. It was my first visit to Tule Lake. It must have been in late July or early August of 1942. W. I. Thomas had heard that I had studied Hebrew, you see, and his next project after The Polish Peasant would have been the shetl communities, the Jewish ghettoes in Europe and America. And he had taught himself Yiddish to prepare for this. We talked about that for hours, what he would do, how he would do it. And he had some Yiddish newspapers along, and, since I know German, I know Hebrew, so I can read Yiddish if I have to. It's hard sometimes, because the words are sometimes different, and you do get a good many Slavicisms. But, anyway, he was impressed that I could read these...You know, "I have a thirty-five year old daughter who weighs three hundred pounds, and she can cook very good noodles, and I'm looking for a husband for her." That sort of thing appears, and it appears in The Polish Peasant, also. He hadn't changed his methodology.
Hansen
You explained off the tape is some detail what you only alluded to on the tape—that is, that, actually, because of a particular problem that he had had at Chicago, he lost his position at the university and later came out to Berkeley.
Spencer
I guess he must have married Dorothy in the interim, because, evidently, she traipsed around at Yale and Columbia and Carnegie [Tech in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania], or whatever. He, evidently, was with her. I don't know.
Hansen
In one of your letters to Dorothy, you mention that [James H.] Barnett [an anthropologist who served for a short while in 1943 (April 5 to May 11) at Gila with the WRA's Community Analysis Section], had sat in on one of Thomas's seminars at Harvard.
Spencer
Right. You see, he [W. I. Thomas] lost his tenure at Chicago; and it was never renewed anywhere else, but that didn't mean he didn't teach elsewhere.
Hansen
Okay, so after leaving Chicago he went to a number of other institutions. But, when he came to Berkeley, he was not on the teaching faculty?
Spencer
I think he was already beyond retirement age.
Hansen
Okay. So, at this point, he was, although not an emeritus faculty at Berkeley, working almost in an emeritus status, right?
Spencer
That's right. Well, he was just there, yes.
Hansen
Yes. And so you think that probably his means of support was what Dorothy was doing?
Spencer
Or, if he got any royalties from his books or inventions. And, again, I'm not sure about the inventions.
Hansen
Yes, why don't you mention those inventions on tape, because we just talked about those off tape, and I think it's interesting.
Spencer
Well, he was supposed to have invented the arms that prevent a file cabinet from falling over when the drawer is opened. And he's supposed to have invented the acid-center golfball. And he invented something else, according to legend, I think, but I don't remember what it is. Oh, he invented a Manhattan mixer.
Hansen
Was he a sociable fellow?
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
He was? So he was easy to talk to, for you?
Spencer
Well, except that he was always sardonic and contemptuous of everybody.
Hansen
How was the relationship between his wife and him—even from the vantage point of, you know, a person like yourself driving a state car up there to Tule Lake with the two of them. How did they seem to get along together?
Spencer
Fine, fine. They would simply talk, but they didn't really talk about the project. That, I think, I should emphasize.
Hansen
Like about Tule Lake, even when you were up there?
Spencer
I think when we came away they had a few things to say, but not much. In other words, she wasn't really using him as a sounding board there.
Hansen
So much of the time when I'm reading the JERS correspondence, the survival of the project appears to me to be almost more paramount than the social situation of the Japanese Americans.
Spencer
It was a question of money. JERS's work was done on a real shoestring, even for those days.
Hansen
How did that work? What was the funding on the project?
Spencer
Oh, Dorothy got $10,000 [$32,500] from [the] Rockefeller [Foundation], and then she got dribs and drabs from other sources [the University of California's Social Science Institute, $29,554; the Columbia Foundation, $30,000; and the Giannini Foundation, an unspecified amount].
Hansen
And then the university had a hand in it, too; it paid her salary or something?
Spencer
I guess so. I never knew, you see. I was out of it, because, being away from the office, and the administrative assistant was Morton Grodzins, and he occasionally would mention to me, "Well, we're going to have a hard time meeting payroll this month," or something like that. I got a very minuscule salary, but there was nothing to spend it on.
Hansen
So you met Dorothy Thomas and you've relayed your personal impression. What did she tell you about the project, and what did she impress upon you that you needed to do?
Spencer
Nothing.
Hansen
Nothing?
Spencer
Nothing. She said, "You will do the empirical side." Well, by that time, she'd used the word "empirical" so much I had to go home and look at it in the dictionary again, just to be sure. And it wasn't at all clear. It was empirical research, period. You know, this was not yet the days of the scheduled questionnaire; not that they didn't exist. They did, of course, but they were not in such common use as they were ten, twenty years later. I received no instruction. I received no statement about the aims and so on of the project. Let's just see how the cookie crumbles, how things are going to go on. And, meanwhile, keep tab of it. So, then,
Hansen
Well, before you got into this Tada stuff, didn't you get some preparation for the work that you were going to do there? Or, did you just have to prepare yourself?
Spencer
Prepare yourself.
Hansen
So, there was no reading list or no common meetings with Grodzins and yourself?
Spencer
No, no, no, no, no.
Hansen
So you did this all on an ad hoc, kind of independent basis?
Spencer
Entirely.
Hansen
And what did you do? How'd you prepare yourself?
Spencer
Well, I went to the office. I had a desk there and she had files and clippings, just from the inception of the whole thing. And, then, I went and got books on Japan and read about people under stress and stuff like that, such as was available at the time. And I read these various things.
Hansen
Did she know anything about Japanese?
Spencer
She?
Hansen
Yes.
Spencer
No.
Hansen
Nothing about Japanese culture or Japanese Americans?
Spencer
Not a thing. I was the only one who did.
Hansen
Nobody else in the university who you could talk to about that?
Spencer
Oh, yes, yes, yes. There were others in the university, but they were in Oriental languages and in literature and things like that.
Hansen
Did you get any help from any of those people, or not?
Spencer
Well, I remember asking. I asked Peter Boodberg, who became later a professor of mine and who was on my qualifying committee. He was a tremendously competent linguist, knowing really all languages from East Asia. He taught Japanese to the Army Specialized Training Program at Berkeley that I was involved in under Kroeber's direction after leaving my job with JERS at Gila in 1943. Actually, I took a course in Malay from him. Boodberg was a Russian. "Well, what are you supposed to do, hmmm?" (in foreign accent) I said, "I don't know. What would you do?" "Well, I go, I look." (in foreign accent)
Hansen
So, is it fair to say that you were a graduate student without very much orientation, actually, in Japanese culture or Japanese American, aside from what you'd picked up from going to school with some Nisei, and you'd had a year of Japanese and, actually, at that time, very little ethnographic experience.
Spencer
Oh, yes, I had. I'd had two years in that with the Puebloes.
Oh, the ones in New Mexico. Okay, so you did.
Spencer
And I had actually lived in a pueblo. I'd had more fieldwork than most people I know.
Hansen
Did you have some direction on the first fieldwork you did?
Spencer
Leslie Spier.
Hansen
Oh, well, he directed that then.
Spencer
He didn't direct it, but he came in after I had compiled it. He gave me some suggestions and guidance, and it worked out fine.
Hansen
So you had a sense, then, of fieldwork procedure.
Spencer
Yes, no problem.
Hansen
Okay. Thomas couldn't have helped you on that, in any event, right?
Spencer
No.
Hansen
Unless she wanted to design for you a more social-structural approach to it. I mean, she didn't have training really in cultural theory.
Spencer
No, she had no training whatsoever. All she saw was a mass of 100,000 plus people being moved.
Hansen
But is that what attracted her, the movement of people, the shifting demographics?
Spencer
Exactly, because that, after all, was the thing on which she made her reputation, that demography of the Swedish that she did [ Social and Economic Aspects of Swedish Population Movements, 1750-1933 (London: Macmillan, 1941)]. That book set the tone for the whole JERS project, because it indicates what Dorothy was, a statistician, a first-rate statistician, as I learned from other statisticians, and a demographer. She was interested in vital statistics—births, morbidities, and everything else. I looked at the book when it came out. I use to own it, but I think I sold it when I sold my books here at the house. But I never read it; good heavens, it was boring stuff. Just look at her stuff in The Salvage [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952].
Hansen
So when she told you that you were going to do the empirical side, this put you in a quandary. You didn't know exactly what she meant by the empirical side.
Spencer
That's right.
Hansen
Okay.
Spencer
I don't know yet.
Hansen
So then, more or less through your own initiative, you started reading things and running down things.
Spencer
Well, yes. And then she'd say, "Tomorrow I'll get a car and we'll go over to Tanforan." And we'd do that.
Hansen
Okay, so how did that work out? Was Morton Grodzins on the project right away?
Spencer
Yes. Really, Morton, Virginia, and I.
Hansen
Who's Virginia?
Virginia Galbraith Taucher.
Hansen
Okay, and wasn't she a graduate student in economics at Berkeley?
Spencer
Right. I don't know what Virginia's role in the project was. She was an economist and she seemed fairly competent, though I don't know if she ever finished a degree or not or whether she took an academic post. I know that her husband was drawn into economics by her and that he was rather the brighter of the two.
Hansen
And Grodzins was a Berkeley graduate student in political science?
Spencer
Right.
Hansen
Were you all about the same age?
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
Early twenties?
Spencer
I'd say so.
Hansen
So it was three young graduate students, really, with a forty-two year old, say, professor of rural economics at the helm.
Spencer
Quite, quite, quite.
Hansen
Okay, so when you'd go over to Tanforan [Assembly Center], there'd been an agreement made between the University of California and the Army?
Spencer
There must have been, because I went along for the ride. It wasn't Army, it was WCCA.
Hansen
Yes, well, that was a civilian wing of the Army, though.
Spencer
Yes, okay, okay.
Hansen
Do you recall the first time you went over there [to Tanforan] pretty vividly?
Spencer
Not very well.
Hansen
You don't.
Spencer
Well, first of all, we were not allowed in.
Hansen
Okay.
Spencer
We never did get in there. Remember, it was a racetrack. And there were these bleachers. And people who visited the internees would meet them in the bleachers. Meanwhile, there were these tar paper huts that had been erected, relocation center style, in which people were sleeping and there were refectories, and so on. And, we always got permission to see certain people, like Charlie [Kikuchi]. And there were some others, people who then left and went to Chicago or whatever.
Hansen
It seemed like you saw Tamotsu Shibatani [a former student at UC Berkeley who became a JERS field researcher and later did work for the project in the Tule Lake center and in the JERS regional office in Chicago], as well.
Spencer
I think so. I don't remember very well. I never really knew him very well, you see.
But did Thomas already arrange to have some meetings with people in Tanforan?
Spencer
Yes, she had arranged for us to meet with certain persons. And then a message would be sent to those persons, and they would come up into the bleachers and sit and talk to us. Now, that's the meeting we had in Tanforan. We did not enter the actual assembly center itself.
Hansen
But they were already connected in some way with the project, weren't they, because they all had been Berkeley students.
Spencer
Yes, now I remember that Charlie then came up to the bleachers, bearing in his hand some manuscript. And it was confiscated.
Hansen
Do you recall your first meeting with Charlie Kikuchi, what your impressions of him were?
Spencer
Only that people talked very highly of him and that he was writing a lot. That's all. And that he had been trained in social work. I guess he was a couple of years older than I.
Hansen
So you probably didn't make too many trips over to Tanforan then.
Spencer
Three, at most. Two or three, but I think three. There wasn't much point in it.[16]
Hansen
Yes, but the situation was still somewhat shadowy to you because you were not penetrating the camp itself.
Spencer
No outsider did.
Hansen
Okay. So, most of your work at this time was in Giannini Hall. And you were still enrolled in graduate classes at the university, of course.
Spencer
Yes, I guess I was. I was taking a seminar from Kroeber, or maybe from Lowie. No, maybe from Kroeber. I don't remember. At any rate, I was taking seminars.
Hansen
So, then, by August 1942, you were set to leave for your fieldwork at Gila.
Spencer
I think I was taken on with JERS about April.
Hansen
Yes, so you had a few months before you went to Gila?
Spencer
Wait, wait, wait. What am I talking about? I was working in San Francisco with the Beltline Railroad until the end of April, 1942; and then I was called up for the draft. And...Oh, wait a minute, wait a minute. Now, I remember. I got a different job in the WPA. I left that. No, I'm wrong. I left that Beltline Railroad along about January, and I went out on Mission Street to supervise a project where people were detached from essentially unskilled jobs until war activities. So that we were running, through the various high schools in San Francisco, the shop teachers were giving steam fitting and plumbing, you know, all those sort of things, for use in the war effort. And I ran herd on that until the end of April. I was really doing payroll and allocation of personnel. Yes, yes, yes. That's right. And then I got onto the project. And I think it was...I couldn't tell you what the date was. I don't remember quite when it all happens.
Hansen
But you were there for a couple of months before you left for Gila.
Spencer
Several months, yes. And then I was drafted, or at least I reported to the induction center. I had been accepted by the Navy, and I couldn't get together on it. You know, foolishly I should have phoned Washington and asked about it, and then I would have gone into the Navy. But I got no advice. I got no advice from anyone. I didn't know how to do these things.
Hansen
So, you feel that perhaps you should have given some thought to getting into the Navy.
Yes, I should have. I might have had a very different career if I had, or if I'd been drafted.
Hansen
But during this time, you were going out to Tanforan with Morton Grodzins and Dorothy Swaine Thomas.
Spencer
And Virginia.
Hansen
And Virginia Galbraith, was it?
Spencer
Taucher.
Hansen
Taucher. And did you refer to Dorothy Thomas as "Dorothy," at that time? Was yours a collegial relationship?
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
Okay. Can you give me a thumbnail sketch of Morton Grodzins, what he was like at that time? Was he, for example, a warm person or a cold person or what?
Spencer
He was rather colorless, in many ways. I never really related to him. He never really became very friendly. He oversaw disbursement of funds; and I never did talk to him about his research, except that I was aware that he was doing this thing on the legal basis of evacuation, and was interested in that and was interested in the property losses, and things of that sort. In other words, his interests were from a fairly wide spectrum, from the point of view of what the evacuees left behind. He was married, and I've forgotten his wife's name [Ruth]. They had a child, if I'm not mistaken. I have really very little to say about him. I never got to know him very well. He kept a kind of watchful eye over the money, I remember that.
Hansen
It seems like most of your correspondence with him had to do with budget.
Spencer
He got his dissertation ["The Political Aspects of the Japanese Evacuation" (University of California, Berkeley, 1945)] out of it, as I did; and he went, I guess, to the University of Chicago, didn't he?
Hansen
Yes.
Spencer
And died there rather young [at age forty-seven in 1964].[17]
Hansen
Right. I don't even know what he died of or anything.
Spencer
Cancer.
Hansen
He did? Oh. So he was somebody connected with JERS who was sort of in the background most of the time.
Spencer
There was some—and I never did understand this—question of proprietary rights of data collected. After Dorothy left and was at Penn [University of Pennsylvania], and I was here, I got a letter from her—it must have been sometime in the 1950s—in which there was...Now, I knew nothing about this. All I can tell you, there was some legal point about rights to the material. And evidently Grodzins had overstepped the bounds, in some respect. At any rate, Dorothy was extremely head up and quite resentful and asked me—wrote and asked me—what I remembered about it. I guess I didn't keep the correspondence. I haven't seen it as I've gone over old papers. But I think I wrote back and said, "Look, the understanding was that we would have access." But, evidently, there were certain documents which Morton used and she felt that she had a right to, or that he was stepping into her domain. I don't really know. As to Dorothy giving us permission to use the material we collected for dissertations or even articles, the question never arose in my mind. I simply assumed that I could use the data I collected in any way I chose. Hence, I never did understand what the big hassle was about between Grodzins and Thomas. I would have thought that Morton could have gone ahead and used his materials, since he collected them, even though he did so under the
Hansen
So you didn't know much about their relationship, actually, because that was back at Berkeley and you were off at Gila?
Spencer
And actually, you see, when I went there [to the JERS office in Giannini Hall on the UC Berkeley campus] and was sitting there in the office doing reading, he was doing whatever he was doing. We really never talked much.
Hansen
Was that true of your relationship with Virginia, too?
Spencer
Virginia was much more outgoing. She was a very, very attractive girl. Very sexy. And she was living with this fellow whom she then married. That wasn't done much in those days, you know.
Hansen
Right.
Spencer
Virginia was interested in the problem of refugee property, or evacuee property: disposal of houses, disposal of land, agricultural products, cars.
Hansen
Was she trying to get a dissertation out of this, too?
Spencer
Yes, but, as mentioned earlier, I don't know whether she ever did or not.
Hansen
Okay. I don't either, so it's...Have you had any contact with her over the years, or have any idea what happened to her?
Spencer
I have not, no. No, I had none. Virginia left the project while I was still at Gila. Then, when I came back to Berkeley in 1943, why, she was gone.
Hansen
Was there ever a feeling of being part of a project. I mean, more than just having a job or a set of responsibilities?
Spencer
Well, there was this boy, Sam [Isamu Miyakawa], whose life history I told you I collected [soon after the interviewee started his fieldwork for JERS in the Gila center in the summer of 1942] as a result of bringing him to Fresno, [California].[19] And I took a chance. I thought, "Well, I'll run up to Berkeley while I'm in Fresno." So we got on the Daylight [train]. Remember the old Daylight?
Hansen
Yes.
Spencer
And I took Sam with me. And, oh, I wanted to see the girl [name not provided by interviewee] to whom I lent the key [to the JERS office in Giannini Hall at UC Berkeley so that she could do her homework there]; and, so, while I was doing that, Sam sat in the office and Virginia used him as an informant and got his data. And then I brought him home to my mother's house in San Francisco, and found a bed for him there. My mother wasn't too pleased, but, nonetheless. So then we left and went back to Gila.
Hansen
So you actually were bringing somebody of Japanese ancestry [Sam Miyakawa] into the exclusion zone who was not supposed to be there at that particular time.
Spencer
Right, yes. And I have a letter which indicated my right to do this. And I was stopped by the military.
Hansen
You were going to use this incident as a lead into, I think, talking about the sense of a project.
Spencer
Oh, yes, yes, yes. Well, all I mean is that I brought this chap in and Virginia then grilled him, and Dorothy did, too. And they took him to lunch. I went to see my girl friend. And they were very surprised that I had brought him, and yet it was perfectly aboveboard. My point is that there were questions which Mort
Hansen
But, was there a sense of a project whereby you felt that you were all in this together and that there were, say, some shared theoretical interests?
Spencer
No, no, no, no, no, no. Not at all.
Hansen
So there was a topical interest and a job interest.
Spencer
A topical interest, interest in the evacuee, a decrying of the injustice that was perpetrated, indeed. But, other than that, no.
Hansen
It seemed like you had some shared anxieties, or shared negative reference points. One of them was that the Army might just take over this whole thing or that the Army or the government might subpoena all of your fieldnotes, or that the WRA might run you out of the camps.
Spencer
All that.
Hansen
Was it important to all of you that the study continue, because the study could have important consequences?
Spencer
No, my presence in the Gila Relocation Center was definitely not essential to the ongoing nature of the project, nor would Virginia's, nor would Morton's, except as administrative assistant; and Dorothy could easily get another. The idea was we would collect these data and then use them in any way we saw fit, and she would ultimately produce a book.
Hansen
Was only one book initially envisioned?
Spencer
No reference was made to the number of volumes that would be involved. In fact, it just spread more and more and she was just more concerned with getting the data, I guess. Pure expedience.
Hansen
What about the other people who were fieldworkers elsewhere? Was Tule Lake important, where JERS had [Shotaro Frank] Miyamoto [who later headed up the Chicago office of JERS], [Tamotsu "Tom"] Shibutani [who later worked in Chicago with Miyamoto], [James] Sakoda [who later transferred to the Minidoka center in Idaho], and [Robert H.] Billigmeier?
Spencer
Well, presumably, they were doing the same thing. In other words, they were following up questions which they themselves posed.
Hansen
But, there wasn't any underlying logic to why certain camps had observers in them?
Spencer
Purely expedience.
Hansen
Purely expedience?
Spencer
It seems to me, Dorothy's thought was to reach out to all of the centers. And then, in her correspondence with the WRA, it was discovered that certain centers would be acceptable, others were off-limits.
Hansen
Now, I know that the project desperately wanted to get into Topaz [War Relocation Center in Utah], and Thomas was anxious to have Tamie Tsuchiyama leave Poston [War Relocation Center in Arizona] and go over to Topaz. Was it because Topaz was populated largely by the Bay Area [San Francisco/Oakland, California] Japanese American community? Is that what JERS was so interested in about Topaz?[20]
Spencer
That's right. That's one thing. The other thing was the Poston situation itself, which was, I thought at
Hansen
So Leighton was running this sociological bureau down at Poston.
Spencer
Do you run into anything on him?
Hansen
I do, on occasion. In fact, he's still alive and, as far as I know, he's up in Canada [in the Department of Community Health and Epidemiology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia]. There's a lot of his Poston material deposited back at [the Department of Manuscripts and University Archives (Collection 3830: Japanese-American Relocation Centers Records, 1935-1953)] Cornell [University, in Ithaca, New York], which I reviewed last summer.[21]
Spencer
Is he still married to Dorothea [Cross] Leighton?[22]
Hansen
No, that marriage has long since ended, and, from what I've heard, they had an unpleasant parting of the ways.
Spencer
Well, she, Dorothea Leighton, worked with Clyde Kluckhohn at Harvard on the Navajo [ The Navajo (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1946)], and her study [with Alexander H. Leighton] of Navajo culture, personality, psychology [ The Navaho Door (New York: Russell and Russell, 1944)], is really, really very good. And she did a few other things in the Southwest. Now, I met Dorothea at Poston and I met Alexander Leighton at Poston. Now, he was commissioned, I think, as a lieutenant commander in the [Medical Corps of the U.S.] Navy.[23]
Hansen
Right.
Spencer
And he appeared there at Poston in full Naval uniform always.
Hansen
Can you testify to the fact that you saw him in that full Naval uniform?
Spencer
Yes, I guess.
Hansen
The reason I say that is I just was reading something ["Comments on the Testimony of Dr. Peter T. Suzuki before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians" (November 14, 1981)] recently by [Dr. Edward H.] Ned Spicer [formerly the head of the WRA's Community Analysis Section and before that Alexander Leighton's assistant in Poston's Bureau of Sociological Research], and he, you know, dismissed that allegation about Leighton as an old saw, and said that it was widely believed at the time, but, in fact, what he did was to wear just a couple of buttons in his lapel. And he did that so that people would know.
Spencer
I remember him in a blue uniform with a white hat, with two and one-half bands, gold bands, on his... Now, whether he was coming or going, I wasn't at Poston enough to tell. Obviously, he'd be crazy if he wore a blue uniform in all that dust.
Hansen
Well, you said it, and Tamie Tsuchiyama has said it,[24] that he was wearing that. And, then, Spicer, as a rejoinder to what Peter Suzuki had written about Leighton [in "Unethical Research by Social Scientists in the War Relocation Authority Camps: A Statement Submitted to the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians" (September 23, 1981)], denied it.[25] So that's why I'm curious. There just seems to be a paradox or a contradiction there.
Oh, I see him clearly before me in his uniform. We came there [Poston] to look at the situation. I don't even remember why we went there. I went there twice. And, certainly, the first time, there was Leighton, resplendent in uniform. And the second time, I don't think he was there. And I remember, I went over, I think, and took Tamie over to Gila, and she spent a little time in Gila with me.
Hansen
That's right. And, from what you wrote in your correspondence to the JERS office in Berkeley, she was a real problem.
Spencer
Well, you see, she had got the idea that the Anthropology Department [at UC Berkeley] was against her. I don't know why she got paranoid.
Hansen
Could you give a little background on Tamie Tsuchiyama, because I don't know much about her?
Spencer
I don't know much about her.
Hansen
But you met her a couple of times. Was she a graduate student at Berkeley?
Spencer
Just a minute. Let me check [in some anthropological reference book in the interviewee's personal library] on this for accuracy.
Hansen
Okay.
Spencer
Here is Anna Gayton. Here is Lila O'Neill. Here's Dorothy Lee, here's Cora DuBois, here's Isabel Kelly, here's Laura Thompson, here's Kay Luomala, here's Gertrude Toffelmeyer, here's Margaret Lantis. Kay was involved in the write-up of the WRA materials under Ned Spicer [Edward H. Spicer, Asael T. Hansen, Katherine Luomala, and Marvin Opler, Impounded People: Japanese-Americans in the Relocation Centers (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1969)], but I don't exactly know what she did for WRA. Margaret was at Rohwer and Jerome [WRA centers located in Arkansas] briefly. I know both Kay and Margaret very well. Margaret worked with the Eskimo and so did I and consequently we are good, old friends. Kay is also still alive. She's a folklorist primarily while Margaret is more an ecologist. To return to Julian Steward, whom I mentioned earlier, he is frequently called a neoevolutionist and a cultural ecologist—the relations of environment and production to society, that kind of thing. Margaret is a bit along that tack. She's a good Kroeber student, as is Kay. Kay was at the University of Hawaii for many, many years and still lives in Honolulu. If I get there, I see her. She's a Minnesota girl, by the way. Margaret wrote a study of Nunivak, Nunivak Island in the Bering Sea; it's considered to be pretty classic. Kay wrote on Polynesian folklore and I think just her association with Japan through the islands was enough to bring her into WRA. But, to return to your larger question, I don't think that you can say that Kroeber and Lowie were anti-women.
Hansen
Were those women you just alluded to all Kroeber and Lowie Ph.D. students?
Spencer
Yes, all of them. That's to 1941. Now, Katherine Holt in 1942, then me in 1946. And then, when I come down to 1947, I find Tamie Tsuchiyama.
Hansen
What's her dissertation's title? Does that book have it?
Spencer
"A Comparison of the Folklore of the Northern, Southern, and Pacific Athebascans: A Study in Stability of Folklore Within a Linguistic Stock." That folkloristic influence did make an imprint on Tamie Tsuchiyama because she did write on folklore. She didn't use the Poston material.
Hansen
Okay. So, she didn't use any of the Poston material, then. And she worked for both Leighton and Dorothy Thomas, didn't she?
Spencer
Yes, she did. I don't remember to what extent she worked for Leighton. As to why Tamie Tsuchiyama wrote her dissertation on American Indian folklore, I suspect that she washed her hands of the whole thing;
Hansen
There seems to have been, also, a lot of husband and wife anthropology teams over the years.
Spencer
Not too many, but there are some, yes.
Hansen
Well, you mentioned about two or three of them earlier today, when we were talking about people who had worked together in the field [Alexander and Dorothea Leighton; Murray and Rosalie Hankey Wax].
Spencer
Well, I suppose. Anyway, I see that Tamie finished her doctorate in 1947. That means that after the war she went back to Berkeley and finished up; and, as I said, you didn't have to defend your dissertation at Berkeley.
Hansen
A lot of people have talked about her, and said that she was, to put it bluntly, "a pain in the ass." Some of the language I have heard, and some of the correspondence that I've looked at, seems to suggest that Dorothy Thomas initially had quite a bit of trouble with her. And then she's saying later on that she's turning out great stuff for them at Poston, and that she was wise not to want to leave Poston. But, then when she goes to Chicago [JERS resettlement office], it seems like [Frank] Miyamoto has to appease her but apparently nobody [the other JERS personnel working out of the JERS office in Chicago included Charles Kikuchi, Tamotsu Shibutani, and Togo Tanaka] wanted her in the office because she was constantly complaining and throwing tantrums.
Spencer
That's what she did. She was constantly complaining. And it was a paranoid complaint always that Kroeber had it in for her, and so on. They let her through. They let her through, but I don't know what happened to her after that. She's dead now, I understand.
Hansen
Yes. She died a couple of years ago, I think. That's what Yuji Ichioka told me, in any event.
Spencer
Do you know what kind of career she had, or where?
Hansen
I just know she had moved totally away from this field [the Japanese American Evacuation], for her dissertation, and I don't know anything about what went on, whether she worked later as a professional anthropologist or not, or where she worked, or what she did.
Spencer
I've never seen anything by her in the literature.
Hansen
No, I haven't either.
Spencer
I didn't know that that was her dissertation.
Hansen
So, she wasn't somebody that you knew very well, then?
Spencer
No.
Hansen
A couple of times you met her, when you had to go to Poston, or you brought her over to Gila.
Spencer
I brought her over to Gila, and she spent a few days with me at Gila. It was rather early on. [John Fee] Embree [who was head of the WRA's Community Analysis Section] went to her and said to her that she should help me, that I was having a little difficulty trying to focus. And she told me that rather gleefully, because she felt I was one of the fair-haired boys in the department, and she was being discriminated against. That was obvious. No, she wasn't terribly prepossessing as a personality. I didn't have any trouble with
Hansen
Yes. I'd like to get into that, because he is referred to in the JERS correspondence that I have perused as "Mister X."
Spencer
That was Tamie Tsuchiyama's "Mister X."
Hansen
What's the background on that? Now she wasn't at Tanforan [Assembly Center in northern California], was she? She was at Santa Anita [Assembly Center in southern California], because in your JERS correspondence you mention that, when you brought her over from Poston to Gila, she visited with her Santa Anita friends who were interned there.
Spencer
I don't remember.
Hansen
Anyway, Tsuchiyama was working for Leighton, to begin with. And, somehow or other, she got hooked up with your project, with JERS.
Spencer
Again, you see, I wouldn't know the truth of that. Would she have been put on our payroll, for example? Were you able to get access to the JERS payrolls?
Hansen
No, no.
Spencer
Did you try?
Hansen
No, I haven't, not yet. There's a lot of data to go through in the JERS collection at the Bancroft [Library at UC Berkeley].
Spencer
I wonder if you shouldn't, though, because then you'd be able to determine from the amount of salary paid, what the status of the individual was vis-à-vis the project. Now, was she part-time? Did JERS just pay her honoraria for jobs accomplished, or was she actually on the staff, so to speak?
Hansen
Well, I think she was on the staff. I'm not sure, but my sense of it was that what Dorothy Thomas wanted her to do was to leave Poston and do fieldwork for JERS in Topaz. And she was very reluctant. And Thomas kept writing you, "That girl is being so obstinate," and, so, eventually, Thomas conceded that she [Tamie Tsuchiyama] was probably right in staying at Poston. Leighton then left [Poston]. The hold that he had over her was gone. She had become very happy because of her connection with Nishimoto and, as you mentioned, he was an intellectual: "He must be very brilliant, because she seems to be taken with him." And, so, then she, you know, produced a lot of stuff for JERS while she was at Poston, most of it after you had left Gila to go to work with Kroeber [in the summer of 1943 for the Army Specialized Training Program on the UC Berkeley campus].
Spencer
I had the feeling she [Tamie Tsuchiyama] was sleeping with Nishimoto. A very strong feeling at the time, I remember that. And, being slightly puzzled because Nishimoto had a family of his own.
Hansen
Was Tsuchiyama an attractive woman?
Spencer
Oh, anything but.
Hansen
So, physically, she wasn't attractive.
Spencer
No. I remember that Mister X that Tamie used to write about. Through that Mister X, she got access to these remarkable data. And, then, I remember, we went and met her at Poston. I don't remember whether
Hansen
Well, your correspondence is almost a diary, because you were writing just about every day. I can remember—and tomorrow when we get into the details of the correspondence, it'll come out clearly—at least two occasions when you went to Poston. One time, I believe, you went over there in order to meet with Dorothy Thomas and W. I. Thomas, and then you drove them over from Poston, I think, to Gila.
Spencer
To Phoenix, too. Yes, I remember that. I remember driving them. They had a university car that somebody had driven down, and then I took it in the rest of the way.
Hansen
And then another time, when you were going from Gila to California, you drove past Poston. I think this was because Dorothy Thomas had asked you to talk with Tsuchiyama. I think she often was using you then as sort of a go-between.
Spencer
Yes, I remember that. I remember I went with a physician, and somebody from the WRA. There was a lady who was a doctor, and she was going from Gila to Poston. I cadged a ride.
Hansen
It's all in your JERS correspondence. I'll bring this correspondence to our next interview session. I'll be able to refresh both of our memories. The correspondence tells exactly who you went with, so it's fairly clear on that. So, I think once we look at that, it'll bring it all back. But, I guess the important thing now is this thing on Richard Nishimoto. He ends up writing, you know, a volume [ The Spoilage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1946)] that's probably most identified with JERS; of course, he coauthored this book, The Spoilage, with Dorothy Swaine Thomas. And, he's not even in the JERS picture, to begin with. He's not one of the people who is initially employed by JERS as a field researcher.
Spencer
You know, Art, I think that this is one of the strange things about that whole enterprise. We collected, as you noted, reams and reams of data. Admittedly, it was raw data, but it could be used in any number of different ways. And, then, we were perhaps less than adequate in determining precisely where it was we were going, or what it was we were doing. And, I think that was true of [Morton] Grodzins—actually, it was less true of Grodzins, who, after all, was confronted with the legal fait accompli. But, for Virginia [Taucher], for myself, for [Robert] Billigmeier, for Nishimoto. And for [Frank] Miyamoto, [James] Sakoda, and others, we didn't know where we were going, obviously. We have all these masses of data. Dorothy Thomas ignores the whole thing. I think I'm mentioned in The Spoilage in one footnote.
Hansen
You are, I think, in reference to the registration crisis at Gila.[26]
Spencer
And I was rather taken aback, because I felt, "Good Heavens. What was all this work for?" I thought we were contributing significantly to this study. But, no. Dorothy became herself so enamored of Nishimoto that she quotes chapter and verse from him. And he... sat there in a barrack, I remember. And his reaction was always, "Hmm!" You'd make a statement. "Hmm!" He was... I don't know what his attraction was.
Hansen
He was an Issei—a younger Issei—so he must have been older than you when you went over to Gila for JERS.
Spencer
Oh, indeed.
Hansen
Like twenty years older, or ten years older, or what? I'm trying to get a sense of it, because he is not somebody who I have a very clear fix on.
Spencer
When did he die?
Hansen
I don't know. Is he dead? I don't know too much about Richard Nishimoto.
Spencer
I just wondered if you looked up in a card catalog if the library would have caught the death date.
Well, I think I can get that. The Bancroft [Library at UC Berkeley] is xeroxing all of his correspondence with Dorothy Thomas for my research use. So, I'll have all that material very soon. I've already read through this correspondence, you know, hurriedly. Thomas used Nishimoto to critique the work that was being done by the other field anthropologists. And sometimes, just like you got annoyed when you got back a critique of your reports from Sakoda that seemed sort of Pecksniffian and superior sounding, Sakoda himself got annoyed when he received a critique of his reports written by Nishimoto.
Spencer
Yes, well, what were Nishimoto's qualifications? The University of Hawaii somehow comes to mind. Am I right on that?[27]
Hansen
I just don't know about him. I was hoping that maybe I could find out a little bit more about him from you.
Spencer
Well, Tamie Tsuchiyama guarded him so carefully and immured him, didn't even want any of us to talk to him. He was her primary respondent. And then Dorothy got into the act, and Dorothy fell in love with him, too. I don't know why. And he gave you the poop from on high. That was about it.[28]
Hansen
And, so, the next thing you know, he became the coauthor of this book The Spoilage. Now this book, as you will remember...
Spencer
Not very well.
Hansen
Well, it's almost entirely on Tule Lake, during its phase as a segregation center. In fact, The Spoilage, in a certain sense, sets the agenda for later works done on the subject of the Evacuation.
Spencer
Did Dorothy bring Nishimoto up to Tule Lake?
Hansen
I guess she must have because the book, in the beginning, deals with the evacuation process, and then, where your footnote comes in is where the authors discuss the registration crisis in early 1943. Then they take up the segregation. And thereafter the rest of the book is given over to events at Tule Lake. And then, Rosalie Hankey [Wax]—who is listed as a contributor to The Spoilage along with James Sakoda, Morton Grodzins, and Frank Miyamoto—focused both her dissertation ["The Development of Authoritarianism" (University of Chicago, 1950)], which compares the situation at Tule Lake with that during the ascendancy of fascism in interwar Germany, and several chapters of a later book on ethnographic practice [ Doing Fieldwork: Warnings and Advice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971)] on the conflict that coursed through the Tule Lake center during the last couple of years of its existence. Then, too, Michi [Nishiura] Weglyn's book of a few years later [ Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America's Concentration Camps (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1976] once again follows the pattern of The Spoilage —that is, it starts with general information on the Evacuation experience and then plunges right into Tule Lake. In fact, the bulk of Weglyn's book is on Tule Lake. When I was writing on the situation at Gila ["Cultural Politics in the Gila River Relocation Center, 1942-1943," Arizona and the West 27 (Winter 1985): 327-62], I was struck by how little the data compiled by you, Charlie Kikuchi, Rosalie Hankey, and the others connected with JERS had ever been used. I mean, this material was virtually untapped, or unquoted, or uncited, or anything.
Spencer
I know, I know.
Hansen
And there were, as we've already talked about, a voluminous numbers of reports coming out from Gila.
Spencer
Well, that surprised me. You know, by that time, I didn't care anymore. I mean, when I had finished my thesis and wrote a couple of papers,[29] I tried to publish my thesis, but I'm glad I didn't; one feels that way about one's thesis. Then I sort of dropped it. I had the disagreement with the Imamura/Matsuura group, the Buddhist church in Berkeley. Well, maybe disagreement is not the right word. They were hurt by my resume of their church. I called it social structure and I tried to define certain organizations within the church. My point was: How has a Buddhist church come to resemble, say, a Presbyterian, or a Lutheran, or a Baptist church in the culture of the United States, everything from opening benediction to doxology.
Hansen
Well, not really. You live your life. You know, you can't be reliving one episode of it time and time again because somebody down the line forty years later like myself is going to ask you questions about it.
Spencer
I think that of the field experience I've had in many different parts of the world, from the Arctic to the Tropics, I'm much closer to all of that than I am to this Japanese American experience. I got to thinking about that, in fact, last night before I fell asleep, anticipating your coming. But, I think that the whole situation with the evacuation and resettlement was just so thoroughly and utterly distasteful. I remember happy times with the Eskimo, and in Turkey, for example, or in Pakistan or in southeast Asia, and certainly in Korea, which I love. But, to do this work among a deprived, dispossessed, unhappy people, rubs off on one; and, I sort of shove it to the rear recesses of my mind.
Hansen
Do you think that's happened generally, and helps to explain why, you know, so relatively little follow-up work was done during the interval since the war?
Spencer
I think it must be. I'll tell you, when [Yuji] Ichioka wrote to me [about the September 1987 JERS conference in Berkeley, California], he said, "Well, let's each contribute a paper." And, my immediate reaction—and it still is my reaction—"A paper on what? What's a paper to be about?" And the only thing I could think of was, well, maybe, given the state of the art of social sciences then as opposed to now, what could we have done differently, or what direction might we have followed that was a little different that would have had more promising results? But, you know, that's like Suzuki's paper. It's easy to argue after the fact, and that doesn't help you. After all, sociology, anthropology, psychology, the social sciences at large, were...They were mature, but they were still at stages we've moved very far away from, the kinds of preoccupations that really were true then. I really don't know what to say. There was a fellow by the name of Hux [Hugo] Wolter at Gila.
Hansen
Yes, he became the head of community activities at the center. So you two became close—Hux is what you just called him.
Spencer
Right. He was a former Lutheran minister—same background as myself.
Hansen
After you left Gila, he got run out of the camp by [Leroy] Bennett [Gila's director].
Spencer
What happened to Wolter [prior to coming to Gila] was he got into parish work and found he wasn't suited for it, and then got into counseling and social work and that kind of thing. And, as was true of social workers of that day—it's no longer true—they became about 200 percent Freudian. And, he said, "Well, what you've got to do is a Freudian analysis of the situation here." Well, I hadn't read much Freud at that time; but I had sort of glimmerings of the idea, and I said, "How?" "Well, look for Oedipal et cetera, et cetera." Who wants to do that?
Hansen
The only social scientist, I think, that would have been connected with the Evacuation who could've pulled
Spencer
Wes could have, or Francis L. K. Hsu, a Chinese anthropologist who taught at Northwestern [University in Evanston, Illinois] but is in California now, could have; a number of people could have. But, of course, the heyday of culture and personality studies was later, in the 1950s.
Hansen
Right, right.
Spencer
Now, it's been dropped. Well, not dropped, but it's going on in a quite different way. The genetic role has been rediscovered, and now it's the heredity/environment controversy all over again: how much weight to give to one, as against the other.
Hansen
Marvin [Kaufmann] Opler [1914-1981] was also in that field.[30]
Spencer
You know, I went to the meetings [of the Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences] in Moscow [in 1964], and Marvin, his wife Charlotte, and I together visited all the psychiatric hospitals in Moscow. Marvin had some kind of entre, and I went along for the ride. That was interesting.
Hansen
Have you had any contact over the years with anybody from...not necessarily just the JERS people, but people, say, who were WRA community analysts. You just mentioned Marvin Opler, for example. Has there been any occasion for you to meet with such people so that you could even talk about that period of your lives? Has there been a tacit pact in effect between you so that you repress.
Spencer
If I were to have met Morris Opler [1907- ] again, I would have even forgotten that he was associated with a WRA center. In fact, we have had many interesting conversations about India and the Apache, which I somewhat follow. I am involved with the American Indian, always have been.[31] And that's the Kroeber-Lowie training we got: they were there. And, of course, Morris had worked with the Lipan Apache and the Chirachaua Apache. So, we would talk about that, rather than the center experience. E. Adamson Hoebel was here at Minnesota for many years; he's long since retired, but he went to Amache [Granada War Relocation Center in Colorado]—I don't think for very long—as a social analyst, but he never talked about that experience in the years that we were associated, nor did I mention Gila. That's interesting. I never thought of that. Anyway, Hoebel worked in the anthropology of law.
Hansen
You know, I have thought about the work people like you and the Oplers and the others did during the war and the impact that it had on you as social scientists in two different ways. One, I felt that the experience had been repressed because it was such a signally unpleasant experience. Then too, almost always it was the first or second fieldwork experience you people had, so there was the attendant anxieties connected with that situation. On the other hand, I have thought that, in certain ways, the concerns that came out of that fieldwork—however traumatizing—got insinuated in fugitive ways, at least, in your future work as social scientists.
Spencer
You internalize it. You learn from it, of course.
Hansen
But it seems like this wartime experience led a lot of the people involved in studying it—I'd like to track this down through their bibliographies—into exploring other related interests later on in their careers. You yourself, in your correspondence to me say that perhaps a lot that you have done in your career, if it's been a success, has had something to do with your wartime fieldwork at Gila. And, maybe it has, because of the decided Asian and religious turn of your research.
Spencer
Well, it certainly brought me into Asia, that it did. And there's always a concatenation of circumstances. I never expected to go to the Eskimo, and I did. And I never expected to go to Korea, and, yet, circumstances were such. I don't know. I'm attracted to Asian cultures, from the Middle East on over.
Hansen
But it also seems like you developed a discipline there, too, of really, you know—you may look back upon
Spencer
Well, I remember sitting in my barrack. After Lowie came to visit the camp, I lost my room in the guest house; and, I had to go settle for a barrack way on the ragged edge of nowhere, out in the boondocks. And I was just as glad I was away from the WRA staff, but I remember sitting down at a picnic table and writing. Charlie used to come over. Charlie and I did a very extensive report on camp administration.[32]
Hansen
I have a copy of that report in my files. That's the one extensive study you prepared with Kikuchi. I recall reading in one of your letters to Dorothy Thomas, written after Charlie had left Gila for Chicago, how it was unfortunate that you hadn't learned how well you could work together with him, or you two would have been turning out more jointly authored reports.
Spencer
Yes. He would lie on the bed and giggle and laugh. We would comment on the various members of the staff who were obviously all, in my opinion, second- and third- and fourth-raters, really.
Hansen
The WRA staff was?
Spencer
Yes. You really never got superior people in there.
Hansen
Except that there were a couple of exemplary people at Gila when you first got there, such as Nan Cook Smith.
Spencer
Oh, well, you're dealing with an idealistic situation, I think, with Eastwood Smith [Gila's first director] and his wife Nan. She had her [doctoral] degree from Yale in anthropology, and he had been for many years with the Soil Conservation Service, as had [Lewis] Korn [assistant project director at the Gila center], out of Santa Fe. And the whole idea was that they would help these Indians develop their land resources and improve their irrigation systems, et cetera. Consequently, there was a strong bias on the part of both toward what might be called the "helping professions." And when Smith found himself up against a stone wall and having at every turn to fight the bureaucracy, he lost fifteen pounds in a month that he could ill-afford to lose, and quit.
Hansen
And you lost a pretty good source of support for what you were doing.
Spencer
Sure, yes. It would have been marvelous if he had stayed. And then they got Robert Cozzens [as acting camp director] briefly, and then he was kicked upstairs in the WRA.
Hansen
What was Cozzens's background?
Spencer
I have no idea.
Hansen
But was Cozzens a reasonable person for you to deal with?
Spencer
Yes. I would say he was reasonable in the sense that I didn't have to deal with him. He recognized and tolerated my presence.
Hansen
He didn't interpose his authority, I guess.
Spencer
Oh, we'd greet each other. In fact, that surprised Dorothy when she came down to Gila. The people who I had written about as my bitter enemies were people with whom I was on a first-name basis.
She was amazed, then, that your relations with the Gila administrators were quite convivial.
Spencer
Convivial, no, but at least sufficiently informal that they recognized me and I recognized them. For example, [W. E.] Williamson, the chief of police, who was a stinker of the first water, in my opinion, and his assistant was [Francis] Frederick.
Hansen
When you first got down to Gila, being, you know, quite young, did the upper-echelon people there—you were at least ten to fifteen years younger than most of them—look at you as though you were a pipsqueak?
Spencer
No, not entirely, not entirely. I had done pretty well in Santa Fe, and these people, like the Smiths and Korn, knew me in Santa Fe.
Hansen
Oh, really.
Spencer
Yes. I had known them in Santa Fe.
Hansen
Oh, so you knew Korn before?
Spencer
Yes, yes, yes.
Hansen
Oh. What was your contact with Korn? Just through the Soil Conservation Service?
Spencer
And then, too, we had an honor society that he and I were initiated into at the same time in Albuquerque. It was when I was up in Santa Fe that I met Nan. In fact, I went on a field trip with her.
Hansen
Oh, I didn't know this. I thought the first time you met her was when you arrived at Gila.
Spencer
Oh, no, no, no.
Hansen
Well, tell me a little bit about that, because I didn't realize you had these contacts in advance.
Spencer
Well, it was just purely fortuitous. I mean, it could have been anybody; but JERS selected Gila and the Smiths were selected for Gila, and we met quite inadvertently. And, it was kind of a reunion. I mean, I never knew them very well in Santa Fe, but at least I knew who they were and they knew who I was. We went to parties sometimes together. And so, we fell into each other's arms. When Smith asked me to take this kid Sam back to his mother's funeral [in Fresno, California], I had no recourse but to obey—no, that's not the right word—oblige him.
Hansen
You wrote in your correspondence with the JERS office at Berkeley that one of the things that those of you connected with JERS were trying to do was to develop a cordial relationship with the Gila administration, [to effect] an accommodation of sorts.
Spencer
Yes, we were there on sufferance, you know, and all it would have done is to take a negative report or letter from the project director and we'd have been out of there. I never had adequate identification. In fact, I had sometimes trouble getting in and out of the camp. I had a much-folded letter from Lew Korn saying who I was and what I was doing. This was before the days of plastic ID [identification] cards, you know. So they were often reluctant to let me in. And that letter could have been canceled at any time, you know. I don't remember when Lew left or even where he went.
Hansen
He left just a little bit before you left. And I can't remember where he went, either.
Spencer
Yes, he went back to Santa Fe. I know that. I knew a very good friend of his [Daniel S. Davidson] at [the University of] Oregon. I taught at Oregon [1947-1948] and he was there at the same time; we discovered the mutual friendship for Lew Korn. Davidson went to the University of Washington in Seattle in 1949 and died of a sudden heart attack soon after his arrival there.
What was Nan Cook Smith's work in? What was her anthropological focus?
Spencer
Oh, God! We went up to Washoe in Nevada, near Reno, and I interviewed for her. I mean, I took down stories from the Washoe. Me and Doug Osborne and Hal Hayes, and we all went together, many beery miles and contact with the Indians. It was fun.
Hansen
Did you ever have the opportunity, then, to discuss anthropological matters with her at Gila? Because the Smiths were not there that long after you got there.
Spencer
Well, I think they resigned early in the fall [of 1942]. We overlapped by maybe a month or something, six weeks at the most.
Hansen
I appreciate how hectic it was at that time, and I know that just meeting the press of everyday business was difficult enough.
Spencer
The administrative center was at Sacaton, which was an Indian school about seven miles from Canal camp and about ten miles from the Butte camp. [The Gila River Relocation Center was comprised of two camps, Canal and Butte, that were located about five miles apart from one another. Canal, which was the smaller of the two, holding about 5,000 internees, was built prior to Butte, where nearly twice as many people of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated. The interviewee lived first in Canal, but later had his quarters transferred to Butte.]
Hansen
I notice on the financial statements you regularly prepared for the JERS office in Berkeley that you ate lots of meals there at Sacaton, at a little cafe or something.
Spencer
At Sacaton? It seems to me we went into Casa Grande, [Arizona], for any restaurant meals. I don't remember any restaurant in Sacaton. Sacaton was just the Indian Service building.
Hansen
I believe your itemized bills mentioned Sacaton, but perhaps I'm wrong. Great prices in those days, too. You sometimes apologized in your correspondence to Dorothy Thomas and Morton Grodzins for your high living costs, and sometimes for a day your bill ran about $1.12 or something outrageously low for three meals. (laughter)
Spencer
I know. I tried to be honest. I was not into money and I knew that the project would suffer for lack of predictable funding.
Hansen
Did you get any interested questions—you know, not skeptical questions like "What the heck are you doing here?"—from the people in the camp who were connected with anthropology, people like Nan Smith or Lew Korn? Did they show a professional interest in your work?
Spencer
It was too soon with the Smiths, because I had hardly a chance to settle in when they left. And they did ask me to leave. They asked me to leave.
Hansen
When you first got there.
Spencer
Yes, when I first got there. The reason being they were just not set up to handle anybody, food or anything else. And they were exerting their every effort to getting evacuees fed.
Hansen
I must say that, in looking through the JERS correspondence and your exchange with Dorothy Thomas, that I agreed with her as against you—that it was very important that you got back in there to be able to document what was happening at the time. Like she said, once it got settled, et cetera, it was going to be a different situation.
Spencer
You're right. I know, but it was so unpleasant. If I couldn't get out of it...
What about Korn? Did you get a chance to have some discussions with him as time went on?
Spencer
They were just too busy. They were just too swamped. I was just an added burden.
Hansen
So you poured your discussions into those letters with Dorothy Thomas and Morton Grodzins and then mostly in talks with Charlie Kikuchi.
Spencer
Well, then I settled into Canal Camp for awhile, and I roomed with a fellow by the name of John Landward. Do you remember the name?
Hansen
Yes, I do.
Spencer
I've forgotten exactly what he was supposed to do.
Hansen
Housing, I think, or something, wasn't it?[33]
Spencer
And a number of us met in Casa Grande, nearby, which was the nearest town of any size. And, let's see, Mort Gaba and Al Hutchinson, who was the elementary school principal at Canal, and Landward and I and another fellow whose name began with Y... Robert [Yeaton].
Hansen
I don't know.
Spencer
Well, there was a choice between him and Landward in some position that fell open.
Hansen
Okay, I'll have to check up on this point in the reports on the camp's administration that you wrote periodically for JERS.
Spencer
I know this because I just reviewed my notes. He [Yeaton] was a ballet dancer—rather good, actually. We sat around a couple of afternoons. I guess it was Al Hutchinson's house. He chose not to live on the project. And we'd drink beer and talk about the problems, what we might do. And even there we ran into considerable difficulty. We each had a somewhat different perception of what our roles were, if we were to do any good for the evacuees. I was very annoyed at Mort Gaba, who was recreation director.
Hansen
Gaba was [Takeo] Tada's boss there.[34]
Spencer
I thought he would be much more liberal, given his background, and he toed directly to the administrative line.
Hansen
No fraternizing, everything.
Spencer
Right. Landward was interesting. He was a Mormon. There were several Mormon employees, but he was the only one who had any pretensions of being a social scientist. He had done work in social science at Harvard, and he was, I mean, a real, honest to God, Mormon.
Hansen
So when you were talking about drinking beer, he wasn't one of the ones?
Spencer
He didn't drink beer. I made my faux pas right off the bat. I said, "Here, have a beer." He said, "No, thanks. I'll have root beer instead." I said, "What's the matter? You belong to some strange, non-alcoholic sect?" And Mort came up close and said, "Don't you know he's a Mormon?" (laughter)
Hansen
So was that a group that you talked to quite a bit?
Spencer
Not quite a bit. There was never time. These people were so preoccupied with administering that there just was never time.
Did you have time?
Spencer
I had time, yes. In other words, my time was taken up with talking to them, or, if I could, trying to establish contacts and working, asking people things, meeting in the evening, and stuff like that.
Hansen
In one of your letters to Dorothy Thomas, later on, you complained to her that you were getting bored. Things had settled down and you wanted desperately, I think, to get back to Berkeley for a little while. And then you were even thinking about going to Chicago to see Kikuchi. He had taken off, and you were obviously missing him and the Kikuchi household where you used to spend a lot of time. And you wrote Thomas to the effect that things were stabilizing, and if they continued that way that you would like to leave. She didn't want you to leave. She said, "You know, when you first got there, you were complaining that you didn't do the sort of pure anthropology that you wanted because there was so much hullabaloo, but now you want to be a "foreign correspondent."
Spencer
I was kind of a brat, I admit. I didn't like it. I wanted out, and yet I felt that I ought to stick it out.
Hansen
You say in your letters a lot—to other people especially, not Dorothy Thomas—you say, "I like it here." And when you were away from camp, you would write: "I want to get back to Gila." But you didn't like being at Gila—from the git-go, did you? I mean, a lot of the time when you were sending those letters, weren't you somewhat dissembling?
Spencer
Maybe I was. I don't really remember. I was so excited to leave, at one point, I remember. And then glad to leave at another, and, I don't know. One became quite schizophrenic about the whole thing, really.
Hansen
What were the things that would be...in every situation there are certain things that are pluses. And when you say that you were starting to develop an evacuee mentality, that could have meant that you were feeling some connection with the [internee] community and everything else.
Spencer
Yes, well, I did. And then I felt great antipathy toward the administrative staff. Sure.
Hansen
Did you think you were doing something valuable?
Spencer
No.
Hansen
You didn't. You didn't feel that the work that you were doing at Gila was valuable?
Spencer
No, no.
Hansen
How come you poured your work out so feverishly? I mean, you really turned out a lot of reports.
Spencer
I don't know. I was being paid to do it, I guess.
Hansen
What was making Spencer run? I don't think it was just the salary. It seems like you were doing...What about just learning skills, or honing skills, of social analysis or descriptive anthropology?
Spencer
You may be right, I don't know. No, if you've been talking applied terms, I didn't feel that there was any particular value in what I was doing. There might be to me in terms of ultimately a dissertation, you see. You know, even now—and I've thought quite a bit about this—I'm not totally clear as to what my role in Gila was or what my self-image was at that time. I wanted in and I wanted out. I was horrified, in part, by what when on, yet at the same time I was very much concerned about being in Berkeley—girl friends and things of that kind. I guess I really felt that we weren't doing enough. What exactly was our task? What were we supposed to be doing? And since this was never spelled out by Thomas and since she held at least indirectly the reins of the project, one wanted from her more direction, especially a graduate student—and wasn't getting it. That's what made me so essentially unhappy. Oh, as far as the day to day life in Gila, that was not a problem, until, of course, the registration bit [a loyalty registration jointly
Hansen
What about in the long run? You see, the WRA's community analysts who were in the various camps, the applied anthropologists, thought they could shape policy, that hopefully, if they could get the ear of administrators, that would make a difference. Your project [JERS] worked on a different underlying philosophy. Whether it was very clearly spelled out or not, you were supposed to be documenting something, you know, about this experience for the long haul. You weren't concerned with the short run. In fact, it seems that your main concern with the short run, once in awhile, was to ingratiate yourself to the administration during times of crisis by helping out a little bit. But your notion was not to get too socialized into the administration.
Spencer
Not at all, and, yet, you couldn't help it. Once the thing settled down, then the administration cut loose and started to party and bring in the booze. And everybody was drunk every single night, and singing, and carrying on, and so on. It was under these circumstances that Francis Fredrick married, as I say, and there was a publicity woman, Clara Clayman. Did you ever run into her?
Hansen
No, I haven't.
Spencer
She had an affair with a guy who was setting up cooperatives, a Canadian [name not provided by interviewee]. And everybody made noise about that, and yet everybody was doing a great deal of bedhopping, that's all I can say. It was a demoralized situation. Really, it was.
Hansen
So, if there was, as some social scientists connected with the Evacuation have claimed, a dissocialization process taking place among Japanese Americans, there was also a similar process for the WRA employees?
Spencer
Yes, yes I think so. And I didn't want to be a lush. I didn't want to get involved in these parties, and I really did my work in the evening; and, yet, I would detect the feelings of the evacuees. I was kind of put in between a rock and a hard place.
Hansen
Did you think beyond your salary to the point of documenting something that someday would be worthwhile? I mean, in the sense that "this is an injustice."
Spencer
I was too young. I didn't see it that way. I felt that the data that I had would have to be screened by someone like Lowie. Lowie and Kroeber kept you pretty much to heel, you know.
Hansen
It seemed like, in your correspondence, you wrote certain things to Lowie, but not others. In fact, you apparently even removed the carbon paper before typing certain things in your letters to Dorothy Thomas if you knew that she would be passing along a copy of your correspondence to Lowie. It seemed like you were a lot closer to Thomas than you were to Lowie.
Spencer
Yes, I was. I was. I don't know.
Hansen
But you did get to do some anthropological work at Gila on religion, actually. You wrote some papers on religion in the camps, and you got to do a lot of social commentary—no, not commentary, but description—on what was happening in the community. It did become commentary once in awhile when you editorialized, calling somebody a bastard or incompetent, or, you know, a misanthrope or something like that. And certain people got your ire up, whether it was Hoffman, who you thought double-crossed you at one time, or Bennett, who you thought was in no position as an auto salesman to preside over a camp like Gila.
Spencer
I still think it was shocking.
Hansen
But you were too young to take a longer view.
Spencer
Yes, I think so. I think so. I was very insecure in terms of... Look, if it had been language, I could have
Hansen
It seemed like you were making some attempts, though, to try to provide structure where you weren't getting structure. Like, one example of it was, when on your own initiative—you talk about this in your correspondence and I've seen the results of it—is that you decided to start doing some block studies. And, you know, the block where [Shotaro] Hikida [an Issei connected with JERS at Gila] lived was one of these. You did, I think, some very interesting block studies, trying to understand the nature of the whole sociocultural context at Gila.
Spencer
Well, the problem there was—and I was certainly aware of that—here you have the people from diverse areas in Japan, then diverse areas in California, and then you throw them together, and you immediately then have all this jockeying for position. Now, where I fell down was that I couldn't get the data. I wanted to find who the dominant individuals or groups or area representatives would be in a situation where people were thrown together and were expected to develop their own governmental process, namely, electing a representative of the block and those kinds of things.
Hansen
And you started to have some success in that, but then you left Gila. You got the idea that doing block studies might be a constructive thing to do for everybody in JERS—those in all the camps covered by the project—that it could give some uniformity to your research effort.
Spencer
I told you earlier that I thought that maybe I could elect sociology as one of my major spheres of interest. And I decided against it. I think it was Dorothy who put cold water on my feelings about this. She said: "Fine, do the block study. Excellent. But, now let's approach it demographically. Let's get into the statistical side." And, you see, this was even before the age of the computer. But she must be up in heaven banging computers right and left. (laughter)
Hansen
So, a lot of times when you were doing your stuff there in camp, you actually felt that you were going against the grain of what was interesting to you?
Spencer
Exactly. Exactly. Yes, I was. In other words, I was doing things I didn't really want to do.
Hansen
So, you not only had left your girl friend at home, but you also kind of left your soul at home when you went over to Arizona.
Spencer
Well, I left my girl friend at home and that [relationship] terminated.
Hansen
Oh, she's not the one you married? Now, how did that situation come about, because you were in Gila all this time, and as soon as you got back from Gila you got married? And you drove up to Tule Lake with her on some business for JERS.
Spencer
That's right. I don't know. Well, actually I'd known this girl for many years, and I renewed acquaintance with her, sort of dropped out with the one who got the keys to the [JERS] office.
Hansen
Did you get a chance to see her at all on these trips where you'd go back and forth [between Gila and Berkeley]?
Spencer
Who?
Hansen
The one who you eventually married?
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
So you did have a chance to renew acquaintances once in awhile.
Oh, yes. We corresponded and so on. I had known her for six, seven years.
Hansen
Why don't we call it for today, and then tomorrow we'll pick up with your JERS correspondence as your point of departure and conversational guide.
Spencer
Fine.
Hansen
This is the second session in a continuing interview with Dr. Robert F. Spencer for the Japanese American Project of the Oral History Program at California State University, Fullerton, by Arthur A. Hansen. The date is July 16, 1987, and the time is about 9:30 a.m.
Today we will be referencing a correspondence file that is located at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley [folder K8.80, Gila River Relocation Center, Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study]. Most of this correspondence represents letters written back and forth between Robert Spencer, field researcher for the Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study at the Gila center in Arizona, and Dorothy Swaine Thomas, JERS director. Some of the letters involve other JERS personnel, in particular Morton Grodzins, Dorothy Thomas's assistant at the JERS office located in Giannini Hall on the Berkeley campus. So, throughout this session we'll be taking up various points raised in this correspondence and exploring and amplifying upon them.
Bob, you got to Gila and what happened to you there you described graphically in one of the first documents that you produced as a [JERS] fieldworker.[35] You explained that when you got to Gila they [the WRA administrative leaders] basically didn't want you to remain there because the camp wasn't even yet outfitted to handle the people that were pouring into the camp daily and they certainly didn't have much room for you. You were told of this situation not by the project director, E.R. Smith, but by his wife, Nan Cook Smith, an anthropology doctorate from Yale, who had apparently been a student of Robert Lowie's at one time.
Spencer
No, no, no. She had been a student of Edward Spier's. She had had contact with Lowie, but, actually, I think her associations were with Spier.
Hansen
Okay, what I was basing my information on here is a letter written from you to Lowie dated August 22, 1942. You wrote, and I quote: "Dr. Nan Cook, your former Yale pupil."
Spencer
Oh, well that may well be, but then Lowie would have been at Berkeley when Nan was at New Haven.
Hansen
Was Lowie, perhaps, a visiting professor at Yale?
Spencer
I think so. Somewhere down the line, he had lectured at Yale. Well, actually, she worked for the Washoe in around Reno, [Nevada], and went to Berkeley, I guess, to confer with Lowie. Her interest was folklore.
Hansen
But Lowie did know her, then, had some contact with her?
Spencer
Oh, yes.
Hansen
Which, therefore, helped your situation at Gila somewhat?
Spencer
Oh, yes, sure. And Lew Korn was very impressed. Actually, it was Lew who said that they didn't have room for me. That was a funny thing. Maybe I should mention it.
Hansen
Sure. Go ahead, mention anything you want.
Spencer
I came to Phoenix and I wanted to go to the camp. And, so, I tried to find a bus to the nearest town. And they said, "You want the concentration camp." And I said, "Yes." I didn't know of any other. But, they
Hansen
I think in one of your reports you mentioned that that camp that you were at was in Florence.
Spencer
Yes, I guess it would be, rather than Coolidge. I don't remember, because I remember the hotel, and it was purely a Chicano community. And I walked around at night and had a few beers. And there was a dance and I went to it and I asked several of the girls around, in Spanish, by the way—remember I'd been in Mexico, so my Spanish got pretty good. And so, I started to converse with them; but, still, I was an Anglo. They wouldn't dance with me. (laughter) So, I was rather disgruntled and went back to bed in this dreadful flea bag of a hotel. Hot! My God, the temperature was about 110 [degrees]. And this is now in what, August, July?
Hansen
August.
Spencer
August, yes. Well, I don't remember quite how I managed to get to Sacaton, but I did.
Hansen
Could you tell me a little more about Sacaton, because in some of your JERS budgetary statements that you sent back to Berkeley, your expenses and things, you talked about eating three meals there. Was there some kind of little cafe there or anything?
Spencer
It was a greasy spoon, or something like that, yes. Run by Pima Indians.
Hansen
So, for a long time before they had the mess hall set up, you would have to bum a ride into Sacaton with somebody?
Spencer
No, no, no, no. They found me a place and they did have a mess hall set up and I was able to eat there; but, at times, I would go back to Sacaton with Smith or meet him there, and then I would hitch a ride back. I just didn't know what to do with myself. I mean, there was this tremendous confusion of these people, too busy to do anything.
Hansen
So you probably got to do a little bit more of fieldwork vis-à-vis the administrators for a couple of weeks rather than the internees.
Spencer
Right, right, right.
Hansen
You've wrote about some of these things in pretty graphic detail, but maybe, thinking back over the years, you can recall your generalized feelings at that particular time about the situation. You were young, going
Spencer
Well, one of the first things that happened was that John Landward [who in the early stages of the center was in charge of housing and employment], the Mormon who I met at Gila.... You haven't run him down yet, have you?
Hansen
No.
Spencer
I wonder if he survived the war, because he was drafted and was sent into the thick of things. I knew that, and that's the last I heard. And, then, as I say, if he had made any kind of reputation for himself as a sociologist, and many of the Mormon sociologists did, then one might well have heard of him. But, I never did again. But, at any rate, we had a bit of a problem with the housing. I went around and inspected the housing. There was inadequate bedding. They used these Army steel cots, you know. Meanwhile, this concentration camp for prisoners of war was extremely well-provided with cots, mattresses, blankets, et cetera, and no prisoners. So, they made some kind of arrangement that the Gila center would borrow cots from them, and then I went over, I remember, and watched them load a truck full of bedding, beds, and stuff of that kind. And, so, Landford and I went around to check the accommodations. Well, one of the first things we ran into was a woman weeping, younger woman, Nisei. Her child had just expired in the heat. There was just no relief from that searing desert heat. And where you read in the paper where these "wet backs" [Mexican nationals who enter the United States illegally to seek employment] have tried to cross the desert [in the American Southwest] and died, and this baby had died. So, I mean, another loss to be attributable to the Evacation. Anyhow, she was crying, and the Buddhist priest brought back the baby's ashes, and that was where we came in. And he held a funerary ceremonial. She asked me if I was Mr. Smith. And I said, no, I'm sorry I wasn't. My position was really rather difficult to explain. Who was I and what was I doing?
Hansen
How did you explain yourself?
Spencer
I played it by ear. I gave different explanations. One of the things that people were very sensitive about was espionage, as they saw it. In other words, I was spying on them to report adverse [behavior]. I had to be very careful there. But I remember that sad case of that woman whose baby had died, and she felt that it was inhuman. She was an articulate Nisei. She said, "It is inhuman to put us in this situation." Meanwhile, the plumbing wasn't working, and the thing that pervaded the entire camp, both Butte and Canal, was this miasma of human droppings. It was just awful: open ditches full of feces. They sent them there too soon. And that was the reaction that I had written in my reports for our study.
Hansen
But it corroborates what I had heard. In 1978 I did talk to Nan Smith. She was then living in Santa Fe.
Spencer
Who?
Hansen
Nan Smith. I got introduced to her by some visual anthropologists [Don and Ron Rundstrom, then Ph.D. students at the University of California, Los Angeles, working in Santa Fe under the supervision of Professor John Adair] who were over there, and we drove out to her house so that I could talk to her, though I did not have a tape recorder with me at the time so was unable to get her comments on tape.
Spencer
So, you have met her.
Hansen
I met her and she was just adamant about the conditions being so primitive at Gila when she got there. She was working in social work, as a nurse and everything, and she could grasp just how unhygenical and unsanitary the situation was. She said that she was appalled. And it really precipitated her husband's ultimate resignation, which wasn't too long after the time that you arrived in camp, within a month or so, as we established during our taping session yesterday.
Spencer
He couldn't take it. They argued with me— "argued" is not the right word. They argued to themselves, "Should we resign in protest, or can we stay and do some good?" And the future looked so bleak, and the
Hansen
Yes, his wife showed me his letter of resignation. As it turned out, the WRA did not really relay his stated reasons when they announced his retirement. The WRA news release of his resignation instead talked only about his ill health. But, actually, his wife said that the resignation was based upon disgust as well as sickness.
Spencer
Yes, indeed.
Hansen
You mentioned a couple of times in your reports, just fleetingly, without enlarging upon it, that Smith was unpopular with the evacuees.
Spencer
Oh, look, anybody was unpopular. Okay? Any Caucasian. The word "keto" was used very widely. You know the word?
Hansen
Sure. It means "hairy beast," right?
Spencer
Like hakujin [Caucasian]. "Keto" is worse. Beast.
Hansen
Beast, yes.
Spencer
The hakujin was all right. But the "keto"...and everybody was "keto." And what happened, of course, was that the evacuees then put up a united front. It was essentially a racial thing.
Hansen
So, very early on then, you know, Smith was victimized by just the fact that he was the head keto.
Spencer
He was the director, yes.
Hansen
Was that animus extended to his wife as well, even though she was functioning in a healing capacity?
Spencer
It was extended to everybody.
Hansen
It was.
Spencer
And that was why I said I had difficulties in explaining my own role, because what could I say? I'm here doing social research. I mean, social research is spying, is reporting, is telling tales. It was very difficult to explain, especially to a lot of former California valley farmers whose children had perhaps gone to high school, but who had no awareness of any kind of sociological or cultural research.
Hansen
While you were being persuaded and allowing yourself, I guess, at the time sufficiently to be persuaded to leave the camp and notified Dorothy Thomas of this fact, and she quickly sent back a telegram [dated 15 August 1942] to you, and she said that it's imperative that you go back to Gila...
Spencer
Yes, and rent a sleeping bag if necessary. All those kinds of things. Yes, I remember that. Is that in there?
Hansen
Yes, and then she adds in her telegram, "FLOWER ARRANGEMENTS UNIMPORTANT. IMAGINE YOURSELF IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETY." And I'm just wondering what your response was to that, since you'd been out there, whether you had to imagine yourself in a primitive society.
Spencer
Well, I got kicked out, in effect. "We're not ready for you. We cannot accommodate you." I had no job description, as far as the WRA was concerned. Yes, I remember that. How can I describe that? There was inadequate food. There was dysentery, which I got. I slept on a wooden floor without anything, in my clothes, using my suitcase as a pillow. I mean, I didn't demand comfort, and I was perfectly willing to say, "Yes, I'll consider it like a primitive society," but it wasn't a primitive society. It was just the dregs of our
Hansen
Yes, they wanted you to come back in about three months. They said they'd give you carte blanche to return once they had gotten things set up.
Spencer
That's right, that's right.
Hansen
And, of course, she didn't want you there in three months as much as she wanted you right there to see the move-in.
Spencer
Well, I saw the move-in. You can imagine. Maybe my powers of description were less than they should have been, but the finger was pointed at certain articulate and industrious Nisei who could help. I've forgotten names, but they interacted with the administration and did their damnedest to get bedding, to get the mess halls in order, to get people assigned to quarters. These are just bare essentials, and people were so preoccupied with them. Only some of the camp had electric lights; plumbing was not in, all of this. And, yet, you have people, both Issei and Nisei, who were trying their damnedest to get the evacuees settled in. There was no time to talk to anybody. Having made that observation, all you can say is, "Okay, the situation then improved, gradually, gradually, gradually."
Hansen
What did you mean, precisely—I think it correlates with what you've just been talking about—when you wrote [in a letter of 16 August 1942 to Dorothy Thomas], "I obviously will not be able to deliver the type of stuff that Lowie is looking for. He will have to be told, I'm afraid. I think there's no room for descriptive ethnography here."
Spencer
Did I say that?
Hansen
Yes. (shows the interviewee the letter in question)
Spencer
Well, I see the letter was sent from from a hotel in...
Hansen
In Phoenix.
Spencer
In Phoenix, ah, yes.
Hansen
This letter was written right after you'd left the camp.
Spencer
Well, Lowie was, as I said yesterday, this essentially otherworldly, courtly, Viennese gentleman. He never stopped being that. And yet, yet, when he came to the camp [7-11 February 1943],[36] and I had him interview Baron [Gohachiro] Miura [a wealthy Issei graduate of Waseda University in Japan whom the interviewee employed as an informant], who was a source of a lot of things for me—I couldn't stand him. And Lowie, then, interrogated him. And I have never seen such tight, closely controlled, vigorous questioning of anyone. And that Lowie could do. And, it's funny. His whole personality changed and he became a kind of gestapo, standarten fuhrer [colonel in the Nazi hierarchy during Germany's Third Reich], something of that kind.
Hansen
Lowie, of course, had done a lot of ethnographic fieldwork himself, before that, hadn't he?
Spencer
A tremendous amount, and he was very, very skilled at it. But, somehow, his fieldwork was always divorced from human reality. In other words, the questions that he would ask would be structural questions, abstruse questions that would relate to perhaps ideal situations, the way they ought to be rather than the way they really are. And I think that's what I mean by that statement. In other words, he was interested in the extended family of Japan. He was interested in associations; and, since associations do loom very large and, since in Japanese culture it is the association which really supersedes the family system—unlike
Hansen
And how did he enter into your concerns here? Because, again, I think one of the things that we have established was that Dorothy Thomas was running this project. I know you were a student, and you were still taking a class, as it turned out, while you were at Gila, from Lowie, finishing up an assignment etcetera; but, did he loom in the background as one of the theoreticians for JERS?
Spencer
Supposedly, supposedly. No, he never did, His interest was marginal, at best. And his interest was sparked through George Matsuura, who was the inamorata of his wife.
Hansen
But he himself was not really interested in the work of JERS?
Spencer
He was interested in Japanese familism, in Japanese associations, in Japanese law, in political pressure groups, as they relate to models. Lowie was a model-builder. People would say that's not fair to Lowie, but, doggone it, he was. He was less concerned with the behavioral reality and much more concerned with the idealized establishment of a model.
Hansen
But he still loomed very large in your thinking at Gila?
Spencer
Oh, absolutely, because he was the anthropologist. Dorothy Thomas I could take or leave alone. All right, so she was nominally my boss; she held the purse strings. And she said go and do whatever you want to do. Fine.
Hansen
This, then, was one of your mixed signals. In a sense, you were trying to satisfy a cultural anthropologist with a set of concerns that he had...
Spencer
Right. Well, of course.
Hansen
...and you were dealing with a social statistician who was concerned with somewhat different matters.
Spencer
On the one hand, I was being a newspaper reporter, a journalist; and, on the other hand, I was trying to be a social scientist.
Hansen
Did you ever get a chance to merge in your mind what Dorothy Thomas had told you about your doing the empirical side for JERS and what you believed descriptive enthnography demanded?
Spencer
(laughter) I never...
Hansen
Was "the empirical side," in part, descriptive ethnography?
Spencer
Yes, in other words, you elicit information empirically through observation and questioning, yes. That's the time-honored, traditional method of anthropology, of ethnology.
Hansen
Now, here you were, in your very first letter to Dorothy Thomas, on August 16, 1942, after informing her that you would be sending her a report in a couple of days, writing this: "I'm not sending a copy to Lowie. I should prefer that he would get a more polished piece of work. He does not believe in preliminary observations and I'm afraid that he would think me over-hasty." So, again, she was asking you to mill the stuff out, and have it up to date, and let her know what was happening in Gila. In fact, there seemed to have been an anxiety on your part when you didn't get off a daily letter to her, and you often seemed impelled to rationalize why a daily letter wasn't forthcoming. And yet, with Lowie, you were thinking about a more polished piece.
Spencer
Well, I think that's fair. That's a proper evaluation of my problem. You see, Lowie was not interested
Hansen
That was too real.
Spencer
It just didn't fall into his purview. He didn't think like that. But then, obviously, he was one of the great anthropologists, in the tradition of [Claude] Levi-Strauss.[37] And Lowie was a tremendously prolific writer, but always in the abstract.
Hansen
Well, you had some concerns that weren't so abstract, being right there and dealing with the situation. One of the things you said here, in your initial letter to Dorothy Thomas, was this: "The whole staff here agrees that Mr. Harvey Coverley is a perfect snake and they say he must be watched." Now, Coverley was associated with the regional office of the WRA in San Francisco.
Spencer
I remember. You bring back the name after forty-odd years, but I had forgotten Coverley. I don't remember anything about him.
Hansen
I think he was a sociologist. But his name doesn't ring a bell at all?
Spencer
No.
Hansen
Okay. Now, you wrote [letter dated 22 August 1942] to Lowie, saying... (laughter)
Spencer
Two-faced so and so, huh? (laughter)
Hansen
This was a few days later. You reminded him that Nan Cook, his former pupil, was there at Gila, and there is a different tone to this letter from your earlier one to Dorothy Thomas. There's not nearly as much anxiety in it. In fact, you seemed to have taken pains so as not to trouble him at all with your own anxiety. It's almost as though you had gone to a different place than Gila.
Spencer
I wasn't aware of this schizoid or schizophrenic approach. I really wasn't. Interesting, as you look into it, that you sense that; but I think you're right.
Hansen
You did say here, "Fortunately, I can go and come as I please in the camp even though the work of all Caucasians here is done under rather adverse circumstances." I think this is what you were alluding to before, the whole feeling against keto that was in the camp. And you told him about this experience of taking this fellow to Fresno; and, again, you didn't tell him the whole story, as it turned out, because later on you actually had gone back to Berkeley, and you never told Lowie about this because you mentioned in a later letter to Dorothy Thomas [26 August 1942] that he'd have been hurt by the fact that you didn't stop in to see him and talk to him.
Spencer
I was only there in Berkeley a day or so, you know. I just wanted to touch home base. Yes, that's right. And I was having, you know, to contravene the charge that was given me. I didn't want to stay any longer than I had to. And Lowie would have made it quite formal. He would have said, "Bring the man to tea," and things of that kind, which I wasn't about to do. After all, here was a grape grower from the valley.
Hansen
Some interesting things happened on that trip with this fellow from Fresno. Didn't they?
Spencer
Well, that's where I got his life history.
Hansen
But isn't it the case that on the way back from California he wanted to go to a house of prostitution.
Spencer
Yes, he did.
Hansen
And so you took him to such a place and waited for him outside somewhere, or did you go in there with him?
I went in with him, and I sat down in the parlor and the girls came in. Yes, and he offered to pay for my pleasure as well, so I sat there. This was still the old-fashioned Pacific coast whorehouse where they'd yell, "Company, girls!" and the girls would come in and line up. (laughter) Yes. And, so he made his selection. I mean, here was a room like this [the one in the interviewee's home where the interview was transacted], and I sat there on the sofa, and he made his selection, retired off to a room, and then one of the girls said, "How about you, honey?" And I said, "Oh, I'll pass this time," something like that. And she said, "Is that a Jap?" (said in a whisper)
Hansen
Really? She did say that?
Spencer
Yes. "I ain't gonna fuck no Jap!" (laughter) "Are you a German? I ain't gonna fuck you, either." Well, that was that enlightening and elevating conversation, as I remember.
Hansen
Did he end up being satisfied? He did have somebody who went ahead with it?
Spencer
Yes, some girl went ahead with it, glad to take his money.
Hansen
Okay.
Spencer
So, I wrote to Lowie that... I think I pretended that I had only gone to Fresno with this chap, and I hadn't come to Berkeley, to the Bay Area.
Hansen
It seems to me that at this juncture you were not only writing letters to Thomas, Lowie, and others in order to clarify what your responsibilities were at Gila, but, actually, to clarify your own identity. At the beginning, you wrote an awful lot of letters. This letter [dated 23 August 1942] you sent to Earle Yusa, who was scheduled to be one of your observers for the study at Gila.
Spencer
Where was Earle Yusa then?
Hansen
Well, he would have still been, I think, at Tanforan.
Spencer
May I see the letter?
Hansen
Sure.
Spencer
Just to refresh my... Let's see. "Gila River, Dear Earle, August 23." Yes.
Hansen
You see, they [Earle Yusa and his wife Mimi] came over to Gila about a week or so later.
Spencer
Yes, that's right. They [the evacuees] were coming in gradually.
Hansen
And Charlie [Kikuchi], too.
Spencer
Charlie wasn't there yet.
Hansen
Right.
Spencer
And, I'm just wondering, was Earle married then?
Hansen
Oh yes, he was married.
Spencer
He was married to Mimi.
Hansen
Yes. In fact, she was pregnant when they arrived at Gila. In any event, in your letter to Earle Yusa, you gave him a good sense of what the camp was like and told him what precautions to take.
Yes, that's right. Earle had been engaged by JERS, then, at Tanforan. At Gila, he never delivered. He sat around with a hang-dog expression on his face. He was, what I would call, I'm afraid, a very "weak sister." He was dominated completely by that shrewish wife of his. And the fact that she was pregnant most of the time that I knew them made it very difficult for him. We had expected great things of Earle, but he never came through. He was a long time just shuffling his feet before taking any kind of job in camp, and then, curiously enough, he took one with the police. He was hired by [W. E.] Williamson [Director of Internal Security]. Part of Earle's problem, quite apart from his dreadful wife, was that he got caught between two conflicting situations. One was a need to be secretive about police matters, something urged by Williamson; on the other hand, he was obliged to follow up with any reports that he could to Thomas. Williamson himself, of course, was very much opposed to our project, JERS. And though he and I had a pleasant enough relationship—it was polite, at least—I disliked him very much, and I knew that he disliked me. I know, too, that when I started to feed Frederick my perspectives on the Gila community, Williamson pooh-poohed it and urged Frederick not to talk to me. Nonetheless, Frederick and I proceeded to develop a modus vivendi, as you know. Well, to backtrack, I don't know how Dorothy Thomas reached Charlie or Earle. Of course, Miyamoto and Shibutani and Sakoda were already on their way in the social sciences.
Hansen
I guess Charlie was in a social welfare program.
Spencer
He held a degree in social welfare. I don't know if it was an MSW [Masters of Social Welfare] or whether it was just a B.A. [Bachelor of Arts] in social work.
Hansen
Yes, I'm not sure either.
Spencer
Being married to a social worker, we've had a problem...I've seen the continuing problem of accreditation toward, let's say, an A.B. in social work, and whether that qualifies an individual for a job. But, Charlie was evidently employed at the time of evacuation as a social worker.
Hansen
I think to begin with he wasn't even getting a salary from JERS while they were asking him to submit these journals. And, then, he gradually, you know, accepted the idea that what he was doing was worthwhile. But he did feel inferior, I believe, vis-à-vis these other Nisei social scientists you just mentioned who were producing, you know, reports that were grounded in some sense of theory and method.
Spencer
Yes, well, Charlie's contribution was only in the diaries and then later, when he started to work with me, we did our long report on administrative-evacuee relations, as you know, and had fun doing it. Beyond this report, however, I included a lot of material that Charlie fed me and he included a lot that I fed him. We had a good working relationship. Charlie had no problem. He moved right into the Department of Social Work and was active in his own way. He played things, in many respects, despite our exchanges, pretty close to his chest. He really felt that his diary was the significant thing. And then he, well, he mulcted the social work department of case histories, case records. He was fearless, in terms of his contempt for the administration and the whole process; and, not only fearless, but humorous about it. In other words, he took a very sarcastic and deprecatory note about the whole administrative business. He thought it was funny.
Hansen
You know, one of the things that you mentioned in this letter to Earle Yusa, after telling him that "it's hotter than the hinges of hell at this point," and things, and you talk about the dysentery problems, then you wrote: "It's difficult, it's a new experiment and I think that you'll make a good go of it especially if Charlie can stomach a few Issei who have illusions of grandeur." Now, from what I gathered from reading Kikuchi's Tanforan diary[38]; this volume, which was edited with John Modell, was dedicated to "Dorothy Swaine Thomas, our teacher, whose vigorous humanity has enlightened both diarist and editor"] was that he was a marginal sort of Japanese, in the sense that he'd been brought up in an orphanage and had lived, to a large degree, apart from Japanese communities and Japanese people.
Spencer
He actually knew more about the Japanese language than he pretended to. But, occasionally, I remember even acting as an interpreter for Charlie, speaking Japanese.
Was his anti-Japanese-ness—because he himself regularly used terms like "Jap" and would say things like "I can't stomach the idea of living around a bunch of Japs," and things like this—was that a pose, or an attitude that he adopted because he felt it would be well-received by Caucasians?
Spencer
He did not identify as a Japanese. That was the whole point.
Hansen
But do you think that attitude was a sincere one?
Spencer
Not only that, but when I talk about "Issei illusions of grandeur," this brings us directly into Japanese culture with the gerontocratic mode, and the emphasis on age and the respect accorded to age. And, clearly, this is what Issei heads of families expected, not only of their children but of the associations within the center. They expected to have the power. And, indeed, you see, there was one of the things that I missed. I never hit that generation difference adequately. And that would have been one of the things that should have been analyzed: to follow through the ways in which the older men would attempt to assume control, and the ways in which the Nisei would resist it. And, yet, it was there, very clearly. And I know Charlie resented it terribly. "I don't want no Jap son of a bitch coming around telling me what to do!"
Hansen
I don't think you missed it. I think it's in a lot of your reports, especially in your analysis of the governmental structure of the blocks.[39]
Spencer
All right, I may have. Put it this way, I didn't think of it as a primary issue; and, yet, it was a very significant issue in terms of the functioning of the center.
Hansen
In fact, I think you got a lot of help on that from the Issei people whose service you engaged to work with you at Gila—[Shotaro] Hikida [the prewar secretary of the San Francisco Japanese Association], especially.
Spencer
I could see what Hikida and [Yataro] Okuna [a former poet and high school teacher in Japan who was commissioned by the interviewee to undertake selected studies for JERS] thought.
Hansen
Right.
Spencer
Yes, and even the priest, [Bishop] Ochi [another of the interviewee's paid JERS informants], and others. And also the Kibei. I was very close to some Kibei, some of whom, you know, were then taken to Moab [the temporary isolation centered established by the WRA in early 1943 outside of Moab, Utah, for citizen internees deemed incorrigible "troublemakers"] and some of whom elected to go to Tule Lake [Segregation Center, following the WRA "loyalty" registration in February 1943] for repatriation [to Japan].
Hansen
So then you wrote to Dorothy Thomas [26 August 1942] and you said, "At Mr. Smith's suggestion I am staying out of his way. It may be that he will not like my familiarity with the camp." So, again, you were making sure that the first thing you did was to get accepted so that you could begin to deal with your JERS assignment. And you talked in this letter about going out and using your expense account, because you had to go to Coolidge or Sacaton or Casa Grande, and these other places, to have your meals. Having been in some of those desert "spas," I can identify with what you were talking about, not only in terms of the heat but in terms of the services and things. After relating a bit to Thomas about your trip to Fresno, this is where you told her the information concerning Lowie that I alluded to earlier: "I wrote Lowie, as you said. I thought it best not to mention the fact that I'd been at Berkeley. Lowie would have been quite hurt that I did not go to see him.... I was rather on tenterhooks escorting that Japanese all over the country. I hope I don't have to do anything like that again soon." But, you explained to Thomas that you had run such an errand for Smith so as to secure your place with the camp administration.
Spencer
At Smith's request. Yes, and actually we were stopped, you know, by military police, and Sam was scared absolutely to death.
Hansen
Well, I think you had a right to be on tenterhooks there, given this situation.
I wanted to get out of there. I wanted to touch base with Dorothy and explain. I wanted to see my girl friend and I wanted to see my mother at that point. And, so, I was just there for overnight. I remember, overnight.
Hansen
With a tight calendar.
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
Also, with somebody in tow and everything.
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
You did get a chance in Fresno, however, to see a rural Japanese funeral, I believe.
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
And this was part of your mission, too, since you were researching Japanese customs and ceremonies.
Spencer
We went to Sam's mother's funeral, yes.
Hansen
Right. So, in a sense, this was not only a case history but you actually did some ethnographic work while you were there.
Spencer
Observation. Well, yes, the thing is, you know, it's only later after you've been immersed in the culture that you can appreciate the symbolism; and I didn't appreciate it yet. My description of the funeral, both of the baby whose ashes were returned and of Sam's mother, was pretty naive. I obviously know what I'm talking about when I talk about Oriental funerals now, but I didn't then.
Hansen
But you've got to start somewhere, of course. You said here, in a letter to Lowie [dated 26 August 1942]: "There is a rather definite reluctance on the part of the Japanese here to answer questions. An air of tension is pervading the camp; I have an idea that things will not always proceed as peacefully as now. The general mood is one of marked dissatisfaction over the lack of preparations." Now, this was very early after you had gotten there. Within a week you were anticipating a big blow-up. And, later in your correspondence this apprehension got reiterated by you. It seems that you already sensed a certain electricity in the air among the internees. Did you fear for your life, even at that time, think that you could be murdered, or not?
Spencer
No, no. I guess I was too naive. I never, never thought of any threat to me personally. But, actually, anticipating a big blow-up, yes. The mood was one of fractiousness, discontent; and, I think it culminated in the Tada case.
Hansen
In a letter dated August 30, 1942, to Dorothy Thomas you mentioned that you were then waiting for your Japanese American observers, Yusa and Kikuchi, to get there [the Gila center].
Spencer
Had Tada been beaten before their arrival?
Hansen
No, that beating didn't occur until a few months later, in November.
Spencer
Oh, I see, but this tension was building up to that beating.
Hansen
Yes, and you were detecting this tension well in advance of it coming to a head.
Spencer
Now, see, I had moved over to Butte camp. Initially, I had been in Canal, but then I moved over to Butte, three miles away or whatever it was. And, Tada, of course, was in Canal; so, I got all of this stuff on the Tada case by heresay. And the tension that was building... I reviewed it later with Frederick. Was he there in camp then, or not?
I think that he had just arrived.
Spencer
Yes, that's my recollection.
Hansen
What you were mentioning in this letter to Dorothy Thomas, so you can get a sense of what was happening, is that you had received a memorandum to field investigators she had sent to you, and apparently it looked to you like it had been prepared for Japanese fieldworkers rather than for Caucasian ones. So, I don't know what you had in mind—perhaps that the contents applied to the observers rather than to the people who were writing up the major reports. You also mentioned your having trouble getting any decent stenographic help. And then you wrote: "I'm glad to see that [Robert] Billigmeier is to be a part of the study. I wonder how he's making out up there. I hear many rumors about the situation at Tule Lake, which apparently has not yet been alleviated." Interestingly, some of Bob Billigmeier's letters, because he signed his name, "Bob," very much like yours, wound up in your JERS correspondence folders at the Bancroft Library. For awhile, when reading these letters, I thought to myself that you were peripatetic. How the heck, I wondered, could Spencer have gotten around to all those places.
Spencer
Well, I told you yesterday, I scarcely remember Billigmeier. I remember meeting him only once, and I guess I must have dealt with him at Tule Lake. Yes, that does come back. I remember being sent up there, I guess, to try to straighten him out. And, at that time, I renewed acquaintances with Marvin Opler.
Hansen
You say "renewed acquaintances." Did you know Marvin Opler before the war?
Spencer
I had known him. I had met him at meetings.
Hansen
Even as a young person?
Spencer
Yes. I went to anthropology meetings—once or twice. But I had met him, in any event.
Hansen
Well, you wrote in this same letter to Thomas that you had received a letter from Earle Yusa, so things were starting to get in place. And, you said: "When our two observers arrive I shall try to center my interests more fully on the problems which are of greater interest to Lowie and me. You must understand, of course, that I shall not do this to the abandoning of observations on the political and economic situation, but Earle and Charlie will be in a far better position to see these developments than I. It's not so easy to attend these meetings however unobtrusively. I may have mentioned that there is a feeling of electric tension in the air. The Issei are strong here and they are dissatisfied. Something may happen at any time. There's a resentment against Caucasians."
Spencer
And it culminated in the Tada beating, yes. What was my basis for saying that? All I can say is just a feeling. As I say, I could have done a better job of analysis if, at that point, I had considered the generational interaction, and remembering that the Canal camp was settled by people from Turlock and Modesto. They were farmers, viticulturalists, and so on, out of the valley. And the sense of Japanese patriarchal authoritarianism was very, very strong indeed. And, yet, the Issei felt frustrated because of their inability to communicate adequately.
Hansen
So Charlie Kikuchi was actually better off, given his mind-set, being put in Butte rather than in Canal.
Spencer
Yes, that's right. Butte Camp was a little more cosmopolitan. There were, for example, people from the Monterey [a town and a county located on the central California coast] area [interned there].
Hansen
At the time you were writing this, you were still living in Canal.
Spencer
Yes, oh, yes.
Hansen
And so you were picking up things that were happening in Canal.
Yes, I was. That's true. What's the date of that?
Hansen
This was just August 30.
Spencer
Well, yes, I was aware of the power hunger on the part of the Issei. And you know, the interesting thing here is this problem of communication, it's a linguistic one, and my Japanese was certainly not adequate to it. I mean, you know, my Japanese is very rudimentary. It was then and is now. The problem was that the Issei could not communicate adequately, and the Nisei, even the observers that we had hired, Earle and Charlie, were at a linguistic loss. So there was a great gulf fixed. Earle, again, he had childhood Japanese. He communicated with his mother, you know, when she was around. It was the Japanese of childhood. And I wondered if another part of Earle's problem is that he felt that he couldn't really get into things because he couldn't really ask the kinds of penetrating questions that one wanted to pose. I feel that strongly.
Hansen
Especially when the atmosphere in Gila was getting so, as you refer to it in here [JERS correspondence], "Nipponized and Japanized."
Spencer
Let me go back to something I told you earlier and amplify somewhat on it, even at the risk of being a bit repetitious. You see, Earle Yusa was put in this very equivocal position. Why did he join the police? He thought if he joined the police he could get an entrée into social disorganization in the community. But then, having made the choice for the police, he was used by Williamson as an avenue, and that put him in direct conflict with me. I made certain statements, and I think I was correct. I think I had a very good perception of what was going on, not perhaps through any training, but maybe I'm a good observer. I don't know. That's not the point. The thing is, I made certain statements—I tried to develop these things with Earle, I wanted more information—and Earle went right back to Williamson and reported it. And Williamson said, "Oh, Spencer's crazy. None of that's true." And that was the basis of contention between Williamson and myself, and Earle was kind of caught in an intermediate position and didn't know quite where to go. Actually, I think his loyalties were more toward Williamson than to me; but, nonetheless, he was collecting his salary [from JERS] and not doing a damn thing.
Hansen
You see, this last point you've made is something that does come out in your correspondence. Whereas the other part, about his conflict of loyalties and where perhaps his predominant loyalties lay, doesn't come out. So, I think it is good that you've talked about this. In any event, in your letter to Dorothy Thomas on September 10, you told her that Earle had arrived and that soon afterward he had trouble. He came down with the affliction that you called "common to the country," which was "valley fever."
Spencer
Oh, yes.
Hansen
And he promptly ran a 104 degree temperature.
Spencer
Listen, that's serious.
Hansen
What is "valley fever," exactly?
Spencer
That's a very serious thing.
Hansen
At the time, you noted that it was undiagnosable almost.
Spencer
It's rather like mononucleosis, but it is a virus, apparently. No, it is not a virus, it's a bacterium. Coccioides. It was endemic to Tulare [California, site of an assembly center that peopled much of the Canal camp at the Gila center] and it was endemic to the Gila area; and, it apparently comes about from the vegetation. And you run these very high temperatures and you feel just rotten. I never got it. There was a lot of it around. Very unpleasant, and there were some deaths from it.
Hansen
You were somewhat familiar with it. I think you mentioned somewhere in your JERS correspondence or
Spencer
Yes, I was aware of it among the Indians.
Hansen
Now then, you were quite happy that your new fieldworkers [Charles Kikuchi and Earle Yusa] got put into the other camp [Butte] because this now gave your study coverage in both of Gila's two camps, what with you living in Canal.
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
And then, John Embree, who shortly thereafter headed up a new section for the War Relocation Authority, the Community Analysis Section, and who by this time had already written his famous book Suye Mura [:A Japanese Village (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939)]...
Spencer
Have you ever seen that book?
Hansen
Yes, I read that book quite a few years ago. Also, I have read the book [ The Women of Suye Mura (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982)] that his former wife, Ella [Lury Wiswell] has recently collaborated on with Robert Smith, a Cornell University anthropologist; it deals with her work in that same Japanese village in the 1930s.
Spencer
Robert Smith was a student of mine. Yes, he's now at Cornell.
Hansen
Oh, I didn't know that Smith had been one of your students. How interesting. Anyway, Embree comes in to head up the WRA's Community Analysis Section. Even by that time, you'd probably read Suye Mura, right?
Spencer
Oh, yes. It was one of the things I read very, very carefully when I was sitting around waiting to go to the center in the Berkeley office [of JERS].
Hansen
Well, Embree visited the Gila center, and you had something to say about him. Because there was in your correspondence a persisting suspicion of Embree and the WRA's new section, the implications for you at Gila, I think it's important for us to explore your initial impressions. You wrote: "By this time, you will probably [have] met Dr. John F. Embree, whom you will remember as an Anthropologist and author of various books and articles on Japan. I was under the impression that Dr. Embree had enlisted in the Navy and lent his technical knowledge to that branch of the service. I do learn however, that he has been working for the Bureau of Information in Washington and has lately been transferred to WRA. On his way to San Francisco he was able to stop at Gila for the better part of last week. He was most interested in our study but being a rather shy and retiring soul, I could elicit little help or information from him. He obtained from me your address and said he would call on you when located in San Francisco. I know that you will be most interested in meeting him." Now, this is a rather neutral kind of reference, but it was the last reference [to him] of yours of that sort. Do you recall meeting Embree and what it meant to you, having read Suye Mura? There were at the time very few anthropological studies of Japan, and here was the guy who had written one of them.
Spencer
That's right. A man who spoke Japanese well and who had written this book and then wrote a couple of other things. He wrote for the war background series put out by Smithsonian [Institution in Washington D.C.] and he wrote a book called The Japanese Nation [:A Social Survey (New York: Rinehart & Co., 1945)], which I have.
Hansen
And I do, too.
Spencer
And he was good. His approach in Suye Mura was essentially Redfieldian. It was "a little community" study.[40] Embree was out of that Chicago community studies background, so he applied an approach to
Hansen
Did you, by any chance, during the period you were with JERS, meet Robert Redfield? Because I know he came out to the Manzanar camp in California. One of the people who was connected with JERS after he left Manzanar following the riot there in December 1942 was Togo Tanaka. He told me when I interviewed him [on August 30, 1973 for the Japanese American Project of the CSUF Oral History Program; see O.H. 1271b] that he was very impressed when he met Redfield and talked to him at Manzanar.
Spencer
I met Redfield, but I never met him at Gila. In fact, you're telling me something I didn't know. I didn't know he'd gone to Manzanar.
Hansen
Yes, I thought maybe he had come to some of the other camps and that perhaps you had the occasion to meet him. You don't mention him in your correspondence, but I just wondered about this point.
Spencer
Embree was a student of Redfield's, and it goes back to this whole British socioanthropological tradition of [Alfred Reginald] Radcliffe-Brown, [Emile] Durkheim [(1858-1917), the French sociologist who pioneered in the establishment of the methodology and theoretical framework of rigorous social science], and so on, a tradition that Lowie both criticizes and, to some degree, employs. But Lowie was not what you would call a functionalist, whatever that means, in the sense of [Bronislaw Kasper] Malinowski or Radcliffe-Brown.
Hansen
You see, the WRA Community Analysis reports actually do reflect this background that you're talking about, because there were a lot of studies done by the various community analysts on the blocks in the different camps. But what they [the WRA community analysts] looked at a block in terms of was the way in which it recreated the village situation in Japan.
Spencer
Well, I had been aware of that and, actually, one of my perceptions in relation to block studies was that this approach was wrong, because a village in Japan has deep historical roots. You have the genealogical listings in the local temple, whether that serves one village or many. But, at least, there's a sense of integration and relating people to each other. But here, in the center, the Issei come from all over Japan. Oh, I admit most come from Kyushu and Shikoku, southern Japan, the area around Hiroshima. No, I don't see that at all. In other words, the interesting thing about it is that here are people thrown together in a way as to lack any historical roots. Now they might share in the same traditions, but there was no way of affecting an integration of these roots toward a common purpose or goal. And that made for the blocks to be rather disparate in their organization—unbalanced, uneven. That was my impression.
Hansen
Well, I think it's an interesting impression. There were some commonalities, however, in the sense that, even though the villages had experienced idiosyncratic historical developments, still they shared certain things, especially those villages constituting a particular region.
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
The other thing is that a lot of the people who comprised the population of a given block derived, for the most part anyway, from the same geographic area in California or wherever.
Spencer
Yes, they did. Now that might have created some sense of solidarity, and people tried to live with relatives, live in the proximity to relatives and friends. Sure, admittedly. But nonetheless, you'd get the rather random, indiscriminate assignment of housing, so that you'd get people who were ostracized because they came from another area, or, more important, they might have been considered members of the pariah group [the eta class]. I know that sounds ridiculous, but it's like throwing a black, fifty years ago, into a white
Hansen
Well, I think there has been a persistence of that eta anxiety, even within the Japanese American community today.
Spencer
Yes, certainly there is.
Hansen
Did you find much of that at Gila, through your observers and your own observations?
Spencer
I got it myself. I'll tell you, by this time I had, gradually, developed a pretty good knowledge of Japanese culture. My observers didn't know it. These were Nisei who had grown up, in essence, rejecting the Japanese background. The one who would have been most conservative—now Charlie's out. I mean Charlie, after all, is really not a Japanese and doesn't view himself as one. Earle was much closer to it, but even Earle was unable to see the implications.
Hansen
Was it true, to a large extent, that virtually any Japanese American who would have become a social scientist or had a bent that way—someone who would have been recruited for a JERS-like project—would have themselves been people rejecting, to a large degree, a Japanese orientation?
Spencer
I had a number of talks with Miyamoto—Shotaro Frank Miyamoto. I believe you mentioned to me that he was still at [the University of] Washington, or retired perhaps?
Hansen
Yes, he's like yourself, I think, an emeritus professor.
Spencer
Yes, he was an American-trained sociologist; and, like so many Orientals, and here's where the Oriental cultural lays its heavy hand on the individual, what you learn is largely through rote memorization and your originality certainly is stifled. He was like that. He knew his lessons in sociology extremely well. He could talk at great length about the formation of voluntary alliances. He could talk about social stratification and he could talk about ecological aspects of community. But, when it came to applying it to a specific situation where you'd have really to stick your neck out, he didn't do it. [Tamotsu] Shibutani less so. Shibutani is much more imaginative. That's my impression, at any rate. And [James] Sakota, like Miyamoto... well, he was a Kibei, and he knew Japanese better than the others, and was much more a Japanese, much more.
Hansen
And, as a result, I think, of all of those observers, he got more implicated in having to take on positions of responsibility within the structure of the camp.
Spencer
That's right.
Hansen
Have you read the book... You probably even read it before you went up to Gila, Miyamoto's study of social solidarity [within the Japanese American community] in Seattle.
Spencer
Yes, yes, yes. That was one of the things I read, I remember. It was his master's thesis?
Hansen
Yes, it was his master's thesis ["Social Solidarity among the Japanese in Seattle," University of Washington, 1939)], and has since been republished three times.[41]
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
And Miyamoto even says in his introduction [to the 1981 publication, which is reprinted in the 1984 version of the book] that he was a person who had lived outside, really, of the community that he was describing in his study.
Spencer
And it's not very insightful. It's a structural study. It's good American sociology in the tradition of, say, I don't know, [Edwin] Sutherland. The point is that I think you have to differentiate between European
Hansen
So that I can better understand the abstractness of Lowie's concerns that you were talking about earlier and the structure that you're talking about now in terms of Miyamoto, let me ask you this question: What would Lowie have thought of a study like Miyamoto's of the Japanese American community in Seattle?
Spencer
Lowie never criticized until he wrote. Have you ever looked at his history of ethnological theory [ The History of Ethnological Theory (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1937)]?
Hansen
No, I haven't.
Spencer
Well, you should because there he takes a stand, and there he criticizes everybody. In fact, in his Primitive Religion [(New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924)] also he lays about him with a club, but never in interpersonal relations. So what he would have said about Miyamoto: "A very revealing study. I'm very pleased that we were able to amass these kinds of data. We need more of this sort of thing. Yes." Very gentle. And you didn't know whether he meant it or not. Then, if he would want to write his history of ethnological theory and include Miyamoto, he'd say, "This is structuralism in the functional-structural sense of Radcliffe-Brown. It's a bunch of hogwash. How can you talk about laws when there are no laws? How can you talk about laws that are yet to be discovered?" He takes that position vis-à-vis the sociologists. And, obviously, Miyamoto is trying to establish laws, as it were, of social behavior in relation to his community.
Hansen
Didn't the two major anthropologists at Berkeley, Lowie and Kroeber, share—for dramatically different reasons—a suspicion of sociology in the university?
Spencer
No, no, Lowie felt that sociology had a real place. Kroeber couldn't have cared less. You see, Kroeber... I said to you yesterday, I consider myself a culture-historian, and I do. And it's unpopular. Anthropologists aren't doing culture-history anymore. But, I listened to Kroeber's lectures on Japan, and I found them thrilling. But what does he talk about? He talks about The Tale of Genji [a novel—the first full novel in the world and the greatest classic of Japanese literature—written by Lady Shikibu Murasaki] in the eleventh century A.D. He talks about the Gempei Wars, during the period in Japanese history where you get the increasing seclusion of the royal house and the emergence of the military dictatorship. He talks about the inventions of the folding fan and the revolving stage. He talks about isolation under the Tokogawa, and so on. He's not concerned with society per se. He's concerned with culture and culture process. His book, the 1948 edition of Anthropology [:Race, Language, Culture, Psychology, Prehistory (New York: Harcourt, Brace)] was designed as a textbook. It really isn't. It's far too advanced. He promulgates there his notion of what culture is, and it's a definition to which I still subscribe. I find it just absolutely beautiful in the way he works this out. That whole book deals with process in culture, culture, the nature and definition of culture, the influence of culture on the individual, on the group, on the unit, whatever it may be—social, culture, or otherwise, but nothing about society. Nothing. He did, in his study "Zuni, Kin and Clan" [ Anthropological Papers of American Museum of Natural History 18 (pt. II): i-ii, 39-204], for example, do some social-anthropological things, but it was always in relation to kinship systems: what you call your mother's brother and that kind of thing. And that interested him. And now when [Kanmo] Imamura and I wrote that paper on the Japanese kinship system ["Notes on the Japanese Kinship System," Journal of the American Oriental Society 70 (1950): 165-73], Kroeber commented on it very favorably. He regretted that it wasn't deeper, that it didn't go further, and, of course, concern with the Japanese kinship system has been very much modern. In other words, Robert Hall, the American historian of Japan, and so on, have dealt with it. But that was not Kroeber's interest. Well, Kroeber was interested in everything. I think that's what kept him young and kept him alive as long as he lived. He had a tremendous pressing, burning interest in all manner of human phenomena and culture. And he would be interested in the relocation setting, for that reason. Well, it was he, rather than Lowie, who led me into studies of Buddhism, because he talked about the Buddhist sects of Japan and how they developed, the
Hansen
Right, right.
Spencer
So you get into some complex things. Let me just illustrate this, as far as Kroeber's concerned. Kroeber had a heart attack in 1943, 1944, somewhere in there [summer 1943, at Lake Tahoe, California].
Hansen
It was when you were back at U.C. Berkeley, after leaving Gila; I know this from reading his widow's memoir of him [see Theodora Kroeber, Alfred Kroeber: A Personal Configuration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970)].
Spencer
Yes. And Kroeber recovered and had to take it easy. And he was expected to take a nap every day after lunch. I had an idea of a paper I wanted to write, and I wanted to talk it over with him. So, I made an appointment. Well, you couldn't burst in on his office. You could burst in on Lowie, but you couldn't on Kroeber. So I made an appointment with him. And I come into his office, a room about this size, and there's a camp bed. And he's lying there with a red bandanna over his face. And I knock and he says, "Come on it! Who is it?" And I identified myself. And meanwhile the red bandana is over his face. Here I am, an insecure graduate student, and there was no eye contact. He says, "Well, what do you want?" And, so, with great hesitation, I mentioned I was interested in the problem of the eunuch, of human castration. And I was aware that there was a journal that would have taken this article and would have paid for it. And I wrote the article and they paid for it. But that's not the point. I wanted to talk it over with Kroeber and see what he thought. And I knew this would interest him; and, indeed, it did. And we talked about the development of the idea of genital mutilation in the Near East, and then it spread to China, and then it spread to Korea, but not to Japan. Now, the question is, why, in Japanese culture, do you have a rejection of genital mutilation? Well, that to Kroeber was a problem. And, so, I came in. I didn't put it like that. In fact, he helped me think it out that way. I explained, "Well, I'd like to do a paper on the eunuch and its spread." He said, "Oh." And then he sat there under this red bandana and the seconds went by, and the minutes went by, but he never said a word. He said, finally, after about five minutes, he said, "Well, it's Near Eastern, isn't it?" In other words, he thought about it. He was giving his thought to it. And I found it very difficult to learn this, because, obviously, in American culture we shoot off at the mouth and we cover all silences. We don't have embarrassing periods of silence. That was Kroeber. Yes, well, he liked the paper. And I did, as I say, publish it ["The Cultural Aspects of Eunuchism," Ciba Symposia 8 (1946): 406-420].
Hansen
You published that paper during the war or after the war was over?
Spencer
Afterwards. I think it was in 1946. It was one of the first papers that I published.
Hansen
Now one thing you didn't give me yesterday was your list of publications.
Spencer
The reason I haven't is because it's not up to date. I've been concerned, I have a lot of other things, but I can't find the master list. I'm not striving for tenure or anything of that kind, so I'm rather careless about my list of publications. Actually, my graduate students are putting out a festschrift for me, which is rather nice.
Hansen
When's that coming out?
Spencer
I don't know. It's in the works right now.
Hansen
Oh, it's just been underway for a little while?
Spencer
Yes. The editor, Robert H. Winthrop, who lives in Ashland, Oregon, says he has a number of papers. I was very surprised. They had a party for me in April and they sprung this on me that this festschrift is
Hansen
Are most of the contributors former students of yours, or mostly colleagues?
Spencer
More former students—Ph.D.s whose dissertations I directed.[42]
Hansen
Has Robert Smith contributed one of the papers?
Spencer
No, he took his doctoral degree elsewhere. Where did he go? I think he went to Chicago. He had a master's here. No, he's not in it. A number of people with whom I have done work of various kinds. Anyhow, that's beside the point.
Hansen
Well, we had launched this discussion earlier that got us to Miyamoto, Lowie, and Kroeber and a few other people. But we began by talking about John Embree.
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
Anyway, we had noted that when you first met him, on September 10 in 1942, you had been at Gila for about a month. At this point you started having problems with your observer Earle Yusa and his wife Mimi. You wrote in this same letter of September 10 to Dorothy Thomas, "I don't know whether you've had the opportunity to meet Earle's wife but if you did, you will realize how very much of a `baby-doll' type she is. How completely she gets her own way and how thoroughly she dominates Earle. From the point of his study, her reactions will be very more interesting than his. A rather typical Nisei in-law conflict has arisen, the details of which I will forward to you later."[43] Anyway, you've got the beginning of a problem here.
Spencer
It isn't a Nisei problem. It's a generic Japanese problem. But I wasn't aware of that at that time.
Hansen
And then you continued this letter by writing: "So far as my own interests are concerned, namely in the Issei generation, I have not found it an easy matter to break into any of the number of cliques and groups which are to be found here." And then you added, "Living as I do with the administration I am able to see a good many of the problems of maladjustment of policy and the like which arise for this group." So you were having a problem getting access to the Issei. Now, did your Issei focus come about because of interests of yours that correlated with those of Lowie's?
Spencer
Yes, and my interest in Japanese culture.
Hansen
In acculturation?
Spencer
Well, ultimately acculturation, but I was really interested in the ways in which Japanese, Japanisms, Japanese cultural elements were manifest in the American setting. That was really my interest. And I had told Dorothy this, and she allowed as how that would be an acceptable thing, but obviously didn't interest her. She was much more concerned with the overall adaptation and adjustment. You know, it varied from time to time. I'd get so immersed in these reports that I was making that I sometimes lost sight of where it was I was going.
Hansen
So, actually, you were trying to do two things simultaneously. At the same time as you were trying to get this empirical data back to Dorothy Thomas, you also had these more reflective studies that you were trying to do relative to understanding Japanese culture. So it's not necessarily that you were schizophrenic, as you put it, as much as it was that you had two different sets of interests—one that you were being paid for, and the other that you were doing out of intellectual interest.
Spencer
Well, that's true, that's true. And it was the second interest on which I wanted to build a doctoral dissertation.
Finally, you concluded the letter in question by saying: Restrictions not yet in effect, have been issued for inter-camp travel, for military patrolling of the boundaries and possibly for censorship." And then you noted, "what trouble this situation is going to produce"—but not just for you and JERS.
Spencer
Oh, Jesus, yes.
Hansen
You wrote, "If these things are put into stringent effect there is no doubt that conditions here will become intolerable for the inhabitants and the already incipient troubles will simply boil over."
Spencer
Yes, I know what I'm referring to. A directive was issued. Now, look. They built these two bloody camps, three miles apart.
Hansen
Yes.
Spencer
And then they said, just by fiat, "There will be no travel, except with permission, between the two camps." And then they rescinded that and they said, "There will be no travel after six p.m." And that was slow to get to the military, who were then guarding the three-mile stretch of road. And, do you realize what kind of military you've got as guards?
Hansen
No, I'd like to find out a little bit about that, because the military police came in for a lot of commentary in your correspondence.
Spencer
Well, obviously the draft was in full swing, and they would pick on the dregs. They would pick on people with an I.Q. of 70 or whatever, who just sort of made it in, who were really subnormal. I won't say they all were. Some of the officers were very, very resentful that they had men like this to command. And, a few may have been fairly bright; but, no, you remember at Manzanar some soldier got up in the guard tower and took pot shots at the inhabitants. Killed several, didn't he?
Hansen
Well, that wasn't from the guard tower, but, they opened fire from a sentry line that they [the MPs] had placed around the jail.
Spencer
Well, I don't know, but whatever it was, it was some trigger-happy G.I.
Hansen
Did you have a chance to talk to any of the military police?
Spencer
No, no, I did not. I steered away from them. I didn't want to be seen with them. I didn't want to be identified in any way with the military. It was very, very strong, this anti-military feeling. Well, I remember I wasn't supposed to drive WRA cars, you know, but I did. They bought cars from the evacuees, you know. And right away Smith said to me—I drove in from Sacaton in a Chevy that belonged to somebody—and he said, "Well, it's all right; but, Jesus, if you had an accident we'd really be in hot water." And, so, but occasionally I would drive, even though I wasn't authorized—not being employed by WRA—to do so. And I remember after this edict came out, I've forgotten why, but I took Charlie's younger siblings and some other child—all in the neighborhood of twelve, thirteen years old. And we got in the car and we went from Butte to Canal. And, on the way, we were challenged by a sentry. Now, we were allowed to travel during the daylight hours, but not during the night. But that order had not been communicated to the military. So, here he comes and levels a gun at these little kids and at me; and, he says, "Our orders...," and so on, and proceeded to chew us out, and treated the little kids as though they were, you know, agents of the [Japanese] Emperor. And the little kids were just scared, absolutely out of their pants. And I wasn't very happy either. "Oh, all right, go on!" And finally we left. We went and did our business at Canal, whatever it was. I think they went back on the bus. There was a bus, an Army truck, that went back and forth between the two camps, driven by a Nisei. Oh, that was unpleasant!
Hansen
Did you ever have to walk the distance back and forth?
Spencer
No, no. Look, temperature 110 [degrees], no thanks!
So, it wasn't a possibility very much even.
Spencer
No. You didn't really leave the camp because of the heat.
Hansen
You wrote [on 10 September 1942] to a fellow named Fred Hoshiyama who was at that time going off to Topaz from Tanforan.[44] You said—and this picks up on just what you were talking about—"I gather that in the month that I have been gone [from Tanforan] the restrictions, army bigotry and the like, became rather intolerable." So, you already had some feelings about the Army before you got to Gila, feelings that had been formed during your visits to Tanforan.
Spencer
Well, I had seen the WCCA and so on; and, as I say, this was anything but a select corp of Army inductees. They were anti-Japanese; they were trigger-happy; they were given a little authority and most of them had a fairly low level of achievement. It was very unpleasant. Yes, I had views about the Army. Imagine some poor devil from, I don't know, Michigan, being assigned to Arizona to run herd on a bunch of Japanese.
Hansen
And they didn't think of them as Japanese, right? But rather as the enemy?
Spencer
Yes, enemy Japs.
Hansen
You said to Fred Hoshiyama: "I believe that you would have liked it here and be more qualified to cope with the rural Japanese who constitute the bulk of the population here. Charlie [Kikuchi], as you might imagine, is rather at sea owing to his inability to speak Japanese." So, what you were talking about before as to language deficiencies did come out in your correspondence at this point.
Three days later, on September 13, you wrote to Dorothy Thomas to tell her that Smith had just resigned as Gila's director, and you gave some of the reasons why you think he resigned. One of these reasons, you said, was simply nervousness and ill health. Then, once again, appeared the spectre of the Army: "Still, the failure of the head [WRA] office in San Francisco to cooperate and increasing attempts of the Army to make this a concentration camp are perhaps of equal importance."
Spencer
Interesting that I should say that—but, yes, I agree with it. The point being then, you see, the Army was given control of the supervisionno, the Army was left to restrict the movement of evacuees, clearly. And, taking the view that they did, that all Japanese were enemies, it meant that the Army was a very vicious presence.
Hansen
Now the other side of the coin is that, in this same letter, you criticized the WRA for making a lot of promises about what was going to be there: "The San Francisco office... has always painted a rosy picture of conditions here [at Gila] and has been inclined to pooh-pooh any descriptions of hardship faced not only by the evacuees but by the staff as well." In other words, you felt that Smith had to end up taking the blame for problems that went back to the WRA.
Spencer
I understood when I moved down there that the camp was to be ready to move into. When I first went down to Gila, I understood that it was all set, that they could take 13,500 evacuees now. We could feed them, house them, bed them, et cetera. And that was the propaganda issued by the War Relocation Authority. Yes.
Hansen
Did you think that the WRA was moving faster than it might have wanted to because they themselves saw the spectre of an Army takeover?
Spencer
No, I would level the same criticism against the WRA as against the military—that you got third- and fourth- and fifth-rate personnel. People who went with the WRA, and I would exclude certain ones who were drawn into it because of interest, were like that.
Hansen
Are you thinking of Leroy Bennett?
Bennett, yes. All right, he got paid $6,500 by WRA, so he moved from his dealership on Van Ness Avenue [in San Francisco] to Gila. And then he was supposed to administer this camp, and his view was one of "Japs."
Hansen
At Gila, the place where you were located, the initial administration of the WRA, at least to my mind, seems on paper to be quite impressive. It was almost solidly Ivy League in the upper-echelon administration. There were Ph.D.s in sociology and anthropology from Yale, Pennsylvania, and Harvard.
Spencer
Yes, because I think these people joined the organization for several reasons. One was that they could make a real significant contribution to the war effort. And that was a major preoccupation at the time, that this is something I can do that will serve my country and the citizens of my country. The second was a respect for the Japanese and a recognition that they were not enemy aliens, but that they really needed help. And, thirdly, that there were jobs available, and one could move from whatever else one might be doing into a job that would perhaps meet the first two conditions. That was fine. In other words, you had an idealistic group. And I think it was exemplified by Smith. He came in full of idealism, and then he ran into these drag-your-feet, paper-pusher, WRA-types, who had come not out of the Ivy League or anywhere else, but rather out of the Civil Service and were transferred from the Postal Service or the Soil Conservation Service, where they occupied a minor capacity, and so on. No, I think that you got definitely the emergence of bureaucratic types. I'll give you an example—and I gave it to you yesterday—Morton Gaba. He came in with idealism and then was frustrated by the bureaucracy.
Hansen
And he had a Ph.D., or was working on one at Berkeley.
Spencer
Right, right.
Hansen
In sociology.
Spencer
I'm not sure. They didn't have a sociology department at Berkeley then.
Hansen
Well, that's right, of course. You mentioned this point to me in our session yesterday.
Spencer
Gaba's work was in something like sociology. Maybe it was social institutions.
Hansen
In your correspondence you just noted this about Gaba: "He's getting an advanced degree from our university."
Spencer
Yes. Anyway, Gaba gave in to the bureaucracy, and I criticized him for it. And we had a kind of a knockdown, drag-out, mouth battle over that. I said at least he should stand up for his principles. He said, "The only way I can stand up to my principles is to knuckle under to the directives which I receive. I can't contravene them." He, more than anyone else, brought that issue out. I rather resented it on his part. I felt that he just leaned over too far in favor of the WRA. But, yes, I took an evacuee attitude, that the WRA was an enemy. And I certainly didn't see people in the WRA who represented any significant achievement, in terms of intellect or abilities or administrative know-how or what-have-you.
Hansen
So you had a kind of Gresham's Law of leadership going on there at Gila with the bad currency in administration driving the good currency out.
Spencer
That's exactly what happened. And, you see, in Smith's case he quickly saw how it was going and he quit.
Hansen
So it was a case of false promises, low-level leadership on the part of the WRA, as well as this encroaching authority by the Army, regulations, that prompted Smith's resignation.
Spencer
Well, yes, actually that Army threat was apparent in the initial stages. But then, as the community settled down, the Army tended to recede.
Yes, because here, even at the time that Smith is leaving, you wrote to Thomas: "The matter of army control is a question which is becoming more disagreeable as each day passes," So, at that point, in mid-September of 1942, it was still on the increase.
Spencer
Oh, very much so. Well, it was this edict which came from the Army which forbade intercamp travel.
Hansen
Well, you did tell Thomas in this same letter that the Army was "gradually usurping WRA powers."
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
And you continued in the same vein. "The military threatens censorship. The impression is one of a keg of dynamite. The Japanese here are going to be goaded too far." Well, this ominous note was struck by you in letter after letter. That seemed to be uniform, no matter who you were writing to, that you were smelling something coming down the pike. So, it must have been fairly clear to you that trouble was on the horizon in Gila.
Spencer
It was one of those things of which you become aware, without being able to put your finger on any one source.
Hansen
Well, Smith left and you surmised that Korn was going to leave, too, because he was such a good friend of the Smiths, but also because he was disgusted with the situation. In fact, in this letter of September 13 to Dorothy Thomas you told her that many of the administration were thinking of leaving Gila. "If they do," you said, "I pity the evacuees." So, in this context, who came in to take over the camp but the head of the San Francisco WRA office himself, Si Fryer, who had been, you know, the superintendent of the Navajos, a person who had worked with John Collier[45] and should have been amenable to working with anthropologists and sociologists. If anybody was familiar with social scientists being employed by governmental agencies at that time, it would have been somebody working with the Navajos, someone working with Collier. And, yet, in your correspondence you treat Fryer as though he were going to run you out of Gila: "He is definitely opposed to my working here and told Mrs. Smith so although I have not as yet met him personally. I asked Mrs. Smith just what she thought of my chances here now. She told me quite frankly that it might best if I were to drop out of sight for a while as long as Fryer is here." And then you added: "Mrs. Smith says that Fryer is definitely annoyed by our study here." Can you recall anything about Fryer and that situation?
Spencer
No, I don't. Obviously, he was there for a very short time, and I guess I just retired into the woodwork, which I was doing anyway. No, no. No, I can't. I really don't remember that at all.
Hansen
Well, later on Fryer looked good to you, once you finally ran into Bennett. Fryer then seemed to be a lot better to you.
Spencer
That Bennett, I tell you, he was weird. Talk about a weird appointment, honest to God!
Hansen
Well, then, too, you had another weird problem with which to cope with at this point. "Mrs. Yusa simply amazes me," you wrote in this same letter of September 13. "I have never met a Japanese girl who was so outspoken, so spoiled, or so possessive of her man. Her demonstrative actions toward her husband are causing considerable unfavorable comment among the older and younger people alike." So, this situation with the Yusas was increasingly a problem for you and the study. Also, in this letter you said: "At the dedication of the Buddhist church today I met a George Matsuura who turned out to be the Lowies' former houseboy. Dr. Lowie will be most interested, I know, and I do hope to obtain considerable information from the boy." Did you get considerable information from Matsuura?
Spencer
From George? No. Oh, he was too young. Put it this way, he was a Nisei. He had the Nisei psychosis. He would never make a statement that was forthright.
Hansen
So you got very little from him?
Well, it was through him then that I met his brother-in-law [Kanmo Imamura], who was a Buddhist priest. And he's the one who they then hired at Berkeley—largely my doing.
Hansen
So your association with George Matsuura resulted in a contact for you, anyway.
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
A major contact.
Spencer
Right, right, right.[46]
Hansen
So you did get information indirectly.
Spencer
Oh, I knew a lot of people like that, such as my friends the Sukiyama brothers, one was a doctor, the other was a dentist. And I didn't really use them as informants, except we'd been in grade school and high school together.
Hansen
How was that? Going there, you, now as a "keto" and also as somebody who could be perceived as a spy, somebody who was getting a salary, they certainly knew, et cetera. And these were former classmates of yours, professional people who were garnering like $19 a month. Did you even dare look them [the Sukiyama brothers] in the eye, or how did that work?
Spencer
Oh, yes. Oh, sure. I talked to them at great length about things like that. I remember Mas saying, "It's just tough shit we're caught in this situation." And I said, "Well, it beats staying out of [being in?] the Army."
Hansen
Right.
Spencer
And he said, "Well, that's true. Good for you." No, there was no feeling...but, again, I was circumspect. And I didn't want to intrude on anybody unless I was given carte blanche to do so. I developed a relationship with Mr. [Yataro] Okuno who wrote a few things for me in bad English, Japanese-English, and, yes, I could penetrate with him. I could really move in with him. But there's an Issei who is not self-conscious, and these Nisei are so bloody self-conscious. It isn't only a matter of, "You are a spy. You are going to report us to the FBI." No, no, no. It's rather that as social individuals, we as Japanese Americans are weighed in the balance and found wanting, from the point of view of the majority of society. It's a social thing. It's a perception of self that comes about, first of all from alienation with the native culture at home, and, second, alienation from the greater society because of race.
Hansen
How did you meet Okuno, and your other primary Issei observer, [Shotaro] Hikida? How did you make contact with them?
Spencer
I don't remember.
Hansen
So you don't know how you got Issei observers like them.
Spencer
I asked Dorothy for permission to hire some Issei. That we had agreed on. And, then, I guess, I asked around and I can't remember...now, yes, I do. Somebody, but I've forgotten who, brought those two, Hikida and Okuno, around to me and I talked to each one and told them what I was going to offer. And Hikida was a forthright, able person, whose English was not bad for an Issei.
Hansen
Right.
Spencer
And I see [from rereading the JERS correspondence] that he went to Chicago and appraised the work situation and that kind of thing, but he was very helpful. And I'd sit down and talk with him, but I couldn't penetrate too deeply with him. I could with Okuno and Mrs. Okuno. Did you, in your research, run into
Hansen
Sure, sure. He was supposed to be an interpreter and a spokesman for the WRA administration at Gila, wasn't he?
Spencer
Well, I'm surprised somebody didn't go after him with a baseball bat. That would be just on the matter of personality. Baron Miura—he was a nobleman in Japan—had graduated from Waseda University in Japan, in philosophy, and he had learned his English in Japan. He came to America and through an arranged marriage with a family in San Antonio—or in Houston or Dallas, some Texas city—and married a girl, a Nisei, from Texas. So here he was, and she was a real Texan, with ya'al and that kind of thing, you know. Sounded like [former U.S. President] Lyndon Baines Johnson. A real Texas accent. I used to kid her about it and she said she couldn't help it. And he didn't hear it, but his English was quite good. And he was one of these untrustworthy people that you think you have a good relationship with and then he goes behind your back and undermines you, and does so with a certain unholy glee. He operated behind the scenes in unpleasant things.
Hansen
He was very wealthy.
Spencer
He was wealthy, yes. Well, he sat like a daimyo [feudal baron] in the old country. His house, his barrack, you'd think you were in Japan the way the thing had been set up. They slept on the floor and there were tatami [straw mats] on the floor. They had the futon [bed quilt] on the floor, and so on. Their clothes were displayed. There was a flower arrangement and all that. And he sat there in a Japanese kimono with his legs in the lotus position and drank tea.
Hansen
With his Texas Nisei wife.
Spencer
And he would say, "Mrs. Miura, bring tea!" And she would bow and bring tea.
Hansen
You know, one thing that doesn't come across—at least blatantly—in most of the documents that I have examined on the Evacuation are the class differences among the internees. In fact, there is a predisposition, I think, to want to deny the fact that there were those differences, that they were somehow all in this together, were all evacuees.
Spencer
That was a Nisei point of view, but the Issei kept these social class differences alive. And, certainly, Miura would have claimed the highest social status. For one thing, he graduated from a highly nationalistic—at times, certainly—university in Tokyo. I've been to the Waseda campus, and it still suggests Japanese militarism to some degree.
Hansen
Did upper-class and wealth, et cetera, hold a person in high repute at a place like Gila, or did it have the opposite effect?
Spencer
No, neither one, I would say. Dare you get the idea we're all in this together. Higher social status was a matter of presentation and definition of self. Now, Miura claimed to be baron. There was [Kenzo] Ogesawarahe lived in Block 61, as I remember—who was wealthy and he had a perception of self. So did Hikida, but that didn't mean that the community would put them on that high a pedestal. There was a tendency to judge people more as to their abilities to deal with problems, like administrative problems and the more cogent problems of living. But, certainly, there was a sense of superiority on the part of some. Again, that's something I missed, you see.
By the way, when Lowie came down [to Gila in February 1943 during the period when the WRA and the Army jointly administered a "loyalty" questionnaire to the internees], I was aware of Miura's duplicity; and, yet, I used to go over there [to the Miuras' barracks] and drink tea and stuff. And I brought Lowie over. I had to—my professor, you see, that whole thing. I told Lowie this and Lowie then said, "Well, all right, I'll talk to him." And, so, we spent an evening over there. And Lowie nailed him to the wall. Now, there was Lowie as a field worker, very gentle, very kind, but very, very penetrating. And I learned a lot
Hansen
So you were skating on thin ice, in your self-perception at this particular juncture, and then you wrote to Lowie in early September, and you said, "In the main, Mr. Smith has been popular with the evacuees. A changed administrative staff, coupled with stricter military control may arouse a state of riot in a community which up until now has been peaceful and cooperative however hard the life may have been to bear." So, it was getting close to the flash point. I mean, this was, in your mind at least, early September that things in Gila were at such a state that, you know, even you were willing to tell Lowie this and ruffle whatever calm he might have enjoyed by saying this.
Spencer
Yes, I had that awareness. Perhaps I exaggerated it. Obviously, it never did break out in the way in which I predicted; as Solon Kimball had asked me, "Can you predict social trends." I guess I was predicting a social trend. No, but I was aware of the great dissatisfaction. And I saw that as centering in the incipient growth of the Kibei organization. The Kibei Club was beginning to be formed, terribly contemptuous of all Nisei, and feeling that the Issei were not really representative of appropriate Japanese behavior. So, those Kibei were troublesome, they were.
Hansen
I want to get back to that point in a little while because I have some questions on that of a specific character. Well, why don't I get into it right now. It seems to me that in a lot of the analysis that was done at the camps—both by your project and down in Poston with Alexander Leighton and with the WRA people under John Embree and, later, Edward Spicer—that a lot of the community analysts were captives of a Nisei point of view, for rather obvious reasons, usually not knowing much about Japanese culture and not having Japanese language capability. This showed up in their picking up the antipathy that the Nisei had to the Kibei, to the point where they almost elevated, I think, the Kibei into a group of anti-heroes—that is, they made them out to be the repository of almost all the evil that was occurring in the camps. I think, too, that this perspective has been sustained in much of the secondary literature that has been generated on the Evacuation, so that the Kibei have been so hobgoblinized that they are not treated as a mixed population, which, of course, they were. Rather, they are imaged, almost uniformly, as being stridently anti-Japanese, as travelling in gangs, as beating people up, as, you know, being in the vanguard of agitation.
Spencer
You mean, you see this in reading from my reports and correspondence?
Hansen
No, I don't think I see anything particularly strong said about Kibei in your writings.
Spencer
No, but I think this. It again raises the class question. The Kibei-Nisei obviously thought of themselves as infinitely superior to the American-born Japanese who had never been in Japan. They had the advantage of contact with the mother country. They had the advantage of language. The Nisei did not, in the main. It was again a sense of personal definition and perception. And your average Nisei, take Earle Yusa, whom I would consider to be quite an average Nisei—vacillating, uncertain, and so on—found these people terribly threatening. Charlie [Kikuchi] would say, "The hell with them! I don't want to be no goddamn Jap!" But, no, I think it's a matter of self-image that the Nisei would object to the Kibei. Not object, but be somewhat terrorized by them. And, hence, it is from a Nisei perception that the active, anti-American, strong feelings would be generated by the Kibei. "It's not from me, I'm a Nisei, and that guy's threatening." The Nisei were hesitant and the Kibei were forthright and not necessarily pro-Japanese. It wasn't a nationalistic issue. It was for some, obviously, but it wasn't a war issue. It was something that would have applied equally well prior to evacuation.
Hansen
In your correspondence from this period, it was clear that you were sensing from conditions that you'd been observing in the camp that something was going to have to give. You were not pointing the finger at any particular group as precipitating these things. You were actually talking about a social situation that was ready to explode. In this particular context, any group could have taken the lead. It could have been the Issei; it could have been the Nisei; it could have been the Kibei. Except there were certain things that perhaps allowed the Kibei to be able to be more expressive and to be more forthright and to take, you know, if not a leadership role, at least one that was perceived as an activist role. You suggested in a lot of your
Spencer
Nisei now, or generally?
Hansen
Generally speaking. The Kibei, not just in Gila but in many of the camps, were the ones who, you know, were targeted as "troublemakers" by the administration. But the Kibei were also ones, I think, who did actively take a leadership role. What was it in their cultural and social situation that allowed the Kibei to look at objective situations like this and then to canalize these into protests, into resistance, both rhetoric and actions?
Spencer
Well, I think that's easy to answer. Again, it's a matter of being able to exploit one's perception of self. The Kibei were infinitely more secure as personalities. They didn't have this "marginal man" status that the Nisei had. They were Japanese. Now maybe their political loyalties might lie with the United States, and for many it did. They were still American citizens. But, nonetheless, they had, I think, a much better perspective on the war.
Hansen
What about vis-à-vis the Issei then? I mean, because that takes care of the situation vis-à-vis the Nisei.
Spencer
Well, that's fine. If my parents who sent me to Japan, who slaved and scraped so that I could go to Japan, that's fine, my family. But then that old fool over there, all he's done his lifelong is dig in the dirt and raise grapes, what's he got to say? And then he's sent to Japan for his wife or picture bride, and so you get down into the dregs of Japanese society, of landless agricultural people and picture brides and all that sort of thing.
Hansen
I think you're presenting an interesting point of view that I hadn't heard expressed before, and maybe it's, again, because of my being a captive of expressed Nisei ideas. And that is that actually the Kibei were more comfortable with their identity; in fact, if anything, they had a feeling of superiority toward the Nisei.
Spencer
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.
Hansen
And was this something that you think was a product of the camp experience, when things were becoming more Japanized?
Spencer
No, I think that whole tripartite distinction was one that...
Hansen
...pre-existed the Evacuation?
Spencer
Well, if you think of the history of Japanese immigration, those after 1910, let's say, they certainly began already to establish ties with the homeland. Once they were settled, once they owned property or rented property, depending on those anti-alien laws, and then in 1924, the exclusion [Oriental Exclusion Act]. Once that took place, then many Issei who could afford it sent their children back to Japan. And already then there's a sense of an elitism that goes with money and the like.
Hansen
You see, it was, I imagine, a reasonably expensive thing to be able to pay to send somebody to Japan in that case. But I've heard two descriptions of the type of people whose children became Kibei. On the one hand, it could be wealthy people who wanted, you know, could afford to send a child to Japan. But, on the other hand, sometimes I've heard it the other way around, where they [the Issei parents] were too poor to be able to feed the kids and, therefore, they sent them to Japan and got their support paid for by, you know, relatives in Japan.
Spencer
Well, I would add a third factor here. Sometimes it was education. Sometimes it was taking care of the unwanted, shall I say, child. But it was also a means by which you could reaffirm family ties. In other words, you hadn't lost your base in Japan if you could establish that kind of contact. I've been here, let's say, I came in 1906 and it is now 1926, or even 1936. Meanwhile, I could send a child and I have reaffirmed my ties that I remember as a child myself when I emigrated.
And then if you retired back to Japan, you had somebody to take care of you who knew the language.
Spencer
Yes, but the thought of going back to Japan was rather rare.
Hansen
It got stronger as the war went on, didn't it?
Spencer
Well, yes, when the matter of segregation and [the] Tule Lake [Segregation Center] came about.
Hansen
We're now reflecting back on the Kibei situation. But, at the time when you were at Gila, was the Kibei situation a blind spot for you? I mean, did you have access to the Kibei perspective? You had observers, such as Hikida and Okuno, who were Issei, and you had those who were Nisei. But did you have anybody who was a Kibei as an observer?
Spencer
Well, you see, I was aware of that lack and so I joined the Sumo Club.
Hansen
Okay.
Spencer
And the Sumo Club was almost exclusively Kibei.
Hansen
And did you also get, as Rosalie [Hankey] Wax later did, any cooperation from George Yamashiro, the head of the Kibei group in the Butte camp?
Spencer
No, no. I knew his brother.
Hansen
I know you got two broken ribs out of your participation in the Sumo Club. You wrote a short, ethnographic paper, which I've just now glimpsed for the first time, on that group and their activities.[47] As one taking part in the Sumo Club, you must have gained some insights into the Kibei point of view, right?
Spencer
Well, yes. The Sumo Club was an embracing of Japanese values, and a re-creation of the Japanese point of view. It was first and foremost designed to perpetuate the ideals of Japanese culture, and particularly then, Yamato Domashii, the spirit of Japan.
Hansen
And they [the Sumo Club members] expressed that in front of you?
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
Why did they let you into the club?
Spencer
Because I was a good wrestler. I had wrestled in college and told them so. I said, "Look, I'd like to try this."
Hansen
Did they look at you in an amazed way when you said this?
Spencer
Yes, yes.
Hansen
Did your ribs get broken because you were a keto?
Spencer
Yes, partly. Yes. A guy grabbed me when I wasn't prepared for it. I was just standing there and he picked me up and threw me down and I fell against my own arm and cracked the ribs in the side. I remember it quite well. I was furious. Then my friend Tad Sugiyama, a physician, taped them up for me. He pushed the sternum and said, "Oh, yes, that's a sure sign of broken ribs." But, still, I joined the Sumo Club. And the discipline was rather arduous. You wait for the matches. And you sit there in a row in the lotus position, back straight. Caucasians are not used to that. And I would relax. "Spencer! Up!" And then afterwards, the food. My God! The things that they put away. And where they got it all, I don't know. Mail, whatever. Big shipments of food. They had octopus. They had sashimi [raw fish]. They had chanko nabe [a hearty
Hansen
So, somewhere there was a source of financial support for that group.
Spencer
Yes, I contributed. And people contributed who were interested. I have a T-shirt, Gila Sumo, that they gave me. I was a member of the team. I went over from Butte to Canal. I wrestled over in Canal. I won one match and lost another. When I lost, everybody went "Yay!" But, at least I tried.
Hansen
That was a good experience for you then, except for the ribs being broken?
Spencer
Well, Al Hutchinson, who was the principal of the primary school, had played football for San Francisco State, and he was my coach, in a sense. He said, "Look, this is the same as football in the line. You simply get at it that way."
Hansen
Were you the only Caucasian on the squad?
Spencer
Oh, yes. Look, I nearly lost my position in the camp.
Hansen
As a result of that?
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
This was viewed by the Gila administration, I suppose, as "fraternizing"?
Spencer
Yes. Bennett said, "That crazy Spencer lets his little Japs throw him around."
Hansen
Well, you wrote a very interesting letter on September 20—on several grounds. It was a long letter and it had a couple of points in it that I'd like to ask you about. Dorothy Swaine Thomas had just offered to pay Earle Yusa and Charlie Kikuchi $62.50 a month. And this upset Kikuchi and Yusa. They both expected, at that point, when they were getting that much money, to produce more than they felt that they could do, thought it was overvaluing what they were doing. Charlie, in particular, was perturbed. According to you, Charlie regarded "the work and the possibility of vehicles for publication as a great privilege and does not feel that he honestly can take that much money." Earle Yusa, you said, "on the other hand, is not so idealistic; he is less reluctant to take that amount of money and is rather egged on by his wife who sees in the potential savings of release to the outside after the baby comes. She dreads the summer heat of next year." So, in any event, you've got this situation where they were going to be paid and yet payment itself seemed to be troublesome to them. Now, I'm wondering if the reason they were troubled by this situation was because that set them up as being seen by the rest of the camp population as "deviants," even more than they might otherwise have been viewed as such.
Spencer
Well, yes. I think all of those factors operated. For one thing, Charlie's statement, that's a good Japanese value statement: It's a privilege for me to engage in this. Yusa was much more self-seeking, clearly. I was approached by [Joseph] Omachi. Now the word got out—I don't know how—it wasn't from me, that these people were being paid by the study. And Omachi came to me and said, "You know, you're paying these people." I allowed as that this was true. Oh, I know how it happened. That bastard [Luther] Hoffman. He was the one who would have let that information out. In other words, he fingered the people who were on my—No, it wasn't my staff; we were equal—but on the staff of the Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study. And so it was known that they were being paid. And [Joseph] Omachi said, "I'd like to come in for some of that gravy and I can help you." And the first thing that he did was to evaluate my material on the [Takeo] Tada case, which you have seen.
Hansen
Right.
Spencer
He felt I had a number of things wrong, which I undoubtedly did, because I got it from heresay. But that
Hansen
Right.
Spencer
Which was also a mistake.
Hansen
And, yet, at that time you were very proud of him. He was somebody that you thought could really help the study.
Spencer
I thought he was emancipated to the extent that he wouldn't suffer from the usual Nisei psychosis. And that's true. He was. He had a lot of life experience. He was older. He had practiced law. He had served members of his own community as a lawyer in Stockton, [California]. I don't what kind of cases he handled. I'd hoped to find that out from him.
Hansen
Once he got on that blacklist, though, almost anything he did would have not only been observed carefully, but probably would have been read. Somehow or other, people in the camp managed to get a hold of things, it seems to me.
Spencer
I don't know. I told Joe, "Why don't you detail some of the kinds of cases that you've dealt with as an attorney." Now, even from the camp, you see, he had clients. There was the question of property recovery. There was the question of financial reimbursement for loss of property, and Joe handled a few cases like that. I wanted to know about them. There was another little difficulty there—[James] Terry, the project attorney. That so and so. Oh, boy! He was trouble with a capital T.
Hansen
At one point in your correspondence, I believe, you even indicate that there were rumors afoot in Gila that Terry was actually controlling the center. This was when [Leroy] Bennett was director.
Spencer
Oh, obviously, Bennett was such a [U.S. President] Ronald Reagan. No, Terry was an insidious figure who moved behind the scenes. Interestingly enough, I once roomed with Terry.
Hansen
Oh, you did.
Spencer
Yes, for maybe... I don't remember how long.
Hansen
Well, somewhere in your correspondence, you noted that within a week you had shifted the place where you were staying four times, so I take it that you had a large number of roommates.
Spencer
Yes, I did. I did. So, Terry was a New York lawyer who, as I understand it, suffered from some kind of disease, and his physicians in New York recommended that he undergo a change of scene, and so...
Hansen
I didn't know about that situation. I'm sorry for interrupting you; please continue.
Spencer
Well, Terry took this job in the relocation center, moved his family and so on from New York and settled in Gila. I don't remember whether he ultimately lived on the project or not. That wasn't the point. But, at the time that I spent several nights in his company, he said, "What are you doing here?" And I explained, and I was quite candid. I told him exactly what I was doing, and the study was doing, and so on. He said, "What do you expect to accomplish?" Fair question. I answered it as best I could, that we wanted to see what kinds of adjustments, and so on, were made. He said, "Well, what do you really feel about this?" I said, "You as an attorney ought to be able to answer this more pointedly than I. Surely you must feel that there has been a contravention of the law, that constitutional guarantees have been eradicated, and that this was unreasonable and unjust." And I felt that way, and I still feel that way. He said, "No."
Hansen
He didn't think it was?
Spencer
He said, "No." "First of all," he said, "we're in a state of war, and a normal bill of rights is suspended."
Hansen
Did Omachi differ from Terry considerably? Since he worked for Terry, I was wondering what their relationship was.
Spencer
This is where Omachi comes in. Terry thought well of Omachi, thought his legal skills were well-honed. I don't know what Omachi thought of Terry. Omachi would never tell you what he thought of anything.
Hansen
I was just wondering if Omachi did to you what you felt had happened with Earle Yusa, vis-à-vis Williamson, and that is that he became more beholden to Terry than he did to you and the study.
Spencer
I don't think so. I don't think so. He was a loner. I think part of being a loner created some tension in his own adjustment to the community.
Hansen
There was an interesting situation with the study's observers, in the sense that they all were employed full-time during the day in other responsibilities, which was good in the sense of being able to have access to what was going on.
Spencer
The understanding was that they would be employed, yes.
Hansen
And that would also deflect attention away from them, too. If they were full-time observers, they probably would have been observed full-time by the rest of the community.
Spencer
Of course.
Hansen
But then it also caused problems for you. Charlie Kikuchi seemed to be productive, Earle Yusa was not very productive. And he could always fall back on the idea, "Look I'm busy with this work with the police." And then the other thing was that when you went to get secretarial help, almost always you got secretarial help that was picked up by the administration and used during the day for many hours, oftentimes overtime. And when push came to shove, they chose to do their work for the administration ahead of yours. You hired a woman named Matsumoto, and here [in a letter from Spencer to Dorothy Thomas dated 20 September 1942] it said that "her job keeps her very busy, often ten to eleven hours a day." And eventually she's got to be let go by you and not, I take it, because her work is inadequate, but because her time was unavailable. And then you were reinventing the wheel each time. You had to get a new secretary, a new typist, or else hire somebody whose skills weren't as good. And then you had problems because they were too slow and they couldn't get out the work at the rate that you needed it. So it just seemed to be a personnel problem.
Spencer
They were also Nisei who worried about whether they were doing it right or not. Am I satisfactory? Every day, am I satisfactory? Am I doing this right? Unable to take any initiative.
Hansen
Then you met Miura who you've already talked about, and in this same letter to Dorothy Thomas, you described him as being of noble Japanese family, a man of wealth, a graduate of the University of Waseda,
Spencer
That's right.
Hansen
You also wrote: "His English is fluent but bad." Now, you said something in this letter which I want to question you about. Miura, you said, told you that he understood fully what the aims of the study were, and that he was greatly interested in the study. Then you wrote: "He has written a novel in English about the evacuation and the assembly centers". You add that you'd like to look at this novel, but you never again mention that novel in your correspondence.
Spencer
I doubt if it was ever written.
Hansen
Okay, so you didn't really see a novel, then? Okay.
Spencer
No, he told me that. I had forgotten that, too. No, he was full of bullshit, really.
Hansen
And you certainly change your opinion of him later because at this time you write: "Mrs. Smith and I both feel that he is a man of integrity."
Spencer
Yes, I know, I know. Then he proved not to be. It was interesting. I was walking down Fifth Avenue in New York, a number of years later, and I ran into Miura. (laughter)
Hansen
Did you have a discussion with him then?
Spencer
No, not really. I was so disenchanted by him by that time. He invited me over, but I didn't go.
Hansen
Now this gets us back to Si Fryer and to women anthropologists, two topics to which we've already alluded. You said, "I should like to return as soon as I can get lined up with Fryer. He will be here six weeks until he can groom a successor to Smith." And you added, "As you know, he was Navajo administrator and therefore must have had his hair full of women like Gladys Reichard, Ruth Bunzell, and Ruth Underhill. I don't blame him for disliking some of those nosy anthropologists." Now, I can't tell the sense in which this comment was communicated, on your part, whether it was tongue in cheek or straightforward.
Spencer
Oh, it was tongue in cheek. I certainly didn't mean it because I have the greatest respect for all three of those women. I wasn't fully aware of the implications of the Navajo studies that had been done at that time. I had worked with the Pueblos, but not with the Navajo. When was that? There was this girl anthropologist who was murdered by an Indian, Navajo or Apache. Anyway, an Athapaskan. A case that has been talked about again recently. I don't know. No, I regret that statement. I shouldn't have made it.
Hansen
You then talked about wanting to get back to Berkeley so as to write up your notes.
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
You wrote, "As you know, I have no place where I can really go to be alone and write up this information. I am simply staying in a barn and with the exception of Sunday I have no place to sit to write anything."
Spencer
That's true.
Hansen
And then you wrote: "You [Dorothy Thomas] mention that I might stop off at Manzanar and Poston on my return travel. I'm willing to do so but I shall need another advance on my travel."
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
So, you were having a difficult time being able, actually, to do the work you needed to do. You could observe,
Spencer
Yes. I had a rough time. I borrowed office space. And I could have it, you know, like four hours. I'd want to write a letter like this one that you are quoting from here. I mean, sharing a room in a barrack with people who are on a night shift and typing would bother them. And I'd share a room with Terry and with [John] Landward and some of the others, rough.
Hansen
What you told Dorothy Thomas was accurate, perhaps, but was it hyperbolically stated in order to get you out of there [the Gila center] for a little while to go see your girl friend on the coast?
Spencer
I think so, yes.
Hansen
Okay, then you told Dorothy Thomas that you had received [James] Sakoda's comments on your case history. She apparently had this habit of sending around the reports that you were sending her to other people connected with the study for criticism. This is what you had to say on that matter: "I have gone over them all very carefully and even at the risk of appearing unscientific I cannot consider any of them valid except for the suggestions for further work. I based my line of questioning, Sam—"he was the Nisei from Fresno who you wrote your first Gila life history about"—on those works of Japanese social organization which I had read. I rechecked with Sam as to accuracy. While I do not wish it to be said of me that I cannot take criticism, nevertheless I resented pretty much the superior tone of Sakoda's comments."
Spencer
Have you seen Sakoda's comments?
Hansen
No, I have not.
Spencer
I don't know where they are. I haven't seen a copy of them either. But Dorothy got mad at me for criticizing Sakoda. She thought his critique was done honestly. I think that's just a reflection of my own insecurity. I think a number of the statements in that letter were me being a "Nisei."
Hansen
But then she wouldn't even have appreciated the force of Sakoda's comments, would she? I mean, she didn't possess a sufficient knowledge base in terms of Japanese culture to be able fully to understand the context of Sakoda's criticism.
Spencer
No, no.
Hansen
And then you talked about Landward. You wrote: "Landward is one of [Pitirim Alexandrovitch] Sorokin's students and also hopes to get a thesis out of his WRA work here."
Spencer
Oh, that's right. I said he was at Brigham Young. He had been, but he was at Harvard.
Hansen
But he was a Mormon. You were right on that, because I think you stated that several times here in your correspondence. He was a Mormon, but he did go to Harvard then?
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
And what does being a Sorokin student imply?
Spencer
Sorokin was a very famous philosophical sociologist, was here at [the University of] Minnesota and then left here for Harvard [University].
Hansen
And what would have been Sorokin's strengths and orientations?
Spencer
It's hard to say. It was more the nature of society, that kind of thing, from a philosophical point of view. And that would fit into the Mormon background of Landward.
Do you mean philosophical as opposed to structure and function?
Spencer
Exactly, yes.
Hansen
Then you had some visitors from Stanford, a Professor William Hopkins and Davis McEntire, and a few people. They had just come from Poston and what you noted was this: "Hopkins asked the question: `Who the hell is Leighton?' They are wondering and so am I why a Navy lieutenant in full uniform should be wandering around a relocation center and why, if he's a medico, is he doing a social study? I'm frankly troubled by Tsuchiyama's lack of response. I don't like the idea of her divided loyalties. Why hasn't she written to me?" So, there were two things here: one, the business of Leighton, which we covered yesterday. And, then, the other thing involved Tsuchiyama—that she was simultaneously working for Leighton on his sociological bureau and for Dorothy Swaine Thomas and the JERS project. You wanted answers from her and, yet, she was not forthcoming because of that situation.
Spencer
Well, she was, as I noted yesterday, a cantankerous personality who was going to go her own way, and this is where she got into trouble all along. And then she immediately laid the blame for her inability to get along on someone else. I don't know yet to what extent she was helpful to Leighton.
Hansen
Well, Richard Nishimoto said in one of his letters to Dorothy Swaine Thomas—and I might have sent you a copy of that letter—that Leighton feared Tsuchiyama as his rival, and that he wouldn't have taken any of Leighton's reports for the ones that Tsuchiyama had done, because he thought hers were far superior to Leighton's stuff.[48]
Spencer
He thought she was superior.
Hansen
Yes, that Tsuchiyama's reports on the situation at Poston were far superior to Leighton's.
Spencer
I can't imagine that she was superior in bed, but that seems to have been the tie between Tsuchiyama and Nishimoto. (laughter)
Hansen
And at this point [September 20, 1942] you were still having trouble with Earle Yusa. You had finally gotten him to take a job at the camp junior high. But he didn't like teaching, so he quit. His wife, Mimi, was still bothering you: "Always crying for attention, refusing to let him out of her sight, she is definitely, I think, a hindrance to him." So that problem persisted. And then you appended your very detailed, itemized, expense account that you kept for the project. Actually, there did seem to be a lot of financial concern. Even though you made light of it sometimes during that year, remarking in your correspondence that you didn't have a head for those kinds of things, I think you did keep a fairly tight budget on everything, and submitted your supporting documentation.
Spencer
Yes, I did.
Hansen
Well, Si Fryer, who you now don't recollect too well, was a person who you then had strong words for [in a letter to Dorothy Thomas dated 27 September 1942]: "Fryer is a perfect heel and I think that you will agree with me when I talk with you regarding his various actions here." But, since you don't recall what those actions were, it would be senseless for us to explore them.
Spencer
Maybe you've got reference to them. Do I mention them, or just say "his actions?"
Hansen
No, it just seems that you underwent a sea change with Fryer. At first you were very fearful that somehow or other he would dislodge you and the project from Gila.
Spencer
I was very afraid of that.
Hansen
Yes, and so each newcomer on the scene, like Fryer, posed for you a similar problem.
It was stupid of me, really. Dorothy kept saying, "Don't worry about that," and I was always worried about it. I was afraid that we were going to get dispossessed, that the project would be ruled off the center, that anyone who came in was a potential rival, that our work would be duplicated by the [WRA] community analysts to the detriment of our work, and so on. I got over it, but, no, I was essentially insecure, I think, and that comes out.
Hansen
One of the things that you talked about [in a letter to Fred Hoshiyama dated 10 October 1942] in a purely anthropological vein was this: "The matter of religion is one which interests me very much especially in regard to conversion to Christianity." What was your precise interest in that topic? I can see where that could have been an interest of yours in terms of your concern for acculturation, but could the conversions to Christianity also have interested you in terms of the protective coloration it provided the internees?
Spencer
That's exactly what it was. I became aware that there were various motivations for converting. And I also became aware of the rather unceasing efforts on the part of missionary people and erstwhile missionaries to Japan, and the Nisei clergy itself to create, again, a social association. Well, Earle Yusa—there were two people in camp with this name. There was Reverend Earl Yusa, who was an Episcopalian, and he was a cousin of the Earle Yusa who was on our staff.
Hansen
In fact, one time you thought Earle Yusa's wife Mimi had given birth to their baby. Earle was coming in for all these premature congratulations, because it was the other Earl Yusa whose wife had had the baby.
Spencer
Yes, well these two Yusas were cousins—first cousins, I think. I attended a number of meetings of the young Christian group. It was nondenominational, and the Anglican Yusa, who wore a clerical collar, led the group. So I tried to joke about that: "Did you ever hear about the drunken minister who got his collar on backwards?" (laughter) And I told the group that and they laughed. And they immediately went over and told him, and so I was put in an embarrassing position then. But, then, there was to be an election of chairmen of some sort for the coming months, and somebody nominated Earle Yusa. What they really meant was the minister [Earl Yusa], and, instead, Earle Yusa the JERS representative was elected, and he had about as much savoir faire in relation to Robert's Rules of Order, and so on, as a duck. And, yes, I was interested in the fact that many people joined the churches because they affirmed thereby their Americanism.
Hansen
You had some constraints in Gila with respect to—and it caused you no end of hassle—your wanting to get Issei to be paid observers for JERS. The state of California wouldn't make a check out to an alien. And so you had to end up working out payment for them in various and strange ways.
Spencer
I don't remember how I did this. I think I put it on my own expense account, didn't I, and then paid them.
Hansen
I don't know, but it was a budgetary constraint that affected in a way the conduct of your fieldwork.
Spencer
Well, there were a whole bunch of edicts that were passed out by the university—paying an alien, paying an enemy alien—and I went down to Tucson, to the University of Arizona, and saw the head of the anthropology department, Emil Howard, who was somebody who I knew when I was in the Southwest before, a very well-known archaeologist, a very nice man. I talked to him and I said, "Look, why don't we work out something here. I could get a crew together and we could do archaeology in the Sacaton region, and also around Casa Grande. And we could do this with volunteer labor, and I could provide the labor. And I know that there would be great interest on the part of many Nisei in the local archaeology." And Emil thought, "Oh, that's marvelous. I'd love to do that." He said, "And we could set up informal classes, and so on." Well, they got that far, and so Emil presented it to the powers that be at the University of Arizona, but they were not going to serve any Japanese. That took care of that. And, so you did run into these anti-Japanese currents of one sort or another.
Hansen
I guess it got particularly virulent in Arizona. At one point you were planning on having a session down there [in Phoenix] with the study, and, lo and behold, it turned out that a state law had just been passed making it illegal for businesses to serve Japanese Americans, people of Japanese ancestry, in any way. The
Spencer
Well, you had that constantly. You know, I come back to my statement: It was wartime, a wartime hysteria prevailed. Whether right or wrong, that was not the issue. One was going to adhere to these rules and regulations that were, in essence, arbitrarily established by legislators or whatever. It was a rough go. From that point of view, it was very difficult.
Hansen
But this even applies to what you were saying earlier about Gaba knuckling under, et cetera. Behind the WRA were layers of laws that precluded them [Gila's administrators] doing what they wanted to do, too.
Spencer
Sure, sure.
Hansen
But you made some attempts to try to interest a California book company, who in the prewar years used to cater to the students, to agree to sell books down at the camp.
Spencer
Yes, that was another thing. They needed books for the high school; they needed books, oh, at every level. I had a number of meetings with people who were going out to school to the Midwest and East.
Hansen
In fact, you worked for awhile in the camp's relocation office, I think.
Spencer
Yes, I did, early on. But then, once in the center, once things sort of settled down, I would counsel students as to what they might do to get out of camp. Oh, I don't know. I helped them with, you know, filling out forms and letters of recommendation and things of that kind.
Hansen
And, too, during one of your trips to Berkeley, you even tried to find a typewriter for one of your observers, Mr. [Shotaro] Hikida. And that turned out to be quite a donnybrook because you couldn't get typewriters newer than about World War I vintage.
Spencer
Right.
Hansen
By November 5, when you wrote to Dorothy Thomas, you had just moved into Camp II. You moved from Camp I, Canal, into Camp II, Butte, and at that point you were sharing a room with John Landward, who was then acting as the center's community welfare advisor.
Spencer
In Camp I. I had been with Landward in Camp I and then I moved to Camp II.
Hansen
Well, what you said here in this letter was this: "I have moved into Camp Two and I am sharing a room with John Landward. Landward is still acting as community welfare advisor for Camps One and Two."
Spencer
I see. Yes, okay.
Hansen
And then, you added this, "He has brought his wife down from Salt Lake City, and has obtained quarters in Phoenix, but managers to spend about three nights a week on the project." Which meant that you finally had a place, privacy, and everything, where you could do your writing and do your work.
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
I think, it was important that you were there at Canal up until November 5, because it meant that the things that led up to the Tada beating, to a large extent—not the immediate, precipitating factors, but the other ones, the mood and everything—had transpired while you were there. So, you had your finger on the pulse of that situation.
Yes, I think so.
Hansen
You wanted Charlie Kikuchi to attend the JACL [Japanese American Citizens League] meetings and pick up some information on the JACL. Not only did he do this, but he also got himself elected to the JACL's board of governors at Gila. You wrote [in your 5 November 1942 letter to Dorothy Thomas]: "He [Charlie] is rather amused by the whole thing, and has visions of Shibutani exploding with wrath because of the step he has taken." As you doubtless know, the JACL has come in for not only a lot of contemporary criticism, but historical criticism as well as to the role it played in the Evacuation.
Spencer
I didn't know. I really didn't. I wasn't au courant with the JACL at all. For a number of years, I subscribed to the Pacific Citizen [the JACL's official newspaper], but I didn't have a very good sense of what the JACL stood for.
Hansen
And at this juncture in your correspondence [5 November 1942] Earle Yusa was still not submitting anything tangible to the project. You said: "He adopted his usual hangdog air, promising to regenerate and be more prolific in his contributions." And you continued: "He's in an excellent position to obtain an analysis of the Internal Security and its inter-relationship with the community." But apparently he refused to place the daily reports at your disposal on the grounds that, if he should be caught with them, it would go hard with him. You then explained your reaction to Dorothy Thomas: "I am afraid that I am not used to such meticulous honesty in the matter of collecting data." (laughter)
Spencer
Did I write that?
Hansen
Yes.
Spencer
Do you know if [Yuji] Ichioka has tried to get in touch with the Yusas?
Hansen
I have no idea. I haven't been privy to a list of the people who he has tried to contact for the conference.
Spencer
You come into that Ichioka situation, in a sense, via the back door. No, I just don't know either. Earle was my age, and he may not be alive. I wonder what happened to the child they [Earle and Mimi Yusa] had. I imagine they had others.
Hansen
It doesn't seem, from reading your correspondence, that your relationship with the Yusas turned out to be altogether pleasant.
Spencer
Well, we got into this hassle with Mimi. I got tired of Mimi's overriding ways, and I told her off. She wanted me to help her get her mother over there [to Gila]. I said, "What for? You've got a husband." And Jean [Yamasaki] had already said this to her, so that finished Jean and me, as far as they were concerned, so we stopped going over there.[49]
Hansen
Already, by early November you were discovering that Miura was not going to be much use to the study as an informant, but what you wrote to Dorothy Thomas was that he did provide you with an excellent entrée into the Issei group.
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
And you also had Charlie Kikuchi talking to members of the Kibei Club, so you were not only getting the JACL group covered, but the Kibei and the Issei as well. So, I think you were starting by this time at least to have the appropriate bases covered in the center.
Spencer
Well, I tried. I tried.
Hansen
Do you remember anything about [Robert] Cozzens, when he came to Gila as acting director?
Now, what was the sequence? [E. R.] Smith was replaced by [E. Reesman "Si"] Fryer.
Hansen
And then Cozzens replaced Fryer.
Spencer
Now, as we talk about it, I have a vague recollection. It sort of comes back. Fryer was a tall, blond man, right?
Hansen
That's right, very tall. I believe that he was probably around 6'3" or 6'4" and he'd been the prewar superintendent of the Navajo reservation with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, under John Collier's direction.
Spencer
Have you met him?
Hansen
No, I've just seen pictures of him.
Spencer
I see, well that's my impression, but I don't think I ever really talked with him, though I remember seeing him around. He only stayed about six weeks. Is that correct?
Hansen
Yes, he didn't stay very long at Gila. He was director of the WRA regional office in San Francisco. And he just came to Gila as acting director until they could get somebody else for the job on a full-time basis.
Spencer
And then Cozzens came.
Hansen
Yes, and Cozzens was also out of the San Francisco office.
Spencer
Yes, I remember him. Dorothy Thomas and he had a good relationship; and, he was essentially in favor, as near as I can judge, of the work we were doing. Again, I don't think he stayed very long. I remember I talked with him a couple of times. He was always very amenable And then they resurrected this [Leroy] Bennett right after. And that was unfortunate.
Hansen
Now, this letter is dated November 10, and you explained that you had run into [Joseph]Omachi, an attorney from Stockton and a graduate of the University of California and Hastings Law School, and you explained how you snapped him up for the study. You wrote to Thomas: "Joe is a Nisei and has spent considerable time dealing with the political aspects of the community."
Spencer
He snapped me up, to be more correct.
Hansen
You put it this way: "He came to me with the proposal that sounded good."
Spencer
That's right. He came, that's right.
Hansen
"He is perfectly willing to accept a half-time assistantship.... His work will be further enhanced by the fact that he lives in Camp 1, and he can cover the activities there."
Spencer
That was the idea.
Hansen
So, again, you had another base that was being covered. You had Kikuchi in Camp II and Omachi in Camp I, and you had some Issei acting as observers for you as well.
Spencer
I tried. And I tried very hard to get Joe to write. And he did turn out that one report which was written in essentially legal language, and he made the comments on my appraisal of the Tada case. I don't think he did anything else, did he?
Hansen
I'm not certain, I'll have to check up on this point.[50]
Spencer
So you see, he was useless. When I left, then I began to wonder what happened to these people. Did Omachi
Hansen
Yes. I believe you dropped Omachi; I think, in fact, that was one of the final determinations you made before leaving Gila.
Spencer
And there was resentment on the part of Omachi, I remember that.
Hansen
When you dropped him.
Spencer
He was angry. He didn't get it that what we wanted was masses of raw data. Let the analysis rest until later. I couldn't convey that to him.
Hansen
Well, I think he stayed on in the camp a little bit longer than that, but I haven't followed that up, and I'll have to do that.
Spencer
By that time, by the time I left, Dillon Myer had begun his relocation philosophy. And then, after the war, when Myer went to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, he applied the relocation philosophy to the Indians.
Hansen
That's right.
Spencer
And the thought was that just as the Japanese Americans were being drawn into the urban life of the United States, wherever, Cleveland, Chicago, or Detroit—you name it—so also could the Indians be treated that way, and so raise their status as citizens, and so on.
Hansen
You'll be interested in reading this recent book by Richard Drinnon[ Keeper of Concentration Camps: Dillon S. Myer and American Racism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987)], a scathing attack on Myer's relocation philosophy in both circumstances.
Spencer
Oh. Well, between you and me and the gatepost, I think it was a good idea to terminate and to have the Indian drawn into the ostensible melting pot of American culture.
Hansen
Do you want to talk about that?
Spencer
Yes, well what we've created is a bête noir in the form of the American Indian. There's a new movement among the Indian to reassert Indian culture. And where do they get the Indian culture? They get it from the folklorists. They're completely out of touch with their past, and they think they're recreating their past. And all they're doing is trying to establish a kind of pressure group. I think they'd be better off if they'd just live as, say, a European immigrant. It's the way I feel about it.
Hansen
Okay, well, I'm glad you've expressed your opinion. I just wanted you to enlarge on it a bit.
Spencer
Well, that's essentially the way I feel about it. And I know there are many of my colleagues, Sol Tax at [the University of] Chicago, and so on, who have taken violent exception to this, that the Indian heritage must at all costs be preserved. Well, fine, if it can be. But it isn't.
Hansen
So, you think what they're trying to preserve is an attenuated culture at best.
Spencer
It's not only attenuated, it's truly fictitious. I look at these crazy Chippewa around here. They come and they live in skid row, and they booze themselves out of their minds, and then they go back up to the reservation and they're a drain on the community because they have to be put on welfare. And they won't keep a job, and so on. And, I think that the Myer program, as far as Japanese relocation was concerned, was a matter of individuals or individual families. In other words, I think you ought to find a job for a Chippewa in Mobile, Alabama, or in Richmond, California, or something like that, and let them live as
Hansen
Do you see this philosophy coming largely from inside Native American groups, or do you think that it has been foisted upon them?
Spencer
It comes from all sorts of sources. It comes from the suits that were filed by the various American Indian nations for reimbursement for dispossession of land, going back into the 1950s. I testified in some of those, and the suits are all right. So many of the tribes won their suits, but it was a mistake. I worked for that Klamath group around Crater Lake, Klamath Falls, [Oregon], and they won their case. There were what, 1500 Klamath, and they got $32 million to spend out of Congress. How did they spend it? Well, they earmarked a certain amount for schools, for rural electrification, things of that kind, and then there was per capita adjustment of, I don't know, a couple of thousand a head. That meant that some families were getting $10,000 and more, which they immediately proceeded to drink up. (laughter) And then, when that was gone, then they were back on welfare. Ridiculous. I'm not particularly a friend of the Indian. I've worked with too many Indian groups.
Hansen
Were you in favor of WRA's resettlement policy—moving Japanese Americans out of the camps and dispersing them throughout the interior of the country?
Spencer
Yes, I was. I thought it was a good idea. I thought it was fine. I spoke again and again in the center—I would talk to various groups, student groups and so on, those planning to go on. I said, "For God's sake, become 100 percent American. You're 200 percent American now. Backtrack a little bit." I said, "Marry a Caucasian. Keep yourself into the society at large. Don't go on with this Nisei inferiority complex." And I believed that.
Hansen
And about 50 percent of them [Japanese Americans] nowadays are marrying outside of their ethnic subculture.
Spencer
Well, they are now, but not at that time.
Hansen
No.
Spencer
And one result of it was that you got the formation of Little Tokyos, in Chicago particularly, in Los Angeles, again, less in San Francisco. I think it's unfortunate. I guess, however much the melting pot concept has been discredited, and it has been, especially when one begins to think of ethnic purity or whatever—cultural reality—nevertheless, it doesn't work out that way.
Hansen
But wasn't it kind of difficult, in a time of war when a subculture had been targeted and tainted and suspected of subversion, to expect such people—in this case, Japanese Americans—to render themselves culturally naked?
Spencer
Of course it was difficult. I told them it was difficult. It was very hard. But, on the other hand, if you could number among your circle of acquaintances, or friends or whatever, Caucasians as well as Japanese, you had gone a long way.
Hansen
I thought it was interesting that Kikuchi, when the project wanted to send him to Chicago, didn't want to go there because of the very reasons that you are adducing. He didn't want to find himself there in another "Little Tokyo."
Spencer
No, he didn't.
Hansen
He wanted to come to St. Paul, [Minnesotal], really, where there were less Nisei.
Spencer
Well,actually,my attitude was in some measure colored by his reflections. But, you see, there I am a cultural
Hansen
But I think you spotted something else, which we can talk about later in more detail—the registration crisis at the camp. And the reason it was a crisis, as you pointed out at the time, was that the government tried to link volunteering for an Army combat team with determining people's eligibility for resettlement. And, of course, that strategy had an adverse affect on resettlement.
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
Not only didn't very many people volunteer for the Army, but such a procedure made everybody else jaundiced about the whole idea of resettlement.
Spencer
That's right. I remember very vividly the policy of resettling Nisei in colleges throughout the Midwest, East, and South set in motion. You had to get the bus to go east from Gila. So, for example, one was going to Drake, down in Des Moines, [Iowa]; one was going to Creighton [Omaha, Nebraska]; another to Cornell [Ithaca, New York]; and another to Howard [Washington, D.C.]. Just imagine!
Hansen
Really?
Spencer
Yes. And there was that feeling. But, I was asked to take them out and give them permission to drive a car. And, again, it was part of my desire to be cooperative and helpful. But I felt this was the right way to do things. And it was very traumatic for the kids. I remember a boy, a particular boy who went to Drake, and all the whole trip of fifty-odd miles him weeping bitterly at leaving his family and so on.
Hansen
I guess it was especially tough if you were an older son and you had expectations that you felt you were abandoning when you went off to college and left your parents and younger siblings behind in camp.
Spencer
Yes, that's true. This boy who went to Drake wrote me afterwards. He got his A.B.
Hansen
Well, I think what's difficult to pick up in your correspondence is your reaction to a trip that Dorothy Thomas and her husband, W. I. Thomas, took down to Gila, where they spent about four or five days with you.
Spencer
At Gila.
Hansen
Yes. And you didn't say anything about it, except to Morton Grodzins, and even then you wrote about it in a veiled way because you apparently wanted to have certain things communicated to Dorothy about it and certain things kept from her.
Spencer
You know, I don't remember that very well. I remember meeting them at the depot. They came down by train. I had a car. I don't know where I got the car. I drove them down to the center. I, of course, had to make arrangements, as I did for Lowie, to accommodate them. But I don't even remember where I put them.
Hansen
Do you remember the Thomases being at Gila?
Spencer
Yes, I remember that. They wanted to see Phoenix, so I drove them around Phoenix. Then I drove them south to the center. But I don't remember whether anything was accomplished. It seems to me I set up interviews with various people, and some of those with whom I had been in contact: Hikida, Okuno, Ken Yamashiro, Matsuura, Miura, and others. I remember that vaguely.
Hansen
She must have met, though, with you and the other JERS observers, Kikuchi and Yusa.
Spencer
I think we went over to Charlie's house and had a conversation there. And as I remember there was nothing
Hansen
How about W. I.? Do you have any recollection of him being there?
Spencer
I know he was there, but he sat there and, "Ah, hah, hah, hah." (laughter) That was his technique. There were no women to feel up, so he... (laughter)
Hansen
Now, one of the things you said was, "I have a request to make, and should appreciate your attention in fulfilling it." And this was when you were writing to Lowie [24 November 1942]: "One of my valuable contacts is a Reverend Suzuki." I think probably what you meant by a "valuable contact" when you were writing to Lowie was in relation to more strictly anthropological concerns.
Spencer
Right.
Hansen
"Reverend Suzuki has expressed an interest in Indian tribes of California and Arizona, and would like to read some of the material that has been written on them." It turned out that you asked Lowie for a number of books, and I guess you got them from him. Now, was this the same Reverend Suzuki with whom Bishop Ochi was living at Gila?
Spencer
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Hansen
Okay.
Spencer
I don't remember that at all. I don't remember giving the books or getting them, or any such sort of business.
Hansen
But you remember Suzuki?
Spencer
Oh, yes. I remember Suzuki and I remember Ochi, and I remember Mrs. Suzuki.
Hansen
Now, it was rumored, of course, that Ochi was sleeping with Suzuki's wife, right?
Spencer
More than a rumor.
Hansen
Yes. How on a matter like that did you establish that it was more than a rumor?
Spencer
They were seen.
Hansen
Oh, they were. By some of the people that you knew? Okay.
Spencer
Yes. That raises some interesting questions. Turn that [tape recorder] off a second.
Hansen
Sure. (tape recorder is turned off, then turned back on)
In some of the letters you wrote from Gila there are allusions made to prostitutes. I know I've run across this situation in connection with virtually every camp—that there were gambling dens, you know, prostitution rings, and all kinds of other forms of so-called vice.
Spencer
Liquor.
Hansen
Liquor, too, yes. In fact, I had an undergraduate student this last semester [in a proseminar on the "Japanese American Evacuation" at California State University, Fullerton] who was trying to write a paper on the underground at the Manzanar camp and he had a lot of trouble with his research because most of these activities were not very well documented. You pick up fugitive references and the like, and you can look at police records; but, even in the police records, a lot of arrests were not made because the internee wardens
Spencer
I talked to Frederick about this, because he had his fingers on that pulse, and he could point out the houses where—the barrack rooms—where there were women available. He knew about them. Did he ever do anything about it? "Swede," Francis, whatever I called him. No, no. He said, "Forget it. That thing, that's going to go on." He said, "Who's it bothering?" He was a very liberal guy, really, in spite of his essentially jackboot, gestapo, mean manner.
Hansen
I guess he just understood that, if you were going to really control vice, then there were simply certain things that you couldn't construe as vice, right? I mean, certain things have to do with the province of human nature, and if you don't allow these to occur, you invite still greater problems.
Spencer
Well, what difference did it make? It was not a crime against anybody, and nobody objected. I mean, I daresay the next-door neighbor might have been disturbed at times, but never chose to object. And, okay, that's the way Frederick felt about it. And I did hear that there were men who would lend out their wives in payment for gambling debt.
Hansen
Did appointed personnel from the WRA avail themselves of the prostitutes who were Japanese?
Spencer
I don't know. I really don't. Look, I don't think they had to. They were so cozy in their own quarters that everybody was...It was a real...It got to the point by March [1943], when things had really settled down, that the WRA personnel—they were boozing it up every night and partying—so I think that there were enough women around. Like Frederick married Jane, and so on.
Hansen
So teachers, nurses, people like that.
Spencer
Teachers, nurses, social workers. There was one social worker I remember. She came in as assistant social worker to Hoffman, sort of on a par with Tuttle. And her forte was dirty jokes. And I mean dirty jokes. You know, this was 1942. Women didn't go around and tell dirty jokes and use four-letter Anglo-Saxon words. And she did. I found it a bit shocking. She would tell a dirty joke and then she would roll on the floor and scream laughing. And she was about as big as Rosalie Hankey [Wax]. (laughter) I don't know, I don't remember any of the jokes, unfortunately. I never remember jokes. But she made a collection of them. And then, she was available, actually, for anybody who wanted her. There was a demoralized, kind of, atmosphere. It wasn't the liberalism that is characteristic of sexual mores today. It wasn't that at all. It was rather that there was this tension, this constant tension, this anxiety about the war and the course of the war and so on, that I think people gave up on it and were just, you know, waiting for the day of judgment to appear. And, meanwhile, it was "Let's enjoy it."
Hansen
Was there a little bit, too, of the kind of imperialist mentality, like the British in India or something? The kind of underside of that, you're encircled by a people you regard as a subject people, alien people.
Spencer
Yes, it was, yes. I think so. What you had was a group of Caucasians, limited to a very circumscribed space, difficult to get out.
Hansen
You seemed to express some concern in a couple of the reports that you wrote very early on that actually the people who were sexually molesting some of the young Japanese gals, the Nisei gals, were the construction workers and then the Army personnel.
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
Did you have some evidence for that concern?
Spencer
No. I knew very little about it; and, actually, if I did hear about it I wanted to stay away from it. And the reason I did was I didn't want to be put in a position of putting a finger on anyone. And I didn't want myself,
Hansen
Well, you had the eyes of Argus upon you, so to speak, didn't you?
Spencer
Rather, rather. Now, maybe you're going to get to this, but a lot of this behavior came out in respect to the camouflage net-making project. You know about that?
Hansen
Yes, I do, and I will get to that situation shortly.
Spencer
Oh, all right.
Hansen
We were talking about Dorothy and W. I. Thomas coming down to Gila for a few days. What apparently happened was that you met them over at Poston and then brought them to Gila.
Spencer
Oh, that was it. Then I brought them back and gave them a ride around Phoenix. That was where I met Leighton.
Hansen
Yes, I'm hoping this triggers something for you because you don't write about it, since Dorothy was there witnessing it with you. But what you said in your correspondence was that you met them at Poston, "which is a horrible place." You were writing on December 3, [1942], to this Fred Hoshiyama who you knew; he had gone to Topaz. And you wrote: "It's a horrible place and we left just as the strike of which you must have heard, broke." So this was the Poston Strike, and I'm very interested in that event, generally, and particularly interested as to what you remember seeing at Poston. Do you have any recollection of what was going on in Poston?
Spencer
Not really. We went to Poston, and I don't remember how I got over there. I remember driving back. I remember meeting Leighton. That was the first time I met Leighton. I think it was the first time I was at Poston. I don't know how —W. I. and Dorothy made it into Poston itself, but I don't remember the circumstances of our meetingthat is, my greeting them—as one remembers sometimes. Tamie was there, and was it at this time that Mr. X's identity was disclosed?
Hansen
I don't think Mr. X [Richard Nishimoto] was in the [JERS] picture yet.
Spencer
You are probably right. That comes with my second visit to Poston.
Hansen
And you made mention of Mr. X the next time, but you don't—and no one does—at least not what I have discovered from reading the correspondence between you and Dorothy Thomas.
Spencer
No, I always thought, I remember, that part of that strike business was directed at Alexander Leighton. And his presence, in spite of what Spicer says, in full naval regalia, was something that triggered the suspicions and outbursts.
Hansen
It's kind of funny because the justification I've run across for starting the community analyst program stemmed from the juxtaposition between the circumstances at Manzanar and Poston. It's said that Manzanar, in late 1942, didn't have any applied anthropologists there to help its administrators. Leighton, through his Bureau of Sociological Research, was able to, you know, enter into the negotiation process. Therefore, whereas Manzanar had a bloody riot, Poston did not, and its strike was ended peacefully and constructively.
Spencer
Yes, yes. But why did the damn fool go around identified as a naval officer? That strikes me as the stupidest goddamn thing that anybody could do.
Hansen
It did then and it does now, eh? (laughter)
Yes. I remember my mouth fell open when I saw this guy in uniform. As I say, I admire his book The Governing of Men. I think the book was good, when you consider the materials that came out at the time. And he was a psychiatrist; he did have a medical degree. I don't understand it. I don't understand it to this day, why that man would do that. I remember, though, going to his office, and he was in fatigues with the maple leaf on his collar. And he was very arrogant, almost like a British intellectual, looked down his nose at you and said, "Ooooh." That's the impression I had of Leighton. And I was aware—Tamie said this—that he was not liked. And I often wondered how he managed to get the kind of insightful data that he did. It rings true. I mean, I don't think he made it up.
Hansen
I went through pretty much all of his Poston stuff last year at Cornell [University]; and, for my money, as far as the JERS Project and Community Analysis Section of the WRA and the Bureau of Sociological Research, as far as having some sort of an organizational structure to it and being able to penetrate key institutions within the community and really get, you know, raw data, his project comes out on top. Leighton obtained minutes of the different internee and administrator meetings, and had observers throughout the different sections of the camp. I mean, the data he collected was pretty variegated and elaborate. Here's this guy in a navy uniform who calls his study something that sounds to the internees like the FBI, Bureau of Sociological Research, and so he creates apprehension on two different grounds. Yet, the data he gathered at Poston and the people who he had working for him—for example, Spicer was one of his assistants—was impressive.
Spencer
Well, Ned [Spicer] was very good.
Hansen
Yes. And then he had Tsuchiyama working for him, and he had a number of other people, all of whom have since gotten doctorates. He had Toshio Yatsushiro, who later finished up his Ph.D. dissertation under the direction of Leighton and Morris Opler at Cornell University, and he had a couple of other Ph.D. candidates on his staff as well. Who's the Nisei anthropologist at Notre Dame? Tom Sasaki, is it?
Spencer
Oh, Tom Sasaki. Yes.
Hansen
So Sasaki was part of Leighton's group at Poston, too. He had a pretty formidable group of people on his staff, considering the circumstances.
Spencer
Interesting, because, see, we in JERS were never able to generate that high-powered a staff. And, I think as a much more experienced social scientist-psychiatrist, Leighton had his questions better formulated, certainly, than I did. He knew what he was going after.
Hansen
Do you think it was an important consideration that actually he was a psychiatrist, in handling the kind of data he had to handle?
Spencer
I don't know. I never have been able to answer that question.
Hansen
Because you were raising the question that somebody had told you that you might have attempted to approach your work at Gila psychoanalytically, in a Freudian sense.
Spencer
Hugo Wolter, yes. Yes, but Leighton's orientation is not Freudian.
Hansen
No, I know, but I was going to say...
Spencer
I don't know how the heck you would do that. I mean, as I say, look for Oedipal survivalists among the Japanese. That would be one possibility. I'd write a paper on that tomorrow if you like, but I'd rather not.
Hansen
Well, after you left Poston and returned to Gila, you wrote to Dorothy [3 December 1942] and told her this: "There are down here, first signs of serious trouble. I had never thought that we would see here incidents in any way comparable to those which we met at Poston."
I remember now the Poston situation. We stayed by the administration building and waited for somebody to take a kind of initiative, which no one ever did. It was just a general strike. And there was no violence connected with it, or not much.
Hansen
But you weren't there during the strike itself, were you?
Spencer
We were at the start of it. We thought we'd better get out. It was just people standing around in groups that I remember.
Hansen
Boy, I wish now you had stayed a day or two. Again, you must have been a little worried about the safety and everything of the Thomases, weren't you?
Spencer
No, I don't think so. I figured they were there on their own, of their own volition. That was their choice. But I obviously would have done my utmost to get them out, in the event of trouble. No, I wasn't worried. I saw the thing as kind of amusing, and it fulfilled my predictions of trouble.
Hansen
Well, at this point [3 December 1942] you wrote to Thomas: "We have an entirely new problem.... The spirit of the community is definitely changed."
Spencer
At Gila.
Hansen
At Gila.
Spencer
What are we talking about? What was the new problem?
Hansen
Well, the new problem was that it was starting to heat up at Gila much like you'd seen at Poston, and Poston was sort of a prefigurement of what was going to happen at Gila.
Spencer
Well, there were several reasons for that perhaps. I don't know whether I detail them. We got the beginning, the glimmerings, of Army registration. That was one thing. We got the beginnings of the introduction of the camouflage net project. What you had was people settling down to a kind of routine existence. It may not have been a very idyllic existence, but, on the other hand, people were over their scare. There were many, you know, when the camps finally closed, that they had forcibly to remove.
Hansen
Right.
Spencer
So X-number of them were quite content to stay there. A lot of them said, "We're a hell of a lot better off than we were in California."
Hansen
Or that they would have been even in California—without a job, without any money.
Spencer
"We have a place to stay. We know where our next meal is coming from. We make a little money. We buy cigarettes, and that kind of thing." They liked it. And there was, especially for Issei, there was interaction with people who, if they lived out in some farmstead in the valley, wouldn't see another human soul of their age group for weeks at a time. So, what I'm saying is, if by... what's the date on that letter you've just been quoting?
Hansen
December 3, 1942.
Spencer
All right. By that time, the worst was over and the people were beginning to settle in. And then suddenly something came along to rock the boat. And then rumors started flying, anxieties abounded. And what were they? They were any number of things. They're going to ship us all back to Japan. They're going to ship us all out and force us into slave labor camps, all these kinds of things.
Hansen
Was there a lot of interaction between Poston and Gila?
No, no. The various centers were, in effect, autonomous.
Hansen
Even with the families being spread around and [the Japanese American community] being a pretty tight community?
Spencer
Well, letters, letters, and then arrangements were made. If I were at Gila and my family at Poston, I could make application to move to Poston. Okay.
Hansen
I used to think that way, too. I've increasingly been persuaded that there was a lot more understanding of almost everything that was going on in other camps. I mean, in a generalized sense, that there was a network, an informational network, which especially in a crisis situation acted very quickly to disseminate information [from camp to camp].
Spencer
I think you're right, but I also think that there was a great deal of rumor connected with it, and that the rumor was unfounded.
Hansen
But still had consequences a lot of times.
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
Whether it was unfounded or not, they're going to do this. They're going to close down Poston and the two Gila camps, and they're going to put people in Manzanar.
Spencer
All that, all that. "We're going to have to go through this whole business of settling in again." And, as we said, that was terribly traumatic. There were the various dissident groups, which I guess I covered, political pressure groups, in that paper.[51]
Hansen
Yes, you did.
Spencer
I looked at that report again, and it seems right, as far as I can tell.
Hansen
Yes, I think you got the whole constellation of that group. There may have been more that I don't know about, of course.
Spencer
Oh, undoubtedly there were more, but at least they were the concerted ones.
Hansen
Well, by this time, you were already getting a lot of good stuff from—at least some stuff—Hikida was getting you stuff, Okuno was getting you stuff. You got weekly reports from Ochi, Miura was starting to do some things for you.
Spencer
Miura.
Hansen
Miura, yes.
Spencer
Largely oral.
Hansen
And you were paying honoraria for these things. And then, in this letter to Thomas of December 3, 1942, you wrote: "Now that we've hired Omachi, our Nisei are taken care of, but I am still puzzled over how much I can allow the Issei. So many have come to me and offered their services as informants, writers, and the like, and there are some people whom I would like to use occasionally on a part-time basis." And then there was one guy you called "an old screwball" in the camp by the name of Fujishige who came in and told you that he was a graduate of the Tokyo Teaching College, and he wanted to write an analysis for you. And it sounded as though people were trying to attach themselves to the project for either one of two reasons: to deflect your attention from what was actually happening; or, alternatively, to elevate their prestige in the eyes of other people, by being affiliated with a university-sponsored study.
I can't believe the former. I don't think there was sufficient unity to permit that sort of thing to develop. No, it was enhancing one's reputation. And then there was money in it.
Hansen
So, the money did mean something to a lot of these people.
Spencer
When you consider $16 a month, or what was it? $13, $16, and $21.
Hansen
But for a person like Miura, money was nothing, really, was it?
Spencer
I don't know. I don't think so, but, then, I don't know.
Hansen
You continued in this same letter: "Now that Mr. Okuno and Mr. Hikida are recognized members of the study and inclined somewhat to boast about their academic connections, about the letters they have received from you, and the like, other Issei want to enjoy the same privilege." Now, this is the second point that we were just talking about. So, at the time, that seemed to be probably what you were thinking.
Spencer
Yes, yes, yes.
Hansen
Let's see. Now, this is December 9, [1942] and you were writing to Lowie, and saying, "You will undoubtedly have heard of the disturbances at Poston and of the more recent difficulties at Manzanar. The spirit of such a disturbance is apparently infectious and indeed has caught hold here in Gila with the result that the last week has given rise to what I think to be, a very ugly situation." And this was after the Tada situation has come about.
Spencer
Yes. I'm amazed at my sentence structure at my young age. Pretty well written.
Hansen
Yes, I think so, too! (laughter) Now, you got a letter from Dorothy Thomas. And this was the first letter written from her to you that I've come across in my research; the 1942 files do not include Dorothy Thomas's letters to you. There's a telegram or two, but only two letters.
Spencer
You say this is a letter?
Hansen
This is a letter from Dorothy Thomas to you. For 1943, I have found correspondence going back and forth between the two of you, but not in 1942, except for this letter dated 10 December and another one dated four days later.
Spencer
Well, what are you missing?
Hansen
I'm missing Dorothy's letters to you in 1942. I've got what you're saying to her, but this is the first real letter from 1942 that tells me what she was saying to you.
Spencer
I wouldn't know where to begin to look for her 1942 letters to me.
Hansen
Well, there should be copies in the JERS collection at the Bancroft Library in Berkeley somewhere. They might be filed in the general staff correspondence rather than in your correspondence file. But, for 1943, all of her letters back to you are in your correspondence file. Anyway, Thomas has decided by December to bounce Earle Yusa from the study.[52]
Spencer
To bounce Earle, by December?
Hansen
Yes, and she's asking you about this guy Bennett, who's just been appointed Gila's director. And she writes: "Tamie, damn her, has decided she wants to stay at Poston. Lowie said, `My God, I am provoked!'" Now see, that's why I was asking you earlier about Lowie's connection with JERS. Why would he get so provoked over what Tsuchiyama's doing at Poston?
Gee, I don't know. Good lord! What a bunch of stuff here [in Spencer's JERS correspondence file].
Hansen
There certainly is. But I'll just get into those letters that I have special questions about or comments on. One person who loomed as a nemesis of yours in your letters was someone we alluded to yesterday: Robert LeBarron. He came in to take over as the reports officer at Gila, and he nettled you no end during the short time that he was there at the center; and you were absolutely ecstatic when he got bounced for attending a congressional hearing that was held in Phoenix. You see, once he was at the hearing, he got called upon to testify, and Bennett had told him not even to attend the hearing. And not only did he attend, but also testified. As soon as he got back to camp, Bennett bounced LeBarron out of the project.
Spencer
LeBarron was still there when Lowie came to visit. I don't remember Lowie's date of arrival.
Hansen
It was in early February 1942. Anyway, you thought that Lowie would impress LeBarron, and you said, "You were right. LeBarron was impressed because he saw himself as something of an anthropologist."
Spencer
Yes, he did.
Hansen
Could you comment a bit on LeBarron so I can get a better fix on him?
Spencer
I see him before me. He was a little, scrawny runt, very pale, bald, with a kind of a wedge-shaped head. And he always wanted to talk to me about artifacts. Well, he would wander around in the desert and pick up potsherds. You know, that's a very vigorous archaeological area there.
Hansen
Oh, so he saw himself as an archaeologist within anthropology, not as a cultural anthropologist.
Spencer
It didn't matter; he saw himself as having some anthropological expertise in the area of archaeology, and he wanted me to do this with him. And then he'd want to talk about the artifacts that he found, and I couldn't care less. One potsherd to me is like another. And, so, yes, he got bounced. I didn't know it was because of his testifying. I see that here in my [JERS] correspondence file there is even a hand-written letter [from Spencer to Dorothy Thomas dated 17 January 1943].
Hansen
Well, later on, as well shall discuss, you wrote a letter to Dorothy Thomas late at night. You didn't want to direct attention to yourself, for fear that when people heard typing late at night through the walls, they would think that you were a spy or something.
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
You wrote this letter to Thomas [dated 17 January 1943] and said: "I hope that you enjoyed the Tule Lake visit. We here received all of the materials from the bunch up there. It's quite a tome, isn't it? Charlie and I are somewhat put out. Both of us feel our efforts have been surpassed." And I think what you were saying there was that Shibutani, Miyamoto, Sakoda, and Billigmeier were really grinding out the reports, journals, and the like up there at Tule Lake and there was a general competition of sorts between the different research teams participating in the study.
Spencer
Art, Dorothy went out of her way to stir that up, that sense of competition. I think she was operating on the premise that if she did, then that would inspire people to greater heights of productivity. However, that still brings us back to this weird question: Given all this stuff—Gila, Tule Lake, Poston—why the hell didn't she use it? Why didn't she use it in The Spoilage and The Salvage?
Hansen
Well, she used some of the Tule Lake stuff in The Spoilage, but mostly that which was produced by Rosalie Hankey [Wax] once she transferred there from Gila and Tule Lake had become a segregation center. She [Dorothy Thomas] might not have maximized the use of the material from Tule Lake, but I think a more important question is: Why didn't she use a little bit more of the Poston and the Gila material.
Spencer
But you see what she did with the Tule Lake stuff is, in terms of the overall evacuation resettlement,
Hansen
The segregation center.
Spencer
Yes, yes.
Hansen
Did you ever have a suspicion that, in her eyes, your material got tainted by the influence that Nishimoto had over her? That, in a sense, he, as well as Tamie, intimated to Thomas that the stuff that was generated down there in Gila was pretty worthless? I mean, did you ever have that feeling?
Hansen
Oh, yes, yes I think so. Now, I don't even remember what Nishimoto's educational background was, or his background in terms of ability to discern or analyze, but Tamie Tsuchiyama became enamored of him. And, as I say, I think he was married and had children. So, he left all that, and he was shacked up with Tamie. All right, fine. And then Dorothy comes along, after Mr. X has finally been disclosed—and I was there at Poston. Or was I? I don't really remember whether Dorothy was there or not. No, she must not have been. That was later. I met Nishimoto; Tamie Tsuchiyama introduced him to me. And he was blasé, sat there puffing on a cigarette, his feet stretched out. To my mind, he was a kind of Japanese ne'er-do-well type. The kind that the Japanese make a kind of clown of, the sort that travels from area to area and tells stories and really has no status, and is bored and lackadaisical, and so on. That was the impression I had of Nishimoto. Now, why? How Dorothy Thomas meets him, ostensibly through Tsuchiyama, fine. But why she became so taken with him, how the two formed this unholy alliance that produced these two books [actually, only one book, The Spoilage ; The Salvage was authored by Dorothy Thomas with the assistance of Charles Kikuchi and James Sakoda], I have no idea. I think it's weird and I think it's remarkable.
Hansen
That's one of the things I hope this upcoming conference in Berkeley will, at least tentatively, resolve. If it's something that people won't talk about during a session, I hope it comes out between sessions, because it's a real mystery to me.
Spencer
Well, Tamie's dead and I wouldn't be surprised if Nishimoto's dead. Dorothy's dead. I don't know if you can answer that question. I suppose you could answer it in terms of time and place, as to how Dorothy became acquainted with Nishimoto. But the extent of his influence over her is curious.
Hansen
And I just think that all the people who are going to be involved in this conference, since those two [Tsuchiyama and Thomas] and probably Nishimoto, also, are dead, are going to have the same question in their mind. Two questions: first, why didn't more and better stuff come out, based upon the kind of work that went into JERS; and second, why was what got published so relatively narrow in relationship to the data collected by the study.
Spencer
Now, I do not know whether Nishimoto read our stuff from Gila or read Shibutani and those from Tule Lake.
Hansen
I think he read every single thing, because I think Thomas sent it to him down at Poston for his stamp of approval.
Spencer
I see.
Hansen
I got the sense from reading the JERS letters at the Bancroft Library in Berkeley that Dorothy Thomas, at some point, began sending everybody's material down to Poston to Nishimoto, and that he patronized people like Shibutani, Miyamoto, and the other study members as junior Nisei who never knew the real Japanese community, who were outside of it. In other words, they did their best, but it was wide of the mark.
Spencer
Well, then, Nishimoto was an Issei.
He was an Issei, and he actually got elected to some important positions down in Poston. So he must have commanded considerable respect within the community. I don't really know.[53]
Spencer
I just remember him as a kind of almost comic figure, in his blasé mode.
Hansen
Well, maybe these are some of the questions that will get discussed at the forthcoming conference on JERS in Berkeley. In any event, Dorothy Thomas, on January 18, 1943, wrote to you as follows: "I've just returned from Tule Lake where we had an excellent conference lasting four days." So, she was traveling around to the different camps where JERS observers were stationed—to Poston, Gila, and Tule Lake.
Spencer
That's all we were allowed, where JERS could be located.
Hansen
Well, there were attempts made by Thomas to get observers implanted in Topaz, but JERS apparently wasn't able to gain government approval for this arrangement.
Spencer
I know that we didn't want to go as far east as Arkansas.
Hansen
Now, in this same letter we find the competitive thing coming into play. These seemingly innouous lines, for example: "Miyamoto particularly is producing really distinguished work." Thomas dropped this line in there and then, you know, you were expected, of course, to pick up on that. Then she would pat you on the back regularly in her letters to you. I think she always told you that you were doing very distinguished work, too, at Gila. "Tom has decided that he doesn't want to go out at all as he has become so interested in the work, and Miyamoto will come back to Tule Lake after an absence of about six months." And she continued: "We have decided to have a conference in Salt Lake City the last week in March." I don't think that conference ever came off. There were some plans for it. You then wrote to tell Thomas that, "A murder took place last night but as the result of a love triangle and not of community ill-feeling." This was one of your hand-scrawled letters. Then, in your subsequent letter to Thomas, you mentioned Frederick for the first time.
Spencer
The date?
Hansen
This was January 21, 1943, and you referred to him as Fredericks, a practice I have since fallen into myself.
Spencer
Yes, it was Frederick.
Hansen
Okay, so, "Fredericks, my friend on Internal Security, tells me that the FBI has the nice habit of subpoenaing everything that it feels might be of use to it." And this was when you started getting anxious about the FBI subpoenaing all of JERS's documentation.
Spencer
Do you blame me?
Hansen
First, you were afraid you were going to get kicked out of Gila, next, that the FBI was going to take all your data.
Spencer
And that they were all going to be sequestered, yes.
Hansen
And so Thomas wanted you to centralize all the data, and all the responsibility, and be prepared to ship it out to her and just say you don't know anything about it, that you had no data on the project. But she didn't want you to be too anxious about it. You wrote: "I was rather suprised to find that [William] Huso...." Do you remember him?
Spencer
Huso? Yes.
Hansen
He had something to do with employment at the Gila center. "Huso knew that Charlie, Omachi, and Earle were associated with the study. Naturally, we haven't tried to conceal it, but, nevertheless, I did not think
Spencer
I remember he rented a house in Tempe, [Arizona], and used to commute in, and I cadged rides with him a couple of times to Tempe. But, I never talked about my own work with him. We exchanged banalities, as I recall.
Hansen
Now, here's something that always got me when I was reading your JERS letters. In the midst of reporting on strikes and near strikes and other things, you wrote to Lowie [23 January 1943] and said, "Enclosed you will find my paper `The Role of Religion in the Gila Relocation Center' to satisfy the requirements for Anthro. 244." And, so you were still a student, and still responsible for schoolwork. You continued: "I must admit that I'm not satisfied with the report; so much has happened here at Gila of greater interest that I worked on the paper only at intervals.... As you will see, I have somewhat neglected the elements of acculturation which appear in camp, and have turned my attention more to the sociological side." So, in a sense, your anthropological mission was being somewhat compromised, even polluted, I guess, by what you were supposed to do in terms of your work with JERS.
Spencer
Yes. That was all right with Lowie. He didn't care. He was pleased, gave me an "A" grade.
Hansen
Okay. In a letter to Thomas dated January 28, 1943, you wrote: "I learned from Gaba—good soul that he is—that [John Fee] Embree has been made head of a new organization, the WRA Social Analysis Division [Community Analysis Section], and that he intends to go to each project in order to recruit personnel who will be of aid in eliciting information comparable to that which we are getting. He plans to have a Caucasian representative in each project who will enlist a Japanese staff, presumably of trained students, to make studies of this kind. Naturally, you can see where this will leave us. Possibility that our materials is to be subpoenaed is not without foundation." So, now this is corroborating the original fear that you had that the stuff was going to be taken. And now you were going to have it taken away by congressional action, or you were going to have it taken away by the WRA seizing it. So, I think you were feeling closed in somewhat at this point.
Spencer
I don't think I was being unduly paranoid either, given the time and circumstance.
Hansen
Which is what you told Dorothy Thomas. She thought you were being paranoid, I think.
Spencer
No, I don't think so. I think the danger was very, very real.
Hansen
And you continued in this letter to Thomas: "Charlie isn't getting along with Tuttle, his boss." That's the person, Bill Tuttle, who you mentioned earlier in the interview.
Spencer
Oh, God!
Hansen
What about Tuttle? What can you tell me about Tuttle?
Spencer
Well, I told you about his child who threw my books on the floor.
Hansen
Yes, but you told me that off the record.
Spencer
Well, yes. Tuttle, I don't know. I got to know him fairly well. He was an innocuous, sort of a missionary-type without being a missionary. A professional do-gooder, and nice, nice, pleasant. Raised his child with a minimum amount of coercion. Yes, he was a very decent sort. I taught him to play chess, and he became really enamored of chess, and he always wanted to play. He'd come around to my place and I was trying to work. And he was very offended. And then I got to Berkeley. I'm writing my thesis or I'm doing my reading—I've forgotten—but, then, he had quit the WRA by then. He wanted to come around and wanted to be friends and interact.
Hansen
Play chess. (laughter)
Play chess, yes, exactly. And here I was trying to, you know, meet deadlines and get a degree. He finally got offended and quit; but, yes, he was a do-gooder, and I mean that in an essentially pejorative sense. He objected to Charlie's using any data. He felt this was a violation of individual rights; and, you know, he was a good psychiatrically oriented social worker, I guess, with maybe a master's degree in social work. Since I'm married to one of those, she at least is not a do-gooder.
Hansen
Who on the WRA staff at Gila were your closest friends, that you felt like you could confide in?
Spencer
Oh, I guess you could say Frederick and Landward and Tuttle, all right... Henderson.
Hansen
Were they people that you did things together with, like play cards, say, the group of you?
Spencer
No, booze it up.
Hansen
Were they mutual friends, too?
Spencer
Yes, sort of. There was a coterie. Now, Tuttle and Landward didn't drink.
Hansen
You mentioned Frederick, and we talked a lot about him off the record and we've even discussed some things about him in correspondence; but, since I don't know if I'll ever be able to locate Francis Frederick, and since he figures so largely not only in what happens at Gila, but what happens ultimately at Moab and Leupp, could you tell me how you met him, what your impressions of him were, and the whole nature of the function that he played, vis-à-vis your work as a field anthropologist at Gila?
Spencer
Well, I was living in Canal Camp, and he had been in that camp for awhile. For some reason, I found myself in the same room with him, I don't know under what circumstances. And he asked me what I was doing, and then he fixed me with this cold, policeman's eye, which he told me later he had cultivated.
Hansen
Oh, really!
Spencer
He said every cop does that, cultivates this look. And, so I got it as I talked, you know, not wavering one bit. And I was really rather intimidated by this.
Hansen
Was Frederick a tall man?
Spencer
About my height.
Hansen
And you're about what, five foot ten?
Spencer
No, I'm six feet.
Hansen
Oh, six feet.
Spencer
I may have shrunk now, I don't know. Anyway, I don't know how we got to talking about different things. I think it was after the Tada beating, and I must have asked him something. And he asked me why I wanted to know, I remember that. And then I told him what I was doing, and he then asked me some questions about various groups. And, by this time, I was well enough into the community so that I could answer him. And I didn't see any reason why I should withhold that information, and he was very impressed. And he felt that Williamson had it all wrong. Well, he and I then would meet periodically and talk, fine.
Hansen
And so you started to meet a lot with him?
Spencer
No, not a lot because he operated in Canal Camp, you see. He almost never came over to Butte, and I would go to Canal periodically. I think for a period of three or four weeks I wouldn't go over there. But, then when I did go over, I made a point of seeing him. And then, one night he had a friend, a Japanese, who
Hansen
If somebody just came across the letters in the files that you and Frederick wrote back and forth to one another, they might be led, at least on a superficial reading of them, to think that you two were boon companions. For example, you used nicknames for one another.
Spencer
Well, that was the atmosphere he tried to create. I don't mean to sound self-seeking, and I don't mean to denigrate him at all. His heart was in the right place, but he was such a pest! He really was. He was constantly coming with questions, questions, and comments, and then he would editorialize for a long time. And then what he had to editorialize about was not really very significant.
Hansen
Was the price worth paying? I mean, the tolerance for a boor worth paying in terms of what you got in the way of information.
Spencer
Well, I knew that Williamson was hostile. And Williamson and I had had it out over Yusa, whom Williamson had, at Bennett's request, incorporated into the police. I knew that, and I thought it be well that I have a foot in that camp. So, yes, I did encourage Frederick. And, then, I never realized that he would sit and write me these reams of letters after I left. But, even if I were momentarily away, I would get letters from him.
Hansen
Were you about his age?
Spencer
Yes, I guess so.
Hansen
So, he was just in his mid-twenties.
Spencer
May be a little older. He'd had police experience. He had been a prison guard at Dannemora [in New York], that kind of thing.
Hansen
And so he started serving as an informant for you then, but it was after the Tada situation.
Spencer
Yes. I think our association began after; and, you know, you find your information where you can. The only trouble is, I didn't expect him to follow me around the ends of the earth. I brought him to my uncle in San Francisco, because I thought that my uncle could steer him on to something. And I introduced him as a former policeman. And my uncle was one of these gun lovers—the National Rifle Association and that kind of thing—and police, to him, stood for law, order, and the way things ought to be. And Frederick said to me afterwards, "Why did you mention I'm the police?" "My uncle loves it!" (laughter) And, so, I said to him, "Frederick here and I have been associated in this center and would you make him a suggestion where he might go to look for a job?" And Bill said, "Why don't you come work for me?" He took him on at twice the salary that he had made at Gila. So, that meant that Frederick was eternally indebted to me again.
Hansen
How long did he stay working for your uncle, do you know?
Spencer
I have no idea. You see, then I finished my degree at Berkeley and I left. I have no idea, and I never asked my uncle.
Hansen
So, actually, you were glad to sever contact with him?
Spencer
It sounds terribly self-seeking and mean, but I don't mean to be. I feel guilty about him.
Hansen
You explained in one letter to me, when I first brought up Frederick, that in truth, he frightened you a bit.
Yes, he did. Well, there was that police manner.
Hansen
Did he frighten you in any other way, that you thought he was playing a double game? Because later on, in your correspondence, it comes out that you struck up a friendship with Hoffman, and then you felt that Hoffman had actually betrayed the trust.
Spencer
Hoffman approached me, and, yes, you're right. He wanted to be friendly and he wanted cooperation with the study; and he, in turn, would provide things for me and then, suddenly, he called me in and read me the riot act because Charlie Kikuchi was repeating some of the cases that he had in his material. I said, "Don't come to me with it." And then he got mad at me. "You're the Caucasian." In other words, "You're the superior man, the superman." Whereas, the little Jap-wog, why, what value did he have?
Hansen
Did you feel Frederick might be playing a double game with you?
Spencer
I don't think so. No, I don't think so. I didn't then; and, certainly, his behavior afterwards when he came and stayed with me in Berkeley... No.
Hansen
One of the things you say in your letter to Thomas [dated 28 January 1943] is that if there is some problem with people trying to subpoena the project materials, that you had made arrangements to leave the stuff in Frederick's care.
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
So, there was that suggestion of trust in Frederick.
Spencer
I trusted him, yes, yes.
Hansen
Dorothy Swaine Thomas wrote back to you [30 January 1943] and closed her letter as follows: "Got another swell report from Frank." Sort of seems, like we were talking about before, that she was encouraging the competition. In this letter, too, Thomas mentioned having made cordial connections with Embree. Now, in your correspondence, you talk about getting feelers from different people as to your being hired by Embree as a community analyst for WRA.
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
And that ultimately, I guess, Embree didn't want people who he thought were loyal to a different project, but rather wanted to start people out fresh with him.
Spencer
I don't know about that. It was just a suggestion that was made, and I decided not to follow it up. I didn't want to be employed by the WRA. After all, I had freedom. I could move in and out of the center. I could work at things as long as I chose or not. I could pick my own areas of investigation.
Hansen
Your salary would have been much improved with the WRA.
Spencer
Well, sure. But, then, I wasn't too concerned about that.
Hansen
Your draft status might have been better protected if you were with the WRA.
Spencer
I don't think so.
Hansen
You don't think so?
Spencer
I don't think so. That was another consideration because others on the WRA staff were drafted right out from under. And I had this relation with my Santa Fe draft board, and, yes, did well...
In reading your correspondence with Thomas I've tried to understand your motive in raising the issue of your possible employment with WRA. I finally deduced that it was the one bit of leverage that you could get, vis-à-vis Dorothy Thomas. First of all, your draft status—she had gone to bat for you once—was coming up again in six months.
Spencer
She went to bat for me again.
Hansen
You were also getting some comments from her now and again that seemed a bit judgmental, if not censorious, so I felt maybe you were mentioning that you had other opportunities to provide greater leverage for yourself.
Spencer
No, I had no leverage. I didn't try to exert any. Don't you see, I viewed this as a field experience and a stepping stone. And I thought when I had enough material that I might ultimately use, that I would pull out and go back to school. And if I was going to be drafted, well, all right, I would be drafted then. It couldn't be helped. But, okay. No, I was quite candid about the whole thing.
Hansen
So you had some loyalties to her that you felt?
Spencer
Yes, I had loyalties to the study. I did.
Hansen
And even to Dorothy Thomas for what she did to protect your draft status?
Spencer
Well, yes, that she took me on when I was an essentially unfledged graduate student, not too well acquainted with the people in anthropology yet, and she was satisfied. She took me on, and I felt loyalty toward her. I still do. She got mad at me a number of times.
Hansen
But it seemed like the way she got mad at you was almost in a maternal, caring way. She didn't seem like she was really mad at you.
Spencer
Yes, I think she recognized that I was genuinely suffering and at times, terribly anxious, terribly depressed. And I'm not a person that's easily depressed, but the situation there at Gila was depressing.
Hansen
In fact, I quite admire the way she did handle some of the situations that you brought to her attention. I think she listened to them and let you know that she was concerned about you, even if, at the same time, she had to reiterate something and spell it out to you in clear terms, "I have the situation well in hand. Don't worry yourself about it."
Spencer
I remember those words of admonition, and I'm not averse to them. I don't resent them at all. I think they were well-taken.
Hansen
Beginning in January and February, of 1943, things were getting to the point where you had bottomed out, insofar as your feelings went, on the project. Let me give you some indication of what I'm talking about. You said, in a letter to Thomas dated January 31, 1943: "There seems no doubt that we have reached the end of our rope so far as the WRA is concerned. All of this, I think, is directly due to Embree's jealousy of the material to be obtained in the relocation centers. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm beginning to be extremely uncomfortable here. LeBarron in reports is beginning to put the bite on me for material. Nice as pie to my face, he talks to the other members of the staff to the effect that my presence here is suffered.... It may appear that I am unduly worried over LeBarron but I don't think I am. You see, he has the support of project director Bennett in this. Bennett is apparently unable to understand the relation of the study to the WRA and expects more cooperation than I can justly give. No one had told Bennett about us and even though I have had talks with him he still is more or less unaware of what we are trying to do. I can reckon Bennett as an enemy and the insidious whisperings of LeBarron don't help much.... I, unwanted guest that I am, have been moved four times since Thursday.... I think that LeBarron, who fancies himself something of an anthropologist, he wrote the phenomenal accounts of the discovery of King Tut's tomb and the like which have appeared so sloppily in Hearst's American Weekly, will be impressed by Lowie
Spencer
I was being paranoid, I think, unquestionably. I told you yesterday I saw the emergence of the social [community] analysts under Embree's direction as definitely threatening to the...Not so much perhaps to the acquisition or the sequestration of our data at that point, as rather in competition with it. And that was stupid of me. I didn't have enough life experience to recognize that people could work on the same thing and perhaps come up with different conclusions. In fact, I guess I've always done that. And I guess most anthropologists do. I am best known for my work with the Eskimos of north Alaska, regardless of my interest in Buddhism or anything else. And there I have been an ethnographer in the field, and I've always regarded the Eskimo of northern Alaska as my particular bailiwick. And I admit that my colleagues in Eskimology share that view, "That's my sphere. That's my domain." And I was reflecting that attitude, that proprietary attitude, when I wrote this letter. It was a really stupid letter to write.
Hansen
But it's the anthropologist's "my people" sense here?
Spencer
Exactly, exactly. And you've got to remember, today there are, what? Five hundred natives in a tribe in New Guinea, and two hundred anthropologists studying them all at the same time. And it is kind of ridiculous. At that time, though...I remember when I went to a meeting in 1947, there were 250 people there. And that was the American Anthropological Association. You go to a meeting now, there's 7,000. I don't like it, but that's a fact of life.
Hansen
And there was a great call on the services of the ones who were available at the time, right?
Spencer
Exactly. And, consequently, I was apprehensive; I was paranoid, clearly; and I saw...Well, then, Jim Barnett came along, as part of that Embree crew. Embree didn't stay with it long. I think he got into the Navy right off, right away quick. And I don't know who headed the Social [Community] Analysis Section.
Hansen
Spicer.
Spencer
Did Ned do that?
Hansen
Yes.
Spencer
Oh, I didn't even know that. I knew Ned very well, but, I...Hmm! You surprised me. I'd forgotten that, or didn't know it, or whatever. My dealings with Ned Spicer were quite good over a number of issues. We talked many years later. We sat down and compared our notes on the Japanese relocation thing and...
Hansen
And he'd spent a lot of time with Leighton in Poston, so he knew the situation.
Spencer
Yes, well Ned worked with the Yaqui and the Mayo in Sonora and wrote that book Cycles of Conquest[:The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533-1960 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1962)]. He was an applied anthropologist, primarily, and a darn good one. He came out of the University of Chicago tradition, Radcliffe-Brown. It's different from the tradition in which I grew up, but I knew him well, I liked him, he liked me, as far as I could tell.
Hansen
Didn't he end up at [the University of] Arizona [in Tucson, Arizona] because he had tuberculosis or a bronchial disorder or something?
Spencer
No, he had cancer.
Oh, cancer.
Spencer
It was very slow in developing. They had to remove a whole section of his lower jaw. Dreadful, anyway. No, he'd been at Arizona before.
Hansen
Yes, but I mean I thought he'd originally gone there prior to the war because of his health.
Spencer
That may well be, I don't know.
Hansen
A lot of this letter from you to Thomas that I've just quoted from doesn't seem to be reflective of paranoia on your part, really.
Spencer
Well, all right. Then, Jim Barnett came along, a sociologist from Harvard. He was then already teaching at [the University of] Connecticut [at Storrs, Connecticut]. I've seen him a couple of times since; but, Dorothy said "cooperate." Right, that's what you want. So, when Jim came, Jim had a room down the hall from me at that time. He sat and talked to me and I filled him full of data on everything, outlined the history of the project, allowed him to see some of the reports I had written. And he and I became very, very close friends. We really did.
Hansen
But then you were sad because he took off.
Spencer
Yes, I was very sad when he took off. In fact, he took off because of me. He said, "What's the use of my being here? Spencer has it all."
Hansen
You had some objective situations, though, that you could be disturbed by. It seems clear that LeBarron was not a friend of yours.
Spencer
No, he was not.
Hansen
And it does, indeed, seem that since Bennett was incompetent, LeBarron perhaps had more power than he might otherwise have had.
Spencer
Quite correct. But, whatever the reason—and I heard this now for the first time on that testimony LeBarron gave against Bennett's wishes. That was news to me. But I know that LeBarron left suddenly.
Hansen
Well, I got that information actually from, you know, your letters. This is how I found that out.
Spencer
Oh.
Hansen
Yes. So, it's something that I picked up from you.
Spencer
Well, at any rate, Lowie came to Gila. Lew Korn was very interested in meeting Lowie. And Lew and I drove to the airport...train. I flew from Berkeley to Phoenix several times. And, yet, I think Lowie took the train. I know the Thomases took the train. Air travel was still relatively new. We were flying DC-3s.
Hansen
I believe that you had nice things to say in your letters about air travel then, which interested me.
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
You were getting to a position at this point in Gila where you needed a friend, though, and this was where you ran into Hoffman. You said, in a letter of February 2, 1943, to Dorothy Thomas: "I think Hoffman is to be regarded as a more powerful ally than Bennett. Now that [John C.] Henderson is gone, I've got to have some substantial backer in the administrative staff and it might as well be Hoffman, unpopular though as he is." So, I mean, you recognized the danger in having Hoffman be your protector, but, on the
Spencer
Yes, and then it turned out that Hoffman was anything but a protector. But, he suddenly turned on our study and—suddenly, no. I don't think he ever was on our side. We were going to cooperate, that was all. And I went into his office several times. We sat and talked and then he called me in and upbraided me because Charlie Kikuchi had used these case data and I, as I say, said to Hoffman, "Don't come to me."
Hansen
Deal with him on that, right?
Spencer
Yes. I'm not his boss.
Hansen
Then, on February 5, you wrote to Dorothy: "LeBarron has reached the ear of the project director and has urged that I be prevented from remaining here." You see, there was also the business whereby you were moved four times in a week. "This situation is further complicated by the inadequacy of housing. I have been thrust into a room with the Chief Electrician on the project, a horrible, drunken, old man who speaks very badly against the Japanese, something about which, as you know, I've become very sensitive.... I never realized how much Henderson protected me." Do you even remember that drunken chief electrician who you once shared quarters with at Gila?
Spencer
I remember him, yes. Well, I was thrust into a room with him. And he just sat there every night and swilled down whiskey, and then he'd do his work hung-over and miserable, in the heat, if you can imagine. It's well to stay away from booze in that climate. Beer, okay. But he said, I remember, he said, "What do you do?" And I tried to explain. It was obvious that he was going to be difficult to explain to because he wasn't receptive. He said, "Well, these fuckers, they're not grateful. We've put up this camp for them. What do they care? They'd tear the whole thing apart tomorrow. Those goddamn Japs!" And on, and on, and on, you know. It was that kind of vituperative indictment of the evacuee. And it was to that room that the [Issei] woman who wanted to seduce me would go.
Hansen
Oh, gee! (laughter)
Spencer
So, even if I'd been amenable, which I was not, I would never know but that he would come stumbling in. (laughter) Oh, God! It was cold. Oh! What's the date of that letter?
Hansen
This was February 5.
Spencer
I don't think I've ever been so cold in my life. I didn't have enough blankets. I wrapped myself up in newspaper. The temperature was down to about 35, you know, in the desert. All right, so it went up in the 80s during the day, but at night it was killing.
Hansen
Now, who was this Henderson again, and how did he protect you?
Spencer
Well, I don't really know what his official function was.
Hansen
Do you remember him at all?
Spencer
Oh, very, very well. He was married to a Mexican lady, a very charming lady, and he had seven children. And six of those children were well into their teens and they were...wherever they lived. I don't know where they lived. But the youngest one, Carmen, Carmen-sita, she was there in the center and everybody idolized her, the evacuees as well as the staff. A very cute little girl, about three. And I used to converse in Spanish with Mrs. Henderson, a nice opportunity. As a matter of fact, I taught Spanish at Gila.
Hansen
For the adult education program?
Spencer
At the center, yes, for Mendel Lieberman. And, yes, that was fun.
You know, you mentioned that Henderson's wife was Mexican American, a Chicana.
Spencer
Right.
Hansen
And there's some other reference, in your letters, to a black nurse who was hired at Gila. Do you remember any other ethnic groups, aside from Caucasian and Japanese, at Gila?
Spencer
I would hardly consider Mrs. Henderson a Chicana. She was of that background, to be sure, but she'd been married for so long to Henderson. She had been pretty much assimilated. And, yes, there was a black nurse. I don't think she stayed long. She was over in Canal anyway.
Hansen
But you don't remember any other teachers or anyone else who were of different ethnic ancestry?
Spencer
No, I really don't. I really don't. I remember Caucasian wives of evacuees who chose to be evacuated.
Hansen
Did you use any of them as informants, relative to their own situation?
Spencer
I talked to one at some length, and asked her about her feelings about it. She was a woman in her late forties, I would say, who had been married for twenty years to this chap.
Hansen
And how did that go?
Spencer
Very happy marriage, and she wasn't going to leave him. He got evacuated, and by God, she was going along. Now, Henderson was a pretty decent chap. He was there from the very beginning. I mean, he didn't bring his family right away. When we were over in Canal, Landward and he and I and Bob Young—no. This guy who was a ballet dancer. I can't think of his name. I remember it begins with Y [Robert K. Yeaton].
Hansen
I can see very clearly why you wanted to leave Gila after awhile. I mean, probably you wanted to leave the camp from the beginning, in a certain sense; but, then, one of the things that you mentioned in your correspondence was that early on there was the pioneering sort of spirit, in spite of all the objective, negative things. You were saying that there was a closeness among the appointed personnel, and there was a lot more "fraternizing"—to use Bennett's term—between the evacuees and the appointed personnel.
Spencer
Yes, well, for example, Henderson, Landward, and I would go over on like a Friday, Saturday night to the recreation halls where they would have dances. Now, we would dance with the Japanese girls, and the girls didn't like it much. They didn't like to be singled out by a Caucasian. But nonetheless we did, and we danced, and we tried to create a benign atmosphere. And we did consciously. And Henderson engineered that, and I think his heart was in the right place.
Hansen
But then Bennett wanted none of that, correct?
Spencer
Absolutely not. So that was terminated. And this tended to throw the administrative personnel back on its own resources. And I think part of their own demoralization and disintegration—and I think I fairly call it that—came because of the isolation which was imposed from on high.
Hansen
It's kind of interesting that later on, after you left, when, you know, [Hugo] Wolter came in—and he'd been there while you were there for awhile—but he tried to reinsinuate this fraternizing principle and he convinced, or overrode Bennett, and was able to get this going. But after awhile he ended up getting bounced for it and they went back to this segregated caste system within the camp. But he was another one who could see the wisdom of it.
Spencer
Yes. His heart was in the right place, definitely. As I said, ex-Lutheran minister, and a decent, decent chap, I think overly psychoanalytic in his approach to things. He insisted we could use psychoanalytic methodology in our social analyses, but he didn't tell me how.
Well, by February 5, 1943, it was getting cold in Gila, as you remarked in a letter carrying that date to Dorothy Thomas. And at this point, too, you were experiencing the winter of your discontent with the situation there. Gaba was going to be transferred; he was being forced out of office. Korn was leaving to... well, at that time you thought he was going to Moab as project director of that temporary isolation center. He never did. They got this guy Ray Best to do that, as you found out from Frederick. So people in the administration at Gila were being forced out and you were starting this misalliance with Hoffman. And Dorothy Thomas was coming down pretty strongly on you because she wanted you just to pay attention to your job and not worry about what was going on in terms of the overall direction of the study.
Spencer
All very well for her to say. She didn't have to face these things daily. You know, these letters are—however extreme or exaggerated they may appear, and they do appear so to me now from this vantage point—I feel that I had no one, really, to pour my soul out to.
Hansen
Especially at this point because your "soul mates," so to speak, were leaving.
Spencer
Well, that, but even so, I couldn't effectively use Charlie. He'd be the one person who was the staunch rock, I would say. But Charlie himself was caught up in these things. And I had hoped to find some point in relation to Hoffman that would let Hoffman see what it was that we were doing. And it didn't work. I mean, Hoffman was a company man, who pretended not to be. That was one reason I talked to Barnett with such freedom. I needed someone like that. And I would write to Dorothy and I'd pour out my misgivings and my fears and apprehensions and anxieties.
Hansen
Sometimes two letters in one day.
Spencer
Yes, yes.
Hansen
You know, in the midst of this maelstrom, what happened? The Lowies decided to come to Gila. And you were not wanting them down there. You were not in favor of them coming at that point. There was no available housing and there was a gasoline shortage. So, you didn't know where they were going to stay or how they were going to get transported. After the Lowies left, you wrote [on 12 February 1943] to Thomas: "I'm very much afraid that the Lowies' visit was rather ill-timed and that it has not been as advantageous to the study as you had hoped it would be. In the first place, I was never able to secure accommodations for the Lowies on the project and although Korn gave official permission for them to stay, Bennett and Hoffman raised objections inasmuch as permits to reside on the project have been banned for other visitors of this kind.... Although Lowie met with favorable reception from many of the administrative staff, nevertheless, he took a positive stance in arguing with Bennett on the subject of the loyalty of the Nisei. A rather ticklish situation arose which I don't think Lowie himself realizes when in his address before the Young Buddhist Association group, he mentioned that controversial subject of the Japanese language and teaching of the Japanese language in the centers, emphasizing the fact that it's not necessary for the marginal man to discard his original culture in order to assimilate himself in the American scene. Although he pointed out that this was a cultural and not a political consideration, there were a number of Kibei in the audience of over 300 who were already tending to use the sanction that he gave for the teaching of the Japanese language to bring pressure on the administration." So, Lowie came in there to Gila and impressed LeBarron favorably...
Spencer
And Korn.
Hansen
And Korn. But, now all of a sudden, you had Bennett out of sorts over Lowie's visit. And Hoffman, too. Do you recall the situation?
Spencer
Oh, indeed I do. Indeed I do. And, you see, George Matsuura... Well, I no sooner got the Lowies in the camp and Louella Lowie said to me, "Where's George?" And, so, I took them over to his barracks. And Lowie, meanwhile, he had big, flat, feet, and he wore high ankle shoes and he wore a suit, a dark suit.
Hansen
Right there at the Gila camp.
In the dust. And these shiny, high shoes. And he walked splay-footed. He was a heavy man, and so incapable of using his body effectively. He could run rings around social structure, but when it came to hammering a nail, why, that's the European male for you. They don't learn these things. And, by the same token, he didn't know how to walk properly. I often wondered how he made out with the Crow Indians. Anyway, so, we no sooner... "Where's George?" All right, so, we walked out in the midday heat over to George's barrack, which was some distance away. He saw us coming and he rushed up. They embraced and they were kissing and loving each other up. She no sooner got in there, "George, George," and they got down in a corner of the sofa and... Remember she was a woman in her sixties.
Hansen
Oh, really? Oh, wow.
Spencer
Yes, and here was little George, and they were making out and kissing and hugging each other, and she was crying and he was crying and then they were kissing some more. It was very embarrassing.
Hansen
This was going on right in front of Lowie?
Spencer
Yes. So then, meanwhile, I had set this up with George, knowing that they were coming. And George arranged then for Lowie to give a talk at the Buddhist church. It was packed to overflowing. It was a whole barrack, a whole, full barrack, with pews, benches knocked together. And Lowie, yes, made those remarks. And, of course, Lowie was a superb lecturer, a very, very, very polished lecturer. And he gave a very polished talk. And I thought the point was well taken.
Hansen
It was also badly taken—by Bennett! You gave a talk one time at Gila. I remember seeing an item in the Gila camp newspaper during my research. It said, you know, something like "Anthropologist To Speak," I can't remember who sponsored it. But it interested me because the thrust of your talk was to encourage Americanization; it had the same drift as what you were saying earlier in this interview.[54] And I was just wondering how that was received in a community that, at that particular time, was having, you know, such hostile attitudes toward the JACL group who advocated the same thing.
Spencer
I don't know. I don't remember giving the talk. I gave many. And that one was mentioned in the paper, all right. I don't think I got any flak from it.
Hansen
I was just wondering if the editors of the paper—it was run by JACL people—chose to emphasize that point in the headlines.
Spencer
Well, they may well have done that. They were always asking me to talk about Indians. I had addressed practically every grade in school on the subject of Indians.
Hansen
So you did a lot of teaching in the camp, then, as well as doing your work for JERS?
Spencer
Well, then I taught this course in Spanish.
Hansen
Yes, but you gave a lot of talks, and would lecture at the camp schools and things like that.
Spencer
Well, yes. I tried to be part of the community, and if I was asked to speak, I would do it.
Hansen
Did you ever speak in front of an Issei group?
Spencer
Oh, many times, many times.
Hansen
About Indians?
Spencer
Yes, yes. About Indians, about ethnicity, and that kind of thing, and then about prospects for the future. And then I was asked to talk about relocation. I spoke out strongly against the establishment of Little Tokyos. I said, "Don't do it. You're just identifying yourself and look what's happened to you now because you did it in the past." My advice was to get away from that. Maybe I wouldn't have been so forceful, but
Hansen
This was all happening when the so-called loyalty registration was starting, so, why don't we discuss that situation next.
Spencer
What was the date of the start of registration?
Hansen
The beginning of February, maybe about February 10, or so.
Spencer
Well, the rumors had been leading up to that. And that's why in December [1942] I was already predicting an upheaval.
Hansen
Well, what the Army started to do earlier than that was to come into camp to recruit volunteers for the military language institute, and there was a flap over that. And there was talk, too, about reinstituting the draft at some point. And the JACL had a big meeting in Salt Lake City in December and that was one of the resolutions passed there. And, so, things were starting to heat up.
Spencer
I remember, I remember. There were those saying, "Under no circumstances, with the way this government has treated me, I will not in any way serve this government." That was the prevailing mood, but then there were the oppositions to it.
Hansen
Was Kikuchi classified as 4-F or 4-C?
Spencer
I don't know.
Hansen
So he might have been subject to the draft, too.
Spencer
I don't know. I think he did go into the Army later on, after he got out of the center and went to Chicago.
Hansen
You did mention here [a letter dated 12 February 1943 to Dorothy Thomas], "I think it well... to mention the fact that Lowie very quickly saw what was going on in the community and that, as I say, his sympathetic and kindly attitude won him many friends from among the evacuee population, because Bennett has insisted upon maintaining a Caucasian oligarchy and suppressing the evacuee independence, any attempts to do what might be called fraternizing are viewed with disfavor. In the same sense, I find myself in a somewhat awkward position so far as Bennett's concerned." So, this was where you were at at the time. And in this same letter, you mentioned that the registration had begun. So, Lowie and Charlie and yourself attended the first meeting, at which this Captain Thompson spoke. And Landward was there. Bennett was there, also, so Lowie had a chance to see exactly the dynamics of the internees' feelings against the registration.
Spencer
Lowie was always sensitive to that kind of thing. That's what made him a good ethnographer. He was very sensitive to it. But let me backtrack a second.
Hansen
Sure.
Spencer
Who came first to Gila? Was it the Lowies or the Thomases?
Hansen
The Thomases came first.
Spencer
So the Thomases had already been there.
Hansen
Yes, originally they were going to come together but then Lowie pulled out. And, so then the Lowies came separately at a later date.
Spencer
I see. I see. And Lowie then came in February.
Right.
Spencer
And the Thomases had been there in January.
Hansen
Right.
Spencer
Yes, okay. This is interesting. Could I clarify something else? Now Fryer was acting director for about six weeks and then he was replaced in that job by Cozzens.
Hansen
For a very short time.
Spencer
Equally a very short time.
Hansen
And then Bennett was appointed as the director.
Spencer
So that Bennett must have come in in November [1942], I suspect.
Hansen
Right. And then remember, during this whole period of time, Hoffman had been there. So, in spite of the proliferation of directors, you had an assistant director there in place. And, then, Korn, too, had been pretty much there for the duration. But now those people, Korn and Landward and some of the others whom you had originally known, began to leave.
Spencer
Landward got drafted.
Hansen
Right. Before it was just the main leadership that was being decapitated but now, actually, the whole administrative structure was being dismantled.
Spencer
Yes, but Hoffman remained.
Hansen
And Hoffman remained.
Spencer
All right. Now then, in November, or perhaps December would be more reasonable, I went to Bennett. I made an appointment with him and went to see him and I explained who I was and what I was doing, and made my usual protests of cooperation, et cetera, et cetera. And Bennett had no more an idea of, you know, what I was or what I was doing than he did of integral calculus. But... Dummy! At any rate, that was when he gave me this long song and dance about how friendly he was to the Japs because Mrs. Yusa, Earle's mother, used to wash his underpants for him, or something like that. Oh, my God! Well, okay. Meanwhile, I had, I guess, run afoul of Hoffman. And Hoffman bad-mouthed me to Bennett and our project. Now, I don't know at what point I was trying to make overtures to Hoffman.
Hansen
Just before this, right, it's when you sensed that others were leaving and, like you said, you never knew how much Henderson had protected you. Henderson was going. It looked like Korn was going, and, so, you were being left without support.
Spencer
Right, right. I thought I could count on Hoffman and I found I couldn't.
Hansen
And you knew the evacuees didn't like Hoffman, but this was a calculated risk.
Spencer
Well, at least, I quickly saw I couldn't get anywhere with Bennett.
Hansen
Yes, and I think you probably felt that Hoffman—and quite rightly so—was angling for the directorship and that also that Hoffman was an infinitely more capable person, however inadequate, than Bennett.
Spencer
Quite. So, then Dorothy came and, meanwhile, I was persona non grata with Bennett. I knew that. I'd go out of my way to avoid him and I had to go to the post office or something and, if I knew he was there,
Hansen
Fast, at that.
Spencer
Yes. Secondly, Lowie came and proceeded to stir up the situation all over again. And I think Lew Korn kind of played that down and said, "Look, you can't do this to a world-famous anthropologist." So, anyway, I continued to be there by sufferance. But, my dealings with Bennett then... I brought Lowie in to meet Bennett, and that was where part of this hassle arose.
Hansen
Doesn't that situation seem like rather an anomalous one to you?
Spencer
Well, what were you going to do? You had a very famous man and you tried to think of Bennett as occupying a position of power anyway.
Hansen
I thought it was interesting that in your correspondence you mentioned a couple of times when you talked to Bennett about the project and achieved some sort of understanding. And, then, you know, a month later he told you that he had never heard of your study. He comes across like he was a complete airhead.
Spencer
Oh, he was... I don't know how they selected him.
Hansen
Well, you said this about Bennett here [letter to Dorothy Thomas dated 12 February 1943], for example: "Bennett himself is at an utter loss to understand the attitudes which are expressed here." And this was right when what was happening at Gila was the registration. The cross-currents in the community were incredible. And when this Captain Thompson was going around the camp and holding meetings with the various sections of the population, he was accompanied by a Nisei sergeant. You indicated in your letters to Thomas that at the meetings these two were hissed and booed and that they could hardly get through the meetings they held with the Kibei. You know, the Army had to bring in appointed personnel and MPs and everything just to guarantee that the meetings went somewhat smoothly. And, then, Bennett had no sense of what in the heck was happening.
Spencer
Bennett's idea was that... well, these are American citizens, aren't they? Well, they should be willing to serve their country. What are they objecting to? Everybody is subject to the draft, et cetera. Oh, what a nut!
Hansen
Do you remember going to any of those meetings? Have the years that have passed since then completely wiped out any recollection of the recruitment meetings with the Japanese?
Spencer
I remember them.
Hansen
Because apparently you attended a couple of them.
Spencer
I don't know that I have anything to add, but I was just aware of the resentment.
Hansen
Did these meetings make your job infinitely more difficult to accomplish?
Spencer
I didn't feel so.
Hansen
They didn't?
Spencer
Not that.
Okay.
Spencer
I don't know. By that time, my reputation with the evacuees was fairly secure.
Hansen
Part of that reputation was also anti-military, wasn't it?
Spencer
Yes, yes, because of that initial experience with the military. Now, the military presence was, in essence, withdrawn and relegated to the outer perimeters of the project, so you really weren't conscious of the military.
Hansen
So, after awhile, they had faded out of the picture.
Spencer
Yes. And so, my objection to the military presence... Well, you know, I wasn't a hot-eyed anti-militarist. But, again, we were in a war situation; and, yet, I could understand and sympathize with the attitude of the evacuees. Good Lord, they were shoved around. Now they were getting shoved around again.
Hansen
And at the same time, here Hoffman, the person who you thought would be favorably inclined toward you, apparently, or so you said, "hates Charlie." In your February 12 letter to Thomas you observed: "Moreover, since Charlie has emphasized his typical evacuee attitude and was caught stealing council minutes, Hoffman is rather displeased." And so, what really drove you, I think, more and more toward Frederick was the fact that you lost any other contact. You said, "I have had a good informant in Fredericks in Internal Security and people don't like him either. He's being railroaded out of here and transferred to Tule Lake very shortly. The fact that Williamson knows that I have been using Fredericks as an informant has not done me much good. LeBarron continues to be annoying, although I think I underestimated his abilities. He's been more kindly disposed since Lowie's visit since he was apparently extremely impressed by Lowie, even though he persisted in calling him `Lowrie', and yet, oddly enough, he considers himself to be an anthropologist. I think that I'm getting temperamental, too, and becoming more and more of an evacuee everyday." (laughter)
Spencer
And then Dorothy would write me back and say, "But, by God, you're not an evacuee! Shut up!"
Hansen
That's right.
Spencer
But, yes, that was true. Now, that was a fairer letter. And, actually, yes, you're right. Everybody was gone. And a new crop came in, like the foul-mouthed social worker and so on. But, those were all minor figures. We had all these visitors from Washington. I saw Mrs. [Eleanor] Roosevelt, she came to Gila, you know, that sort of thing.
Hansen
This is the third session in a continuing interview by Arthur A. Hansen with Dr. Robert F. Spencer for the Japanese American Project of the Oral History at California State University, Fullerton. It is July 17, 1987, and the time is 10 a.m. This session, like the earlier two, is being conducted in Dr. Spencer's home in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Bob, I see in your letter to Lowie of February 18, 1943, an allusion to "our friend, Reverend Ochi." So, apparently, you had introduced Ochi to Lowie when he came to Gila and the two of them had talked together.
Spencer
George Matsuura took care of that.
Hansen
Can you enlarge a bit on Ochi? Earlier you talked about how Lowie had demonstrated his ability to be able to question an informant.
Spencer
That was with Miura.
With Miura, right. But what about with Ochi?
Spencer
Well, Ochi was interesting. I believe he was married, but his wife was not there at Gila. Perhaps she was in Japan or perhaps he had come as a missionary from Japan and been caught by the war. I have the feeling that was it. He spoke no English whatsoever. He was a man, I'd say, in his forties, rather vigorous. Unlike Suzuki, who looked like the next strong wind would blow him into the next county. He was a classic Japanese. Handsome. Looked like a medieval scroll. A samurai face, long nose, and well defined mouth, chin. His eyelids were heavy and, yet, he didn't have a pronounced eye fold. Very handsome man, by Japanese standards, and by ours, too. And nothing ruffled him. He sat and meditated, as a Zen priest would. What his role vis-à-vis Suzuki was, I don't know. But then he got caught screwing Mrs. Suzuki; he was seen doing it through the window of the barracks.
Hansen
At the time you were talking about Ochi in this letter to Lowie, you were telling him something that you told to Dorothy Thomas and wrote in a report at much greater length. You said, "On Tuesday the FBI moved in and apprehended twenty-eight of the subversive Issei and Kibei leaders and took them off of the project to be placed in internment camps."
Spencer
Date?
Hansen
This is February 18. This was right at the time of the registration furor.
Spencer
Just a second. When did the memorable questions twenty-seven, twenty-eight come in?
Hansen
Right at this time. And this was right at the height of this so-called registration crisis.
Spencer
Yes, as I recall, they were questions relating to disavowal of any foreign allegiance and...
Hansen
Willingness to serve, wherever asked.
Spencer
Willingness to serve, yes. That was part of the registration complex. Now, you asked me yesterday whether I had attended any of those meetings. Yes, I had, because those two crucial questions came up, and there was remarkable division of opinion as to whether you could register and still leave those questions out, not answer those questions, qualify them, et cetera. And that was the big issue, and I thought it was bureaucratic bungling, myself. It'd be so easy to get around that without making such a big deal out of it. But then, when it became a big deal, obviously then the government had to stand; and, if it retracted, it would, as the government saw it, lose face with the Japanese. And, because the Japanese talked about face and losing face—which is rather overdone—the WRA and the Army and all the bureaus immediately latched onto this saving face idea vis-à-vis the Japanese.
Hansen
In your JERS correspondence and reports, you described pretty graphically the round-up in the two camps, and the FBI coming in there with the military police, and with WRA officials from the project, and them collectively moving the alleged internee dissidents out of the center in a matter of minutes.
Spencer
And so on, yes.
Hansen
Was that round-up something that you witnessed?
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
Is it still something that you can recall in some detail?
Spencer
Well, you couldn't get near it. They cordoned off a street between barracks. You know the barracks faced onto a sort of a common area, and then there were the washing facilities, showers, and so on... all that was in the middle.
Right.
Spencer
And they cordoned off the whole street so that you could stand in the next street and see them just come in, grab somebody, put them in a truck; and, meanwhile, the MPs were there with rifles, ready to defend any... That was all. That was all there was to see. It was over in a matter of minutes. I mean, they swept through the camp. They had the names; they had the places; they had the...I don't know, but they evidently went through earlier in the day and found out where each person would be at a given time, because they pulled some out of mess halls, pulled others out of offices.
Hansen
But it was just a surgical kind of removal, then. I mean, very quick and without a lot of fanfare.
Spencer
Yes. Now, I'm confused in my mind because there was the removal to Moab and then the removal to Tule Lake; these were separate issues.
Hansen
Well, the people who they picked up at this time were the ones who, actually, they ended up taking to Moab.
Spencer
I see.
Hansen
Moab was for citizens. The Issei they took to Lordsburg, which was an internment camp in New Mexico for aliens. The Kibei—because this was Issei and Kibei that they picked up—were taken to Moab.
Spencer
Was this the time when Frederick took that group to Moab?
Hansen
Yes, this was the way that Williamson got rid of Frederick—assigning him the job of transporting these people who they picked up over to Moab.
Spencer
[F. J.] Graves [Associate Director of Internal Security] also.
Hansen
Graves also went over there to Moab at this time, I think, but...
Spencer
Graves came back.
Hansen
Graves came back to Gila, and Frederick stayed at Moab and ran the internal security operation over there, and then later at Leupp.
Spencer
That's right, that's right. And then continued to write to me to inform me of his adventures.
Hansen
Right, and I was just wondering. There's a couple of things here. One, you had a very close contact with Frederick. You also must have known quite a few of the ones who were picked up, because a lot of them were Kibei Club members and sumo wrestlers. So, I just wondered if you recall any individuals who meant something to you, acquaintances of yours, being picked up.
Spencer
I don't think so. The trouble is, there are so many faces that drift in and out there, I don't even remember who was taken. I think there's a list.
Hansen
Well, you actually provided a very clear description of this round-up in the letter you wrote to Dorothy Thomas on February 18, 1943. You said: "The Canal round-up was completed in about twenty minutes. Nine Issei were taken and one Kibei. The Issei were, as nearly as I can tell, as follows: Hirokani, who figured so prominently in the Tada beating; Tani, the apparent head of the Kenkyu-kai, an agent for the Rocky Nippon newspaper who had emerged as a leader at the time of the Tada beating; Fujimoto, the Issei advisor to the Kibei Club and head of the Sumo Club; Okamoto and Katagawa, Judo leaders; one woman by the name of Mrs. Matsuda, who had been most active at the time of the hearing of Hirokani in that she supported actively the justification for Tada's assault; and three others who are not known to me. The one Kibei who was taken was a man named Akimoto, who is president of the Kibei Club.... The case against him was not clear, but he was taken anyway."
Yes, that's right.
Hansen
You were then living in Butte, and you said this about the round-up in that camp: "Six Issei were taken. They were Dyo, leader of the Kyowa-kai; Ototaro Yamamoto, whom I have mentioned so frequently as a leader of the Issei, his lieutenant Ando."
Spencer
Oh, that one!
Hansen
"And three others who were rather out-spoken in their pro-Axis expressions. Twelve Kibei were taken from Butte and, of course, the first one nabbed was George Yamashiro." And then you say, parenthetically, "Poor George, and all my source of information gone." And you continue: "Yamashiro's lieutenant, Victor Inouye, the president of the Sumo Club and vice president of the Kibei Club, Fukumoto; and nine Kibei officers. The round-up in Butte took place just as quickly as the round-up in Canal. The six cars circled the camp, picked up the individuals concerned in no time at all. Yamashiro and his cohorts were arrested in the Kibei Club room. Of course in both camps news of the round-up spread quickly and several individuals who knew that they would be taken or feared that they would hid. About fifty people have remained in hiding for the last two days. Several people were hidden by their friends, and have not, as yet, been apprehended. Two more were taken from Butte on Wednesday. On Tuesday, several people barricaded themselves in their apartments and refused to come out. A gun jammed through the windowpane quickly broke the resistance. No one was allowed in or out of houses concerned while the arrests were taking place. All of the Issei, fifteen of them, are to be interned in the Lordsburg Internment Camp in New Mexico. The thirteen Kibei are to be sent to Moab. The Issei were placed on the train Tuesday night; the Kibei were taken in a truck, driven by Mr. Fredericks, associate Chief of Internal Security here who is now being permanently transferred to Moab. Moab Center is known as a segregation or isolation center. It is run by the WRA under slightly different rules than control the usual relocation centers. No resettlement is to be allowed for these Kibei, and it seems likely that they will be disfranchised and deported after the war."
Spencer
Was that the case? Was that true?
Hansen
Well, thanks to Frederick's disclosures at Leupp, which you were privy to on the study, a lot of the people who otherwise might have ended up in Japan permanently disenfranchised, ended up instead being cleared. Once the Leupp camp was closed, some of them were released to relocation centers other than Gila, and some of them were resettled, and a number of them were sent to the Tule Lake Segregation Center.
Spencer
You mean, some opted to return to Japan?
Hansen
In some cases, they did. But, at that point, it seemed clear that that's where they were ticketed for, and apparently you had a very clear sense of this, you know.
Spencer
I guess, yes, I did. And it comes back to me. I mean, I remember those cars and trucks swooping around the periphery of the center, and then coming in and blocking off the streets. Those crazy military. I said, you know, it was that level of military that they had, incapable of being used in the front line anyway.
Hansen
So Frederick was in on this round-up.
Spencer
Frederick was in on it. And when he came back—he came back to Gila for a visit a couple of times—he was very annoyed at Graves, who grabbed somebody, I don't know who, who was not on the list, who was not proscribed. It may have been Okomoto. Now, George Yamashiro... Yes, I see him before me, but I think I was over-dramatizing there. "My best informant" is ridiculous. I had sort of, it seems to me, a kind of joking relationship with George.
Hansen
Well, he was probably the most powerful Kibei in the entire Gila complex. And, in that, Okomoto, who was in Canal Camp, was the head of the Gila Young People's Association, which was the Kibei Club.
The Seinen-kai.
Hansen
Right. And they were a much more, you know, accommodating group, and were not as vociferous and outspoken as their counterpart over in Butte. Well, during the time of these hearings, you wrote to Dorothy Thomas, in this same letter from which I have been quoting, a bit about Yamashiro. You said: "I have mentioned George Yamashiro's addressing his own Kibei Club on the subject of enlistment. His openly expressed attitude was one which has been found among many other groups and has been seconded by a majority of the Issei." And he had stood up at a meeting of the Kibei, after the Army team had been to Gila and spoken with the Kibei group, and said, "I cannot advocate anything," being careful not to violate the strictures of the sedition act. "But," he said, "for myself, I would not do this, this, and this." And it was very quickly after that that Bennett and Williamson and the others took a little trip over to Phoenix, saw the FBI, contacted the commandant at the neighboring military police camp, and then this round-up was effected, which you graphically described in your correspondence. You used a term in a letter you sent to Lowie on February 18, and I wonder if you used it advisedly or not. "On Tuesday the FBI moved in and apprehended twenty-eight of the subversive Issei and Kibei leaders." You did not place the word subversive within quote marks. Was that something that you felt was the case, that these leaders were subversive? Because, later on, most of the dockets that were written up by Frederick and sent to you intimated that the only subversive thing they did was to belong to certain organizations.
Spencer
If that was written at the time, I probably would not have put the term in quotes. In other words, I believed that they had taken subversive, troublemaking individuals. I think I honestly did believe that. Look at us today. Here we are at our relatively advanced ages, and we still have faith in our government. You look at these processes; you look at Ronald Reagan, or you look at all the problems that have arisen, you still want to have faith in your institutions. And certainly, being very young at the time, I believed honestly that these were selected out without prejudice, with benefit of investigation, and that it was a legitimate sweep.
Hansen
I wonder who you had faith in at that particular time, because almost all the people involved in the sweep, with the exception of the FBI, were ones you had repeatedly said were ne'er-do-wells, incompetents, and perverse people. I mean, we're talking about the Army, the Military Police, and, in fact, a little bit later...
Spencer
Right. Yes, I know that. But then they were the immediate agents. They were not, as I saw it, the ones who engineered the sweep. That would have been done by a much more responsible element. Look, I didn't think about this very seriously, or care. Here I'm confronted with the reality, and one takes certain things on faith. And my faith was that the government was doing the best it could, under the circumstances of wartime. And, yes, I knew of Yamashiro's activities, and I knew of the activities of many. And, in some measure, I agreed that they were potential troublemakers within the center, at least... subversive, yes.
Hansen
Do you think that Frederick was duplicitous, in that Frederick seemed to not question so much the policy of taking out these people. But, later on, you know, he drummed up the data that got them released.
Spencer
I cannot answer that question. I just don't know. Now, yes, you're quite right. That's exactly what Frederick did. And Frederick, as you pointed out, developed the reputation among the internees of being the tough, first-class SOB. And then, it turns out that he writes gentle letters of recommendation for his charges. I don't know. The man's mind was totally inscrutable. I just couldn't put a finger on it. That was part of the reason why I was suspicious. Suspicious, maybe that's not the right word. Why I was rather stand-offish and chary. I never knew what the guy was going to do, or what stand he was going to take. On the one hand, he professed to be very partial to the evacuees, but on the other, he treated them like dirt. Honestly, I don't know to this day. And it's one of the things that led me to keep Frederick off at arm's length. I was his bosom companion, but he was not mine.
Hansen
What I think is incredible is that two major adversaries in this situation are Frederick, on the one hand, and Yamashiro, on the other. Yamashiro is considered the most vociferous and vocal of the, you know, the "subversive" elements in the camp.
Spencer
Did you ever find out what happened to George Yamashiro?
Yes. He eventually went to Moab, and then to Leupp, and then from Leupp he was released to Tule Lake. And he was very much involved in the strident situation at Tule Lake, and he's talked about in The Spoilage, because he becomes a force at Tule Lake. And then, I believe, he chose to renounce his American citizenship and return to live in Japan. He had gotten married. When he was at Leupp he got released to go back to Gila, and he was at Gila for a short while. And you might have even seen him at that point. He came back to Gila to get married and the Gila administration were very reluctant to permit that. When he did come back, the Gila administration tracked him, and I think they arrested a few of the people he talked to; so, he was very, very suspect. But, what I find interesting is that he and Frederick were at sword points. And, later, Frederick prepared a reasonably positive statement of his character and his conduct at Moab and Leupp that got him some consideration so that he could be released. But, at the time, I think Frederick was very suspicious of him, and might have even conveyed his suspicion to you. But two of your major informants, then, were, on the one hand, Frederick, and on the other hand, Yamashiro. So, you were getting, you know, the point of view of diametrically opposed people.
Spencer
Yes. Just aside, do you know how many Japanese were repatriated after the armistice?
Hansen
Yes, a very large percentage. According to one source that I've read recently [Donald E. Collins, Native American Aliens: Disloyalty and the Renunciation of Citizenship by Japanese Americans during World War II (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1985)], one out of every fourteen Japanese American citizens chose to repatriate. And then almost all of them later on decided that they wanted to undo that process, because it was done under duress. And they got legal assistance from a counsel up in northern California, Wayne Collins.
Spencer
I keep hearing about that.
Hansen
He tried to do things on a class-action basis, but he was frustrated by the activities of other people in the American Civil Liberties Union, and he ended up having to take people through the legal process on an individual case by case basis over a very long period.
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
So, it dragged out for years, maybe twenty-some years.
Spencer
Well, but then in terms of the actual repatriation after 1945, were there many?
Hansen
Well, like I say, a lot of those people did not, you know, get their citizenship back again for a long time.
Spencer
I know that, yes.
Hansen
At Tule Lake, a goodly number of them opted for, you know, repatriation. And it was a huge movement, and that's what caused a lot of the strife up there, that they demanded that Tule Lake truly be a camp that was a segregation camp. And, so they felt that there were too many people who were actually, you know,...
Spencer
Lukewarm about it.
Hansen
Yes, lukewarm, and "loyalists" who had never left Tule Lake [at the time it was converted from a relocation center into a segregation center], or were there for family reasons or convenience. And so they demanded this resegregation movement, and that's when all of these activist groups formed.
Spencer
I was at Tule Lake when that was starting, yes. Have you been up to Tule Lake?
Hansen
No, I've never been to Tule Lake. You mentioned earlier in this interview that you did some work up in the Klamath Falls, [Oregon], area.
Spencer
Later on.
That must have been right in the same territory where the WRA center had been located during the war.
Spencer
There's a change in the vegetation and so on, so that it doesn't seem like the same area. Tule Lake is much more out in the basin. Where I was working was a pine forest.
Hansen
Well, let's see. On February 19, in a letter to Dorothy Thomas, you wrote, "The sentiment in the community is growing to the effect that the men apprehended are martyrs." And the situation, as you write about it after that—very shortly after that—starts to be quieting down. In fact, by February 24, you write this to Thomas: "Oddly enough, our situation is extremely quiet." You say, further, "You'll be surprised to learn that since the round-up of what were thought to be subversive leaders, there has been no difficulty whatsoever." Apparently even the feeling that those who were apprehended were martyrs had died down. And, you continued: "Omachi is a bit worried...for fear that he will be accused of having given the names to the FBI." And you then told Thomas that you didn't think that she needed to worry at all about Kikuchi. "The only cause for his disfavor in the community was, I think, his affiliation with the JACL. The JACL, of course, has pretty much died down and does not promise to be the power that we all thought it might be. All of the JACL people have been more or less obliged to drop into the background.... As I say, the situation is very quiet; but I know now after six months here how unpredictable these community trends are.... A lethargy seems to have hit this community, and when I finish my own report on the story of Army enlistment, I think I shall go back to doing purely anthropological work unless something else pops." Now this was written in the daytime on February 24. That night, on Wednesday evening, was when you wrote the letter to Dorothy Thomas that was, probably, the most desperate letter that you had ever written to her, because this was definitely a letter of disquietude. Here's what you said: "I have had some serious doubts as to whether I should increase your own worries by adding additional ones. In view of an occurrence this afternoon, I think that in order to protect our position here, you should be informed as to what has happened. Charlie and I are in what appears to be serious trouble, not, of course, with the evacuees but rather with the administration. I'm beginning to feel that my own position here is in jeopardy and I have the uncomfortable feeling that I may at any time be hailed into Bennett's office for summary dismissal from the project. Of course, I may be all wrong but I can't help worrying. This whole situation is the result of a chain of circumstances which began some time ago as the follow-up of LeBarron's animosity. I think that you'll agree that I had established pretty amicable relationships with the staff here during my first months at Gila. Unfortunately, the Smiths left, followed by Henderson, now Korn and Landward soon. I had found two excellent sources of information in the liberal persons of Fredericks in Internal Security and in Lieberman in adult education. Lieberman, you will remember, was thought by us when you were here to be a kind of pest. Actually, he has proved really interested and loyal to us. Both he and Fredericks were swell about passing bits of news on to me. Bennett chose the earliest opportunity for transferring Fredericks and because of Lieberman's liberal stand on registration has asked his resignation. See Lieberman's editorial—`Loyalty is not the only issue.' Under Bennett's bigoted despotism, the administration has gone from bad to worse along an extremely conservative line. It's revolting. Unfortunately, I am the stork among the cranes, having been linked with the two, the only helpful associates on the staff that I have had. I made a bid for friendship with Hoffman, something which was perfectly all right and thought I was well-received. Then Lowie had what Bennett considered the temerity to argue on the subject that loyalty might not be the sole issue in this case of registration and enlistment. Hoffman called me in recently to ask about loyalty and I replied that in view of the strong Japanese family ties, loyalty was not so much a primary issue. I feel that I answered satisfactorily. Then Hoffman said, `What do people think of Gaba?' a question which I interpreted as pure interest on Hoffman's part inasmuch as Gaba is his assistant. I may possibly have mentioned before that Gaba is really hated by the bulk of Gila residents. It is said by some that Tada's beating was aimed to discredit Gaba. Gaba works hard but he lacks appeal and the right kind of personality. Having expressed the willingness to cooperate with Hoffman's Community Services Division, I felt that I could safely express what I had heard, surely not as an opinion but rather as what I know and as confidentially as I could. I told Hoffman Gaba was unpopular, little more. Hoffman told Bennett, Gaba, Korn, Williamson, and Brown what I had said. He made it appear as though I had volunteered the information and that I was trying to crucify Gaba. Oh, what a son of a bitch. Korn came to tell me before he left for Washington, that for Christ's sake to lay off inter-administrative politics. I assured him that I had always and then he told me of Hoffman's treachery. In the bustle over registration, the thing blew over although Korn said Bennett was `plenty sore,' not only at me but at Lowie as well. Today
Spencer
Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Hansen
"... and at the same time, members of the Community Council reported to Hoffman the complaint that Charlie was taking C.C. [Community Council] minutes. Hoffman blew up and asked me if this was our definition of cooperation; Tuttle had reported Charlie to Hoffman, his own superior. I got out of it as best I could, but told Charlie to lay off trying to get these things in that way. Charlie was terribly incensed over the fact that I get recognition and he, a Japanese, doesn't. The next thing that happened was that Charlie was going in and tell that `patronizing bastard' off. I've managed to hold Charlie in check for some time but now, because an issue has been raised over pay in the net project, Charlie wanted to see the council minutes. He went in to ask Hoffman for them, and Hoffman wanted to know why he wanted them. Charlie explained. Hoffman said that he didn't think we had any right to send away material to Berkeley without the project director's knowing what it was. He pointed out that members of the council (jealous of C.K.) had complained. Hoffman furthermore said that we had been receiving `confidential' information from administrative staff members and disseminating it among the people, an application again of the accusation leveled against me for being like liberal Fredericks and Lieberman. Charlie blew up and I'm afraid he didn't do us any good. I'm not worried over the matter of material, that's been solved. I know Bennett to be hostile, however, and I know Hoffman to be a rat. I'm afraid, not without reason, that Bennett will ask me to leave. They seem to think that we are trying to be a pressure group all our own in moving community reactions. This is what worries me and I don't know how to reassure them. I can go to Hoffman and apologize for Charlie's outburst, and it really was an outburst, or I can go as Charlie wants me to do, before the council to explain our purposes."
Spencer
That's extremely interesting. I had given you some glimmerings, and I hadn't realized I'd summarized it so.
Hansen
Let me just finish this one paragraph, because I think it wraps it all up. "Hoffman said to Charlie that Bennett didn't know about the study. Well, for God's sake, I've been in to see the man and explained. I introduced Lowie and I've tried to be congenial. But you simply can't talk to that old goat. An engineer of sorts, a former auto salesman, he has no more concept of what we're doing than the man in the moon. Furthermore, he hasn't the patience to listen. As Lieberman said, `You can't explain social studies in terms of kilowatts and piston rings.' As I say, I'm puzzled and worried. Lowie, Charlie and I have done what we believed right. I'm as communicative as a clam, I get criticized for it; I try to be helpful and answer questions, I get it in the neck. What will you do if that stinker Bennett tries to be self-assertive? I wish you could come down here for a short visit. I nearly phoned you tonight but what good would that do? If I see Hoffman I let Charlie down, if I take a firm stand I jeopardize our position the more. God on a horse, what do I do now? Well, it's late, too late to type; these partitions are anything but soundproof. I think I'm getting like Tom [Shibutani]. This might be temperament but I think it's justified. Frankly, I'm very concerned and I think this is serious. Bennett can order me off the project. Yours, Bob." Then, you added a postscript: "I can't fathom Hoffman's motives. Charlie thinks he wants to protect himself from having things written about him and to assure the protection of Embree's social analysis division. Hoffman doesn't know about our agreement with Embree. I better explain that, no?" So, there was a calm in the Gila community, but there was hell within your own situation, as far as the existence of the study.
Spencer
I wrote the calm letter in the morning, and then that thing broke in the afternoon.
Hansen
Exactly.
Spencer
With Hoffman. You see, I remember Hoffman calling me in. I used to go into the administrative building to pick up my mail, you know. And then I remember one girl coming, one of Hoffman's secretaries, said, "Mr. Hoffman wants to see you." I went to see him and then he started reading me the riot act. And, who
Hansen
I don't, but there was somebody at the time who did, and that was Dorothy Thomas. I think that her situation was that she had to quiet you down.
Spencer
No, not at that time. I think that was a fair letter. I think that my fears were very real. She didn't have to face up to Hoffman. She didn't have the specter of Bennett at her elbow. The point being, there again, you see, she wasn't in the situation. But more than that, she had information which I didn't have, which she did not share with me. Namely, that by virtue of her position at Berkeley, and the fact that she was in touch with the WRA office in San Francisco or in Washington, as the case may be, she was in a position to obtain certain guarantees about which I knew nothing.
Hansen
So, for her to tell you not to worry about it, she had some basis for being unruffled and you didn't.
Spencer
She was going over Bennett's head, yes. But, see, she never told me that. But that came out rather obviously when she was able to move with ease to Tule Lake, especially at the time of segregation. You see, I didn't know that. I thought that we were there just by sufferance. I was impressed by the fact that we were limited to the number of centers in which we could operate. But she was able to play politics with people higher up than the WRA people. What cabinet was WRA subsumed under?
Hansen
The Department of Interior.
Spencer
That's right, of course. I honestly don't know, but I thought it was a fair letter. I still think so.
Hansen
But it's clear that your position at that time was, even if Thomas didn't think so, tenuous, because how could you possibly get information if you didn't have any kind of cooperation. Even if they didn't throw you off the project, they could still make your life miserable.
Spencer
Well, that's it. My friends were gone. Lieberman became quite a close friend. I agreed to teach Spanish for him because he wanted me to. In fact, he wanted me to teach a number of things, but I taught Spanish. Do you know anything about him?
Hansen
Not much. What can you tell me about him?
Spencer
Mendel Lieberman was an attorney, who was trained, I don't know, at Berkeley, I guess. A very brilliant man, but forced into law because of his own Jewish background of paternalism, and his father insisted that he take up a profession. And, really, his aim and goal in life was adult education. He felt that he could rescue mankind, that he could save man from himself by education. And he was married to Ynez, "Chickie." And he and Chickie took the same attitude that I suppose non-WRA people would. It was a liberal point of view. I mean, in those days there was considerable equivocation about a liberal point of view. On the one hand, it was expected in certain circles. On the other hand, there was the problem of national secrecy, national defense, the war period. How far can you go with your liberalism? I think, sanely, all of us saw Japan and Germany as the enemies, which indeed they were; and we saw the Japanese American evacuees as the victims of a rather dreadful tragedy. And I think that's the point of view I still take. And I think that everyone does who thinks about it.
Hansen
But there were a lot of people on that project [Gila] who weren't thinking about it, right?
Spencer
Exactly. And, on the contrary, there were many more people who identified the Japanese American with
Hansen
Except when you had private discussions, like the one you talked earlier about having had with Terry.
Spencer
Yes, with Terry and with Bennett, too. And, I'd forgotten that Lowie got us into hot water, largely, I think, because his speech was reported in the Gila News-Courier.
Hansen
Plus, it was a packed group, according to your correspondence, that he spoke before at Gila. It was a group that specifically would have been interested in what he had to say, because of the consequences of his talk for them.
Spencer
Yes, yes. And he was so charming about it, too. He could be terribly charming. But Bennett took umbrage at what Lowie said. I wonder if I didn't exaggerate that a little bit. Maybe I did and maybe I didn't. I don't know.
Hansen
I don't think you did. The internal evidence shows that you had all of this animosity from LeBarron, and you do comment on how favorably impressed LeBarron was with Lowie. LeBarron was your enemy, first and foremost, at that particular time. If you could see how LeBarron's animosity for you was allayed by Lowie's presence and his talk, I don't think there would be any reason for you then to exaggerate Bennett's reaction. I think that probably you were stating the truth. And you got dragged over the coals because of it. And you say in two or three letters that you were happy about what Lowie said. I think you were charmed by his message—you felt it needed to be said and you were proud of him for saying it. On the other hand, you knew that it wasn't going to make you situation there at Gila very easy.
Spencer
I realize that was one of the few times I ever heard Lowie lecture; and that was the first time. See, I'd always taken seminars from him where you interacted on a face-to-face level. I didn't realize that he could charm a 350-people audience.
Hansen
What's interesting, too, is that at Gila was probably the first time you saw Lowie do fieldwork, too, as well as the first time you saw him lecture.
Spencer
That was terribly impressive. Here was this clumsy, splay-footed—but a jewel—with his kind of almost false bon ami. And, yet, it wasn't. It was not false at all, but it was formal politeness. And then, suddenly, he really stuck it to the informant. He sure raked Miura over the coals, and Miura was charmed.
Hansen
(laughter) To be raked over the coals. About a month later, on March 21, and this was getting close to when you were going to be leaving Gila, you wrote to Dorothy Thomas: "Actually, I have a little news."
Spencer
I didn't leave Gila until June, you know.
Hansen
Right. At this point, you had just gone on a short trip to Poston. You wrote this to Dorothy Thomas: "I stopped at Poston as per instructions and saw Tamie." And, you continued, "Tamie says the atmosphere is just the same as before the November strike." So, things were starting to heat up over there at Poston about the net workers and the disproportionate wage scale that they had at that center. And these were similar to things that were happening at Gila. You said, "While I was away from Gila nothing of note happened. The figures on military enlistment have come out, and I suppose that Charlie, I remember now that he did, mentioned that there were 102 enlistees at Gila." And they were expecting to have 300. They were supposed to get 10 percent of the projected 3,000; and the whole thing blew up in Gila and they really didn't get too many. "A significant change has come over the administration. They have decided to allow the proposed travel to Phoenix and neighboring points. So, some may go and some may not. Those with cars, the staff, I mean, may take Japanese into the towns. The Tuttles are doing it today, and some of the teachers have done so already."
(laughter) I'll tell you a funny story.
Hansen
Okay, sure. Go ahead.
Spencer
Yes, we were allowed to take evacuees into town. And I wanted to take Mr. Okuno and I wanted to take my girl friend Jean. And I talked it up to Tuttle, and Mrs. Tuttle said, "Sure," and she drove. Well, then, we—they looked around Phoenix, that was all—and then stopped for lunch. And it was a late lunch, as I recall, maybe three or three-thirty in the afternoon. Or dinner. Maybe it was dinner, I don't know. But, I thought, here is poor Okuno. He hasn't had a drink for all this time. I wasn't supplying liquor. So, I asked him if he'd like a cocktail, and he said yes, he would, he'd like a martini. So that sounded good to me, so we each had a martini. And Okuno got absolutely pie-eyed. He got up and he danced.
Hansen
On one martini?
Spencer
On one martini. He danced, and he sang Japanese songs. And the Tuttles who were God-fearing Fundamentalists who didn't want alcohol at all... And, oh, it was embarrassing. Oh, it was terrible! And I didn't know what we were going to do with him. And I thought he'd pass out on one martini.
Hansen
He was you Issei observer who, I believe, was a poet, too, wasn't he?
Spencer
Yes. Wispy little man, charming little man. But I never thought he'd get smashed on one martini. Of course, nobody else had a drink, just he and I.
Hansen
How did people react to him in Phoenix, or to the entire situation?
Spencer
You mean as you walked on the streets?
Hansen
Well, didn't you stop at a bar to get the drinks?
Spencer
Oh, we stopped, we went into a restaurant. And we sat down at a table and I ordered the drinks.
Hansen
Yes, well you were mentioning these sort of strange reactions when you came back to the West Coast with Sam—the Nisei about whom you wrote a life history—for the funeral in Fresno. And even in a house of prostitution where they were talking about, you know, him being possibly a "Jap."
Spencer
I don't know. I think it depended on your breaks. Sometimes you'd run into anti-Japanese feeling and sometimes you wouldn't. And, as I remember, this trip we didn't.
Hansen
Was there a Chinese population in Phoenix at that time?
Spencer
Not an appreciable one.
Hansen
So they really wouldn't have even necessarily confused Okuno with being of Chinese ancestry.
Spencer
There were Chinese restaurants, as there are all through the Southwest, but no, not really. In fact, I know that many evacuees wanted to go to the Chinese restaurants because they loved Chinese food, Chinese-American food. And I know that when I went to San Francisco, at times I had to buy stuff in Chinatown to bring back, particularly pickled tofu [soybean curd].
Hansen
For different people?
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
Well, by the end of March, Charlie was starting to work full-time with you, because he was getting ready to be moved to Chicago or wherever. And he quit his job in social work that he'd had on the project there
Spencer
Was that any good?
Hansen
Yes, I think it was quite good. It was helpful for me. I mean, you covered a lot of things.
Spencer
I don't remember. I remember Charlie lying on the bed, kicking his feet up and saying, "Let's talk about this."
Hansen
Well, Morton and Dorothy seemed to respond to it very, very favorably, but, you know, I don't know. "Things in the community," according to a letter you wrote to Thomas on March 25, "are pretty quiet." Omachi was in the hospital with valley fever, and you said, "So many [of the evacuees] are thinking in terms of resettlement. I don't like to think what this community will be like when all the Nisei leadership is gone and they're all going, too." So, you were not only losing a lot of informants; but, probably, you were losing your chief coworker in Kikuchi and the friendship circle that he and his friends represented for you. Even some of your wrestlers had gone. "I wrote to Tamie and asked her to come down when she could. If she can only tear herself from X for a while she will be down. I don't ever remember telling you about X." So you see, at this point, I don't think X was a factor with Dorothy Thomas and the JERS project, and this is March 25, 1943.
Spencer
Make a note of that. If that question comes up at Ichioka's conference, why, we can support the initial encounter with Richard Nishimoto.
Hansen
What you said about him, at this point, was very little. You said, "He certainly seems to be a brain. I can understand Tamie's liking for him; he is probably the only one at Poston with whom she can feel at home. All her Caucasian friends, Ann and Mitch [Kunitani]... have left Poston. Spicer, of course, is at Minidoka and Leighton is really not expected back. The `Bureau' has more or less folded up." So there was that divided loyalty of Tamie's that we talked about earlier.
Spencer
So, this was March. On the basis of six month's fieldwork, Leighton wrote that book The Governing of Men.
Hansen
That's right. It was all based on that first year at Poston, on the strike there, and the Poston Strike, as you know, occurred in November 1942.
Spencer
Right, right.
Hansen
"Bennett is quite affable toward us. He sets up a barrier between himself and anyone coming in to see him, however, I cooled my heels in his anteroom for two hours yesterday afternoon and then he went to Phoenix. He did say he was glad to see me back however. I told you that the arch-enemy was fired, namely, LeBarron."
Spencer
Bennett said he was glad to see me back?
Hansen
Yes, Bennett was glad to see you back. (laughter) That's too much to take, huh? On March 27, you wrote to Dorothy Thomas and you said, "I'm afraid that my letters must be rather dull. Actually, there's nothing of note happening at Gila." And you also note here, "May I, provided that the keynote of the community here is the same as now... take, at my own expense, a short trip of about ten days duration to Chicago?" You already had mentioned, in this same letter, "Hikida is making a quick trip to Chicago next week to get first-hand information on the resettlement phase. He is going with a wealthy friend named Mr. Oishi."
Spencer
Oishi.
Yes. And then you wrote: "I should like to see the Kikuchis there [in Chicago] and the many others who left from Gila. I should like to see some of this resettlement phase also. You plan to be in Chicago during the month of May, do you not?" Now, just last night, you told me that you, living here in Minnesota, rarely go to Chicago. Here was a chance for you to go to Chicago then. What did you want to do in Chicago? Were your interests purely academic?
Spencer
My interests in going there were what you just stated from my letter. I wanted to see what was happening... what kind of adjustments were made. I'd been interested in students who... Gaba had called me an "intellectual fascist" because I was more interested in seeing that the students got out to school than I was in terms of Joe Okimoto finding a job in a grocery store. I was. I thought that the students ought to be given the chance. Okay.
Hansen
So, you were wanting to get permission to go to Chicago.
Spencer
Yes, and I wanted to see friends that I had made. Ah, yes, Jean had gone to Chicago, I think. No, maybe not yet. I don't know. Somebody had that I wanted to see.
Hansen
If anything, you were going a little bit nuts there in Gila, right?
Spencer
Cabin fever, yes. And I don't know why I said I'd do it at my own expense. I think maybe that was a veiled request for support for the trip. But I never went.
Hansen
Yes, as it turned out, Dorothy Thomas didn't want you to go either. And, at this point, Barnett was coming to Gila from the WRA.
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
And he had been a classmate of Korn's at [the University of] Pennsylvania, and he'd been teaching in Connecticut, and you wondered what he would be like, and you felt that may be Embree was double-crossing the JERS project. And then Thomas wrote back to you on March 29 and told you that that wasn't the case.
Spencer
And, as I said, Barnett and I became very, very friendly. In his view, I had penetrated the community so deeply that he felt that there was nothing for him to do.
Hansen
Well, Thomas told you, emphatically, that Embree was not double-crossing her or the project, and that she certainly hoped that you would not get a chip on your shoulder and that you would greet Barnett when he arrived at Gila.
Spencer
I wonder, then, later on why she told Rosalie Hankey [Wax] not to have any dealings with Gordon Brown [WRA community analyst at Gila].
Hansen
Yes, yes, I know.
Spencer
There was something about Gordon Brown, I don't know what. There was something negative, but I don't remember what it was.
Hansen
And then there was another factor, too. At that particular time, I think Embree himself was leaving WRA. So Thomas had worked up a deal with Embree, but perhaps she had not worked up a deal with Embree's successor as the head of the WRA's community analysis section.
Spencer
Yes, but Embree, by that time, was ready to leave.
Hansen
No. What I'm saying is this: While you were there at Gila, Embree was the person with whom Thomas had struck up a deal. That was the person. But Spicer came in after Embree as the chief of community analysis for WRA.
Yes.
Hansen
And don't forget you talked in one of your letters about divided loyalties that Tamie might have had between the Leighton project and your JERS project. So, with Spicer coming into the WRA, he'd already been connected with the Leighton project, maybe there was some anxiety because of this connection. I don't know either.
Spencer
I don't know, except that I knew Ned Spicer very well, and had known him before, and saw him at Poston and saw him in Tucson. And we had both worked as anthropologists in the Southwest, irrespective of any association here. And he was maybe ten years older than I, I guess. And, in anthropology, being philosophically a little bit... he represented that Chicago school. But, certainly, we were very friendly, Spicer and I. But I had left by the time Ned took over from Embree.
Hansen
In many ways you might have been happier had you worked on the Leighton project.
Spencer
Had I continued with JERS, I would've been happy to have Ned there, because I didn't get along with Embree. I didn't like Embree. I was insulted by Embree's request to Tamie Tsuchiyama that she help me out. I was, which was dumb on my part, because I didn't know what he meant by that remark. Oh, I know. When he came, and it was early on, you know—it was the early day—she asked me some questions as to what I was doing, and I was very much stand-offish. I wasn't going to tell him. Perhaps he came away with the impression that I didn't know anything.
Hansen
And you wondered why he was prying into what you were doing.
Spencer
Yes, so that was quite possible, because there was an atmosphere of suspicion and mistrust.
Hansen
That was another way you could become an evacuee, right?
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
Well, as you were saying to Thomas, things had quieted down and now you wanted to work on more purely anthropological matters. You turned your consideration to following up something that Lowie had suggested, a comparison of Buddhist life in the pre-Evacuation period and then. And then you wrote to Thomas [in a letter dated 1 April 1943] that you were getting extremely valuable material from Ochi for a religious study. And then quickly added: "And, yet, I wonder how significant you [Dorothy Thomas] will think it." You then noted, by way of contrast, that "Lowie will love it." In any event, you then reported that one man did thirty more pages of translation of this material for you and you talked to him about this, and so you were making progress with that work.
Spencer
Yes, that's right. We paid Ochi to write an essay for us, which was totally valueless. And then I got some Kibei to translate it and he didn't know how, because he couldn't deal with the Buddhist concepts. And I kept pushing him—I can't remember his name—for that. I finally did get the thing translated; and, as I say, it wasn't worth anything.
Hansen
I think it was a guy name John Fukushima who did your translation.
Spencer
Yes, well, maybe. I think we paid Ochi thirty bucks for the essay, at any rate.
Hansen
And something like $15 or something for the translation. But then at this point, you started doing the block studies.
Spencer
Yes. I'll tell you what, as I see it, I remember this period. It begins to be a little clearer in my mind. I correctly say that things had quieted down. That whole business of registration, that whole business of loyalty, the dissidents had been removed from the community.
Even the fraternizing started occurring again somewhat, a loosening up between staff and internees.
Spencer
Well, I never had any trouble with fraternizing.
Hansen
No, but I mean in the project.
Spencer
In the project, yes. And things were pretty serene.
Hansen
Travel was opening up a little.
Spencer
Yes. The evacuees were allowed to go to Phoenix and many, many were leaving and going east.
Hansen
And here you had an Issei like Hikida going to Chicago.
Spencer
Yes, well, the exodus to Chicago from all of the centers had taken place. And it was pretty clearly indicated that there would be the development of a Little Tokyo in Chicago, as indeed there was, and is still, out there in North Tenth Street, Division Street, and so on, in Chicago.
Hansen
The truth of the matter is, you were in a state where you actually could have the luxury of doing anthropological work.
Spencer
I was. And, yet, I felt that... Remember I said to you that I had thought perhaps I might elect as one of my major fields for the Ph.D. in anthropology, the relations to sociology. Now, one anthropologist, four years ahead of me, Wally Goldschmidt at UCLA, did precisely that. And he wrote his doctoral dissertation on agricultural work in the San Joaquin Valley, which was later published [in 1948] under the title of As You Sow. A new edition came out ten or twelve years ago [in 1978]. And Wally, of course, has been a very successful anthropologist. A horse's ass, but a very successful anthropologist. (laughter) I don't like him, never did. He's so arrogant. But I know Wally very well. Dorothy Thomas, an agricultural economist and rural sociologist, was one of his mentors for his dissertation.
Hansen
So Thomas was on his doctoral committee.
Spencer
Yes, actually she, I think, was one of the supervisors of this dissertation that later became As You Sow. Wally, for the first time in anthropology, had opened up that avenue to sociology. And, as I said, I thought I would perhaps be involved with that, so I chose a sociological rather than an anthropological topic. I continued to work on the Buddhist things, which really interested me. That's where my primary interests lay. And yet, I felt, well, maybe we'd better do something that is more sociological, and, hence, I devised that block study thing. Now, didn't I write a directive on what to do in relation to the block and the kind of information one wanted?
Hansen
Yes, you did, and you sent it around to everybody else on the JERS project,[56] those who were at Tule Lake and Poston...
Spencer
Yes, I did.
Hansen
... to see if you could have some sort of unified approach to the same phenomena.
Spencer
Use the comparative method and see. Make any sense?
Hansen
Right. Yes, I thought it did. And, in fact, I think you carried it out. Unfortunately, what you wanted to do was a representative number of blocks, and you ended up only being able to get three of them done before you got out of Gila.
Spencer
Yes. Well, it was boring work. But, nonetheless, I think I'm the only one who did an analysis of small group formation.
At Manzanar, the WRA did quite a few block studies.
Spencer
Did they?
Hansen
They did.
Spencer
I didn't know about that. I don't know about that yet.
Hansen
And that was largely the business about the village thing that we were talking about yesterday, where they took the Embree concept from his study Suye Mura and tried to apply that to blocks in the centers.
Spencer
Oh, yes.
Hansen
And then, at Poston under Leighton, because he didn't have the personnel to carry out such an ambitious undertaking as these block studies, doing them devolved upon people who did not have sociological training; as a result, there's a tremendous disparity between the quality of some of the block studies which were done by people of the sort like Spicer himself, and then by some of the people who were nothing more than really high school kids, who just were interested in helping out. And, so, their block studies aren't very useful. But, still, having them available has been very helpful. I mean, in other ways.
Spencer
Well, I don't even remember how they came out. I didn't reread my own.
Hansen
Well, I think the block study that you worked closely with Hikida on, I think the block study of Block 64 came out quite well. The other one [on Block 61], that Okuna worked on, was not quite as detailed and as rich.[57]
Spencer
But I think that explains why I did the block studies, why I started that, why I conceptualized that.
Hansen
Oh, yes, the sociological concerns. Now, in your letter to Dorothy Thomas of April 1, 1943, you said: "Tamie is here and oh dear God, what a mess." She was over at Gila for awhile. You continued: "That gal is more temperamental than an opera star. She came with a Miss [Elizabeth] Colson, an employee of Leighton's bureau."
Spencer
Oh, with Miss Colson? Do you know who Miss Colson is?
Hansen
Is it Elizabeth Colson?
Spencer
Yes, Elizabeth Colson of [the University of California at] Berkeley. She's a pretty good friend of mine now. But that was my first contact with her.
Hansen
Well, here's what you wrote about that first contact with her back in 1943: "I received her [Tamie Tsuchiyama's] letter stating that she was coming on the same day on which she was to arrive. Under the present circumstances, no strangers are allowed on the project, even other WRA employees, that is, to stay on the project. So when Tamie and Colson arrived on Tuesday night Colson was told that she would have to stay in emergency quarters but she could not stay the following night. She burst into tears and blamed me. Tamie blamed me too, saying that I should have wired her. Tamie said that she didn't want to come anyway and that you [Dorothy Thomas] and I made her come."
Spencer
Oh, Jesus, yes.
Hansen
"So I have hardly seen her inasmuch as she has been visiting with the Santa Anita group. Tamie's mad and wanted to go back to Poston right away. She stayed at Charlie's the first night and then went to stay with X's brother, walking out on Charlie much to the family's annoyance. Then she came by this morning saying that she wanted to visit with her Santa Anita friends.... I know that she's mad at Charlie and me, although why, I'm sure I can't say. I think that she's getting into an escapist rut at Poston and doesn't
Spencer
Elizabeth? Well, she didn't stay with the WRA. She was brought into the Leighton project. She was, where? At Harvard [University], or [the University of] Chicago, I've forgotten, at that point. She weathered the war somehow. Oh, I know. She went up to Puget Sound and did a study of the Macay Indians, which she published as a book. It's a very good one. Having done that—she didn't publish it right away after the war, it was some years, but she went to Africa. She went to England and then she went to Africa. And she worked with a man named Max Klugman at the Rhodes-Livingston Institute in what was then Rhodesia. And, when Max left, she became director of the Rhodes-Livingston Institute. And she was there for many, many years.
Hansen
Did you say she's passed away since?
Spencer
No, no.
Hansen
She's still alive.
Spencer
She's not even retired, yet, at Berkeley.
Hansen
So, she's still at Berkeley and teaching then, huh?
Spencer
And she and I wrote the obituary together for Wilson Wallis, whose festschrift [ Method and Perspective in Anthropology: Essays in Honor of Wilson D. Wallis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1954)] I put together [edited] after his death.
But, Elizabeth is a first-rate anthropologist, very, very good. Sort of a "butter wouldn't melt in your mouth" type, but very insightful, able, and worked on African tribes, American Indians. And her foray into the relocation center situation was very short-lived. She went to Berkeley about twenty years ago, I guess. She's not well, but she manages. I hear from her. I get letters from her every once in awhile. She's a Minnesota girl; she comes from up north, in Waseca.
Hansen
Has she ever married?
Spencer
No.
Hansen
She hasn't. Well, then, on April 1, 1943, you wrote to Lowie about similar things. Things had been quiet, and you said, "The arrest of the subversive elements in the community seems to have removed the spirit of dissension.... On my way to Gila I stopped at Poston to see Miss Tsuchiyama. She seems quite happy there. I urged her to visit Gila and she's with us today; although it must be admitted that she seems so well adapted to Poston now that she was reluctant to leave. This, I think, is traceable to a fear of the outside world which many of the evacuees have. She doesn't like Gila at all although she is very busily renewing acquaintances from Santa Anita Assembly Center."
Spencer
There was a Maryknoll father who visited Gila from Poston at this time. I tried to get him to drive back and take Tamie with him. And he didn't want to do that because he wanted to go somewhere else first. He was going east, maybe to Moab, for all I know, and then on back to Poston. But, he was going to make a detour. And then he arranged for her to go back to Poston with somebody else. And I don't know what happened to Colson.
Hansen
You did such a formal job of presenting this episode to Lowie. It's "Miss Tsuchiyama" and "She seems well adapted to Poston," and "she's reluctant to leave." And, boy, this is perhaps the classic example of you taking a different tack with Lowie in your letters from that you took when writing to Thomas. The information is not untrue. Everything you said to Lowie was the same, but it was just the tone you adopted and what you chose not to talk about that was so contrasting.
It'd make an interesting evaluation of interpersonal interaction, wouldn't it?
Hansen
It's really something.
Spencer
It's amazing. You know, I wasn't even aware of it. But you made me think about it. And, yes, of course, if you knew Lowie and if you knew Dorothy Thomas, why, you would see exactly why I tried to be... I won't say ingratiating. That wasn't it. I just tried to hit the proper note.
Hansen
Well, you got letters fairly regularly from Morton Grodzins, such as the one he sent you on April 5, 1943. He had just passed his doctoral exams, and he was writing you about budgetary matters. Then he added: "Dorothy wants me to tell you that she sympathizes with you and your Tamie troubles. But she doesn't want them to get you down. As for myself, I don't see why you can't handle Tamie in that excellent manner you seem to have used in handling the Prairie Flower." And he carries on a joking relationship with you about this "Prairie Flower" in your correspondence.
Spencer
A little different. It's one thing to have a Japanese beauty. It's another thing to have Tamie Tsuchiyama. (laughter)
Hansen
And then you were going to go over to Denver and have a powwow with the rest of the people on the project. Wrote Grodzins: "Omachi is definitely not invited. There's simply nothing for him to do or learn there. The same, incidentally, goes for Charlie, unless his leave clearance is late and he wants to stop off en route for a day. Neither Shibutani or myself are invited, so it's an exclusive party." So, you were going to get together with Dorothy Thomas and Tamie Tsuchiyama and...
Spencer
I wonder why we never did.
Hansen
I don't know if the meeting ever came to pass.
Spencer
No, it never materialized.
Hansen
They had some sort of meeting in Phoenix, but I don't think you ever got to it. And the correspondence here is unclear as to why. Now, Thomas provided a really interesting analysis about the differences between anthropologists, sociologists, and historians. She said, in a letter she wrote to Charlie Kikuchi dated April 4, 1943, that she had been trying to get some help at Berkeley from the historians. "I have found it impossible to get any help from the historians (e.g., M. M. Knight, with whom I have discussed the matter) because they refuse to pass a judgment on the `significance' of a situation or trend until after..."
Spencer
M. M. Knight. Now, Knight was an economic historian.
Hansen
Well, that's who she must have been talking to.
Spencer
Right.
Hansen
I have never heard of him. Anyway, Thomas continued:..."a sufficient period of time has elapsed. If we carried this point to its ultimate logic, however, we would find ourselves in the sad situation that historians are in generally, i.e., with bits of unsatisfactory documents on which they base very large generalizations. So, what we try to do is to write up certain segments, as of a given point of time, as if the situation were stabilized. We draw tentative conclusions. Then we continue to make observations, add to our data, and revise our conclusions. In this way we will have a real jump on the historians when the whole thing is over, or when it reaches a point of relative stability. Bob has been particularly successful in utilizing this approach." She's talking here about you.
Spencer
Interesting, her own philosophical evaluation of disciplines and the contribution they could make. It's interesting, too, that this is a statement that was made in the 1940s. We phrase that very differently today, in terms of societal integration and synchronic versus diachronic issues, and that kind of thing. A letter
Hansen
It does explain what it was she thought those of you connected with JERS were doing.
Spencer
Exactly.
Hansen
And especially since she said you had been doing it particularly well.
Spencer
And how do you conceptualize it and what are your aims and purposes.
Hansen
One way of achieving her aims, whatever they were, was to have her field workers write her a letter virtually every day, where conclusions were drawn, which was precisely what you did, and then to revise and refine your conclusions in more formal reports, which is again what you did at Gila. I think she was happy with that.
Spencer
I think I kept her abreast of events as best I could. Certainly, I kept the flow of letters going, didn't I?
Hansen
Yes, you told her some interesting things. Some of them were humorous and some of them were not only humorous but revealing. You wrote, for example, on April 14, "We've had a big religious festival, Buddha's birth-date, and a phenomenal funeral, the biggest so far. I have joined the sumo club and wrestle occasionally. I now belong to the two most subversive organizations: the sumo and kibei clubs." (laughter) And, Barnett had arrived at Gila and you thought he was a decent chap, and the only thing you didn't like about him was that, "he had the habit like," you said, Bob Billigmeier's friend, Doug Cook, at Tule Lake. "He tends to pick up manuscripts and begins to page through them. I was quite firm about that, inasmuch as he picked up sections of the administrative report which Charlie and I were writing and which I regard as not fit for staff eyes. My heart sank, but I was able to divert his interest. I honestly don't know what a man can do on coming cold into a community of this kind. He knows nothing about the Japanese at all, admits that he has never seen one. He wants to hire a staff of five workers; and of course he's just out of luck on that score.... Most of the half-way sophisticated Nisei plan to resettle anyway.... I believe that a social analyst can do a great deal of good by offering suggestions to the project officials. It seems doubtful, however, that any suggestions will be followed by that donkey, Bennett, whose unpopularity, by the way, is on the increase daily. Barnett seems to be a fairly nice individual and I don't anticipate any trouble from him. You'll be glad to know that my worries are allayed." And then you said, "I miss Charlie more than I can say.... I used to drop over to the Kikuchis every afternoon before dinner, and often would work there in the evenings. And of course, Charlie was always willing to contribute his views on the community." And you said, "Charlie and I worked together so successfully on your administrative report that I wish that we had written together previously."
So, this was a change going on, too. Your work situation had changed. Either you had gotten a new cohort or a new competitor, you were not quite sure yet. And you were losing a colleague who you had worked with and who you had shared the whole Gila experience with, almost from the beginning—certainly, you two went back to Tanforan days—and a family circle, that you felt some sort of bond with.
Spencer
Yes, I had broken with Yusa, with whom I used to spend a lot of time, trying to get him going. And, I don't know, I used to go over to Yusa's house, in the winter, before Mimi decided that I was preempting her husband's time too much, and so on. And a lot of people would gather there, and it was nice. We'd have conversations and so on, and I could hear every evacuee complaint, and that sort of thing. And we'd just talk about all sorts of things.
Hansen
Well, you didn't have much left there at Gila anymore. You didn't have contacts in the administration, and you didn't have actually trustworthy workers.
Spencer
I had contacts with lower-level administration, and I had contacts with people who came in to do various jobs, like Curry, who came from Newfoundland and was there to organize a series of co-ops. He was of
Hansen
You can recall that.
Spencer
And I was friendly with them. We went and had dinner in Phoenix together. I remember Curry and Clara and I,and who else was there? Landward was gone. Oh, I used to go and play chess with Tuttle occasionally. I couldn't stand his child. I waited until his child was in bed. And Tuttle was...I told you I had taught Tuttle chess, and he became a real avid chess player, which I never was. Enjoyed it occasionally, but not every day.
Hansen
But those contacts weren't people who could protect you when things got tough.
Spencer
No, not at all. Not at all.
Hansen
And you had sketched out a very ambitious program for documenting the blocks. And, frankly, looking at what you had in the way of help there, the slippage was not only in the quality of their work and the rate of their work, but sometimes, even in their physical health. For example, Omachi was laid up in the hospital. You didn't have too much, you know, in the way of human resources to be able to execute what you wanted to do.
Spencer
No, I didn't. I had to depend on these Issei who lived in the block. Hikida could answer the questions very well, but Okuno could not. Okuno's realm was poetry.
Hansen
I mean, it was coming to the end of your stay there, and it seems, viewing the situation retrospectively, that there was an internal logic governing the whole thing, almost a psychological imperative that your work there at Gila had to end. I mean, Kroeber came in and pulled you away from the project, but it seemed almost as if—now, you didn't say this to Dorothy Thomas—it was somewhat welcome.
Spencer
Well, you're quite right. Things had quieted down, and when Kroeber came through with his offer...You see, my aim was professorial. I wanted to teach. I wasn't interested in being locked into continuing field research. I saw no end to the Japanese American project. Obviously, it was, what, 1943 still. The war had two more years to go and Japanese successes were rather marked; and the opportunity to teach both language and area struck me as very favorable. And, yes, I left on that basis. But I think I left at a time when the whole mood, the whole spirit, of the Gila project at least, had changed. One of the factors was the development of that camouflage net project. And this gave the evacuees an opportunity to earn considerably more than they did at the nominal, fixed salaries that the WRA was paying. Because a private contractor, with government contracts, had enlisted the labor of the evacuees to work on these camouflage nets, and they set up these huge poles and had these nets and then the workers would tie these multicolored strips on the nets. Dreadful job, dreadful. But I don't remember what they were paid. If you said fifty cents an hour, I would think maybe that's reasonable.
Hansen
I think they were making enough, though, where they could, instead of making $19 a month, end up making over a hundred and some dollars a month.
Spencer
Right, right. Now, that meant that there was first of all an influx of money into the community, which manifested itself by mail order purchases through Wards, Sears, et cetera. However, most thought of using this as a nest egg for relocation elsewhere than in the West Coast zones. And I remember my girl friend Jean, she took a job there, worked very hard, got in overtime, and then used the money to transplant herself to Chicago. That was one example of many.
Hansen
But you pointed out something interesting in one of your letters to Dorothy Thomas. I think you said, in effect: "Here the WRA is aggressively pushing the policy of resettlement. Then they're allowing in the
Spencer
I didn't realize I'd been so insightful about it. But, no, I thought it was reasonable for those who wanted to leave. It was one way, at least, of getting out of the situation. But, obviously, at $12 a month or $16 a month, you were not going to make very much to even buy a bus ticket.
Hansen
Right.
Spencer
Did the War Relocation Authority under Dillon Myer, in its furthering of the resettlement, offer subvention?
Hansen
Some, not very much. I think, you know, it covered transportation and provided a very small stipend as an inducement to leave. But, wasn't that one of the things you pointed out, that they really didn't give the evacuees enough to go out of camp. So, I mean, you'd have to do something to override what they were making at the camouflage net factory.
Spencer
Yes. Of course, if someone went out and got a place to live in, say, Chicago, the others could come and stay there with them momentarily, until they located themselves.
Hansen
But a lot of the Issei parents didn't want their Nisei kids to resettle, and that was one of the reasons they were against that registration thing. Because, remember, they were registering for resettlement at that time. That's why a lot of parents told their children to answer in the negative. Otherwise, they said, they'd be forced to be resettled out of camp. And, consequently, then the kids would say, "Well, I want to go. I have a chance to get a job." And their parents would respond: "You can make more money if you stay right here and work on the camouflage net factory."
Spencer
That's right.
Hansen
I think you covered that situation pretty well. Well, anyway, at this point you were getting ready to go somewhere, whether it was Denver, Chicago, or somewhere else—as long as it was out of Gila.
Spencer
I was getting itchy feet, I know that. I mean, I was now bored.
Hansen
Well, you tried to get into the Army Language School, and you got accepted. You said, in a letter to Lowie dated April 19, 1943: At the same time, I dislike the possibility of being drafted into some branch of the service in which I have no interest and the opportunity of really learning Japanese is to me at least quite attractive....I hate to leave you and Dr. Thomas in a hole, so to speak[,] and I know that it would be difficult for anyone else to pick up immediately where I leave off." You had applied for and were waiting for acceptance from the Army Language School. You had heard very shortly after that that you were accepted into that program. You then sent a wire to Major Gould, the head of the school, withdrawing your application for admission. You then told Dorothy Thomas [in a letter dated 21 April 1943]: "I think that my choice is a wise one and I know that you will be pleased. I hope I won't regret my decision but I don't think I will."
Spencer
I wonder why I did that?
Hansen
Well, earlier you had applied for the Navy Language School.
I was accepted for that.
Hansen
From what I can gather from reading this whole corpus of your correspondence, I think it was owing to your anxiety about your deferment. Thomas, at one point, had sent you an explanation as to how your deferment status had been mistakenly arrived at. Rather than being placed in the category that you should have been put in, apparently you were put in a more desirable category, one that protected you better. And, all of a sudden, when she told you about that, you feared that once Selective Service found that out, they were going to put you on the hit list, so it seemed likely that you were to be called up again. And you wanted to make sure that if you did get into the Army, it wouldn't be as a foot soldier. You'd be doing something more in line with your background and abilities.
Spencer
The way I felt about it was, with my eyes, I would have been marked for limited service. It meant I'd be a cook or a dishwasher, or something like that, with no opportunity for advancement. And that annoyed the hell out of me. I felt that was discrimination. And, besides, who wants to serve in the Army if you don't have to.
Hansen
But you had a good reason for turning down the Army Language School, too. I think you went on and explained what your reason was—that you didn't like what the Army Language School was doing, the kind of Japanese you were going to be learning, et cetera.
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
It was much more in terms of implementing, you know, military policies on things. Here's what you said in a letter that you wrote to Lowie a little bit after that [on 22 April 1943]: "The opportunity to do work here is, I believe, of greater advantage not only to me but to the war effort as a whole. I hear from [William W.] Elmendorf, currently enrolled in the same school, that the study of Japanese is subordinated to military regimen and that the time spent is not altogether, in his opinion, worthwhile. In considering all these factors I have decided to remain with the Evacuation and Resettlement Study. Too little time was allowed me to sever my connection with you and Dr. Thomas and I feel too, now that Charles Kikuchi has left for Chicago, the study would suffer considerable if Gila were to remain unsupervised. I believe that my decision was a wise one and that I shall not regret it. Of course, I shall have to take my chances with the draft in July but I know that you and Dr. Thomas will lend support in my appeal for deferment." Then, in the very next paragraph of this letter, you said: "Dr. Kroeber has written me outlining plans for the development of an Army program at the University. I have written back expressing my interest." And, so, this is a bifurcated message, isn't it?
Spencer
Yes, you've got to understand that I really was loyal to Lowie and to Thomas at that point. And I told you about Kroeber and his personality. And he just wouldn't take no for an answer. Besides, I wanted to teach. I was glad of the opportunity, and I was fed up with Gila, and I had married. All these things.
Hansen
So it was time to go, really.
Spencer
Yes, I felt so.
Hansen
Well, you got along with Barnett very well. And then you got a letter, dated April 24, 1943, from Thomas, telling you this: "Miss Colson landed here at the beginning of the week. Believe it or not, Leighton sent her up for a period of two weeks to write a report on `pre-evacuation phases', something that Morton is spending full time on, and has been for almost a year! She is certainly a shy femme. She didn't ask me for anything at all, and I shooed her over to Mrs. [Ruth] Kingman [Executive Officer] of the Fair Play Committee [Pacific Coast Committee on American Principles and Fair Play]. As Morton said, `What a charming, vivacious girl.'"
Spencer
Elizabeth gives that impression, but she is hard as nails. And, obviously, Dorothy didn't see that. After all, she carved herself into a place as director of an African institute of world stature. I don't know how she did it, but she did, and she did it very effectively. She administered that center very effectively.
Well, Thomas finally sent James Sakoda, who had been in a concentration camp of one sort or another for a long time, without any relief, down to Gila to see you. Do you remember Sakoda at all?[58]
Spencer
I remember Sakoda very well, but I don't remember him coming to Gila.
Hansen
How do you remember him, then?
Spencer
A shy, bookish Nisei. He was a Kibei actually. Now maybe shy isn't the right word. He is a Kibei, and his behavior patterns are much more Japanese than they are American. I was viewed by him to be senior; and, therefore, I was given a good deal of deference. And he extended that same deference to Dorothy Thomas or to anyone else whom he envisioned as his superior—socially, intellectually, in age. He was very much drawn to honorific behavior.
Hansen
When do you remember seeing him? You say you don't remember him at Gila. Where would you have seen him?
Spencer
I saw him at the beginning of the project, in the Tanforan phases. Now, whether he was at Tanforan or whether... Where the hell did I see him? Well, when I made that trip with Sammy Miyakawa to Fresno, and then I wrote Sam's biography, and then Jimmy Sakoda was given the biography and he criticized it and that made me mad. Where was he when he wrote that, when he wrote those criticisms?
Hansen
He was initially at Tulare [Assembly Center, in California] and then he went to the Tule Lake [Relocation Center] and then he transferred to Minidoka [Relocation Center, near Hunt, Idaho].
Spencer
No, he wasn't at Minidoka yet.
Hansen
No, that was way off. I think that was still some months in the future, as part of the segregation process.
Spencer
Well, why did I meet him? I mean, I see him very clearly before me. I mean, really, if I were any good with a drawing, I could draw you a picture of him.
Hansen
Well, in any event, you met him at some point prior to his being sent by Thomas to Gila. You know, this letter you received from Dorothy Thomas on April 24, 1943, is an interesting one. She said that W. I. had remembered Barnett from visiting one of his seminars...
Spencer
... at Penn [University of Pennsylvania].
Hansen
Let's see, I think you mentioned another school, not Penn.
Spencer
Maybe Yale.
Hansen
Okay, I've got the reference now. In your letter to Dorothy Thomas dated April 21, 1943, you indicated that it was at Harvard [University].
Spencer
Oh, yes. I don't know whether Barnett's still alive or not. Barnett's was a kind of tragic situation.
Hansen
At Gila?
Spencer
No, his personal situation. He and his wife tried very hard to have children. And, finally, they had a child. It was a mongoloid and died. And they were talking about adoption. Then they settled that and he left. He was so concerned with his personal issues that he left. And then he was teaching at Storrs, the University of Connecticut.
Hansen
Oh, yes.
And I think his career was there. I don't know what he ever did, if anything. I think he sent me a paper on conceptualization of social stratification, something of that kind. But, we remained in correspondence for a number of years, and I saw him here. He came through one time.
Hansen
In Minnesota?
Spencer
Yes, I took him to lunch at the Campus Club, where you were last night. That's the last I've seen of him. And then, like all those things, you know, the correspondence failed. So, I don't know whether he's still alive or not.
Hansen
I really was surprised he was at Gila for so short a time.
Spencer
He was a thoroughly nice person, and burdened by his own sense of tragedy in his own family situation. Yes, he got a little girl, placed by the adoption agency. And they were very happy. And when I married, he sent me a wedding present. And when he left—I was still there when he left—he'd been there a couple of months, I guess, if that long.
Hansen
I don't think he was even there at Gila for a month.
Spencer
He bought a lot of things like tools. He was going to hammer things in the wall and make little partitions and bookshelves for himself. And he brought a saw and hammer and he gave those to me. And I still have the hammer downstairs in the basement.
Hansen
You know, all these memories you have about Barnett strike me as quite amazing. His stay at Gila was incredibly short. On April 18, 1943, you wrote to Thomas: "The social analyst has arrived. Then, on April 27, you wrote this to Thomas: "Here is an odd bit of news. Barnett feels that in his work he'll be too dependent on me and that his position as social analyst is valueless. He also has a weak stomach and cannot stand the food here. Moreover, he doesn't wish to be separated from his wife. He's therefore quitting as of Saturday. Very odd, don't you think?" Talk about a ninety-day wonder. Barnett was a nine-day wonder.
Spencer
Well, I guess so, but again, I had established a very, very friendly relationship with him. And I remember I took him around, introduced him to people, and he was anti-WRA. That was one thing very clear. And once he had disassociated himself from the administration, then he was persona grata, as far as I was concerned.
Hansen
He clarified a lot of things for you, and I think he alleviated a lot of anxieties you had, and he provided a friend at a time when you desperately needed one.
Spencer
Exactly. As you point out, I was divorced from the whole administration by that time.
Hansen
You even, as mentioned earlier, talked a little about it [in a letter of 18 April 1943 to Thomas]. You said: "I believe that a social analyst can do a great deal of good by offering suggestions to the project officials. It seems doubtful, however, that any suggestions will be followed by that donkey, Bennett."
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
Okay. So, you thought about going to the language school and, upon second blush, you decided against going.
Spencer
Yes, my own feeling was, I remember, I'll take a chance. It's a gamble, but here's my chance to get into anthropology and move ahead professionally. I had a burning ambition to be an anthropologist, and I didn't see how that detour into the Army would help me any. So, I gambled, and I won.
Hansen
Yes. (laughter) Backtracking a letter or two, Thomas, on April 24, mentioned something about Morris Opler,[59] which I'd like you to comment on.
Where was Morris?
Hansen
Well, he was at Claremont [the Claremont Colleges in Claremont, California] at the time the war started.
Spencer
Oh, he was at Claremont.
Hansen
He was a professor of anthropology there, and then he got hooked up with Embree and decided that he wanted to be the community analyst at Manzanar, as I understand it, and that's where he ended up.
Spencer
But not for very long, surely.
Hansen
Oh, he was at Manzanar for a long time.
Spencer
Was he really?
Hansen
Yes, he had a definitely adversarial relationship with Manzanar's director, Ralph P. Merritt.
Spencer
Did he publish anything [on his Manzanar experience]?
Hansen
Not anything afterwards, to speak of. But while he was with WRA, he ground out many, many reports; he was probably as productive as any one of the WRA people. He produced reams of stuff.
Spencer
Morris would. Morris has his reputation. He's considered to be not very bright. I don't know why, because I think he is, but he's a tremendously hard worker. I think, that of all of the social scientists of the period, Morris is the hardest worker.
Hansen
And you're not confusing Morris with his brother Marvin?
Spencer
Oh, no, no, no.
Hansen
Okay.
Spencer
I knew both of the Oplers very well. I knew Marvin much, much better. As I said, I would continue to see Marvin at meetings, more than I saw Morris. And then, we were in Russia together, Marvin and I. We traveled around in the Moscow area. I traveled with him and [his wife] Charlotte. And Charlotte must have died shortly thereafter. That was in the 1960s. And then Marvin lived alone.
Hansen
I guess I had a reason for saying that. Apparently, you were afraid that Opler was going to get sent to Gila by the WRA, and Barnett came instead. And Dorothy Thomas thought this was splendid. She wrote to you and said: "I'm glad Opler did not go to Gila, as he is a sort of crude and difficult personality, although I understand his work is good."
Spencer
She found him that?
Hansen
Yes. "He's at Manzanar. His brother (inferior I understand) is going to Tule Lake. Leonard Bloom turned down the offer." Now, it sounds like she was deprecating the intellectual capabilities of Marvin Opler relative to those of his brother Morris.
Spencer
Yes, but, you know, Dorothy had great respect for Lowie. She disliked Kroeber. Her contact with anthropologists was fairly minimal. W. I. Thomas had written that book, Primitive Behavior, about 1910, and W. I. was very, very well-read in ethnology. His evaluation of twins in African societies, for example, is still viewed as a classic. All right, today with Levi-Strauss and all that sort of thing, why, it's a very different perception of twins. But, nonetheless, W. I. Thomas had pretensions of being an anthropologist. Not really. He never was anything but a sociologist, but he was a comparative sociologist. And I think his view of anthropology would have colored Dorothy's, so she didn't like anthropology generally. Lowie,
Hansen
You mean W. I. Thomas, when you say that?
Spencer
Yes, W. I. Thomas. Oh, well, Dorothy Thomas, she was just an agricultural economist, or demographer, or whatever. Kroeber had no truck with her.
Hansen
So, you think the reputation of the Oplers was probably just refracted through Dorothy Thomas. It's really coming from Lowie or her husband, W. I. Thomas.
Spencer
Not from Lowie, because Lowie would have respected Morris Opler.
Hansen
Well, the thing Dorothy Thomas is saying about Morris Opler is that his work is good. It's when she's talking about Marvin Opler, that she says, "His brother (inferior I understand) is going to Tule Lake."
Spencer
Yes, that's right. You see, when I went to Tule Lake for Dorothy, long after I was disassociated from Gila, then I contacted Marvin at Tule Lake and I spent a number of very pleasant days with Marvin. And we talked about different things. But I never thought that Marvin was any great shakes as a theorist. I never thought of myself as one either. But, then, Morris Opler is. Morris came up with a number of ideas that I have found pedagogically extremely useful. That notion of themes in culture, for example, is insightful and useful.
Hansen
Yes, I found it so, too, actually. And I think students that have used themal analysis have used it fairly effectively. I think one of the best things that's been done on the evacuation was written by Toshio Yatsushiro.
Spencer
Who?
Hansen
Toshio Yatsushiro, who, I suspect, was one of the people who Nishimoto dismissed as too young to really understand the Japanese community, but who was employed by Leighton at Poston on his Bureau of Sociological Research. After the war he went to Cornell and picked up his Ph.D. [in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology], working under the direction of both Leighton and Morris Opler. In his 1953 dissertation ["Political and Sociocultural Issues at the Poston and Manzanar Relocation Centers: A Themal Analysis"], he married Opler's concerns with those of Leighton's. It's a very long and detailed study.
Spencer
Yes, I wonder what ever happened to Yatsushiro.
Hansen
I understand that he's an anthropologist connected with the University of Hawaii.
Spencer
Oh, oh, oh. Yatsushiro. Yes, I met him in Hawaii.
Hansen
Did you?
Spencer
Yes, when I taught at Hawaii.
Hansen
I've never seen a single thing written by him since. Being an anthropologist, though, you probably have.
Spencer
I remember meeting him, that's all, when I was teaching there.
Hansen
Well, in any case, he applied Opler's theory of themal analysis to the evacuee culture at Manzanar and Poston, using the data that he got from Opler at Manzanar plus that from Leighton at Poston, which he had helped to generate. And then Opler had another student at Cornell named [William Chandler] Blanchard, whose 1952 dissertation ["A Themal Analysis of Administration in a Cross Cultural Situation:
Spencer
That analysis would be rather contrived, I would think.
Hansen
Well, I think you would be rather interested to look at this dissertation, even if it is less interesting and more analytically attenuated than Yatsushiro's.
Spencer
I say that would be contrived because that was not Opler's intention. You either see themes as characteristic of total cultures, or they really have no value. Well, really, you pull from literature the establishment of certain major leitmotifs, or themes. But Opler's concept, as I say, I have found a very useful thing in my teaching.
Hansen
Yes. It has heuristic value for just opening up whatever culture it is that you're studying.
Spencer
I used it. I wrote a paper which I never was proud of. I read it at a meeting in Vancouver, where I took a perspective on Austrian culture—having married an Austrian.
Hansen
And you employed themal analysis in that paper?
Spencer
Yes, yes. The mistake that somebody like Blanchard might well have made is that you've got to be completely immersed in the cultural situation before you can elicit a shorthand statement that is characteristic of that culture.
Hansen
Yes, because you develop the themes as a series of postulated statements. The themes don't exist in the culture as such.
Spencer
Yes, it involves putting words into the mouths of the participants [of a given culture].
Hansen
Right, right.
Spencer
And Opler did it so beautifully with the Lipan Apache.[60] Gee, that's a nice paper. That's 1942, actually. So he did that before he went to Manzanar, obviously. There are a couple of students of Opler's at Macalaster [University in St. Paul, Minnesota], and when he comes to town, why, they usually have a party for him.
Hansen
Have you met Morris Opler over the years?
Spencer
Yes. But, as I say, I knew Marvin much better, and my wife Marietta took a course from him at Reed [College, in Portland, Oregon]. She had her introductory sociology-anthropology class from him.
Hansen
Morris Opler also taught at Reed for a little while. But that was earlier, before he went to Claremont.
Spencer
Yes, yes. Reed was such an unhappy situation, from the point of view of the faculty. As I said, there was hostility for those who published or who had scholarly pretensions. It considered itself a teaching institution.
Hansen
Publishing was at variance with pedagogy, right.
Spencer
Yes, you'd perish if you published.
Hansen
Yes. (laughter)
Spencer
So, under the circumstances, Reed was not a happy place. And anthropologists were passing through. They'd stay a year and go, and stay a year and go. And that was true of Morris and Marvin, and Margaret
Hansen
Oh, he's one of the fellows who was an analyst, too. He was the community analyst at the Poston [War Relocation] center [in Arizona].
Spencer
I can see why. Well, Dave never wrote anything after he got to Reed. He's in his seventies now. He published his dissertation, because you had to when you took a doctoral degree from Columbia.[61] So he published his dissertation, and never published a thing since. And he has taught at Reed all these years.[62]
Hansen
And he came to Reed right after you left there in 1947.
Spencer
There was a girl by the name of Marian Piersall who tried to get into Reed, the social analysis department, and then didn't. And, interestingly enough, she was hired by Elizabeth Colson at the Rhodes-Livingston Institute in Salisbury, Zimbabwe; and she went to Africa for a number of years. I knew Marian. She took her Ph.D. at Berkeley a year or two after me. I knew her very, very well. She drank herself to death about three years ago.
Hansen
The Japanese American Evacuation actually touched your generation in anthropology quite a bit, didn't it?
Spencer
We were touched by the war, there's no question. There were those that went to the language schools: [William W.] Elmendorf, [Richard K.] Beardsley, [Julian H.] Steward, any number of others. I could have gone to that. I was accepted at both Army and Navy, as you know. It meant that you developed people who were concerned with things Japanese, or Far Eastern. I mean, my whole competence in the Far East goes back to this period. I had had that year of Japanese, 1936-1937, that's all, and then a few friends among Nisei, but I really didn't know anything about Japan.
Hansen
But, as little as a year of Japanese seems to be, and as little as your contacts with Japanese Americans were, in terms of your being brought up in San Francisco, that was infinitely more cultural familiarity than could be claimed by most of the other non-Japanese Americans who worked in the camps.
Spencer
That's right. At least, you know, I worked on language when I was in the camp, and actually I had a fair speaking competence. It's gone now because I haven't used it. And it's been replaced by Korean.
Hansen
But Embree, when he tried to recruit community analysts, for this new program that so worried you at the time, wanted all Ph.D.s, which he pretty much got. But he didn't succeed in getting anybody, I don't believe, who really knew very much about Japan.
Spencer
What Embree wanted was somebody who could perceive the problems immediately, but he would be the final arbiter of things Japanese, So, it didn't matter whether they knew Japanese culture or not.
Hansen
He could impart that.
Spencer
He could interpret that. I think Embree's idea was to coordinate a whole bunch of raw reports, and he would be the figure who assembled them all. When did Embree die? Wasn't it 1950.
Hansen
Yes, 1950. He was killed in an accident.
Spencer
Yes, yes. After the war, he wrote a very fascinating paper, which I've liked, on "Tight and Loose Social Systems," a comparison of Thai and Burmanese social systems.[63] And, again, that's equally insightful. That's a very helpful formulation, if you take a view of cultures as holistic systems, this "tight-loose" distinction.
Hansen
Has it helped you in your work?
It has helped me in my teaching, let's say. I've used it as a way of analyzing certain situations. Use it in my work, no.
Hansen
I want to try to tease some information out of you which I have not been able to elicit before, because you haven't remembered it real clearly. Maybe if we get into the text of this, you'll remember the context. You got a letter from Dorothy Thomas on April 24, 1943, and she said: "Re your coming to Berkeley soon, I think you can be helpful in a very difficult problem that I have on my hands, but which I will have to turn over to surrogates due to my trip to Chicago."
Spencer
This is Dorothy writing?
Hansen
Right. "Due to my trip to Chicago," she continued, "the problem is Billigmeier. I have certainly failed in getting him on the path. I have pressed continually to get something from him, however crude, that I criticize and thus see how he was coming along. He has disregarded every one of a series of deadlines that I have set, not from cussedness (he is really a fine fellow), but apparently because of the mental conflicts that the evacuation has set up. He is a very disturbed person. He finally, yesterday, came through with a manuscript on the schools (one of three that is due now, the others being the registration crisis, and the administration.) It is unmitigatedly terrible. The boy has spent an enormous amount of time in building up contacts and getting inside information, yet he finds it impossible to systemize his observations or even to give us the observations in their crude form. Morton has gone over the manuscript carefully and agrees with me completely in my appraisal. Now, the point is, how can we salvage something from Billigmeier's work, and at the same time `save his face'? My proposed solution is a three day conference (maybe less) with you and Morton, at which he has ALL of his notes, and at which you and Morton fire questions at him while Mrs. Wilson takes the whole thing down in shorthand. This puts a burden on you, I realize, but if I wait until I get back from Chicago, it is just plain too late. Also, I feel that you and Morton can actually do a better job with him than I can. Morton knows pretty well the sorts of reports I want, he is bright and quick, and a good organizer of material. You have the background in another project and are also bright and quick and a good organizer. It seems to me terribly important to save what we can in this situation. Our other Tule Lake collaborators were naturally wondering what in the hell Bob has up his sleeve, and I simply cannot show them the drivel he has turned out."
Now, what I don't have is what happened at that proposed meeting, because it's clear from what you replied to Thomas that you wanted to go and participate in it.
Spencer
Let me backtrack a second. I drove Dorothy and W.I. Thomas to Tule Lake at one point. Do you remember the dates?
Hansen
No.
Spencer
What is the date of her letter?
Hansen
April 27, 1943.
Spencer
All right, I came back to Berkeley and Dorothy then had gone to Chicago. Now, when did I come back? I came back to Berkeley from Gila and got married on May 21, [1943].
Hansen
Now then, there's a letter to Thomas in your [JERS] correspondence file that is signed by both you and your wife "R. F. Spencer and E. A. W. Spencer." But this letter is dated September 8, 1943.
Spencer
Yes, yes, yes. Well, I had driven Dorothy and W. I. up to Tule Lake at some point in there, and I don't remember when. I was at Tule Lake twice—once with Elizabeth and once with the Thomases. I damn near hit a cow. (chuckles)
Hansen
Well, see, this trip in September 1943 must be your second trip to Tule Lake because you're writing back to Thomas in Berkeley and telling her about the trip that you and your wife had up there and your meeting
Spencer
Tell me first. Have you interviewed Billigmeier?
Hansen
I've talked with Billigmeier [in his office in the Department of Sociology at the University of California in either 1978 or 1979]. I didn't interview him formally. He had a lot of material on the schools, which is kind of interesting, because this is what this first report of his for JERS was allegedly about.[64]
Spencer
Now, he was at Tule Lake for how long?
Hansen
Oh, I think he was there for a couple of years, at least a year or so.
Spencer
When I came up to Tule Lake in September 1943... my God, I don't remember Billigmeier. I remember meeting Billigmeier, and I see before me a chap with glasses and...
Hansen
Somewhat tall.
Spencer
Yes, but I don't remember ever really adequately having a conversation with him.
Hansen
Because this seems like a traumatic kind of experience. You're taking somebody who is roughly your contemporary and you and Grodzins are sitting there and...
Spencer
Well, I don't know that we ever met and did it. I'm sure I would remember if we had catechized Billigmeier for three days. But I don't think we ever did, or at least I didn't.
Hansen
You don't talk about the matter again in your correspondence.
Spencer
The reason I ask if you interviewed Billigmeier is because, obviously, if you went through a letter like this with him, he would still, I suppose, feel...
Hansen
I don't think I would have brought this event up, really.
Spencer
Did he get a Ph.D. dissertation out of his JERS work?
Hansen
I'm not sure about that, either. I don't think he did. I don't know what he worked on, but I don't think that he ever published anything about the Evacuation.[65]
Spencer
And he's been at [the University of California at] Santa Barbara for many years.
Hansen
Oh, gosh, he was there when I started my sophomore year in 1957 at Santa Barbara, after transferring there from Berkeley. And that would have been, you know, twelve years after the war. And he was an established professor when I got there. I believe he's still there, if he hasn't retired by now.
Now, let's see, when did I get an offer from them [the University of California, Santa Barbara]? Was it 1947.
Hansen
Well, I imagine it would have been right about that time.
Spencer
I didn't accept it because they wanted me to teach both geography and anthropology. I talked to Kroeber about it and Kroeber said, "That's all right, but it means you're building up an anthropology department and, at the same time, you're responsible for geography, and you may wind up falling between two chairs." He says, "I wouldn't take it." So I didn't.
Hansen
That's when you took the position at the University of Oregon, right?
Spencer
Yes, I took a job in Oregon instead.
Hansen
So, what happened, is that this conference with Billigmeier never came about. That's the only thing I can think of.
Spencer
Now, Grodzins may have done it.
Hansen
Yes.
Spencer
Billigmeier may have come down from Tule Lake and then Grodzins may have catechized him.
Hansen
But the thing that comes out is that you did somehow get out to Berkeley at that time.
Spencer
That's why I wonder if that's the time I took Dorothy and W. I. to Tule Lake.
Hansen
It's hard to determine whether this catechizing of Billigmeier by you and Grodzins ever came about. But something else came about that led to your departure from Gila, and not too long afterward—you got a letter from Dorothy Thomas, who had just returned from her trip to Chicago.
Spencer
Date?
Hansen
May 25, 1943. And she said: "We are, of course, greatly disappointed at the result of your conferences with Kroeber. But there is no use going into that any further. You have made your decision, and I hope it works out well for you in the long run." And then she told you about a JERS conference she wanted to hold in Phoenix with you, Sakoda, Tsuchiyama, and Nishimoto.
Spencer
See, I accepted Kroeber's offer; and, on that basis, I decided to marry this girl.
Hansen
Okay.
Spencer
Because I would now be back in the Bay Area. So I did. Okay.
Hansen
Now, as to this conference that you were supposed to have in Phoenix, it was to be held in June. Wrote Thomas: "Since we may close out Gila, I do not believe it will be profitable to have Hikida, Okuno, Omachi, et al. present."
Spencer
Oh, yes.
Hansen
Did you ever have that conference in Phoenix?
Spencer
I don't remember.
Hansen
You don't remember attending such a conference?
Maybe I was so preoccupied with a new wife or whatever else, that I can't remember clearly. My memory begins to fail me at this point.
Hansen
Well, this should refresh your memory a bit. You said, in a letter to Thomas written on May 25, 1943: "I have hesitated to admit the decision inasmuch as I dislike leaving the study. In the past year I have come to have a strong belief in the possibilities of the study and I feel that in this matter I have been between two very hot fires.... I sincerely hope that you will not feel that I am doing the disloyal thing of joining forces with Kroeber. When Kroeber approached me on this matter he simply took it for granted that I would work for him on his program relative to Southeastern Asia. He stated it in such a way as to preclude no alternative. He was, or seemed to be, quite furious at my hesitation to accept his offer with the proper alacrity. Kroeber, I feel, and I may be wrong, left me no out. I must admit that I feel that I am letting you down.... This, I know, leaves you in a helluva hole regarding the work in the field. Kroeber's program will not entail too much time with the result that if you were willing, I'd be able to spend time getting down on paper the material I have been collecting."
Spencer
That was a lie, of course.
Hansen
And you continued: "Gila I believe, is too fruitful a field to let go." You then said, "I am going to have a talk with Lowie concerning the matter of a suggested replacement from his side. After all, he suggested me and possibly he may be able to find someone who will do the job even better than I've been doing. There is of course, the fact of the Japanese Language which has been a great help to me but actually that isn't essential."
Spencer
But Lowie felt that I had enough data, too. I say, I really wondered. Kroeber pressured me. He had no one else, and he needed somebody to supervise the area of teaching and to begin work with Vietnamese. And he had signed a contract with the Army to train Army personnel in four languages. So, he was working very hard to build up a coterie of instructors. And I was to be, essentially, administrative assistant and instructor in the Area Language Program. Well, it was something that interested me very much; and, as I said, I wanted to teach. I think Lowie was satisfied. However much Lowie was drawn to sociological aspects, he nonetheless remained the ethnographer. He didn't care whether I left Gila.
Hansen
What about the war itself at the time, the urgency that either Kroeber or Lowie might have felt about just the relative weight of what these two contributions would be?
Spencer
That's right, that's right. Kroeber became sort of a 100 percent patriotic American at that point. He used that, I remember, as one of his talking points for me to take this job with him. Well, see, I'm glad I did, because I'd had the fieldwork and then I got the teaching experience. I got the rank of instructor, and I was still three years away from my Ph.D. It delayed me in getting a Ph.D., admittedly, but it was smooth sailing from there on in.
Hansen
How would you assess the relative value to your subsequent career of those two experiences that you had?
Spencer
I can see the interrelationship between the two; but, I think they were in many respects equal. On the one hand, through the JERS project, I established a close rapport and contact with Lowie, and then working for Kroeber... Here I'm working for two of the most prominent anthropologists of the day. And I'd say that the things dovetailed and worked very well for me personally. I'm delighted.
Hansen
Actually, did you have much of a choice when you're a fledgling anthropologist yourself, and the perhaps leading anthropologist in the world had asked you to work with him on a particular project during the midst of a world war, where, at that point, it was still very indeterminate what the outcome would be.
Spencer
You let Dorothy Swaine Thomas go fly a kite, I'll tell you that right now. And you knew that Lowie was not going to hold it against you. So, what the hell? But I tried to be tactful, and I wanted this job with Kroeber very much.
Here's what you said [in a letter dated 30 may 1943] to Dorothy Thomas: "I have the feeling that you are furious at me for leaving the study. Dorothy, I must admit that I have never had to make so difficult a decision before and I hope that you can appreciate the reasons for my taking the step. In a sense, giving up the work that I have done and the contacts I have here is tremendously hard and even painful. I do regret the hole in which I place you.... I don't know what to say except that I feel guilty at letting you down. With me it was a question of antagonizing you or Kroeber and I chose to get you down on me rather than Kroeber. Thank you for your good wishes."
Now, what happened ultimately, as far as when you went back to Berkeley? You still had some work with the project, so you must have had some continuing relationship with Dorothy Thomas.
Spencer
I don't know. On May 21, I'd been back a few days, and we had agreed that Elizabeth and I would get married, so we got married. That was fine. We went down to Los Angeles for our wedding celebration, a day or two, not long. And then the understanding was that I would go back to the project and disassociate myself from it gradually. I believe that July 1 would have been the beginning of the Kroeber project.
Hansen
Right.
Spencer
And, consequently, my separation from the Gila project, from JERS, would have taken place at the end of June. And, I went back for several weeks, and left again in order to come home for the beginning of Kroeber's project. So, I was still there [at Gila] through June.
Hansen
And was Dorothy Thomas furious at you, when you were talking to her, or not?
Spencer
No, but then Kroeber evidently felt also guilty about the situation, and it was he who pushed Hankey, as you pointed out. Although, I had mentioned Hankey earlier as a possibility. She was a person who was around; she was forthright. And, you tell me something interesting about her that she, having found the frustration of living in the center, she then proceeded to eat herself into thirty pounds.
Hansen
Yes, she tells this on herself.
Spencer
Yes, I know. And then goes out in the desert for long walks and cries.[66] I never attributed that kind of emotion to Rosalie, so perhaps I've done her an injustice over the years, because I've always thought she was a tremendously aggressive female, who would ride roughshod over anything and everybody.
Hansen
Well, she depicts herself at that time as being brought up in the Depression in East Los Angeles, among a Mexican American barrio community, and going up at the age of about twenty-seven to [the University of California at] Berkeley, after going to junior college in Los Angeles.
Spencer
I don't know. I kind of take what she says with a grain of salt. Her book [ Doing Fieldwork ] is, I thought, rather self-serving.
Hansen
You read that when it came out, did you?
Spencer
Yes. I've forgotten it, you know. I mean, I read it. I guess I read it more for the Gila description than anything else.
Hansen
She doesn't give you a lot of credit there. She says that of the two contacts you gave her, one turned out to be an inu and the other patted her on the rump.
Spencer
Well, it's an indication of the fact that my contacts had dispersed.
Hansen
But it's also probably an indication of the fact that they were your contacts.
Spencer
That, and, also, she wanted to start with a clean slate; for that I wouldn't blame her. I would want to do
Hansen
Did you have numerous sessions with Rosalie Hankey at that time before she went up to Gila?
Spencer
No, no, no.
Hansen
You didn't?
Spencer
Once, I think. I remember we met on the balcony of Eschelman Hall on the Berkeley campus. I talked to her about it and that was it.
Hansen
Well, you did send some letters off to try to make some connections for her.
Spencer
Yes, I think that was one thing.
Hansen
And you wrote one of your remaining friends in July. On July 15 you wrote to Hugo Wolter, who you called Hux at that time, and you told him that, "Dr. Thomas believes, with good reason, that Rosalie will be most adequate for the task of securing social data. I hope, too, that she will hit it off better with the administration than I was able to do."
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
And this certainly wouldn't have been the person who patted her on the fanny, would it?
Spencer
I don't know.
Hansen
I mean, that's not a possibility, is it?
Spencer
It's not impossible.
Hansen
It's not impossible.
Spencer
I don't know. I mean, here he was an ex-Lutheran minister. But maybe, like me, he had turned his back on his condition. (laughter)
Hansen
Well, let's see, what were you doing in the months immediately after you left Gila? You were already working for Kroeber, starting in July. But, then on September 6 you wrote a letter to Dorothy Thomas from Tule Lake.
Spencer
Well, I guess there was a break before the students came in and there was some time. And Dorothy said: "Why don't you take your car and collect some data for me." And I don't remember what data she wanted, but I remember we spent a number of days collecting material.
Hansen
Well, you wrote to Dorothy on September 7, 1943, and said: "Peck put us in a house in Tule Lake or rather I should say the famous `Golden Hotel' where we occupy very unpleasant quarters and with our fellow guests were at the night-long mercy of a drunken landlady. However, this at least places us near the project and leaves us free to work. After writing you..."
Spencer
Oh, that hotel was in Klamath Falls.
Hansen
"...we saw Best following an hour and a half wait. He got us started and we have had virtually the freedom of the place since. It begins to look as if our stay here will not be too successful from the point of view of getting you the information you want." Apparently Thomas wanted access for JERS to all of the Tule Lake files. And it turned out that the Tule Lake administration finally granted you this access, to the previous project director's files and everything, but you couldn't find anything of striking importance. You wrote
Spencer
Well, that's right. And it was not well-defined. It was just get what you can. You know, I don't remember meeting Billigmeier up there at Tule Lake on this occasion. I remember driving up. I remember staying there in Klamath Falls. But I don't remember what Dorothy wanted specifically.
Hansen
Well, when you got back to Berkeley, you started to work for Kroeber. And before you allude to what you did there, I want to find out if you had any contact, sporadic or otherwise, with the JERS project, whether occasionally you went to lunch with Morton Grodzins or whatever.
Spencer
No, I'll tell you, I was teaching eighteen hours a week; and, man's inhumanity to man, you know, in that kind of situation. And, having to keep up with it, I just didn't have time. I was swamped with preparation for classes.
Hansen
I guess, because of something that you later told Theodora Kroeber, your time and energy were especially impacted. In her book on her husband, her biographical account, she mentions that you provided her with a letter describing the nature of her husband's work during World War II, with the language program. And she says in this section of her book that not too long after the program got started he became very ill.[67]
Spencer
He had a heart attack, yes. His own anxieties, I think, came through in his treatment of me, in his rather cavalier demand that I come to him, and he would use me. And I remember he supervised my teaching and my preparation very, very meticulously and carefully, demanding that I follow out a certain pattern that he conceptualized, which was philosophically congenial to me, in any case. So that was historical, largely. And, so that was no problem, but he drove himself. And, let's see, he would have been how old then? Born in 1876, so in 1943, well, he was nearly sixty-seven. But, anyway, he was well along in years. And the pressures just weighed on him very heavily.
Hansen
Did the prospect of working with Kroeber teaching Japanese and Chinese, at first, and then...
Spencer
Well, I didn't do too much in language. It was more coordination. I'd use this technique of native speakers, and then we brought in people, both native and trained linguists, like Mary Haas and Murray Eminole.
Hansen
Oh, so you weren't doing too much on the language side then.
Spencer
Not too much.
Hansen
I see.
Spencer
However, I did use the Vietnamese material. I helped with that. I helped Haas and Eminole. I was not at all concerned with Thai or with Chinese at that point, though I began to study Chinese myself, as much as my time allowed.
Hansen
Did you get an extension on your deferment, as a result of being involved in that program?
Spencer
Yes, right away.
And did you stay with that program for the rest of the war?
Spencer
Until the program died.
Hansen
And when did it die?
Spencer
The end of 1944.
Hansen
And, at that point, you resumed your doctoral studies and started working on your dissertation?
Spencer
No, because then I was really in danger of the draft. Now they were really scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Hansen
And no cover anymore.
Spencer
And no cover anymore. I got a teaching assistantship in the Anthropology Department that kept me going, you know. Didn't pay very much. But I did all right. The dollar was worth more. It wasn't too bad. And I took a job with Standard Oil of California in Richmond, and they got me a deferment right away. So, then I had to traipse out to Richmond, and it turned out I was terribly allergic to the gas fumes and I was sick all the time at the refinery in Richmond. So, they transferred me to the San Francisco office. So, I used to commute from Berkeley to San Francisco and worked there on, what is it, Bush and Sampson Streets, I guess. And I stuck that out for several months. Then I said, "Oh, the hell with it. Maybe now if I get into the Army they'd find some use for someone who can handle German." (laughter) And this was 1945 now, so I said, "The hell with it." I wrote my draft board. "Oh, go ahead and draft me." They rejected me. All my fears over the years had been for naught.
Hansen
Were your eyes really bad at that time?
Spencer
Yes, I've got really poor vision. Excellent with correction, no problem.
Hansen
Like most people in academic life, right?
Spencer
Right. I always had defective vision, so I was rejected. I would be helpless without glasses, yes.
Hansen
You went back after the war to graduate school, though, and took your exams. Right? In 1945?
Spencer
Right, 1945.
Hansen
And then you wrote your dissertation and finished it in 1946 and got your Ph.D. degree.
Spencer
Yes. And then I got a job at Reed.
Hansen
Right away.
Spencer
Well, I finished my degree in the summer of 1946, got the job at Reed, and then went up to Portland.
Hansen
And during this interim of time, even when you were back at Berkeley as a student, was there any contact with Dorothy Swaine Thomas, any talk about what was going to be done with the data?
Spencer
None, none. Maybe I felt guilty, I don't really remember, but I kind of avoided that. No, wait a minute, wait a minute. Charlie [Kikuchi] came to Berkeley in 1945. Now, the restrictions were gradually being lifted.
Hansen
Right, and it opened up the West Coast.
Spencer
And Charlie came back to Berkeley in 1945, and I had him and W. I. and Dorothy over to dinner. I lived
Hansen
And so when you went up to Reed, you probably then saw Dorothy Thomas for the last time?
Spencer
Yes, I did. Because then at Reed, you see, I was involved in a divorce situation. And, well, I suppose I treated my former wife with a certain cavalierness. Anyway, I fell in love with Marietta, and here we are.
Hansen
Forty years later.
Spencer
Forty years later.
Hansen
At that point, too, you were starting to build your career in a related, but different, direction from what you'd been working on for your dissertation, right? What topic did you start working on? What topic, after leaving the Buddhists?
Spencer
Well, all right. I finished the thesis. And, as I say, it was a hurry-up job. As I pointed out to you, Kroeber and Lowie didn't think much of theses. They never felt a thesis amounted to much.
Hansen
Right.
Spencer
And I think that's right, although I've heard people say it's the best thing you'll ever do. Well, all right. At any rate, they viewed it that way. Did you show the potential? That was their question. So, I wrote the dissertation rather hurriedly, and got the degree and went on to Reed. I remained in contact with Buddhists and Buddhist groups. I was very interested in Japanese Buddhism in its spread in America. That had been my thesis, and I followed it up. I joined the Portland Buddhist group. I was in correspondence with the Chicago Buddhist group, the San Francisco-Berkeley hongwanji, and the Los Angeles one as well, and I kept that up. And I collected a lot of materials. And this guy, Swedberg... is that his name?
Hansen
Yes, Dale Swedberg.
Spencer
Yes. Now I sent him all of my correspondence and other Buddhist materials, after you declined them and suggested that he contact me about this material. That's a funny thing. He wrote me long letters, and then I sent him the stuff, and he wrote me a letter and he said: "The stuff arrived. My wife called me at my office and she said a big package had arrived." I've never heard from him since then.
Hansen
You've never heard from him since he received your Buddhist materials?
Spencer
No. I thought maybe he would comment on the papers and their usefulness to him and that kind of thing. But these were all Nisei publications on Buddhism. I then went to the University of Oregon for a year, and I felt, really, I would stay there. I hated Reed. I mean, I hated Reed, but at least Marietta and I came together as a result. And I went to Oregon for the year, rather than Santa Barbara. And, that was fine. I didn't mind the teaching, and the teaching load was pretty good. Salaries were awful then, of course.
Hansen
Wouldn't it be interesting if you'd gone to Santa Barbara? There would have been Shibutani, Billigmeier, and Spencer—all three JERS project people—teaching there at the same time.
Right. Anyway, but I was just going to say that the department at Oregon had an interest in the local Indian, and since I was now away from Buddhist things, I went ahead with that and got a grant from the American Philosophical Society, and worked that summer on the Klamath Indians. And, then, I got the offer here.
Hansen
At the University of Minnesota, in 1948.
Spencer
Yes. And by that time salaries were getting better. So, Marietta and I drove out here in 1948. And I kept up with the Buddhist interest. I published a few papers, you know, some in rather obscure places, as in India. And, that's it. I've been here ever since.
Hansen
But your career has diversified since you've been here.
Spencer
Well, then, yes. All of a sudden opportunities came and I grabbed them. I had a chance and I'd been here, what, three years, when I heard of this possibility of going to the Arctic. And, though I'd never thought about the Arctic, nonetheless, a geographer said to me, "The Navy is looking for an anthropologist to work in north Alaska." "The Navy? What port?" It was the Office of Naval Research, and I'll say for them that they're not interested in applied views. They wanted pure science, and they were entertaining projects, and somebody had mentioned an anthropologist. And John Weaver, the geographer who had called my attention to it, became president of the University of Wisconsin. He suggested that I apply. I applied, Marietta and I went up to Point Barrow, Alaska, for two years running. Already the tendency was that you lock yourself into a particular focus. And there were those people who have worked with Eskimo and they are...
Hansen
Still working with Eskimo.
Spencer
Yes, they're still working with them. I didn't want to do that. The next year I had a chance to go to Southeast Asia. I went to Burma, came back to Buddhism. And then Sri Lanka. And also I had a chance to stop off for several months in Turkey. So, I mean, my interest in Islam and Buddhism, and then in the Far East, Japanese. I've wanted to do these different things. And I admit sometimes I've spread myself too thin.
Hansen
You mentioned off tape last night that you've been in several departments at Minnesota. Which departments have you been in since you've been here, at least as an affiliated member.
Spencer
Geography, Linguistics, East Asian Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, South Asian Studies, and... well, the medical school and psychiatry.
Hansen
Have you appreciated the university here in terms of its flexibility and its openness?
Spencer
Yes, yes. It's been very good in that respect.
Hansen
And now that you've just reached the age where you're retiring, what are your research plans?
Spencer
I want to do more with Buddhism in Korea; it's very interesting. This is one reason I want to go to Korea now.
Hansen
So, Buddhism as a research topic has stayed with you all these years.
Spencer
Yes. Well, nobody's done really an adequate study of Korean Buddhism. Japanese is a dime a dozen; but the Korean Buddhism is Zen, and yet it isn't Japanese Zen.
Hansen
You mentioned once when we were taking a walk during a break in our taping that you were going to work with somebody in Korea.
Spencer
Yes.
A Korean scholar over there?
Spencer
Yes, an anthropologist, with a Ph.D. from [the University of] Hawaii.
Hansen
You've had two kids [Claudia and Paul] and they're both grown up now.
Spencer
Yes.
Hansen
And when you look back upon the experience that we've been talking about off and on for three days, your work with JERS during the war, what does it now mean to you?
Spencer
Oh, well, I think I said to you yesterday, didn't I? Or did I say it to Marietta. No, I think when Marietta and I were driving over to have dinner with you last night, I was commenting on our meeting of yesterday. And I said, "You know, it's a funny thing, Art's questions pulled out so much that I had really forgotten." And it's true. And yet, when you ask me to make out a curriculum vitae, for instance, and outline my field experiences, I think of the Pueblo languages, I think of the Klamath, I think of the Eskimo, I think of Southeast Asia, East Asia, or Turkey, and Pakistan. But I don't think of the Japanese. It's not the first thought that occurs to me. I have lots of field experience, but that was so anomalous, so unstructured, so problematical, that I don't identify with it to the same degree that I do to work of mine as personal. And perhaps because it was a team project, even though I was given my head and allowed the freedom to do as I chose, I still felt the compulsion to participate under an overall umbrella in which other workers were involved. And I was basically unhappy. Look, you're twenty-four, twenty-five years old. For God's sake, you want a certain amount of direction. You're insecure. You're starting out in a profession; you don't know whether you know it well enough to be able to handle it or not. Solon Kimball, ten years my senior, says, "Can you predict social trends?" and fixes me with a cold, fishy eye. And I hem and haw and shuffle my feet, because I should have told him, "Go soak your head. For goodness sake, predict social trends. That's a stupid question!" Yes, I can say that now, but at that time I felt, when he put it that way, I ought to be able to predict social trends. And I felt terribly insecure.
Hansen
Just before we started taping this interview, I read you a passage from a Christopher Isherwood novel, Down There On A Visit [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962], and during the past three days you've kind of "gone down there on a visit."[68] And you've been doing it, in fact, off and on since I wrote to you a couple of years ago. You've read back through some of your correspondence, you looked through some of your field reports, different things that you wrote. Are you comfortable with that twenty-four, twenty-five-year-old fledgling fieldworker-anthropologist-social analyst-foreign correspondent?
Spencer
Well, look, I'm sufficiently removed from it that I can take a somewhat detached view. And I can ask myself the question, "What if I had a student whom I had placed in that situation, could I expect anything different?" Now, I don't think so. And, if the student were as productive as I was, I'd pat him on the head and give him an A. I don't think I did too badly.
Hansen
Well, you did get patted on the head by Dorothy Thomas.
Spencer
Well, yes. Except I never appreciated that. I was always looking for criticism rather than for any compliment.
Hansen
So, when [Peter] Suzuki, in this [1986] article on the JERS social scientists [in Dialectical Anthropology ], takes the attitude that he does, does it make you feel less comfortable with yourself and your contribution in the war?
Spencer
No, no. First of all, I'm not a Marxist. And my whole training has been anti-Marxist, anti that kind of evolutionary perception. I think he's a horse's ass, and I think it's a stupid article, real dumb. That here he pontificates, sets himself up as a high priest of this whole Japanese American situation. I mean, it's ridiculous. And the fact that Ichioka thought sufficiently well of that article to have it duplicated and sent out to people who would ostensibly be involved in his meeting, does not, in my view, put Ichioka in a very
Hansen
Well, I don't know that Ichioka necessarily agrees with Suzuki. I think he sent out that article because it's the first time that somebody has really attempted, from whatever perspective, to provide some sort of evaluation of what went on in the camps, other than the people who worked for the WRA, who issued final reports, and the like.
Spencer
So, I am Japanese; therefore, I know all about Japanese. Therefore, people who worked with Japanese, even in the camps, have done wrong. I'm an anthropologist, and I know what's right, and I have my feet firmly in the gospel according to Saint Marx.
Hansen
Well, let's hope that there will be a dialogue at the conference and that other people will add their perspectives.
Spencer
Well, I just hate to be in a situation where we have to listen to polemics and people jumping up and down and getting excited. That's so boring.
Hansen
The tape is running out, Bob, but before it does I want to thank you very much, not only for responding to my letters, and in providing the documentation that you did for me, but also for your generosity here during these past three days. I found you JERS materials very useful when I first encountered them in my research. I was attracted to the materials, and to the person who produced them. I was particularly attracted by the fact that you were such a young person, and I empathized with the situation that you were in at Gila. When I was that age, I was beginning my career as a college teacher, and just getting up in front of a class seemed hellish. But relative to what you went through at Gila, all that seems so tepid and tame. It must have been very difficult for you at such a tender age to do fieldwork under the conditions of a place such as Gila, and whatever anxieties you had at Gila...well, they are quite understandable.
Spencer
Well, you recognize the prevailing malaise. I had tried to pinpoint it, and you saw it at once. Namely, that it was wartime, and there was this sense of tremendous anxiety. Now, you were probably too young to remember that, and then this generation has grown up, you know, without this threat of war. Vietnam was not a threat of war. Vietnam was an action far away in which people could take a stand or not, as they chose. But it's when you may wake up one morning and find a bomb in your lap, when you don't know what's going to happen when a major base has been attacked, when the Japanese have moved across the entire Pacific, when the Germans have moved well into the Soviet Union, and so on. That was a scary time, believe me. It was frightening.
Hansen
And its frightening nature is compounded when you're also yourself of an age where you're very likely to be involved in a world war.
Spencer
Not only that, but then you're dealing with a population that has been influenced directly by the war. Ooh! That was rough.
Hansen
Well, my feeling is that the work that you did at Gila, largely self-generated and self-conceptualized, has
Spencer
Well, I don't know either, because you've got so many shades of opinion in the social sciences today, regardless of discipline. You know that from history, and it's true about sociology, anthropology, psychology. You do your thing and you hope that it works out.
Hansen
I feel that your work at Gila already has had historical and public policy value. I think about the whole business of documenting the Evacuation during this redress movement that's currently going on. Without material like yours to work with, how can we know what went on in the camps? You're victimized by the selective and convenient memories of one or another group of people. If you did nothing else, you put down your observations and preliminary interpretations very graphically and quite objectively, or so it seems to me. I think that there was a scientific temper at work, even when you were in a state of angst about things. Whether you could predict trends or not, you were certainly describing trends. And those trends correlate with trends that other people in your study were describing in different camps, as well as what the WRA community analysts were observing in the assorted centers. Suzuki may harbor grave reservations about the value of the work people like you accomplished, but I think that each case has to be examined individually. From my own perspective, I think that the work that social scientists did in the camps during World War II was, in the main, extremely useful and extremely valuable. I think their very presence in the camps helped to mitigate some of the worst horrors that could have come about in terms of how the evacuees were treated. More importantly, I think that they've provided memory, and that can be used by posterity to guard against the temptation of selective amnesia. So I do not share Peter Suzuki's particular point of view. I can agree, surely, with certain things that he expresses, but I think his predisposition, clearly, is generally not to try to see the value of JERS's work, but rather to condemn it.
Spencer
Well, Suzuki starts out with the premise that everybody else was wrong.
Hansen
Self-righteousness is not a good mood in which to conduct inquiry.
Spencer
That's right, it's not.
Hansen
We're now out of tape, Bob, so let me end by thanking you very much for this long and extremely informative interview on behalf of the Japanese American Project of the Oral History Program at California State University, Fullerton.
Notes
1. Born in 1876, by his death in 1960 Kroeber had become one of the major figures shaping the history of American anthropology. At Berkeley he developed one of the world's great research museums and teaching departments in anthropology. For an overview of his life and work, see Julian H. Steward, Alfred Kroeber (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973).
2. Lowie, who was born in 1887 and died in 1957, achieved, like Kroeber, the reputation in his lifetime as one of the world's great anthropologists. See Robert Murphy, Robert H. Lowie (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972) for a brief but useful biographical and bibliographical study of Lowie.
3. Dr. William Isaac Thomas (1863-1947) was a pioneer American sociologist who contributed distinguished work in cultural change, personality development, and ethnography. For an appreciation of Thomas and his work in the context of the Chicago School of Sociology, see Martin Blumer, The Chicago School of Sociology: Institutionalization, Diversity, and the Rise of Sociological Research (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) and Lester R. Kurtz, Evaluating Chicago Sociology: A Guide to the Literature, with an Annotated Bibliography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
4. A quasi-civilian agency of the Army in charge of the management of the evacuated Japanese Americans during the assembly center phase of their incarceration in 1942.
5. Franz Boas (1858-1942) was born in Germany, but came to America in 1886 to carry on investigations in North America, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. In New York City he taught at Columbia University and was the Curator of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History. A pioneer of general anthropology in the twentieth century, he established cultural relativism as the dominant viewpoint in the discipline.
6. Professor of Urban Studies at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, Peter Suzuki was interned as a teenager in two government camps established by the U.S. government (in Washington and Idaho) for Japanese Americans; his anthropological writings since 1981 have been sharply critical of the work done by social scientists (such as Robert Spencer) connected with the wartime evacuation experience of Japanese Americans.
7. A research associate in the Asian American Studies Center at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and a widely published authority on Japanese American history and culture.
8. Carl Sauer was chairman of the UC Berkeley Department of Geography from 1923 to 1954 and was an authority on desert studies, tropical areas, the human geography of Native Americans, and the agriculture and native crops of the New World.
9. Sumner, an American economist and sociologist, was a prominent publicist of social Darwinism who was strongly opposed to socialism.
10. The author of such notable works as The Material Culture of the Marquesas Islands (1924), The Tanala, A Hill Tribe of Madagascar (1933), and The Study of Man (1936), Linton was an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin from 1928 to 1937 before moving on to Columbia (1937-1946) and Yale (1946-1953).
11. For more on William Popper (1874-1963), see Essays in Honor of William Popper (Berkeley: University of California Department of Semitic Languages, n.d.). See also Popper's obituary in the Journal of the American Oriental Society 84 (July-September 1964) for an explanation of his contribution to Islamic scholarship.
12. In a letter from Dorothy Thomas to Richard Nishimoto [Mr. X], dated 8 January 1944, she wrote, in connection with Tamie Tsuchiyama, a University of California, Berkeley, doctoral candidate in anthropology and a JERS researcher, the following: "I am really deeply concerned about her future. I know that Kroeber will not do anything at all to push her, and that he actively discouraged her and put impediments in her way. This is more a matter of sex discrimination than of race discrimination: in spite of close friendship and mutual professional respect, he suggested that I be made Associate rather than full professor here even though I had been Associate Professor at Yale for six years. His suggestion in my case was not accepted, but he has strong antagonisms of this sort. Lowie, who admires Tamie greatly, is too introverted to do anything. So her future here is very uncertain indeed." See Folder W1.25A, Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study [JERS], Bancroft Library [BL], University of California, Berkeley [UCB].
13. Born in Poland, Radin came to the United States as an infant. He was an authority on the culture of primitive societies, particularly North American Indian tribes, and a pioneer in the use of autobiographical documents.
14. For a contemporary account of this situation, see Robert F. Spencer, "A Preliminary Analysis of the Role of Religion in the Gila Relocation Center" (Winter 1943), 29-30, Folder K8.50, Gila Relocation Center [GRC], JERS, BL-UCB.
15. Folder K.086A, GRC, JERS, BL-UCB, contains four documents illuminating this incident.
16. At least two of these visits by Spencer to the Tanforan camp (24 and 28 July 1942) were documented by him in the form of field trip reports. See Folder B8.01, Studies of Assembly Center Events, JERS, BL-UCB.
17. Morton Grodzins's dissertation was published under the title of Americans Betrayed: Politcs and the Japanese Evacuation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949). Before his death, Grodzins achieved recognition as a social scientist. Another of his prominent publications was The Loyal and the Disloyal: Social Boundaries of Patriotism and Treason
18. The controversy involving Dorothy Swaine Thomas and Morton Grodzins and the use of JERS material in Americans Betrayed has been explored in an article by Peter Suzuki, "For the Sake of Inter-University Comity: The Attempted Suppression by the University of California of Morton Grodzins' Americans Betrayed, " in Yuji Ichioka, ed., Views From Within: The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study (Los Angeles: Asian American Studies Program, University of California at Los Angeles, 1989), 95-123.
19. See Folder K8.40, GRC, JERS, BL-UCB.
20. For a detailed study of the Topaz center, see Sandra Taylor, Jewel of the Desert: Japanese American Internment at Topaz (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1993).
21. After World War II, Leighton, along with Morris Opler, who served as the WRA's community analyst at the Manzanar War Relocation Center, developed a Poston/Manzanar Project that included their respective field notes and the reports compiled by the units they headed at Poston and Manzanar as well as dissertations and theses based on these data that were written by their Cornell graduate students. For an inventory of the material, see D. Gesenway, M. Roseman, and G. Solomon, "Guide to the Japanese-American Relocation Center Records, 1935-1953" (Ithaca, N.Y.: Department of Manuscripts and University Archives, Cornell University Libraries, 1981).
22. Dorothea Leighton, a psychiatrist, received her M.D. degree from Johns Hopkins University and was a special physician with the U.S. Indian Service.
23. At the time that Alexander Leighton assumed the leadership of the Bureau of Sociological Research at Poston, which was jointly administered by the WRA and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, he was serving as a consultant to the Indian Personality and Research Project.
24. See letter from Tamie Tsuchiyama to Dorothy Thomas, dated 2 November, 1942, Folder J6.32, Colorado River Relocation Center [CRRC], JERS, BL-UCB. Tsuchiyama, who worked concurrently at the Poston center for the Bureau of Sociological Research and the Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study, discussed this matter in the context of explaining to Thomas why the Leighton-directed BSR was experiencing difficulty. "The fact that Dr. Leighton is in navel service and must wear a regulation naval uniform," noted Tsuchiyama, "has also tended somewhat to increase the distrust of the Japanese people towards us as a group. Many of my friends caution me never to be seen with him in public."
25. The relevant comment by Spicer is this: "Dr. Suzuki repeats an old criticism of Leighton, current in the Poston Center, that he `roused suspicion' by walking around the center in naval uniform. In the first place, Leighton did not wear a naval uniform; he wore only collar ornaments. He did this to make sure that he was not hiding the fact about himself that he was a lieutenant commander in the navy. Any effort to hide that fact would have roused far more suspicion, as well as being dishonest. Of course, the open identification of himself as a naval officer would have been entirely incompatible with intelligence work, and hence his behavior in this connection is a demonstration that he was not engaged in `intelligence.'"
26. See The Spoilage, 68, fn. 221.
27. Richard Shigeaki Nishimoto (1904-ca. 1955), like Robert Spencer, was a graduate (in 1925) of San Francisco's Lowell High School. Four years later, he received a degree in engineering from Stanford University, where he also enrolled in some social-science courses.
28. See Lane Ryo Hirabayashi and James Hirabayashi, "The `Credible' Witness: The Central Role of Richard S. Nishimoto in JERS," Views From Within, 65-94.
29. These papers include the following: "Structure of a Contemporary Japanese-American Buddhist Church," Social Forces 26 (March 1948): 281-87; (with K. Imamura) "Notes on the Japanese Kinship System," Journal of the American
30. During World War II, Marvin Opler was a community analyst for the WRA at the Tule Lake center. So, too, was his brother Morris a WRA community analyst, at the Manzanar center. For a good overview of the life and work of Marvin Opler, see the obituary of him by Morris Opler in the American Anthropologist 83 (September 1981): 617-21.
31. See, for example, Robert F. Spencer, et al., The Native Americans (New York: Harper Row, 1965, 1977).
32. See "Evacuation and Administrative Interrelationships in the Gila Relocation Center" (March-April 1943), Folder K8.42, GRC, JERS, BL-UCB.
33. John Landward, after the departure of Nan Cook Smith from Gila, became the director of the center's Social Welfare Department. Prior to his employment with the WRA, Landward had been trained in social work at Harvard University and served as a missionary in the Netherlands for the Church of Latter Day Saints.
34. Takeo Tada, chief internee assistant in the Community Activities Section of Gila's Canal Camp, was beaten by several other internees on the evening of November 30, 1942, an action that set in motion a series of events that nearly culminated in a massive strike, such as the one staged at the Poston center in November 1942, or a bloody riot, like that which beset the Manzanar center in the succeeding month. For a discussion of this situation, see Hansen, "Cultural Politics in the Gila River Relocation Center, 1942-1943," 327-62.
35. See "Preliminary Report" (August 15, 1942), in Folder K8.52, GRC, JERS, BL-UCB.
36. For Spencer's description and assessment of Lowie's visit, see his letter to Dorothy Thomas, 12 February 1943, Folder K8.80, GRC, JERS, BL-UCB.
37. Rather than concentrating, as with most earlier structural-functionalists, on how the elements of a society function as a system, Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-) focuses on the origins of the systems themselves. He views culture, as it is expressed in art, ritual, and the patterns of daily life, as a surface representation of the underlying structure of the human mind.
38. See The Kikuchi Diary: Chronicle from an American Concentration Camp (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1973).
39. See, for example, Robert Spencer, "Political Pressure Groups," Folder K8.62, 21, and "The Canal Camp Block 4 (July 1, 1943), Folder K8.38, 29-37, both in UCB-BL, JERS, GRC.
40. Robert Redfield (1897-1958), a cultural anthropologist and the author of The Little Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), was one of Embree's mentors at the University of Chicago, where he completed his doctoral studies.
41. It was first republished in the prewar period as a section of a work entitled University of Washington Publications in the Social Sciences 11 (December 1939): 57-130; then, in 1981, it was republished as Number 2 in the Occasional Monograph Series of the Asian American Studies Program of the University of Washington; finally, in 1984, it was republished as a book by the University of Washington Press in cooperation with the Asian American Studies Program of the University of Washington. Included in the 1984 volume is a highly useful introductory essay by Miyamoto.
42. See Robert Winthrop, ed., Culture and the Anthropological Tradition: Essays in Honor of Robert F. Spencer (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1990).
43. The "conflict" mentioned here is covered by Mimi Yusa in the diary she maintained for JERS at Tanforan and Gila from July 16 through September 30, 1942. See Mrs. Earle T. Yusa, "Tanforan Diary,"Folder B12.30, JERS, BL-UCB. For example, the entry for September 5, written several days after the Yusas had transferred from Tanforan to Gila, read: "Mother-in-law wanted to know why I didn't want to live with her. I told her the following: That I wasn't the type of Japanese girl who
44. For background information about Hoshiyama, who served JERS as a paid observer at both Tanforan and Topaz, see Fred Hoshiyama, "Family History and Autobiography," Folder B12.35, JERS, BL-UCB.
45. John Collier (1884-1968) was an American sociologist who, as U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs (1933-1945), secured passage of the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act that fostered tribal organizations, communal land-holding, and traditional culture.
46. After reviewing and proofreading the preceding portion of the transcript in spring 1988 for this present interview, Robert Spencer offered the following remarks:
In conclusion, it was, what, forty-five years ago. In those forty-five years, I've turned to other things. I really never thought I would go back to any concern with the Japanese American issue. My thought was to get the Ph.D. thesis out of it, which I did, write a couple of papers, which I did, and then that would be the end of it. And as far as I was concerned, it was. The experience stood me in very good stead because I established a reputation for having some acquaintance with Buddhism, which I do—it remains one of my special interests—and that enabled me to work in Burma and Sri Lanka and now in Korea where I have a strong interest in the Korean branch of Zen. In Korea Zen is a dominant form of Buddhism. My only regret in not attending [Yuji] Ichioka's conference of last summer is that I missed seeing Charlie Kikuchi. I would have liked to have seen Charlie because he and I developed a closeness that I did not share with anyone else in the relocation situation. In other words, there was more to it than just working for Dorothy Thomas; we became close friends and we could interact quite effectively. I visited the Gila site once [after World War II]. It's gone. I drove by it once, and everything was gone and cleared. One could see the outlines of some of the houses still. Actually, the staff quarters were given to Arizona State University [in Tempe, Arizona] and used for new faculty housing at a time when Arizona State was really burgeoning. I visited these quarters because a friend of mine took at job at ASU and was assigned one of these apartments. They were not bad, jerry-built of course. But the evacuee barracks must have been demolished and the materials sold or whatever.
47. See Robert F. Spencer, "Sumo Club and Tournament," Folder K8.64, GRC, JERS, BL-UCB.
48. See letter from Richard Nishimoto to Dorothy Thomas, 22 October 1943, Folder W1.25A, JERS, BL-UCB.
49. During the Yusas first two weeks at the Gila center, they lived with Jean Yamasaki and her family. During his visits to this household, Robert Spencer and Jean Yamasaki became close friends. Their friendship was sustained after World War II through periodic correspondence that lasted until Spencer's death in June 1992.
50. In addition to the two reports referred to by Spencer ("The Formal Organization of Constitutional Self-government" and "Notes on Spencer's Report of Tada Incident"), Joseph Omachi wrote one other report during his JERS employment ("Draft Resistance"). See Folders K8.28-30, GRC, JERS, BL-UCB.
51. See Robert F. Spencer, "The Rise of Political Pressure Groups in the Gila Community," Folder J8.62, GRC, BL-UCB.
52. Although Earle Yusa produced no reports for JERS while at Gila, he did complete at least three short ones for the study during his detention at Tanforan ("House Managers," "Selection of Temporary Council," and "Internal Security Department"). See Folder B8.38, Tanforan Assembly Center [TAC], JERS, BL-UCB.
53. For Nishimoto's positions and power in Poston, see Hirabayashi and Hirabayashi, "The `Credible' Witness," 69-75.
54. Actually, the story in question was entitled "Anthropologist Urges Family Relocation" and appeared in the issue of the Gila News-Courier on 22 December 1942. It read:
The nisei must discard the cultural pattern distinctly Japanese, and adopt the Western modes if they wish to become an integral part of the American society," Robert Spencer, anthropologist from the University of California declared Friday night [December 18, 1942] in a lecture on "Japanese Family Life."
Spencer spoke to the group of the patriarchial [sic] trait instilled in the Japanese individual, which is still evident in the average nisei. He deplored the reactionary tendencies and the lack of progressiveism which this trait brings out.
The liberal anthropologist, who is engaged in research within the center which is aimed to aid the evacuees in resettlement, said of relocation that "the nisei family will be more successfully relocated than the individual, inasmuch as families can more easily adjust themselves to new environment."
55. See Robert F. Spencer and Charles Kikuchi, "Evacuee and Administrative Interrelationships in the Gila Relocation Center," Folder K8.42, GRC, JERS, BL-UCB.
56. See memorandum from Robert F. Spencer to All Field Workers, 23 April 1943, Folder K8.36, GRC, JERS, BL-UCB.
57. For the block study of Block 61, directed by Shotaro Hikida (assisted by Robert Spencer and James Sakoda), and that of Block 64, directed by Yataro Okuno, see Folder K8, GRC, JERS, BL-UCB. For a more ambitious block study, see that on Block 4, directed by Robert Spencer and based upon confidential information supplied by block manager George Onoda, ibid.
58. See the 1988 interview (O.H.2010) with James M. Sakoda, by Arthur A. Hansen, in the Japanese American Project of the CSUF Oral History Program. It has been edited for publication in the present volume.
59. The Japanese American Project of the Oral History Program at California State University, Fullerton, includes an interview with Morris Opler (O.H. 1660) that was transacted on June 4-6, 1978 by Arthur A. Hansen and David A. Hacker. Currently, this interview is closed to researchers.
60. See Morris Opler, Myths and Legends of the Lipan Apache Indians (New York: American Folk-lore Society, 1940).
61. David French's dissertation was published as Factionalism in Isleta Pueblo (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1949).
62. For a recent essay written by David H. French, see "Gary Snyder and Reed College," in Jon Halper, ed., Gary Snyder: Dimensions of a Life (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1991), (16-23). The biographical note on French in this volume, 432, reads:
David H. French is Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, at Reed College. He was born in Bend, Oregon, in 1918, and studied at Reed (1935-1938), Pomona (B.A., 1939), Claremont (M.A., 1940), and Columbia (Ph.D., 1949).... He has been engaged in broad fields of activity, including social and cultural anthropology, ethnobiology, and linguistics, and has taught generations of students at Reed (1947-1988) and held visiting professorships at Columbia and Harvard. After decades of work with Northwest Indians, French received a Certificate of Appreciation from the Confederated Tribes of Warm Spring, Oregon, in 1989. The American Anthropological Association also awarded him a Distinguished Service Award in 1988. He continues to reside in Portland, where his retirement activities focus on research and writing.
63. Spencer here is probably referring to Embree's article, "Thailand—A Loosely Structured Social System," American Anthropologist 52 (April-June 1950): 181-93.
64. See the 87-page typescript, "School Report," in Folder R20.12, Tule Lake Relocation Center [TLRC], JERS, BL-UCB. For the other reports Billigmeier wrote for JERS while at Tule Lake on such diverse topics as the Caucasian administration, population and ecology, registration, and segregation, as well as his diary of events and short accounts of miscellaneous topics, see Folders R20.01, R20.03, R20.05, R20.07, R20.09, R20.10, and R20.14.
65. Before his World War II employment with JERS, Robert Henry Billigmeier had completed an M.A. thesis at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1939, "The Minority Problems of Transylvania." Following the war, he finished his
66. See Wax, Doing Fieldwork, 66-72.
67. See T. Kroeber, Alfred Kroeber, 180-91.
68. The passage from the late Christopher Isherwood's autobiographical novel that was read to Spencer prior to the taping of his interview, 13-15, centers on the middle-aged, British-born, naturalized American's reflections on his twenty-three-year old self:
And now before I slip back into the convention of calling this young man "I," let me consider him as a separate being, a stranger almost,... For, of course, he is almost a stranger to me. I have revised his opinions, changed his accent and his mannerisms, unlearned or exaggerated his prejudices and his habits. We still share the same skeleton, but its outer covering has altered so much that I doubt if he would recognize me on the street. We have in common consciousness; there has been no break in the sequence of daily statements that I am I. But what I am has refashioned itself throughout the days and years, until now almost all that remains constant is the mere awareness of being conscious. And that awareness belongs to everybody; it isn't a particular person.
The Christopher [of twenty-three]... is, practically speaking, dead; he only remains reflected in the fading memories of us who knew him. I can't revitalize him now. I can only reconstruct him from his remembered acts and words and from the writings he has left us. He embarrasses me often, and so I'm tempted to sneer at him; but I'll try not to. I'll try not to apologize for him, either. After all, I owe him some respect. In a sense he is my father, and in another sense my son.... No, I will never sneer at him. I will never apologize for him. I am proud to be his father and his son. I think about him and I marvel, but I must beware of romanticizing him. I must remember that much of what looks like courage is nothing but brute ignorance. I keep forgetting that he is as blind to his own future as the dullest of animals.
69. In his introduction to Views From Within (24, fn. 4), Yuji Ichioka depicts Suzuki's Dialectical Anthropology article on JERS as "a one-sided, polemical essay."
Index
- Acculturation studies, 194
- Adair, John, 224
- Adams, Ansel, 179
- American Civil Liberties Union, 292
- American Weekly, 277
- Anthropology
- Anthropology (Kroeber), 238
- Army. See United States Army
- Army Language School, 307-308, 314
- As You Sow (Goldschmidt), 301
- Bancroft Library, 210, 211, 222, 269, 271
- Barnett, James H., 198, 278-79, 282, 299, 305, 308, 309-10, 311, 315
- Beardsley, Richard K., 314
- Bennett, Leroy, 197, 213, 220, 242, 244, 250, 251, 259, 269, 277, 279, 281-86, 293-96, 298, 315
- Best, Ray, 281, 315, 326
- Billigmeier, Robert H., 206, 211, 233, 270, 305, 314-16, 317, 332n65
- Blanchard, William Chandler, 312, 313
- Block studies, 236, 301-302, 306, 331n57
- Bloom, Leonard, 311
- Boas, Franz, 188, 327n5
- Boodberg, Peter, 200
- Brand, Donald, 189
- Brown, Gordon, 293, 299
- Buddhist church, 212-13, 238, 300, 323, 324, 330n46
- Bunzell, Ruth, 253
- Bureau of Indian Affairs, 259, 260
- Bureau of Sociological Research, 206, 207, 265-66, 299-300, 328n23, 328n24
- Casa Grande, Ariz., 217, 218
- Catholic church, 180
- Child in America, The (Thomas & Thomas), 196
- Clayman, Clara, 220, 305
- Collins, Donald E., 292
- Collins, John, 244, 258, 330n45
- Collins, Wayne, 292
- Colson, Elizabeth, 302-303, 308, 313, 315
- Community studies, 235
- Cook, Doug, 305
- Coolidge, Ariz., 222-23
- Coverley, Harvey, 228
- Cozzens, Robert, 215, 259, 284, 315
- "Cultural Aspects of Eunichism" (Spencer), 239
- Cycles of Conquest (Spicer), 278
- Davidson, Daniel S., 216
- Depression, 191
- Doing Fieldwork (Wax), 212, 319
- Down There on a Visit (Isherwood), 325
- Dozier, Ed, 185
- Draft, 276, 321
- Drinnon, Richard, 260
- DuBois, Cora, 192, 208
- Durkheim, Emile, 236
- Eggan, Fred, 189
- Elmendorf, William W., 308, 314
- Embree, John Fee, 209, 235, 247, 273, 276, 277, 278, 294, 299, 300, 301-302, 314
- Eminole, Murray, 321
- Eskimos, 277-78, 323
- Eta class, 236-37
- Ethnology, 190, 237-38
- Ethnology [journal], 190
- Eunichism, 239
- Evolutionism, 191
- Exclusion zone, 205
- Executive Order 9066, 178-79
- Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 272
- Frederick, Francis, 216, 220, 230, 232, 263, 264, 272, 274-76, 281, 289-91, 293
- French, David, 313, 331n61, 332n62
- Fryer, E. Reesman "Si," 244, 253, 255, 258-59, 284
- Fukushima, John, 300
- Gaba, Morton, 218, 243, 273, 281, 283, 298
- Gayton, Anna, 190, 192, 208
- Gifford, Edward, 178
- Gila News Courier, 295
- Gila War Relocation Center, Ariz.
- administration and staff, 215-18, 220, 224-25, 242-44, 258-59, 273-74, 277-81, 285, 293-95, 297, 298, 305
- alcohol at, 220
- Army recruiting at, 286-87, 296
- arrests at, 286, 288-90
- block structure, 221, 236, 301
- buildings, 224, 226, 330-31n46
- camps of, 217, 232, 233, 240-41, 257
- Caucasians at, 197, 228, 232, 233, 250, 264, 281, 284
- deaths at, 224
- festivals at, 305
- illegal activities at, 263-64, 272
- internee government, 221, 231, 297-98
- JERS researchers at, 192-93, 201, 232, 233-35, 237, 255, 259, 268, 270, 277, 279-80
- Kibei at, 248-49
- leave clearances from, 228, 231-32, 240-41, 296-97, 300-301
- living conditions at, 224, 226, 242, 280
- and local community, 218
- location of, 217, 222
- military police at, 240, 241-42, 243-44, 275, 288
- morale at, 220, 233, 267
- organizations at, 257, 258, 282, 289, 290, 293, 305
- and other camps, 267-68
- population of, 221, 233, 236, 242
- recreation at, 249-50, 283
- registration crisis at, 284, 286, 288
- schools at, 257, 280-81
- unrest and riots at, 240, 267, 269, 290-93, 329n34
- visitors to, 195-96, 211, 215, 226-27, 254, 262, 265, 269-70, 279, 282-87, 315
- Gila Young People's Association, 290
- Goldschmidt, Wally, 301
- Governing of Men (Leighton), 206-207, 298
- Grodzins, Morton, 199, 200, 201, 202, 204-205, 211, 212, 303-304, 308, 316, 317, 320, 328n17, 328n18
- Grodzins, Ruth, 204
- Graves, F. J., 289, 290
- Gunther, Erna, 189-90
- Haas, Mary, 321
- Hall, Robert, 238
- Handbook of the Indians of South America (Steward), 191
- Hankey, Rosalie,See Wax, Rosalie Hankey
- Hayes, Hal, 217
- Hayes, Joe, 320
- Hearst, Phoebe Apperson, 193
- Henderson, John C., 279, 280
- Hikida, Shotaro, 221, 231, 268-69, 302, 306, 331n57
- Hoebel, E. Adamson, 214
- Hoffman, Luther, 197, 220, 275, 279, 282, 287, 293, 294
- Holt, Catherine, 195
- Hopkins, William, 254
- Hoshiyama, Fred, 241, 242
- Howard, Emil, 256
- Hsu, Francis L. K., 214
- Huso, William, 272
- Hutchinson, Al, 218, 250
- Ichioka, Yuji, 188, 213, 258, 325, 333n69
- Imamura, Kanmo, 196, 212, 213
- Impounded People (Spicer), 208
- Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (Lowie), 193
- Isherwood, Christopher, 325, 332n68
- Issei, 233, 247, 256, 289, 290, 291
- Jaeger, Alma Koepke, 180-81
- Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), 257-58, 283, 284, 293
- Japanese American Evacuation
- Japanese Americans
- acculturation, 255-56
- conflict among, 240, 247, 248
- culture of, 236-37
- discrimination against, 248, 256
- ethnic identity of, 237, 248, 261
- gangs, 247
- immigration, 248
- in Japan, 248
- marriage patterns, 261
- in military, 283-84, 286, 296
- outgroups, 236-37
- property of, 205
- religion, See also Buddhism 255-56, 272
- repatriation of, 290, 292
- in San Francisco, 183-84
- social structure, 237, 247, 248, 331n54
- women, 330n43
― 337 ― - Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study (JERS)
- administration of, 199-200
- and camp administrators, 215-16, 218, 220, 222, 224-25, 255, 259-60, 277, 279-80, 285, 293-95, 320
- and community analysts, 214, 216, 235, 265, 276, 277, 278-79
- conferences, 314-15, 317
- correspondence, 222, 233
- criticism of, 179, 325, 328n18
- data gathered by, 204, 210, 211-12, 215, 270, 272, 293-94, 326
- and FBI, 272
- field sites, 206-207, 271-72, 298
- field workers, See also individual names 192-93, 197, 201-206, 209, 211, 232-33, 237, 250-53, 256, 269-71, 298
- funding and budget for, 178, 179, 199, 204, 210, 217, 255, 256
- goals, 199, 206, 211, 219-20, 304-305
- informants, 205, 231, 262, 268-69, 275, 282, 290, 298, 300, 306
- mulitdisciplinarity of, 303
- offices, 196, 199, 200, 206, 207, 209
- origins, 178, 179
- project design, 199-200, 201
- repository for materials, 210, 222, 269, 271
- salaries paid by, 250, 256, 268, 306
- scholarly use of, 204-207, 211, 212, 213, 254, 270, 271, 326
- staff, 252
- value of, 219, 325, 326, 330-31n46
- and WCCA, 202-203
- and WRA, 206, 273
- Japanese language, 233-34
- Japanese Nation (Embree), 235
- Japanese villages, 235, 236
- Kardiner, Abram, 190
- Keeper of Concentration Camps (Drinnon), 260
- Kelly, Isabel, 208
- Kibei, 231, 247-49, 288-91, 305
- Kikuchi, Charlie, 197, 202, 203, 209, 214, 219
- Kimball, Solon, 247, 324
- Kingman, Ruth, 308
- Kinship systems, 238
- Kluckhohn, Clyde, 207
- Klugman, Max, 302
- Koepke, Hans Heinrich Joachim, 179, 181
- Korn, Lewis, 215, 216, 217, 222, 223, 279, 281, 282, 285, 293
- Knight, M. M., 304
- Kroeber, Alfred Louis, 178, 188, 190-94, 203, 209, 210, 238-39, 306, 311, 317-19, 321, 327n1
- Kroeber, Clifford, 191
- Kroeber, Theodora, 239, 320-21
- Kunitani, Ann, 298
- Kunitani, Mitch, 298
- La Barre, Weston, 213-24
- Landward, John, 218, 223-24, 253, 254, 257, 273, 274, 281, 284, 285, 293, 305, 329n33
- Lantis, Margaret, 208
- Le Barron, Robert, 269-70, 277, 279-80, 282, 293, 296, 298
- Lee, Dorothy, 208
- Leighton, Alexander, 206-209, 213, 247, 254, 255, 265, 266, 278, 298, 299, 302, 312, 328n21, 328n22, 329n25
- Leighton, Dorothea Cross, 207, 209, 210, 328n22
- Leslie Spier, 1893-1961 (Spencer), 187-88
- Leupp Isolation Center, Ariz., 289, 290
- Levi-Strauss, Claude, 227, 238, 311
- Lieberman, Mendel, 280, 293, 294, 295
- Linton, Ruth, 190
- Lordsburg Internment Center, N.M., 289, 290
- Loyalty registration, 219, 231, 267, 283-84, 286-88
- Lowell High School (San Francisco, Calif.), 182, 183, 184
- Lowie, Luella Cole, 195-96, 227, 282
- Lowie, Robert H., 178, 188, 191-96, 220, 222, 226-28, 236-38, 244, 262, 263, 272-73, 308
- Luomala, Kay, 208
- McClellan, Peter, 208
- McEntire, Davis, 254
- Malinowski, Bronislaw Kasper, 236
- Manzanar War Relocation Center, Calif., 178, 269, 310-11, 328n21
- Marxists, 324
- Matsuura, George, 196, 213, 227, 244, 282-83, 287
- Merritt, Ralph, 310
- Method and Perspective in Anthropology (Spencer), 303
- Military police, 240, 241-42, 243-44, 275, 288
- Mr. "X". See Nishimoto, Richard
- Miura, Gohachiro, 226, 252-53, 258, 268
- Miyakawa, Isamu "Sam," 205
- Miyamoto, Shotaro "Frank," 206, 209, 211, 212, 237, 238, 271, 272
- Moab Isolation Center, Utah, 231, 288-89, 290
- Modell, John, 230
- Mormons, 218, 224
- Murasaki, Shikibu, 238
- Murdock, George Peter, 190
- Murphy, Robert F., 194
- Museum of the Academy of Sciences, 193
- Myer, Dillon, 260, 307
- Native American Aliens (Collins), 292
- Native Americans, 207, 214, 253, 260-61
- Navy Language School, 307, 314
- Nisei, 213, 237, 248, 261, 330n43
- Nishimoto, Richard, 210, 211-12, 255, 265, 270-71, 295, 328n12, 329n27
- North American Eskimo, The (Spencer), 194
- Ochi, Bishop, 196, 231, 263, 268, 287, 300
- Okimoto, Joe, 298
- Okuna, Yataro, 231, 268-69, 296-97, 302, 311
- Olson, Ronald, 178
- Omachi, Joseph, 250-51, 252, 259, 292, 297, 306, 315
- O'Neill, Lila, 208
- Opler, Charlotte, 214
- Opler, Marvin Kaufmann, 214, 233, 312, 313, 328n21, 329n30
- Opler, Morris, 310-11, 312, 313, 329n30
- Oriental Exclusion Act (1924), 248
- Osborne, Doug, 217
- Pacific Citizen, 257
- Park, Robert E., 196
- Pierce, Marilyn, 208
- Piersall, Marian, 313
- Poston War Relocation Center, Ariz., 206-208, 254, 255, 265, 266, 269, 296, 298, 302, 328n21, 328n23, 329n25
- Polish Peasant in Europe and America (Thomas & Znaniecki), 179, 198
- Popper, William, 185, 190-91
- "Preliminary Sketch of Keresan Grammar, A" (Spencer), 178
- Primitive Behavior (Thomas), 311
- Primitive Religion (Lowie), 238
- Prostitution, 228-29, 263, 264
- Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred Reginald, 236, 238, 278
- Radin, Paul, 193, 328n13
- Reagan, Ronald, 189, 291
- Redfield, Robert, 235, 330n10
- Reed College, 313
- Registration crisis. See Loyalty registration
- Reichard, Gladys, 253
- Rockefeller Foundation, 178
- Rocky Nippon, 289
- Roosevelt, Eleanor, 287
- Roosevelt, Franklin D., 178
- Rumors, 267-68
- Rundstrom, Don, 224
- Rundstrom, Ron, 224
- Sacaton, Ariz., 217, 223
- Sakoda, James, 206, 211, 212, 237, 308-309
- Salvage, The (Thomas et al.), 201 270, 271
- San Francisco, Calif., 179, 181-82, 183-84
- Sasaki, Tom, 266
- Sauer, Carl Ortwin, 189, 327n8
- Service, Elman, 189, 191
- Shibutani, Tamotsu, 202, 206, 209, 237, 254, 270, 271, 272, 304
- Smith, Eastwood R., 216, 222, 223, 224-35, 258, 293
- Smith, Nan Cook, 215, 216-17, 222, 224-25, 228, 244, 253
- Smith, Robert, 235, 239-40
- Social Solidarity Among the Japanese in Seattle (Miyamoto), 238
- Social workers, 213, 230
- Sociology and social theory, 196, 236, 237-238
- Sorokin, Pitirim Alexandrovitch, 254
- Spencer, Elsa M., 179-80
- Spencer, Frank H., 180, 181
- Spencer, Marietta Bunzel, 181, 192, 322, 323, 324
- Spencer, Robert F.
- anthropology career
- academic training, 178, 187-92, 196, 200-201, 226-27, 238, 239, 321-22
- dissertation, 180, 194-95, 196, 212-13
- festschrift, 239-240
- fields of study, 301
- fieldwork, 178, 185-86, 213, 230, 323-24
- influences on, 194, 318
- interest in, 178
- Kroeber, work with, 318, 320, 321
- research and writing, 178-80, 187-88, 238, 239, 255, 272-73, 277-78, 300, 301, 312-13, 322-23, 324, 330n46
- teaching positions, 213, 216, 313, 316, 321, 322, 323, 324
- theory and method, 312-13
- athletic activities, 185, 249-50
- birth, 177
- childhood, 177, 181-83
- draft status, 203, 276-77, 307, 321
- education, 177-78, 182-83, 184-85
- Evacuation, attitude toward, 213, 214, 261
- family background, 179-81, 182
- friends and colleagues, 233, 281-82, 299-300, 302-306, 315, 322, 331n49
- girl friends, 219, 221, 258, 303-304, 306
- and Japanese Americans, 183
- with JERS. See also Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study
- language interest and training, 177, 178, 185-86, 191, 198, 233, 314, 317-18
- lectures by, 283
- marriages, 186, 190, 308, 312, 315, 318, 322
- wife. See Spencer, Marietta Bunzel
- anthropology career
- Spencer, Teresa F., 180
- Spicer, Edward H., 207, 247, 265-66, 278, 298, 299, 329n25
- Spier, Leslie, 187-88, 192, 201
- Spoilage, The (Thomas & Nishimoto), 211, 212, 270, 271, 291
- Spuhler, James, 189
- Standard Oil Company, 321
- Stevenson, Ellen, 189
- Steward, James, 191, 194
- Steward, Julian H., 208, 314
- Structural-functionalist theory, 237-38
- Sugiyama, Tad, 249
- Sumner, William Graham, 190, 327n9
- Sumo wrestling, 249-50, 289, 305
- "Superorganic, The" (Kroeber), 193
- Sutherland, Edwin, 196
- Suye Mura (Embree), 235, 301-302
- Suzuki, Peter, 188, 194, 207, 213, 287, 325, 326, 327n5, 328n18, 333n69
- Suzuki, Reverend, 262-63
- Swedberg, Dale, 323
- Tada, Takeo, 200, 218, 232, 233, 252, 257, 269, 275, 289, 329n34
- Tale of Genji, The (Murasaki), 238
- Tanaka, Togo, 209, 235-36
- Tanforan Assembly Center, Calif., 202-203
- Taucher, Virginia Galbraith, 201-202, 205, 211
- Tax, Sol, 260
- Terry, James, 251-52, 253
- Themal analysis, 312-13
- Thomas, Dorothy Swaine
- and camp administrators, 294-95
- colleagues and associates, 311
- description of, 196-97
- evaluation of, 179
- at Gila Center, 211, 262, 265, 266-67, 279, 284, 285, 315
- husband. See Thomas, W. I.
- influences on, 311
- and JERS. See Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study
- marriages, 196-97, 198, 199
- research interests, 201, 254, 301, 311
- students of, 301
- Thomas, W. I., 179, 196-97, 198-99, 205, 211, 262, 265, 266-67, 311, 315, 327n3
- Thompson, Captain, 284, 286
- Thompson, Laura, 208
- Toffelmeyer, Gertrude, 208
- Topaz War Relocation Center, Utah, 206
- Tree of Culture, The (Linton), 190
- Tsuchiyama, Tamie, 192, 206-10, 212, 254-55, 266, 269, 270, 271, 296, 298, 299, 302, 304, 328n12, 328n24
- Tule Lake Segregation Center, Calif., 212, 231, 248, 270, 271, 290, 291, 292, 311-12, 315-16, 320
- Tuttle, Bill, 273, 293, 296-97, 305, 315
- Underhill, Ruth, 253
- United States Army, 241-42, 243-44, 261, 283-84, 286-87
- University of California, Berkeley, 178, 184, 191, 193, 194, 208, 238
- University of New Mexico, 178, 187, 189-90
- Valley fever, 234
- Wallis, Wilson, 303
- War Relocation Authority (WRA), 179, 215, 224, 228, 242-43, 306-307
- War Relocation Authority Community Analysis Section, 214, 216, 219, 235, 236, 247, 265, 273, 276-79, 299, 310-11, 314, 328n21
- Wartime Civil Control Administration (WCCA), 179, 202-203, 242
- Wax, Rosalie Hankey, 192-93, 209, 212, 249, 270, 299, 319-20
- Weaver, John, 323
- Weglyn, Michi Nishiura, 212
- White, Leslie, 191
- Williamson, W. E., 216, 229, 230, 234, 252, 289, 293
- Winthrop, Robert, 239
- Wiswell, Ella Lury, 235
- Wolter, Hugo "Hux," 213, 281, 315, 318
- Women of Suye Mura (Wiswell & Smith), 235
- Yale University, 190
- Yamamoto, Ototaro, 289
- Yamasaki, Jean, 258, 303-304, 306
- Yamashiro, George, 249, 289-90, 312
- Yeaton, Robert K., 218, 281
- Yokuts-Mono Chiefs and Shamans (Gayton), 190, 192
- Young, Kimball, 196
- Young Buddhist Association, 282
- Yusa, Rev. Earl, 256
- Yusa, Earle, 197, 229-30, 232-34, 237, 240, 247, 250, 252, 255, 256, 258, 269, 275, 305, 331n52
- Yusa, Mimi, 229-30, 240, 242, 250, 255, 256, 258, 305, 330n43
- Znaniecki, Florian, 179
- "Zuni, Kin and Clan" (Kroeber), 238
An Interview with
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Use Restrictions
This is a slightly edited transcription of an interview conducted for the Oral History Program, sponsored by California State University, Fullerton. The reader should be aware that an oral history document portrays information as recalled by the interviewee. Because of the spontaneous nature of this kind of document, it may contain statements and impressions which are not factual
Scholars are welcome to utilize short excerpts from any of the transcriptions without obtaining permission as long as proper credit is given to the interviewee, the interviewer, and the University. Scholars must, however, obtain permission from California State University, Fullerton before making more extensive use of the transcription and related materials. None of these materials may be duplicated or reproduced by any party without permission from the Oral History Program, California State University, Fullerton, Fullerton, California, 92834-6846.
Interview
- Interviewee:
- James M. Sakoda
- Interviewer:
- Arthur A. Hansen
- Subject:
- Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study / Tule Lake and Minidoka War Relocation Centers
- Date:
- August 9-10, 1988
This is an interview with Dr. James M. Sakoda by Arthur A. Hansen for the Japanese American Project of the Oral History Program at California State University, Fullerton. The date is August 9, 1988, and the time is approximately 10:45 a.m. The interview is being held at the campus of Brown University [Providence, Rhode Island] in Room 109 of the Department of Sociology office complex in Maxcy Hall.
I will say, by way of an introduction, that Dr. Sakoda, whom I will take the liberty of calling "Jimmy" [or "Jim"] throughout the interview, was one of more than 112,000 Japanese Americans who were evacuated from the West Coast during World War II and incarcerated in a panoply of different assembly centers, concentration camps, and the like. But unlike many of the others who were evacuated, he had a dual responsibility. He was a participant in the Evacuation; but he was also an observer of it. He was employed by the University of California-sponsored [Japanese] Evacuation and Resettlement Study [JERS], directed by Dr. Dorothy Swaine Thomas, and he was in the employ of the project for a long time, from shortly after Pearl Harbor [7 December 1941], through his tenure at the Tulare Assembly Center [central California], next at the Tule Lake [War] Relocation Center [northern California], and finally at the Minidoka [War] Relocation Center [southern Idaho]. After the war, Dr. Sakoda returned to the University of California, Berkeley, where he finished his doctoral dissertation in social psychology in 1949. He has since held teaching appointments at Brooklyn College [New York City], at the University of Connecticut [Storrs, Connecticut], and at Brown University, where he is a retired professor.
Let us start off the interview, Jimmy, by talking about your family background. You mentioned in our correspondence that your older sister, May, had a historical manuscript in her possession that deals with your family. Since, in your own autobiographical writings that I have read, there's little that treats your family's background in Japan, maybe you could provide a short overview of it.
Sakoda
I actually don't recall very much of my family history. Probably I didn't hear very much of it and for that reason didn't know the past. Our parents didn't talk all that much about Japan. My sister must have talked quite a bit to my mother and got some of the details from her. As far as I can make out, my father came to this country with his older brother around 1902 or 1903. They were later joined by the younger brother in California. They came from a large family, a very poor family in Hiroshima [Prefecture], a village called Funakoshi not too far from Hiroshima City itself. When they landed in Seattle, [Washington], they worked as laborers for a few years. At one point, they were in Montana, working on the railroad, I presume. My father was fifteen or sixteen then, and one thing that my sister mentions, it was very cold, and they wanted to go to California, and there they got into a number of different occupations. At one point, they collected
Hansen
I think people forget that. They always talk about the sojourner mentality but then they don't follow up to talk about the fact that some people realized their intention, they came here, made some money, and then went back to Japan. They talk instead about those people who stayed and either went belly up or did well in the United States.
Sakoda
If you follow through on different families, you'll find that quite a number of the Issei [immigrant generation Japanese Americans] ran grocery stores and laundries and the like, and they saved just enough money so that they could feel they could go back to Japan and retire, which left the Nisei [U.S. citizen children of Japanese immigrants] there [in Japan] with problems of what to do with themselves.
Hansen
A couple of quick questions before we continue with your narrative. That is, you mentioned your father and you mentioned your older brother, and we don't have a name for either of them.
Sakoda
My older brother's name is George. My sister's name is May. I had a younger sister whose name was Ruby. There were four of us in the family. To go back a little way, my father went back to Japan and married my mother and brought her to this country.
Hansen
What was your father's name?
Sakoda
My father's name was Kenichi.
Hansen
And your mother's name?
Sakoda
My mother's name was Tazu Kihara. The family name is Kihara. According to my sister May, they were simple farmers, but were once well off and traced their ancestors to a Fujiwara clan.
Hansen
Was she from the same village as your father?
Sakoda
No, she was from a neighboring village, Saijo, in Japan.
Hansen
But they were both from villages in Hiroshima-ken.
Sakoda
They're both from Hiroshima-ken. So he brought her back. I guess she started having children fairly quickly. My brother George was born in 1913. My sister May was born in 1915, I think. I was born in 1916. I think my younger sister Ruby was born in 1918. There was another boy—I think it was a boy— but he died in childbirth, so there were four of us. One of the things that happened while we were in Lancaster was that George and May were sent to a Catholic Maryknoll school in Los Angeles, [California], to be brought up. They had a child care facility. So they were there for a little while, which indicates a problem that occurs early, in that it was necessary for the wife and the husband to work full time in order to get started in business. It was necessary, for one thing, for the man to have a wife to work by his side.
Hansen
Could you explore at length here the multiple reasons why Issei would send a son or daughter to Japan? What's behind the creation of what became a sizeable population [within the Japanese American community] which a lot of analysts who have dealt with the [World War II] camps have had trouble [dealing] with, and that is the Kibei group. Sometimes I've heard that it was quite wealthy families who sent their children to be educated in Japan. I've heard just the opposite, also, that it was the poor families who couldn't afford to keep their children in America and therefore sent them to Japan so that they could live with somebody else and thereby lighten the family's economic burden.
Sakoda
I think there are two aspects that are involved. One was the fact that, in order to work full time, it was better for the Issei to free themselves of small children. The need for a day care facility, which was not always available, was sometimes met by the Christian Church, sometimes by the Buddhist Church. But there were no day care center type of things generally available. To send the children to Japan served the function of freeing themselves to work full time because, to go back to the sojourner attitude, they're going to go back to Japan anyway. Why not have grandparents, for example, bring them up because they're available as baby sitters.
Hansen
Was there a propensity for sending to Japan a particular sibling, like the oldest son or the second oldest son, or was there any particular pattern involved?
Sakoda
That I don't know. It would seem to me that the first children would be the ones that would be sent to Japan because the Issei parents would need to work hard when they were just starting their business. The other reason which is met by Japanese in this country today—and some of them are well off—is this notion that they're not going to be here forever. They'll be here five years or six or seven years or whatever, and then they're going to go back, and what's going to happen to the children if they don't learn Japanese in Japanese schools, particularly because there's so much competition. One solution to that now is to start Japanese language schools, and they're doing that. I'm sure that, at that time [prior to World War II], many of them felt that if they sent their children to Japan, they would have a Japanese education and they wouldn't have any trouble when the family went back to Japan.
Hansen
Was there an age at which a higher frequency of kids were sent to Japan? For example, you were sixteen when your parents sent you to Japan. Was that old, relative to other Kibei?
Sakoda
Well, I went to Japan at sixteen, but it was because my father had to pull up stakes and we all went to Japan as a family. Most Kibei were sent to Japan when they were young and were called back after spending their formative years in Japan.
Hansen
So yours was not really a typical Kibei experience.
Sakoda
There's a problem of defining what a Kibei is. The best definition of a Kibei is one who has had his formative education in Japan, which means, roughly, grade-school education. Because if they returned to the United States after that, then they had already been brought up as Japanese and would have difficulty learning English, so you can identify them as being Kibei. Actually, I could be called a Kibei, technically, because I was in Japan for six years. Put it this way: I was more "Kibeish" when I was in this country than after I went to Japan because my social life was with other Nisei in Japan and I became more Americanized while I was in Japan.
Hansen
From reading some of your autobiographical writings,[1] it seems you favor the designation for yourself of "conservative Nisei." Do you differentiate between that status and a Kibei?
Sakoda
Oh yes. There's a great deal of difference between Kibei who, when they came back to this country,
Hansen
How would you define the difference between what you are calling a conservative Nisei or a Japanesy Nisei and somebody who was, say, brought up in a very rural Japanese community, someplace in the San Joaquin Valley [California] or Sacramento Valley [California]? Because the preponderance of those Nisei were brought up where speaking Japanese was very normal to them, unlike somebody who was brought up, maybe, in Seattle, [Washington], or in San Francisco, [California], or Los Angeles in a more urban setting.
Sakoda
That's where you found the so-called Japanesy Nisei being brought up. They spoke Japanese all the time and sometimes they couldn't speak English properly. They couldn't pronounce their "th's," for example; they pronounced "th" like a "d." When there was a large number of Japanese, particularly in rural areas, then you were likely to find a lot of so-called Japanesy Nisei who were brought up with the culture and spoke Japanese a lot. Also the fact that, if you were brought up in a rural area, you were tied down to the farm. There was a lot of work to be done there and not a great deal of leisure-time activity, so that you wouldn't have the time to go to socials or to go to dances or even learn to dance. On top of that, if your parents told you to learn judo or flower arranging, then it took you out of activities that other Nisei might grow up with in becoming Americanized.
Hansen
So was that your situation in Lancaster? I had the feeling that there weren't any other Japanese families around.
Sakoda
There were about two other Japanese families around with whom we interacted, but we were small when we were in Lancaster. I hadn't started to go to school yet. My father sold the farm, I guess, and moved to Los Angeles. We lived in Gardena [Los Angeles County]. This was right after the war [World War I]. We lived in Gardena because there wasn't housing in Los Angeles. We lived there a year or two, I think. I started to go to kindergarten there, I guess, and then we moved to Los Angeles. When we moved to Los Angeles, housing was difficult to find. The Japanese just couldn't live anywhere; they had restrictive covenants then. Housing was hard to find, as a result of which we found housing in the industrial area with half the people being Japanese and the other half Mexican. The Daiichi gakuen, the Japanese language school, was there. We lived right behind the Japanese language school. There was a railroad that ran right close by. There was a gas tank five or six blocks behind us. The White King Soap Factory on First Street—we lived near the First Street bridge—was right close by. So every afternoon at five o'clock, there would be a great stinking smell in the air. But it was a very poor area surrounding an industrial area, not too far from Little Tokyo—Amelia Street, Turner Street, Jackson Street, and that area. There was a whole group of Japanese in that area. Since the language school was there, it was kind of a focus for the Japanese. There was also a Japanese hospital there on the corner, a block away from us.
Hansen
Do you remember anything about that Japanese hospital? I'm interested in prewar medical services for people of Japanese ancestry. To what extent did people in the community go to integrated hospitals and to what degree did they go to segregated Japanese hospitals?
Sakoda
That I don't know. But I would think that, following the pattern in that area, most families would prefer the Japanese hospital and would send them to the Japanese hospital if they could. Actually, we had a Caucasian doctor, who was an old man. Evidently, he wasn't a good doctor because my older brother got
Hansen
Where did those doctors get their training?
Sakoda
I don't know.
Hansen
Were they Japanese or Japanese Americans?
Sakoda
This doctor was Japanese; he was an Issei. Most Nisei were too young to be doctors. He could have got his training in this country but I'm not sure.
Hansen
Do'you know any West Coast medical schools like USC [University of Southern California] that were open to Japanese Americans to go to med school?
Sakoda
I wouldn't have known which schools were available. I would imagine that schools were available. They could practice within the Japanese community. What was difficult was practicing outside of the Japanese community.
Hansen
Did they practice traditional Japanese therapeutics and medicine there as well as Western, scientific medicine, so-called? Biomedicine?
Sakoda
That I don't know. You know that my parents used to have things like plasters and this heat treatment, moxa; they'd do that sort of thing. I don't know if the doctor did that sort of thing.
Hansen
Did you ever go to the Japanese hospital yourself for any operations?
Sakoda
No. I was once crossing the street with a bunch of kids. We were riding on the back of a wagon, and then we jumped off right in front of the Japanese hospital and everybody ran across the street. I was the last one to run across the street. I got hit by an ambulance; it was a hospital ambulance. I wasn't hurt that badly but it hurt for a few days. They came and apologized. But I didn't have to go to the hospital. Since then, I haven't really been to the hospital. I had no experience with that hospital.
Hansen
Before I sidetracked you, you were talking about your situation living in that area on the outskirts of Little Tokyo.
Sakoda
There were two ways to go in that area, I guess, the high road and the low road. The high road was to work hard, to do well in school, and go to church on Sunday. We went to the Buddhist Church on Sundays. Every day, after the public school let out, we went to Japanese school. Later on, we went only on Saturday to a language school in Compton [Los Angeles County]. But [there was] this routine of church and school and not doing anything really bad as kids. We did play a lot. We had our own group of kids who played together. We would not get into real trouble.
Hansen
Was your situation of being a conservative Nisei rather a typical one? Or are you defining your experience as marginal to the mainstream Nisei experience?
Sakoda
I guess that depended on the area. But taking the group that lived in this particular area, we constituted maybe not a half but certainly more than a small minority.
Hansen
When you and Frank Miyamoto were on the [JERS] project, you both had a feeling that the behavior of the people in the camps was predicated to a large degree, if not the largest degree, by their population of origin, where they lived before the war. I'm just wondering about the population of origin for the different
Sakoda
It's probably possible to do a statistical analysis based on the Form 26 data that the WRA [War Relocation Authority] accumulated. All the families in the relocation centers were interviewed and the data was coded. It included information on what town they came from, what county they came from, what occupation they had. Also, education and education in Japan. They had religion, which you do not get in the United States census. Religion turns out to be an important index of how conservative they are because Buddhists, by and large, were more conservative. So if you're a Buddhist and if you were brought up in a rural area with a lot of other Japanese, then that almost was a guarantee of conservative behavior because it would mean that your background was more likely to be in the Japanese tradition than not. On the other hand, if you were brought up as a Christian and you lived in a place that had few Japanese, then you were more likely to be Americanized. The parents themselves would be more Americanized because of their contact with some of the Christians. The Christians would also have contact with Caucasians in various ways. If you lived in the city, in the urban area, even though there were a large number of Japanese, you have this urbanization factor which would tend to move you toward becoming more and more Americanized. So there are some trends there that can be analyzed.
Hansen
Were there some kind of cultural encystments right within the city of more conservative groups who would tend to live in areas close to the Buddhist temple?
Sakoda
Not necessarily live close to the Buddhist temple. It didn't matter where you lived. As long as you lived within driving distance, you could always, on Sundays, go to the Buddhist Church. But it is true that where the people lived, churches tended to spring up. In Los Angeles, there was a Union Church downtown. There was a Nishi Hongwanji, which is the main hongwanji and the largest Buddhist church. There were also two other Buddhist churches. Also, in Boyle Heights, on the east side, across the First Street bridge, Japanese began to move up in that area around Evergreen Cemetery, so that became an area of Japanese concentration. There were a lot of Jewish people there, also.
Hansen
Was that an Americanized group that was moving towards Boyle Heights or not?
Sakoda
It was not necessarily Americanized. It was people who could afford to make the move. We did move to Boyle Heights. There is probably some correlation between being able to move up and becoming somewhat liberal, going more for education, being less tied down, I would imagine, to old ideas. But there was a Higashi Hongwanji, a Christian church, and a Japanese language school there, so that churches and schools tended to spring up where there's a concentration of people.
Hansen
How deep was the split between Christians and Buddhists in the prewar Japanese America, whether in San Francisco or Los Angeles or wherever? You hear often that in Japan religion is not taken very seriously in terms of doctrine, yet, culturally, you hear that there was a lot of persecution of Christians and, even in the camps, a lot of the cultural rifts tended to break down in terms of Christians and Buddhists. Was this division alive and well in the prewar period? Did it have hostile dimensions that people suppressed rather than talked about?
Sakoda
As far as I know, generally speaking, I guess, there wasn't any real hostility as such. Christians and Buddhists more or less could be neighbors, for example; that was all right. But as far as church activities were concerned, they kept it separate. Like, in our neighborhood, our immediate neighbors were Christians but that didn't make much difference. On the other hand, when we were roving around the streets in groups—this was in Boyle Heights—there was a Japanese Christian church, and there was a group of young people, boys and girls, who seemed to be having a social event. They invited us in but we didn't go in. But there was a gap there. They were playing with girls and we were all boys out on the street. So there were definite gaps, I think, in terms of what they did, how they did it. The Christians were always ahead. There were a smaller number compared to Buddhists but they were always farther ahead in terms of organizing social events, for example, than the Buddhists. As the young Buddhists grew up, they tried to emulate having social events. They used to have Buddhist conferences in, say, San Francisco or Los Angeles where
Hansen
So being a Christian signified a whole cluster of cultural things. It could be that there was more peer interaction across gender lines and it could mean that there was actually a more democratic family structure in the sense that you would find kids and adults together more interacting rather than conforming to a hierarchical pattern.
Sakoda
Yes. There's also more acceptance of the American culture. I remember that whenever we went to movies, it would be a Japanese movie. Or when a play was put on, it would be a Japanese play. We went along with our parents and, quite often, we wouldn't understand one word. There was one night we went to a movie that was held at the Christian church, and they were showing Les Miserable. I remember that because in the middle of that movie there was an announcement that our house was broken into. But the very fact that instead of a Japanese movie they're showing an American movie indicates the attitudes toward American culture, the acceptance of American culture. So there's that kind of a difference. I guess throughout you'll find that being Christian, to some extent, in this country had its advantages. It happened particularly in the relocation centers. Kids went to college. A lot of those who went to college were Christian, which, if you see the statistics, about 80 percent were Christians. That undoubtedly arises from having contacts with Christians who were helping the Nisei to go to college from camp and more willingness to face the outside world dominated by Caucasians.
Hansen
On the other hand, as the camps became more Japanized, as you had these Americanized Nisei leaving, there was coercive activity and targeting of inu [dog, informer] and things like that. Then, it would really be to your disadvantage, in a sense, to have this Christian background, wouldn't it? It would probably set you up more as a potential... What I am getting at was, in the mainstream society, when the camps first opened, it would have behooved people to have identified themselves with Christianity because it would be seen as more akin to the non-Japanese population. But as the camps themselves became more Japanized, then there was a lot of pressure put on people to speak Japanese, to act Japanese, et cetera, the very fact of your being a Christian or being in an organization that smacked of the mainstream would set you up as a target for an inu accusation, wouldn't it?
Sakoda
That's not exactly true. It was only in Tule Lake, after it became a segregation center, that Japanese culture was emphasized.[3] In Tule Lake, during the loyalty registration crisis, being pro-America or pro-Japan became a very big issue. The main issue became, were you in favor of registering or not? Those parents very often were in favor of kids not registering because they were afraid they'd be drafted or they would have to volunteer. Those who were Americanized felt that, well, they should take the chance and register, and they did. They were more likely to be Christian than Buddhist, Nisei rather than Issei or Kibei. Many of them said that the Nisei should, too. That marked them as being pro-America and created very hard feelings. I guess that nobody would speak to them in the block, and they were required to sit at tables reserved for inu. So very soon after registration, a lot of Nisei left. They wanted to leave. Before that, many of them felt that they were there, they were doing jobs, they were working for the people. After that, they felt that all the time they worked for the people was wasted, they really weren't wanted. That led to a lot of people wanting to leave and a lot of people leaving.
Hansen
Which was, of course, true of your very colleagues on the study up there, [Tamotsu] Shibutani and [Shotaro Frank] Miyamoto.
Sakoda
Tom and Frank felt that their lives were in danger; they just felt they couldn't stay. Although I imagine if they had stayed it would have blown over.
Hansen
I'll get into this later, but I remember reading in your correspondence where you had felt that they had made
Sakoda
Yes. I think that after it was over, many of the people who were against registration felt sheepish. Like, in my block, I got up and said that Nisei, if they're going to be in this country, should go and register. That marked me as an inu. But afterwards they found out by registering "no,no," they wouldn't be drafted. This was the message that came from the administration, which could have made this clear earlier but they didn't. Then, those opposed to registration went out and registered. Some of them had taken out repatriation papers to avoid having to register, and they felt very sheepish about that because it turned out that it didn't make that much difference if they registered. That was misinformation early that they were getting. They really felt very sheepish about it. But there was a change in attitude toward us, for example, in the mess hall. I think Tom and Frank could have stayed if they wanted to but they didn't want to stay because they didn't feel safe.
Hansen
Was their situation, though, a little bit different from yours precisely because they were more Americanized Nisei and seen that way in the eyes of the community? Would that have made it a little bit harder for them to ever regain credibility in the eyes of the community, whereas somebody like yourself probably was viewed with greater disdain at the time of the registration because you would be seen more as a turncoat? Here you were, someone who knew Japanese culture, could speak Japanese and the like. But then, once it blew over, you had something to build on. You had some capital to be able to work off of.
Sakoda
I guess part of the difficulty with the Tom and Frank situation was this: they lived closer to the administration building. They got together quite often with [JERS staff member] Bob Billigmeier, for example, and people in the administration, such as Dr. [Harold] Jacoby, a sociologist in charge of internal security. I was farther away from the administration, in Block 25, and I purposely kept away. I very often didn't go to see Tom and Frank, for example, because I felt that it wasn't too good to be seen together all the time. I don't think they took that precaution.
Hansen
I want to get back to that later because I was wondering whether it was a self-conscious choice, a strategy, as you've outlined and we've been talking about it now, or did some of that have to do with your own propensity for being around a certain type of people. I mean, you went to the Sacramento block, which you described as full of many conservative Nisei, which was your own upbringing. So I was wondering if it was just a strategy or if it was in part just something you lapsed into by feeling more secure, more at home, or whatever.
Sakoda
No. We felt rather insecure in that situation. We were put in Block 25; it wasn't a matter of choice. We were outsiders, with no connections within the block. We were friendly with the mess hall chef and his wife, who had worked in a Caucasian home, I believe. I was also on good terms with the Issei block manager, who had come from Oakland, [California]. We were also on speaking terms with families in our barrack.
Hansen
The Sakoda family group.
Sakoda
Yes, my brother George and younger sister Ruby. It would have been better if we had been in with a more urban group or if we had been in with a group of Northwesterners; we wouldn't have had all this negative attitude. For example, the young people in the block wanted a dance party, so I helped them organize a dance practice. At one of the meetings, an old Issei got up and said, "You know, in Japan, the women stay five feet behind the man. They shouldn't be holding hands and dancing with them." This was really rural, backward thinking that these rural people were exhibiting. The surprising thing is, that if you look at the Issei in this country, they are more backward than the people in Japan culturally.
Hansen
Linguistically, sometimes, too, right?
Sakoda
Yes. The reason for that is they brought the Meiji-era culture, which emphasized enyro and gaman, and they lived it; there was no change in this. Whereas in Japan, they were learning to like baseball and go skiing and learning songs, you know, operas, and things of this sort. They were becoming Westernized
Hansen
This is what I meant, actually, earlier on, when I was getting at the distinction between your type of conservative Nisei [and those Nisei raised in rural areas exclusively]. You were not only brought up in Lancaster but you moved into Los Angeles and lived on the fringes of Little Tokyo and then in Boyle Heights, and you had some experience living again in a rural area in Artesia. But you had an admixture of experiences and yet, when you were at a place like Tule Lake, you were in the Sacramento area where you had a cultural divide. I mean that you, now, were in the ironic position of being looked at as the more liberal or more Americanized of the group. Now, part of this situation is attributable to an interesting thing that you've mentioned, and that is that you said quite the opposite of what people would expect, that your real Americanization came about once you went to Japan. I'm going to ask you a two-part question here. Did some of this process of Americanization for you start when, in fact, you were moving out to a place like Boyle Heights? And was there, then, a continuation of it once you went to Japan? Was your family's move out to Boyle Heights spurred by activity that your family was involved in that got you into the mainstream culture a bit more? And did you yourself start liberalizing some of your attitudes?
Sakoda
When we moved from Amelia Street to Boyle Heights, that might be described as a social move upwards because we were moving from a slum area to a decent, middle-class area. So there was some shift there, I would imagine, in terms of being more middle class. We went to school with a lot of Jewish kids, so whenever they had a Jewish holiday, half the school was gone. That was junior high. But our friends were still all Nisei. We went to the Buddhist church on Sunday, went to the Japanese language school after public school. The bus came and picked us up. So actually, culturally, we were still caught in the Japanese culture. There may have been a little shift but there wasn't that much of a change.
Hansen
But then when the Depression came along and your family fortunes met with some reverses and your dad started to do hog farming in Artesia, were you plunged back into a rural "Japanesy" context there?
Sakoda
By then, we had... I guess much of the "Japanesy" context still remained, except that we were growing up, we were going to high school, and we were learning both cultures. We were becoming quite bicultural, I guess is the way to put it. I still took judo lessons locally. I went to a Japanese school on Saturday in Compton. The Compton Japanese school was reputed as the best Japanese school in southern California, so we went there. There was a wide variety of Nisei. There was an inkling of a growing social life, which was brought on partially by my sister May. My sister being older, she was more conscious of the need to learn manners, dressing up properly. We did have a party or two. So that the socialization process was also Americanization of sorts. But by and large, we didn't have that much leisure time. We worked a lot around the farm in the morning and then after school. I could have gone out for basketball but I didn't because I had to go home to help.
Hansen
How old were you when you moved out to Artesia, about?
Sakoda
I had just started high school.
Hansen
Was it Artesia High or Leuzinger High or which...
Sakoda
It was Excelsior Union High School. So when I went to school there, I did well. We came right home and worked at home, so there wasn't all that much interaction with the rest of the community. So there was a little loosening up because we were more scattered, I guess. We weren't playing daily with Nisei, for example, although our immediate neighbors were Japanese, in the three houses right around us. We kept within our circle of Nisei friends; that really didn't change. So the kind of life changed but not our orientation to the Japanese community. You could still say we were considered on the Japanesy side.
Hansen
But then in 1933 you had some other problems—family problems—which sent the whole family to Japan.
Sakoda
One thing that I guess you should point out here is that the Depression probably had a lot to do with people's
Hansen
Where was that, exactly?
Sakoda
White Point was near Palos Verdes Estates [Los Angeles County].
Hansen
Was it a resort or a beach?
Sakoda
It was a resort. It had cottages and a swimming pool.
Hansen
Was that a class-based thing in the sense that you would see largely well-to-do Japanese Americans there?
Sakoda
That's right.
Hansen
So that was an index of the fact that you were financially comfortable, because you mentioned going there and then [off tape] once going to Yosemite [National Park in California], I think.
Sakoda
Yes, we took a trip to Yosemite. So that was indicative of sort of an urban, middle-class adjustment.
Hansen
Had your dad by that point relinquished the sojourner mentality? Was he pretty much set, then, on staying in the United States because he was making it and had kids and everything?
Sakoda
No. I think he still was thinking of making enough money to return to Japan. A lot of families, I think, were caught up with the daily chores and just making ends meet. But in the back of their minds, they always had this idea that they were not going to die in this country, they were going to die in Japan.
Hansen
Were you and the other kids consciously and conscientiously preparing yourself for the possibility of going to college in Japan and making your living in Japan?
Sakoda
No. That was never really mentioned. The idea of learning Japanese was generally instilled in us by our parents saying that if you knew both languages, it was much better than if you knew just one.
Hansen
Better in a utilitarian way?
Sakoda
Yes, a utilitarian way.
Hansen
If you stayed in the United States?
Sakoda
Yes, if you stayed in the United States.
Hansen
But there wasn't so much thought, then, to going to Japan and setting up a business there or anything.
Sakoda
No. They never did present it that way. It was always "Go to school and do well and learn whatever you have to do." So people went into engineering and became a doctor or whatever.
Hansen
You were making an interesting point just before we started taping this interview about the activity of people, in any ethnic community, outside of their community. Perhaps we ought to explore this a bit on tape. What was the point that you were making?
Sakoda
Well, sometimes people think that to have contact outside of your own group is good. I guess very often
Hansen
A lot of people who were brought up in the Little Tokyo area before the war and a couple of decades before that, actually, when they reflect back on it, they recall not having had a homogeneous population living there, that, in fact, they remember blacks [African Americans] and, say, Mexican Americans or Filipino Americans all living in that area. Was that true of yourself? Or did you become a conservative Nisei, as you've put it, because of living in a Japanese enclave?
Sakoda
We were brought up conservatively. Part of what that meant was our activities were pretty much circumscribed. We lived with the Mexicans but we really didn't get involved with them at all. As a matter of fact, there was a bunch of Nisei who might be called somewhat on the rowdy side. Part of the difference is in the kind of activities that were played. They were less likely to be serious, more likely to go for group sports like football and basketball, and more likely to get into trouble. We didn't have anything to do with them, either, so that we kept to our own safe conservative group.
Hansen
Was there a Japanese term for them? I mean, a terms that defined, in a sense, their taboo quality for you.
Sakoda
The term that the Japanese use for the person who is serious is majime. I'm not quite sure what the other term is—fumajime, perhaps. There is a distinction between the person who works hard and gets married, has a family. That's the ideal to be. The opposite of that is the person who doesn't want to work, who gambles, who fools around with women and causes trouble.
Hansen
Did they use the word yogore at all?
Sakoda
Yes. Yogore is a term meaning "dirt," and it is not applied to people usually. That's the term that Nisei gangs used to refer to themselves. The organized counterpart to that is the yakuza in Japan. In our translation, it would be a street gang.
Hansen
Like hoods.
Sakoda
Yes. It could be just a bunch of kids running around and having a good time. They could get into gang fights and the like but we didn't see any of that in our neighborhood.
Hansen
So it could be loosely applied, then.
Sakoda
But you could say there were street gangs, meaning a group of kids going around together. We had our own group, but we didn't run around in the same way. We did do all kinds of things. We made our own kites and we played games like Prisoner's Base, jintori, and Kick the Can.
Hansen
Let's turn now to Excelsior High School. A lot of times, you see the way in which social space is used quite interestingly by different groups. Even if you go to Evergreen Cemetery in Boyle Heights, you can see the segregated patterns in the cemetery. I think if you had a more refined sense of it, you could probably even see class differences as well as ethnic differences. At Excelsior High School, at eating areas or in the library, et cetera, were there divisions among those people of Japanese ancestry that went to the school, where you could see that conservative Nisei would tend to gravitate toward one another as opposed to having just a loose coalition of all Nisei groups?
Yes. When we moved out and started going to Excelsior Union High School, we were outsiders; we never got in with the group of Nisei in that area. So I guess I never did get into that pattern. Later on, when I went to Japan and came back and went to Pasadena Junior College [in Pasadena, California], there was a group of Nisei. Most of the Nisei would get together at a couple of tables at lunch time, and I used to hang around them.
Hansen
But from your diary entries of that period included in the autobiographical narrative that you've written recently,[5] it seems as though you weren't just with conservative Nisei. It seemed from my reading as though you were with Nisei students, in a general sense.
Sakoda
Those Nisei were more Americanized. They were always talking about girls and dates, talking about the opposite sex. They were the socialized, Americanized Nisei.
Hansen
The difference between, say, Excelsior and Pasadena, the intervening variable, [was] your years spent in Japan. Now, you've described those as almost the Americanization of James Sakoda. How did that operate? Because most people think that the so-called Kibei experience of those people who were in school in Japan prior to camp and everything else became highly indoctrinated and very Japanized and, therefore, when they came back, they had a tough time accessing an Americanized group. But for you, it was something of a passport into that group.
Sakoda
Yes. There are a number of things involved. One is this business of leisure time, having leisure time. Now, the way we went back to Japan. When I was a senior in Excelsior High School in 1933... This was the depths of the Depression and we had a hard time getting along; we had to work hard. One of the things my father did was to force-feed the hogs with wheat in order to get them to the market earlier, which is kind of silly because you're overloading the market. But in order to get by, you have to sell more at a lower price. But anyway, there was suspected hoof and mouth disease. We don't know whether it was real hoof and mouth or just an excuse to kill some hogs to reduce the hog population. But anyway, when that happened, we were paid a lump sum. My father at that point got what he had always looked for, a lump sum of money. He decided to take the money and go back to Japan.
Hansen
Jimmy, before you continue, did that situation cut across ethnic lines or was it like where Chinatowns were burned down because there was allegedly a "contagion" there? Do you think that was public policy, that even though it was going to cost a little money, it was a way of getting rid of the Japanese from that area? Or were there hog farmers who were non-Japanese who got the same sort of treatment?
Sakoda
No. The hog farmers were all Japanese in that area. I don't know whether it was ethnic or not. If I had to guess, I would think that it may have been the idea there were too many hogs on the market bringing prices down. Anyway, being paid this amount, they took that amount and then started up again later. As a matter of fact, we were the only ones going back to Japan. So that was a sojourner attitude coming forth.
Hansen
Take the money and run back.
Sakoda
Yes. Other families had done the same thing, except they had saved it for a long time. Now, what happened when we went back to the village in Hiroshima, my father's brothers were doing well and so we got the use of a two-story house, and my father had nothing to do. All we had to do was to go to school. So that changed the picture, I think, a great deal. For the first time, we didn't have to work so hard, keep our noses to the grindstone in terms of working. So there was a relaxation of attitudes toward things like partying and dancing. When we were small, my mother was very strict. She would never let us go to movies, for example, unless it was a Japanese movie. So when the time came for us to associate with other Nisei, conveniently there was a Nisei club organized in a Christian church, and we were one of the first to become involved in that. The four of us, we were kind of instrumental in getting it going.
Hansen
Was this in Hiroshima?
Sakoda
This was in Hiroshima, the city of Hiroshima. We called it the Hiroshima Nikkei Club. So we met every
Hansen
Did you feel very different from the other students? Not the Nisei ones who were involved in this enterprise with you but the Japanese students?
Sakoda
Yes, we were quite different. We could get along with them in class, but we just didn't have much in common with them. We didn't make the effort to make friends.
Hansen
Did they treat you like you were outsiders and foreigners?
Sakoda
Not really. They didn't really treat us differently from others. I guess it was more a matter of choice on our part. One kid who wasn't too well adjusted at home and at school hung around with me, so we became friends. However, he was expelled from school. Then, we also met some university students who wanted to learn to speak English, and they came to the club to practice their English.
Hansen
What seems kind of strange is what you were saying before about if you're going to meet girls, if you're going to learn how to dance, you've got to do this, this is very important. Yet, you must have been thinking right from the start that somehow you weren't going to stay in Japan because social dancing wasn't necessarily going to have to be part of your life in Japan. In fact, wasn't there a lot of pressure during the 1930s for educational institutions to suppress that very type of Western behavior?
Sakoda
Yes. While we were there, they had the so-called 2-26 incident, which was February 26 [1936], the assassination of the prime minister and the military took over control. After that, there was pressure to amplify Japanese culture. But generally speaking, we were more or less insulated from that. We took military training in school and we heard lectures from military officers on how great Japan was and all of that. We were hardly touched by that. We lived in our own culture.
Hansen
Is it fair to say that, just as when your parents had the sojourner mentality when they were in the United States, so too did you and your siblings and friends have the mentality that you were eventually going to come back to the U.S.?
Sakoda
That was not clear. Among the Nisei, there were several groups. One group was when the parents went back with the children, the parents were retired, and obviously, they would want the kids to stay in Japan, stick around and get a job. There were others who were sent to Japan to look for a job. It was very hard to find a decent job in America; it was very difficult. There were almost no jobs outside of fruit stands and working on Grant Street [in San Francisco, which was constituted largely of gift shops for tourists] or becoming a gardener. So some with a college education went looking to Japan for jobs. Others were in school, trying to get some Japanese education. Some of the girls were sent just to get a little more culture. All of them were in a kind of dilemma as to whether they were going to stay in Japan or come back.
Hansen
A dilemma of their parents' creation or their own?
Sakoda
It was partially their parents' pressure, saying "You've got to stay." Some stayed and some came back. It depended pretty much on the family circumstances whether they stayed.
Hansen
Were most of them like you in the sense that their formative educational experience was in the United States?
Yes.
Hansen
So their situation in Japan was very much like, say, later on, the Kibei who returned to the United States, in the sense that their formative education was in one place, and yet, they found themselves in another place. So you were more a Kibei when you were in Japan than when you were in the United States. I mean, in terms of the Kibei representing a certain type of cultural experience.
Sakoda
Yes. I was becoming more Americanized with the social activities I hadn't had before in this country. It's strange because after I went through three years of what's called a commercial school, which is one of the schools we could get into, I made friends with some Nisei there.
Hansen
Is that like a community college?
Sakoda
No, Matsumoto Commercial School was a high school-level commercial school, one of the few schools we could get into. It was a private school. Then, I went to Tokyo, to Toyo University, and spent three years there.
Hansen
What kind of university was that?
Sakoda
That was a Japanese and Chinese classics college. So I had the idea that I'd go back to the United States. I always had the idea of teaching Japanese when I came back here, so I felt I should learn some of the classics, classical literature, to teach the language. My father wanted me to stay in Japan. He said he could put up some capital for me and I could pick a job somewhere. But I decided that I wanted to come back.
Hansen
Had your brother already come back to California to go to Davis before you returned?
Sakoda
My brother, after graduation from what's called the commercial school, came back and went to Davis, which was then an agricultural college. So he had already come back. Then, after a few years, I decided to come back. My older sister, May, who went in for music training, she could sing, so she decided to get some voice training. After trying it for awhile, she decided she wanted to come back, too. My younger sister, Ruby, came back at that time as well. She had gone to a woman's college in English. She had a Japanese education. All of us had Japanese education, as well as having dozens of years of Japanese language school education, so we could pick up a magazine and read it, for example, if it was not too difficult. We had language training in this country and then also in Japan, so we were in a peculiar situation in which we, in some ways, had more Japanese culture but became more Americanized. But actually, it was becoming more internationalized, which is a distinction I think a lot of people don't understand. The Nisei in this country, even though they're Americanized, they tend to have this feeling of inferiority. They can't fully accept themselves as full citizens, for example, and they find that difficult. They're always conscious of this race problem. When you become internationalized, you're above the race problem as such. You accept yourself for what you are. The Issei in this country, when they come, they knew they were Japanese; they could accept it. The Nisei, on the other hand, they can't quite accept their being neither Japanese or American and they always have had problems with that.
Hansen
How would you characterize the Kibei situation? I know others who have written on this point have said the Kibei had a greater sense of who they were and what their heritage was. Is that something that you would agree with?
Sakoda
Kibei have a greater sense of identity the same way the Issei have and they don't get that confused. Their main problem was that, in order to live in this country, they had to get education in this country. Those that succeeded in learning to speak English and get a college education generally managed to do as well as most Nisei. They had both languages, and they generally managed to make the step up in terms of occupation and meeting Nisei girls and getting married and all of that. The Kibei who weren't able to make the grade weren't able to go to school and learn English, and they're the ones that ended up in marginal jobs like Issei bachelors—agricultural laborers, gardeners, fruit stand workers, houseboys.
But even subsequently, haven't a lot of the Kibei, and even ones who have made it economically, ended up in what you would call marginal or international jobs, in the sense that they're involved in marketing enterprises where their bicultural, bilingual background can be useful.
Sakoda
If they get into a good job, then that's fine. But often they don't manage to get a decent job. It was true of Nisei. The Nisei were in a situation before the war, before the Evacuation, when it was very difficult to get a decent job, even if you had a college education. For the Kibei, it was even more difficult. But if they didn't learn English, if they didn't learn to get along with Nisei, then the Kibei really had a hard time. They very often segregated themselves as a result, as we did when we were in Japan. They are the ones that people think of as typical Kibei. They're what I would call the lower-class, non-successful people.
Hansen
The prewar Japanese American community, like most ethnic communities, was very complex; it was a tangle of different types of groups, and you have mentioned some of them in your writings. You mentioned Issei bachelors; you mentioned Kibei and conservative Nisei, marginal Nisei. Another group that you just allude to a little are what are called Hawaiian Nisei. Now, before the war, what did it mean to be a Hawaiian Nisei? The one thing I can see in common between, say, Hawaiian Nisei males and Kibei males is that Nisei girls weren't too interested in dating them. Somehow or other they represented an outgroup, because of linguistic or cultural traits or whatever... Maybe you could help me on that.
Sakoda
I really hadn't had much contact with Hawaiian Nisei but generally speaking, I guess, when they came over [to the United States mainland], they ended up as outsiders and, more often than not, they were not going to climb the educational/social ladder. The result was that they were laborers or something and they were looked on as rowdies or troublemakers. I didn't have much contact with them.
Hansen
When you were over in Japan, were some of the Nisei who you were socializing with Hawaiian Nisei?
Sakoda
Yes. That's interesting that you mention it because we had some Nisei from Hawaii in the Nikkei Club. It's again this distinction—it seems to be important—between the people who were what the Japanese would call majime, serious, and those who weren't. We had some Hawaiians who went to our school, and they joined in with us. There were no barriers in there between us. But they were the ones who were serious about school; they were interested in reading literature and going to school. So they fitted in very well. There was a group of Hawaiians who formed their own club. We thought we might contact them, but they were different. There was a gap. I was convinced that the gap was created by the general idea that we had when we were young: this is our group and those groups are a bunch of rowdies, don't have anything to do with those people. I think it was a gap that was hard to bridge.
Hansen
Some people have described the Hawaiian Nisei as rowdy and others have described them as not being as uptight as the Nisei mainlanders. Is there room for both interpretations? The fact is that they were part of a larger population [of Japanese people] in Hawaii and therefore didn't have to feel as cowed as the mainland Japanese Americans by the majority group.
Sakoda
I think that the basic question was whether they could become accepted. The basis for acceptance, for example... If you went to college, and you did well. If you didn't and you didn't have any family connections, particularly, and you were trying to meet, say, Nisei girls, it might have been difficult because of the gap existing there. It was the same sort of problem, I think, that the Kibei faced. If they did go to college and learn English and made contacts, they wouldn't get in trouble. Otherwise, they would be in a situation where they would want to make contacts with Nisei girls but not have any way of doing so.
Hansen
So what did young Kibei men do for girl friends?
Sakoda
I'm not sure. There were Kibei girls but I don't know if they went with Kibei boys. I think one of the things that happened—I've seen a number of cases like this—is that quite often the very conservative Nisei girls who weren't particularly popular with Nisei boys sometimes went out with Kibei boys.
Hansen
I wonder if some of the problems the Kibei had in camp had to do with sexual frustration as much as cultural
Sakoda
There is probably some truth to that but some of the Kibei did marry Nisei girls who weren't too popular. There was a very peculiar problem with the so-called "Japanesy" girls. They were not forward. Very often, they objected to boys being mushy. One of the things that they said was that girls who were popular with boys—you know, carried on conversations and flirted with boys—the way they put it sometimes was that, "Well, boys will play with girls like that but when it comes down to marrying them, they marry the quieter girls." That's terrible to think that "Japanesy" girls were so inhibited. (laughter)
Hansen
I heard or read somewhere that a lot of the Kibei girls ended up marrying Issei, that the younger Issei felt more comfortable with them than Nisei.
Sakoda
Yes. I would think that that's quite possible. The older Nisei girls had a problem because they were too old for the Nisei who were in the same age range. Even if they were the same age, they would be too young for the girls. I think the Hawaiian Nisei were older, generally, so I imagine some of the Nisei girls married Hawaiian men before the ordinary younger Nisei. But part of that could be checked using the Form 26 questionnaire tape.
Hansen
When was the Form 26 questionnaire given out, right when you came into camp?
Sakoda
Yes. That was in 1942. As soon as you came in, the family head was interviewed.
Hansen
That's when you were working as an interviewer.
Sakoda
I was working as an interviewer then in Tule Lake, yes. What Dorothy and I did was to take information off of the Form 26 form, information that we wanted, like religion, and Issei, Nisei, Kibei. By the way, they defined Kibei for you.
Hansen
Three or more years of education in Japan?
Sakoda
I'm not sure how many years in Japan was used. Then, I was interested in the localities, the idea of where they came from, how much concentration of Japanese there was. We had some help from the WRA in transcribing some of this information onto cards. Then, we added to that block information, where they lived in the block. We had some pictures of blocks where there were concentrations from the Northwest or California. In the loyalty registration tabulation, there would be black blocks and white blocks. The black blocks are a high percentage of so-called disloyal responders—about 25 percent of them.
Hansen
Social history has come of age in the last twenty, twenty-five years, and one large section of social history—not the entire subsection of the field but a large section of it—is involved with what they call "cliometrics," quantitative history. The very sort of data that you were generating back during your JERS days—demographic material, et cetera—is so valuable, and it's been sitting there for almost half a century ready for social historians to interpret. Graduate students in U.S. social history search around for dissertation topics, and nowhere perhaps can you find such rich data to interpret. For family historians, to take just one example, the data produced by you and the others in JERS is there, grouped by families, ready for the picking. Yet, social historians haven't picked it. I just can't understand it.
Sakoda
I guess it would require some funding to do it. But when the WRA wrote its statistical report [The Evacuated People: A Quantitative Description (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946)], they did a count of who was there, in terms of how many Issei, Nisei, Kibei there were, and year by year, when they left. Then, they have a sex distribution, and marriages and deaths and the like. A typical demographic picture but no correlation, between, say, disloyalty and that kind of information. So we did as much as we could with hand tabulation. But with computerized information, you can do a tremendous study of all of these different factors that would help you. All the questions that you raised about Kibei and...
... marital patterns and Hawaiian Nisei.
Sakoda
Who married who. A lot of that could be answered.
Hansen
I was fascinated to see you struggling with things that today's family historians have been struggling with, such as the basic definition of a family and the distinction between a family and a household? These are things that you had to come to grips with in the work that you were doing for Dorothy Thomas.
Sakoda
We did it by hand under very difficult circumstances. Now, you have computers that will make tabulations easily. The need is to add behavioral information, such as loyalty-disloyalty status and time of relocation, to the basic Form 26 questionnaire.
Hansen
Somebody will discover this data in a little while. It's unbelievably rich research material.
Anyway, you went to Japan and got Americanized. You mentioned the commercial school, and after that you went and studied the classics at Toyo University in Tokyo. At some point, you not only thought you would go back to the United States but you actually made the step to go back there. What was the precipitating factor? Was it the political climate in Japan? Or was it just your age? Or was it that your brother was encouraging you to come back?
Sakoda
No. My brother was struggling along at that time. He had finished [the University of California at] Davis and was looking for a job. He could only find a job in a flower nursery or as farm labor, so my father was telling him to come back to Japan because he wasn't having an easy time there. I had finished my three years of Chinese and Japanese classes; I could go back and pick up on my university education in this country. So it was in line with my plans. My father wanted me to stay but I just could not see myself settling down to a desk job in Japan.
Hansen
You say that mildly, that your father didn't want you to do it and you wanted to. Was it more than just a difference of opinion? Did it come down to some very serious arguments and hard feelings?
Sakoda
There was no real argument. He let it be known what he wanted, and I decided to come back. Neither he nor my mother insisted on my staying in Japan—they were understanding.
Hansen
Is that because your brother had already paved the way for you?
Sakoda
No, I don't think that was it, because that made it harder, actually, for me to leave, because he had already left. My father had always hoped that George would come back. No. I think it was one of those peculiar things about the so-called "Japanesy" family, and that was, you were willing to do what your parents wanted you to do most of the time, and you were quite compliant and all that. But behind that, I think, there was also the general notion that your parents were thinking of your welfare also, that you would be better off in this country than in Japan.
Hansen
I'm currently writing the introduction for a novel that our Japanese American Project is publishing. It is called "Seki-nin,"[6] which centers on the protagonist's strong sense of duty toward his parents. In the prewar period, in 1939, this young man's father wants him to leave the United States and go to Japan; his mother has the attitude that he should be allowed to have some choice in the matter and stay in the United States if that is his desire. In spite of having been very successful in the context of Seattle, [Washington], and high school life and everything, he ultimately heeds his father's wishes and goes to Japan. There he gets drafted into the Japanese army and ends up being killed in battle in China. You mention in your narrative that your mother, at the time you were leaving Artesia, stood up for you in the sense of saying that maybe you should be allowed to stay and finish high school. Did you have your mother in your corner of the ring, so to speak, in the family struggle over where you would be? Did your mother help enable you to come back to the United States?
Sakoda
Yes. She didn't insist that I stay in Japan. Maybe she felt that I would be better off in this country. Where
Hansen
She's the one who ended up taking your psychology class at Tule Lake, right?
Sakoda
You mean Hattie? Yes.
Hansen
No, I meant Hattie's mother. Then it was your mother-in-law who took an English class at Tule Lake from your sister, is that right?
Sakoda
That's right. She was taking an English class from my sister Ruby. So she kind of enjoyed camp life. But then just before closing, her husband was working in Boise, [Idaho], as a gardener at the country club, and so she joined him. She had this hysterectomy operation, and I think she was supposed to get the best doctor that was associated with the country club to do the operation. But he was out of town, so this other doctor did it. He must have bungled it because she died of peritonitis, which she shouldn't have died of. She really worked hard, suffered a lot. With this reparation thing coming out,[7] she's the one that should have got it.
Hansen
If your mother had told you, "Don't go back to the United States," would that have made a difference to you?
Sakoda
It might have. It's rather peculiar because at one point there was no question that that's what I would have done. If my parents said, "Do this," then I'd do it. I remember in high school discussing Silas Marner [written by George Eliot in 1861], and the teacher asked me, "If your parents asked you to marry a girl you didn't like, would you do it?" I said I would. (laughter) She was surprised. That was the frame of mind. This is what you mean by being "Japanesy." So by the time I got to Japan and stayed there six years, I hadn't changed my attitude. So I'm not sure that that would have been sufficient. I think I would have thought of what would be best for my future.
Hansen
Did she feel when you came back to the United States that you were in safe hands? I know you were coming back because you had an idea you might want to be a language teacher at the school that had the reputation for being the best language school in southern California, the one that you had gone to in Compton. Did she feel that you were in a safe place by that time and that you could make your way?
Sakoda
No. I don't think she felt that it was safer. It certainly was not a safe destination, because my parents were in Japan. When I came over, I only had a little bit of cash. Basically, I had no money to speak of. I had some moral support from old family friends, but I was on my own trying to go to school.
Hansen
So it took some forbearance on her part, then?
Sakoda
Oh yes. This was particularly true of my two sisters, because they both came over soon after I came.
Hansen
I know Issei parents were very reluctant to allow their daughters to leave camp. Now, this was leaving a country and coming across the Pacific.
I guess it was fairly clear that we weren't happy with living in Japan and we wanted to come back over here. They were replying to that, I guess.
Hansen
You were placed in sort of a tight spot while you were still in Japan. I know from reading your [unpublished] narrative ["The Unresettled Minidokan Evacuees, 1943-1945"] that at one point the police thought of you as a suspicious character because you were American.
Sakoda
Yes. I was secretary of the Hiroshima Nikkei Club and I was interviewed once by what must have been an undercover detective, and he wanted to know what the club was all about. They were keeping track of foreigners. So I explained. What he wanted to know was whether the club had a purpose or not. I said, yes, it had a purpose. Actually, the main purpose was to get together and have a good time. That more or less satisfied him, that it wasn't a political organization that might do something. So I got over that. But I knew he was watching us throughout the period after the 2-26 incident.
Hansen
Were all those clubs dissolved by the year after you left?
Sakoda
No. Our club continued, I think; they were allowed to continue.
Hansen
Did you ever have contact after that with any of the people who were in that club? Did you see any of them in the course of your work in the camps or, after the war, just in society?
Sakoda
Yes. Afterwards, when I came back to Los Angeles, one of the girls had come back and gotten married. Another girl had come back earlier. She was unhappy in her family situation, so she got a marriage proposal from an Issei. He was supposed to be in some business; it turned out he was a gardener. But she married him and had children, and she seemed to be reasonably well-adjusted. I've seen her a couple of times. I haven't seen too many of them. We went back to Japan in 1970, I think, and I met a couple of them; they were still in Japan.
Hansen
What kind of jobs are they doing in Japan?
Sakoda
This business of knowing both English and Japanese and the notion that if you know both languages you'll be able to get along, I think that's probably true. There are jobs with travel agencies or companies looking for people who know a little English. They can be translators and things of that kind.
Hansen
Had you stayed there, then, you probably would have ended up in a similar type of sphere.
Sakoda
I would think so, yes, and I would have maintained contact with other Nisei in similar situations. It would be like being Kibei in Japan.
Hansen
So that if not a self-encapsulated subculture, it's still a definable subculture in Japan.
Sakoda
Oh, it's a definite subculture. They had social activities of their own, kept their contacts with each other.
Hansen
And that's persisted down to today?
Sakoda
I would think so, yes. They may be more merged with the general population now, but I wouldn't be surprised if they kept their contacts with each other.
Hansen
How did you get back to the United States? You took a boat, I presume.
Sakoda
I took a boat, yes.
Hansen
And you knew where you were going when you came back? Or was that specific destination still up in the air?
A Mr. Endo from the Compton Japanese School came after me and met me at the wharf, so I stayed with them during the summer. I was going to go and help teach and then go to a local junior college to continue my education.
Hansen
Why didn't that work out when you came back? What had changed? You, mostly?
Sakoda
It was probably a combination of things. One was that my Japanese wasn't good enough for teaching; I was still not proficient in Japanese. There was also the fact that I had changed and I had become a regular Nisei and not as majime as before. Mr. Endo was quite proud of his Japanese school, and he had Issei working for him as teachers. I hadn't kept up enough with learning the language.
Hansen
So even with your six years of being in Japan and attending a college where you were studying Japanese classics and everything, your facility in Japanese still wasn't up to teaching at a language school in the United States?
Sakoda
With some effort, I could have taught in it.
Hansen
Was it because of the quality of that particular school? Do you think somewhere else you might have been able to get by?
Sakoda
It's like all language learning. What you have to do is get away from your own language and immerse yourself in their culture, and I never did that in Japan because my friends were always Nisei.
Hansen
So you were speaking most of the time in English when you were in Japan?
Sakoda
I was speaking English, although I could speak Japanese to the Japanese people. I didn't even read a Japanese newspaper, which was probably a big mistake. It's like the Kibei in this country. What happened was that they didn't get on with their learning English sufficiently to get by.
Hansen
So by the time you got back here, you were now marginal to this culture.
Sakoda
That made me marginal to the Nisei society, because although I had become Americanized I had been cut off socially, and I didn't have a family base and I was on my own. In that respect, I was more like a Kibei, the main difference being that my attitudes were more Nisei than Kibei. I had nothing in common with them.
Hansen
But the group that you found yourself working with shortly were Issei and Kibei, largely, right? I mean, before you went to Berkeley and even before you started at Pasadena Junior College, weren't you working in the summer in migrant labor?
Sakoda
Yes. I worked one summer for a farmer. I first got a job as a schoolboy going to Pasadena Junior College. I worked in a home. I was expected to do five or six hours of work.
Hansen
A day?
Sakoda
Wait on the table and wash the dishes and do some housework.
Hansen
You were supposed to do five or six hours of work per day?
Sakoda
Yes. I wasn't very good at it. I had learned how to place the silverware. I didn't have the attitude, I guess, to take a job like that.
Hansen
Had your work ethic lapsed a bit during the time that you were in Japan? Because you mentioned the fact that one of the differences between your situation in the United States and Japan was leisure, that all of a sudden your family was better disposed over there and you had nothing to do but go to school.
Yes, I guess that's true. I probably had gotten into a habit of not working all the time as I had to do before. This leisure business, I think, is quite often what distinguished the rural kids from the other kids. As long as you were coming home and working on the farm, for example, there was no room for real quarrels about what you were going to do and how you were going to do it. All of a sudden you had leisure time...
Hansen
Then, it became problematic.
Sakoda
Yes. Then, it became problematic. But then you were not home all that often. You were outside socializing, and I think that's partially what happened.
Hansen
It's kind of funny that one of the portions of becoming Americanized, actually, was to be able to have leisure time and to think about how to utilize your leisure time.
Sakoda
Yes, I think that was an important factor. One of the things that I found in studying the concentration of Japanese is that when they were scattered, the percentage of Buddhists—which is the measure of our culture, actually—was low. When you got into a moderate number of Japanese in the community, the percentage went up. Then, when it got large, it went down again. What made it go down, I think there was an urbanization factor that entered in. Part of that, I think, was leisure, really.
Hansen
Or, perhaps, at that point they started to experience punitive actions toward them because they carried too high a profile. There's a point at which there is security in numbers. But when the population coalesces too much, it could set in motion reprisals by the surrounding community: "Look we've got to do something about this particular ethnic community." Then it might be deemed prudent for the ethnic community to low-profile its presence once again, and maybe one way of doing this is to disaffiliate yourself from some ethnically distinctive institution or practice like Buddhism.
Sakoda
If you lived in a rural area with a lot of Japanese, there was usually a Buddhist church. There was not much choice. But when you got into an urban area, I think there were more choices. You could go to a Christian church if you wanted to, or go to a Buddhist church. But I would think that one of the things that happened was that you had also more leisure time that left room for conscious choice.
Hansen
To recap what we've been saying, when you came back to the United States from Japan in 1939 you ended up finding out that your capacity for teaching at the Compton Japanese Language School was less than what either you or your employer had expected. Then, you moved on to Pasadena City College and you got a job as a schoolboy, and that didn't work out too well either, right? Could you elaborate a little more about why that didn't work out.
Sakoda
I guess part of the reason was that I had had one job with a high school teacher, and the fellow he had before came back and so he wanted the job back, so this teacher said, "Okay, let him have the job back." Then there was a second job I found. She [the woman of the household] wanted to know if I had experience, so I said yes, I had experience. She found out that I didn't even know how to set a place properly, so she thought I was not really qualified. But she let me stay, so I stayed the whole semester.
Hansen
Had you had much contact with Caucasians before you had those jobs?
Sakoda
Before that, in the Los Angeles area, the only contact I had was with teachers, generally. In high school, I had one Caucasian kid who I palled around with in school. Otherwise, it was all Japanese. Before going to Japan I had almost totally no contact with Caucasians outside of teachers. In Japan, we met in this church, so we got to know the church people, who were Christians missionaries. So that became the first real contact with them. When I came back, this schoolboy job was the first new contact that I had had with a Caucasian.
Hansen
Did you have any resentment toward the caste system nature of that job, that here you were, [of] Japanese ancestry, quite well educated, and you were working as a schoolboy for a Caucasian family you might not have even regarded to be as educated as yourself?
I didn't really have any resentment. I knew it was just a temporary kind of a job to get me through school. It was the easiest way of getting room and board. I suppose what I should have done was to get a part-time job and find a cheap rooming place to live in. But it was temporary for me, so I really didn't resent it. I found it amusing, though, when she mentioned that there was a great future in being a houseboy.
Hansen
How long did you stay with that job?
Sakoda
That was one semester, I think.
Hansen
While you were at Pasadena.
Sakoda
Pasadena, yes.
Hansen
How did you feel about coming to Pasadena? You were no longer a youth of seventeen. By this time, you must have been around twenty-four years old. You were born in 1916, and this is about 1940 that we're talking about, right?
Sakoda
I came back in 1939.
Hansen
And you'd had quite a bit of schooling by then. You'd had three years of college and you went to this other business school, and here you were at a junior college in Pasadena. Did you feel you were way beyond that stuff? Was it kid's play? How did you regard it? Was it a chance for you to socialize? Or what was going on there?
Sakoda
It was just catching up with some requirements so I could go to the University of California at Berkeley.
Hansen
Did you know about Berkeley?
Sakoda
Yes. I had it planned to go there all along. I just had to get, I guess, an associate of arts degree in order to get into California [UC Berkeley]. So it was an easy time in school. I knew I did well. Like, in geometry, I did very well. I usually got a better solution than the teacher did. So schoolwork didn't bother me. The surprising thing is being caught in the tight financial circumstance without family support, why I would persist to that extent in going to college. Because that made all the difference later on. If I had stopped and gone to work or something, I might not have gotten any farther. But I saw this as sort of a background emphasis on education that the Issei emphasized.
Hansen
Subjectively, the jobs that were open for you at that time were limited.
Sakoda
That's another thing. It was very difficult to get a job anywhere, with or without a college education. One summer, I worked as a farm laborer. That's stooping pretty low in jobs.
Hansen
You say that was "stooping" pretty low. Do you mean that literally?
Sakoda
Well, for awhile, what I did was to pick cucumbers ten hours a day, and that's stoop labor, leaning over and picking cucumbers as you leaned over. Ten hours a day. My back really ached. I lived in a Japanese labor camp with mostly Issei, some Kibei, old men who probably had been on the lowest rung of the social ladder. They couldn't do anything else but farm labor. I felt it was something I had to do just to make a little money. I earned only 25 cents an hour. Ten hours a day, that's $2.50 a day. The charge at the camp was, I think, 60 cents per day. If you didn't spend too much, you could save money. So I did that one summer.
Hansen
How did you hear about Berkeley? Because you went up there in September of 1940 to go to school.
Sakoda
My brother went to Berkeley. I had known about it all along.
Oh, he went there before he went to Davis?
Sakoda
Yes. Well, the University of California was the place to go.
Hansen
What did Berkeley mean at that time to Japanese American students?
Sakoda
It was the university to go to. As far as tuition is concerned, you could go for next to nothing. You needed a "B" average or something like that to get in. So it was kind of a natural step. But in order to go there, I had to earn some money. One summer, I went to Bellflower, [California], which is the town next to Artesia. I was staying with family friends at a hog farm near Bellflower. I went to this market, which had a vegetable section. The whole thing was run by two Japanese. When I went in to ask for a job, Mr. Mori said, well, he already had a couple of Japanese girls selling with some American kids. He didn't want to use too many Japanese. They were paying non-union wages at that time—the union had not been formed—25 cents an hour. So I talked to him. This was after I had been up to Berkeley, very soon after that. I told him I was interested in personnel management, and he seemed to be interested in that. But he said he'd call me. I went to another place in Long Beach, [California], a fruit stand, and I asked the Japanese running it about a job. He said he couldn't pay me full union wages. So I said, "Oh, I understand. I'll work for less." I was to contact him later on. Mr. Mori called and he said he'd hire me, so I worked for him for the same amount—25 cents an hour. Later the place was unionized and the pay went up to 50 cents an hour, which was pretty good pay at that time. That's when I realized that unions were a useful thing.
Hansen
You mentioned a little while ago the term "Japanese," and then, in juxtaposition to that, you used the term "American." I'm wondering, from the frame of reference of a Japanese American in the 1930s, who was embraced by the term "American"? What population was encompassed by the term "American"?
Sakoda
I guess you're talking mainly about Caucasians. You're not talking about Mexicans and blacks or anything like that.
Hansen
When we were driving through Providence this morning on the way to this interview, you were talking about Italians. Would Italian Americans have been encompassed under the term "Americans" by that time?
Sakoda
Maybe, maybe not. Maybe not. Maybe I'm talking about non-minority groups; people who were obviously minority groups then would not be included. Actually, it's all very vague, because I hadn't had all that much contact with other groups.
Hansen
But it would have been white for sure.
Sakoda
It would have been white for sure, yes. It wouldn't have been black.
Hansen
You went up to Berkeley, I know, and you found some objectively difficult situations there as far as housing. You tried working for a history professor and a librarian, again as a schoolboy, and that didn't work out. You tell about that in your narrative. But what you don't tell about is why that didn't work out. What was the problem there?
Sakoda
When I went to Berkeley, I didn't know a soul there and I didn't have much money. I went to the university employment office for a houseboy job, but I had to stay in a hotel for two weeks before I landed a job in the Berkeley hills. I guess I probably wasn't working as hard as I should. I did probably what amounted to the minimum of housework. I did the cooking and cleaning of the house. I also didn't get too intimate with them as either teacher or librarian.
Hansen
Were they a history professor and librarian who worked at the university in Berkeley?
Sakoda
Yes. And I usually took off some evenings and some weekends, and I went to the Buddhist church service on Sundays. I took part in the newspaper activity with the young group. I also took part in some of the services and conducted some of the discussions, which were usually about social problems. I did get
Hansen
At Tulare?
Sakoda
Yes. It was a period of change, and part of the change was that things were not owned individually, but had to be shared. The Christian minister had control of the piano that they owned, so my idea was that we would share the piano. So one time we asked him, "When can the Buddhists use it?" He said, "Sunday afternoon, no. Sunday night, no. Monday, no. Tuesday afternoon, no." He'd go through the days. "Thursday, ah, maybe." (laughter) So the idea of charity hadn't gotten across to him. But anyway, they had Buddhist services in Tulare. One of the things that Reverend Imamura did was to have services for Nisei in English. Part of the problem with the Buddhist church, for Nisei anyway, was that the Buddhist priests came from Japan. They were ordained in Japan. They would come over and, generally speaking, didn't know much English, and they would conduct all the services in Japanese. One of the things that Reverend Imamura did was to start having English services for Nisei, which was a good idea because in order to get the attention of the Nisei, it was better to use English.
Hansen
Then they went to Gila. I know Robert Spencer wrote his dissertation on Imamura's church.
Sakoda
So they carried it on there. I guess there was some controversy as to how they would carry on the services. But I think he introduced the use English for Nisei there. Since then, in Berkeley, I guess there was a period in which he wasn't doing very much. He died but I contacted his wife recently. She contacted me at the conference. She had a little book she sent to me called Higan, which was written by Jane's mother in 1972 and translated into English in 1986. I didn't happen to meet her but she said she was interested in writing a Buddhist history. I sent her pages of my Tulare journal. So I corresponded with her, and she told me that the Buddhist church now is doing very well. They have a lot of Caucasians coming to the service.
Hansen
The Buddhist church in Berkeley?
Sakoda
Yes, the one in Berkeley. They're now really doing very well. I guess Bob Spencer wrote about the thing in a negative sort of way. I haven't read about it. Have you read that?
Hansen
I haven't. I'm going to get that dissertation ["Japanese Buddhism in the United States, 1940-1946" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1946)]. It's being published [by AMS Press]. I think I told you somebody's publishing it.
Sakoda
So that experience with the Buddhist church was something that kept me occupied. I made friends. When I say "Japanesy," I knew some of the people, like the Odas of Berkeley, that I saw close up. They remain in the background. I also know the college students who were a little bit mobile socially and a little bit more organized socially. They were active in the leadership positions, so there were gradations that you saw even within the Buddhist organization. The Kibei had a group of their own. I guess they felt insecure among all the Nisei, so they formed a subgroup in the church. But mya activity of that sort probably led me away from doing all the work I should have been doing. But anyway, I wasn't a very satisfactory houseboy.
Hansen
Were your employers likable enough people?
They were quite likable, yes. But I guess I could have made more effort to be friendly with them, which I wasn't. I really never bothered.
Hansen
Do you remember at this late date what the history professor's name was?
Sakoda
I had it somewhere. I probably have it in the diary. [Professor Van Nostrand]
Hansen
When you went up to Berkeley, it was with the intention of majoring in what? Because this wasn't a time to just be scouting around for something to do. It was probably a time when you should have been making firm decisions about what you could do.
Sakoda
Well, I was confused, I guess. I had some thoughts on being a writer. I thought about going into Japanese language, learning more about Japanese language. I had gotten into psychology, which eventually became the thing I concentrated on. But in between, I wasn't really sure what I was going to do.
Hansen
Had you even heard of psychology by the time you went to Berkeley? Or was that something you discovered there?
Sakoda
I think it's something I discovered there. I hadn't thought of it initially, I don't think. All this time that I was keeping a diary, which was started in Japan, I was interested in psychology. I had read some books on psychology. I was interested in history also. Going through a period, I was thinking about history. I read [H. G.] Wells. Was it Outline of History [1920]? Also, at Pasadena Junior College I took a psychology course.
Hansen
Prior to your class at Pasadena, were you reading Japanese psychology or were you reading Western psychology?
Sakoda
I was reading Western psychology.
Hansen
Even in Japan.
Sakoda
Yes.
Hansen
What prompted you to start keeping the diary? Was it because of a personal relationship with somebody? Or was it self-consciously to monitor your own progress or your society or whatever?
Sakoda
I don't know why I started keeping a diary. It was a New Year's resolution that I made January 1, 1935. I'm not sure what the motivation was. I know I kept a lot of it in shorthand because I wanted to keep up with my shorthand. I don't know why I kept it up, though. I think it was common for Japanese to keep a diary.
Hansen
You mentioned a little while ago, when you went to Berkeley, one of your thoughts was possibly becoming a writer. A lot of writers keep a diary and use it as a source book for what they write. Were you doing any of that, putting down ideas for a short story, a novel, or anything else that you could later embroider?
Sakoda
No. I wasn't really thinking of being a writer. But I did quite often observe people and write about Japan. I had picked up the practice of looking at people and describing them.
Hansen
In those early years, was the diary all directed outward to other people? Or were you also monitoring yourself?
Sakoda
I was monitoring myself also. I probably wrote down a lot about what had been going through my mind—what I thought about what I saw and read—at that time.
Hansen
As you were monitoring yourself, what were you finding out? What patterns did you start seeing? As you
Sakoda
Yes. I haven't read the diary in a long time. I should reread it sometime. When you question what life is all about and what the purpose in life is, I think that's when you start observing and thinking. The Outline of History, I think, had something to do with that. All of it came from some thought of doing something useful. Thinking of the future, I wanted to do something useful.
Hansen
You know, before we move beyond this point, I want to ask you a question about the diary. It's an interesting phenomenon that around the turn of the century, still in the Meiji Period, there started to appear in Japanese literature a lot of autobiographical novels. Some critics have had a difficult time being able to understand this development, because the sense of Japaneseness involves obscuring self, not bringing attention to it. Also, during this period a lot of Japanese—I don't know about Japanese Americans—allegedly were maintaining diaries, which also involved a preoccupation with their own comings and goings. I'm wondering how one can resolve that apparent contradiction between self-denial and focusing on oneself and one's activities.
Sakoda
I don't think there is a real conflict there in that self-denial is in terms of other people. When you're face to face with somebody else, you may think of what he's thinking and trying to do what you're expected to do in the situation. That's okay, but if you're faced with yourself, I don't think you had that problem.
Hansen
Is it in part compensatory, because in interpersonal relations you have to be self-effacing, that you need to redress the situation a bit by dwelling on self and therefore turning to a diary?
Sakoda
I suppose there are personality types who turn inward or outward. If you're always action-oriented in terms of the outside world, then you don't have any need for introspection, and I would imagine there's some of that.
Hansen
I asked that question to you as a psychologist, number one, but also as a person who, when you were in the camps during World War II, maintained three layers of data: a journal with an obvious social dimension to it; a diary which was quasi-social, quasi-personal; and then a private diary that dealt with very private parts of your existence. So you're not just a casual person to ask this question of. It seems that you've been a prominent practitioner and even reflexive thinker about that process of recording.
Sakoda
Dorothy Thomas wanted us not to hold back anything, even if it was personal. My solution was to keep a public journal and a more personal diary, which covered what I did and thought. My private diary included two love affairs. I think there was some thought of trying to record as much of that as possible, although it got difficult at times because some of it was private and other of it was rather risky, particularly at times like the loyalty registration. I started using initials to hide the names of people because I didn't want to get people into trouble. Frank and Tom, I guess, were talking about burning some of their materials because it might get others in trouble.
Hansen
Did they burn some of their material?
Sakoda
I don't know if they did or not; I don't think they did.
Hansen
They were talking about doing it at one point?
Sakoda
Yes. I had an interview where I heard about that. Dorothy and W. I. Thomas said they were afraid that they would be called as witnesses to testify, and so they were talking about digging a hole and hiding their material. (laughter) You can see how paranoid you could get. But for awhile, I was not writing in the diary during the day.
Hansen
You were fully inured with the practice of keeping a diary by the time that you got involved in the JERS project, then, correct?
I had been keeping a diary in Japan and I kept that up to some extent, not every day. I have a diary for the periods before I went to Berkeley. That's very helpful, actually. I not only wrote about my own problems, but also took to writing about everyone that I met.
Hansen
Not only during your Pasadena days but also when you were working in the labor groups?
Sakoda
That's right, yes. All through that period. That runs into Pearl Harbor. I kept up my diary then. I was taking a course, Social Psychological Research 145, I think, from a liberal professor named Ralph Gurdlach. I was doing a paper on the reaction of the Japanese to the war, titled "As They Await Evacuation."[8] That was when I worked on my typology of the different kinds of Nisei. Kibei, who were pro-Japan, if you wanted to, could be broken down into those who were maladjusted and those who were successful. The Nisei, you had in the middle, caught between the U.S. and Japan. The Americanized Nisei emphasized socializing. You had the rowdies, which I put in the lower class. Closer to the American side, I had the marginal Nisei. I had two dimensions, a horizontal dimension of Americanized versus Japanesy, and a vertical dimension—lower-, middle-, and upper-class. So I wrote about each of the groups and their reactions to the war. So I had developed a typology fairly early.
Hansen
Now, at that point, one group that you hadn't known very much before, the marginal Nisei, you were finally getting to meet. They were a relatively new group to your frame of reference, right? Why don't you talk a little about how you came into contact with that particular group and then go into some depth on their personalities. Tell me about these people: Kenny Murase, Warren Tsuneishi, Kazumi Sonoda, Bob Kinoshita, Tom Shibutani, Charlie [Kikuchi], and the like.
Sakoda
The person who first got me started in contacting the so-called marginal group was Kenny Murase. He was staying with me in a room I had rented from an Issei. We were "batching," doing our own cooking. I had lost my schoolboy job. The rent was $16 a month and it was too much for me to bear alone. I'm not sure how I ran into Kenny Murase, but he was staying at the Buddhist dormitory.
Hansen
You were rooming with a very young Issei, right? A college-age Issei?
Sakoda
No. He was an older Issei who was doing domestic work. So Kenny and I shared a room; we shared the cooking and all. We didn't spend too much on food. But we did get along as a result of sharing the expenses. He was interested in liberal, leftist causes. He was going to a meeting of the Young Democrats. He would go to meetings at the university on topics like race relations. He was also writing a column. There was a little magazine called Current Life, and he wrote a column for them. Have you ever seen that?
Hansen
You mean Jimmie Omura's magazine?[9]
Sakoda
Yes. So I guess he wanted to be a writer. But he had a habit of collecting what I called marginal people as friends.
Hansen
Before you go into his friends, what about him and his background?
Sakoda
He came from a Fresno, [California], farm area. I don't know too much about his family; he never talked about his family. But evidently he was isolated from Japanese in high school and was trying to get away from his family.
Hansen
I was just curious what kind of background would give him the base for having this liberal dimension to his personality.
Sakoda
All of his friends seemed to have been brought up outside of the Japanese community and they were antagonistic toward other Nisei. Since he took kind of a leftist point of view, that put him, as far as the Japanese community was concerned, as an outsider.
Hansen
Did he go left enough so that they would refer to him as an aka [red, Communist] at that time?
Yes. I wouldn't be surprised if they referred to him by that term. Within Nisei circles, it probably wouldn't make that much difference. But he did have contacts with people who were marginal, and Charlie Kikuchi was one of them.
Hansen
Tell me about when you first met Charlie Kikuchi, because he lived with Kenny Murase beginning in the fall of 1941,[10] and I know you were there living with Murase in the fall of 1940, right?
Sakoda
Yes, Kenny was living with me. But the Issei man complained about the noise at night and Kenny shifted back over to the Buddhist dormitory and batched with Charlie and Warren.
Hansen
Haste Street, I think, is where he was living.
Sakoda
Yes. He and Charlie and I think Warren Tsuneishi also lived with them. Of course, Charlie's background is pretty well-known, from the [Louis Adamic] book From Many Lands [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1939].[11]
Hansen
Did you know of that book at the time?
Sakoda
I think I had read about that. I didn't have too much to do directly with either Charlie or Warren, but I did talk on a number of occasions with Warren.
Hansen
You had a lot to do with Kenny Murase, though, right?
Sakoda
We went to some of the race relations meetings and things of that sort, although I suppose we weren't actually that close, because I was also going with the Buddhist group, too. But I did get to know Charlie and Warren. There was another student named Sonoda.
Hansen
Kazumi.
Sakoda
Kazumi Sonoda, yes. I guess he had psychological type of trouble. Kenny befriended him; I befriended him also, kind of took over as a friend to him. There were others.
Hansen
What about Bob Kinoshita?
Sakoda
Bob Kinoshita was living at the Japanese student house. You think of the Japanese student house as a place where people were socially well-adjusted and going to socials and the like. Bob was maladjusted in that situation. I'm not sure what the dissatisfaction was. He was another one of those dissatisfied, disaffected kind of Nisei that came along. There was a girl named Lillian Ota. She later married a professor of sociology. She worked for the Daily Californian [U.C. Berkeley student newspaper] and had a contempt for other Nisei, even though she lived at the Japanese women's house.
Hansen
You were mentioned in a paper ["I Protest"] that Kenny Murase wrote after Pearl Harbor, dwelling on this progressive group, as he called them.[12]
Sakoda
I called it progressive, also.
Hansen
Like progressive marginals. They all get mixed in there. Liberal, whatever. What Murase, going through the different personalities, wrote about you is that what you brought to that group was a kind of inside dopester's information about how repressive Japan was at that particular time, that you could speak with authority about Japanese society based upon your six years there. You knew what you were fighting against, in a sense. I know Warren Tsuneishi took on the name "Wang," which was a very Chinese identification, to show where his allegiance was in the Sino-Japanese struggle. But, according to Murase, if the group was going to go down to the docks in San Francisco and picket the ships carrying scrap metal and the like to Japan, it was your role to deepen the others' sense of what was going on in Japan so that the group's actions were not just abstract but real. Is that a role that you felt comfortable with or not?
I don't remember that at all. It's probably a political interpretation of things. I wasn't particularly politically oriented at that point, and he was. He still is crusading for student funds right now, student scholarships or something. The last time I saw him at a conference, he asked me for a contribution.
Hansen
And you didn't know Charlie and Warren too well at that time?
Sakoda
Not too well. Charlie, especially, not too well. I talked to Warren about problems which troubled him, such as Nisei girls' behavior on dates. But I wasn't that close to him. I still remember his complaint about the "bovine complacency" of most Nisei. Charlie, Warren, and Kenny lived together, so they had to know each other well, and I had only lived with Kenny. As I said, my contacts were more varied than theirs. I had the Buddhist group, where I was a discussion leader. I enjoyed talking and dancing with sociable Nisei girls, but also was attracted to the quiet type of girl.
Hansen
Would it be fair to say that you were marginal to the marginal group?
Sakoda
I was sort of marginal because my background was quite different, and I really wasn't all that leftist, anti-Japanese or pro-Caucasian, although I did go to some of the meetings and found it easy to talk to them. But I was not anti-Nisei as they were and was not particularly comfortable with Caucasians.
Hansen
Another name that you list here that we haven't talked about who figures in your life and in the life of the JERS project to a considerable extent is Tom Shibutani. Tell me how you met him and how you would see yourself vis-à-vis him. He doesn't seem, from what I can gather, to be of quite the same ilk as Kikuchi, Tsuneishi, and Kenny Murase. He seems to be of a somewhat different group from them.
Sakoda
Yes. I guess where I had most in common with Tom was that we had taken the same social psychology course with Ralph Gurdlach. He was writing a paper and I was writing a paper. I think he concentrated on rumors, and I was writing about this typology business. He seemed better off financially than the rest of us.
Hansen
Is that psychology class where you and Shibutani met? Or did you meet through informal...
Sakoda
I had met him previously, but that's where I really came to know him.
Hansen
How did he strike you at that time, as a brilliant young man?
Sakoda
I'm not sure that he struck me as brilliant at that point. He was bookish and the most adjusted of the bunch. But the one thing that I remember is, he was dating a local wholesome Nisei girl named Tomi, I believe.
Hansen
The one he married?
Sakoda
Yes, the one he married. We had heard that he was dating her to get information on the Nisei, and she accused him once of that, that he was only interested in her for the information. (laughter) We were wondering whether he was going to get in trouble or not. Well, he ended by marrying her, so I guess it was all right.
Hansen
Were his contacts more with Caucasians than the rest of you in this group that you've mentioned?
Sakoda
I don't know. I don't think any of them really had that many Caucasian contacts. That's the problem of marginality: you don't want to belong to a group, but on the other hand, you're not out of the group, either. He did talk a lot about rumor, so he had kind of an academic orientation which was useful and which was, later on, useful for me. So he did have, at least, contacts with his professors.
Hansen
I've read somewhere he was on the debate team at Cal, and that his father had been a professor somewhere or other in the eastern United States, NYU [New York University] or some such place.
Tom certainly had this academic orientation. He was always making outlines of this or that, what we had gotten on the study. He was also the one that was instrumental in getting me on the Evacuation and Resettlement Study.
Hansen
How did that come about?
Sakoda
About the time he had to leave Berkeley, he introduced me to Dorothy Thomas. I had written a paper[13] by then. We really didn't have a lengthy interview or anything, and she was recruiting people. She didn't have enough money. She said she'd let us know if she got funding. I had already been keeping a diary, kept up the journal, and she said she'd let us know later on. Later on, she did come and offered Charlie the same thing.
Hansen
How did Dorothy Thomas strike you when you first met her? Could you give a portrait of her and some of your subjective feelings about her at the time?
Sakoda
I don't remember too much, but as far as I know, I was quite impressed that she was interested in doing a study of the Japanese. There were no negatives. As a matter of fact, all during the study, collecting of the data, she was very sympathetic, very encouraging. If I asked for anything—paper, supplies—she'd get them.
Hansen
But initially, when you first saw her, what were your impressions? You draw conclusions about a person, to trust or not to trust or whatever. I've never seen a photograph of Dorothy Thomas. What did she look like and what was her characterological makeup? Did she gesture a lot? Was she loud? Give me some sense of her as a person.
Sakoda
I don't know. I was asked that not too long ago. I'm not sure. If you want to look at it somewhat psychologically, she had aspects of this thing about feminine protests about her. She always dressed in a suit. She's the one when she was told she couldn't get into the men's faculty club, she made a big fuss. So in that respect, if you want to categorize her, she was really tough. There's an outside and an inside to most people. Inside and outside tend to be different. She was very good when it came to doing things for us. Like, for example, when I came back to Berkeley, we were trying to find housing, and the university had houses, you know, and one of them had been reserved for Asians. When we got there, it was filled. There was a vacancy in another house, and they said we couldn't have it. So Dorothy called San Francisco and raised hell. So the next time we went there, they offered to give us housing. So when she got angry, she got real nasty.[14] Part of her problem was that there were people who were trying to get into Tule Lake to do a study. I guess Opler was one of them. Was it Marvin? He ended up in Tule Lake.
Hansen
Yes, Marvin Opler.[15]
Sakoda
He tried to talk to her into letting him come in under the study, and she said, "Nothing doing. Get your own permission." She had this dog in a manger kind of attitude about aspects of the study.
Hansen
Proprietary?
Sakoda
Proprietary, yes.
Hansen
There were some names floating around that I've seen at one time or another who were loosely connected with the study during those early months after Pearl Harbor when the money was just getting firmed up, and then even into the assembly centers. I see names like Fred Hoshiyama and Mitch Kunitani,[16] names like that. Did you know those people at the time?
Sakoda
No, I didn't know any of them.
Hansen
Earle Yusa?[17]
Earle Yusa, yes. I never met the others. I guess some of these people were contacted. I guess many of them didn't last very long.
Hansen
When Charlie Kikuchi was at Tanforan, at one point he wrote something like this in his diary: Funny thing, this study. We've supposedly got this person, that person, the other person on, but we never get together and talk about anything. If I don't see Tom Shibutani at the post office, I might not see him for weeks. I was wondering to what extent JERS was a project in the months after Pearl Harbor and before you went to Tulare and some of the others went off to Tanforan and Tamie Tsuchiyama went to Santa Anita. At that period, was there any kind of coalescence? Were there any get-togethers? Did you formulate strategies or talk about what you were to do or have workshops or anything?
Sakoda
She [Dorothy Thomas] hadn't got her money then, and by that time we had scattered. So there was no getting together that I know of.
Hansen
You scattered, actually, more than most in the sense that I don't think there was anybody else connected— and correct me in this if I'm wrong—with JERS even in a loose way, except you, at Tulare Assembly Center. Is that right?
Sakoda
That's right, yes.
Hansen
What was the errand that you were running for the there at Tulare? What were you supposed to do?
Sakoda
The early message was that you were to observe what you could and see what was going on. Actually, there wasn't that much direction early in the game. I went to southern California and joined my married sister's family in Sierra Madre, near Pasadena. People [of Japanese ancestry who were living] there were sent to Tulare.
Hansen
Because you actually could have gone to Tanforan out of Berkeley if you had wanted to as an individual, right? Because Warren Tsuneishi did that. He was from Los Angeles.
Sakoda
I'm not sure. I'll have to look that up, but that's probably so.
Hansen
But did you know people at Tulare? Or were you among strangers there?
Sakoda
We lived mostly among strangers, I guess.
Hansen
Who constituted "we" at this time?
Sakoda
My sister's family, the Takasugis—Kingo Takasugi, her husband; Yaye, his sister; and his mother.
Hansen
This was May's family, right?
Sakoda
Yes, May's family. And my brother George and my younger sister Ruby. So we were together. We didn't know too many other people, actually.
Hansen
But you didn't know a lot of people at Tulare.
Sakoda
We didn't know a lot of people because the people that the Takasugis knew went elsewhere. The local area people went elsewhere, and we were pretty much alone. There were a few people we did know from the distant past, but not as a group, such as the Shoda family from Lancaster and Reverend and Jane Imamura from Berkeley.
Hansen
By this time, had you talked not only to Dorothy Thomas but also to her husband, the eminent sociologist W. I. Thomas?[18] Had he met with you yet or not?
No. The real meeting took place after we got to Tule Lake.
Hansen
So at Tulare, what contact did you have with Berkeley, the office there? Did Morton Grodzins come out to see you?
Sakoda
We were alone. Dorothy Thomas sent me a letter telling me that I was accepted on the project. She enclosed an outline which included many items I had not covered at all. I was taking notes and had been all along, and that was it. It wasn't until I got to Tule Lake that Dorothy and W.I. would come down and meet with us. By that time, Tom and Frank were there, and we'd get together with Dorothy and W. I.
Hansen
You wrote a couple of things while you were at Tulare, so you were already starting to try to make some sense out of the settling in and everything, right?
Sakoda
I'm not sure what reports I wrote, but I did cover such things as complaints about the toilet facilities, the relationship between the Buddhist and Christian churches, the Social Welfare Department, and dances which I attended.
Hansen
I'll refresh your memory on that. I was looking at it the other night. I've got the catalog [Edward N. Barnhart, Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement: Catalog of Material in the General Library (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California, General Library, 1959)] here, and it lists what you've written there.[19] But in any event, you were only there a month, from what I can gather.
Sakoda
That's right, yes. My main involvement was with the Buddhist church, which was being organized by Reverend Imamura and his wife Jane. I was asked to be the contact man with the Christian church there. I was also involved with the Social Welfare Department, but not as a regular worker. People remember Tulare as a pretty well run place, and Reverend Imamura went to Gila after Tulare.
Hansen
So had you ended up taking Dorothy's invitation to go to Gila after Tule Lake, you would have had some contacts there. In fact, at one point you did go down to Gila for about a month, I think.
Sakoda
In the summer of 1943, Dorothy arranged a conference of her workers in Phoenix after the registration crisis was over. The trip to Gila was for a week, and I spent a day or two with Tamie at Poston, which gave me a chance to look the two camps over.[20]
Hansen
And you already related that you met with the Imamuras and probably some others that you had known from Tulare there. But you got your marching orders, apparently, from the project, or they got their funding, and so you were sent to what was going to be, from what I can gather, the main focus for the study, Tule Lake. Then, they were going to have a check camp that they were going to also use, and that was going to be Gila. So Spencer was sent there. And then Kikuchi went there, and then Poston was kind of taken care of by [Alexander] Leighton and his group [the Bureau of Sociological Research],[21] and then that eventually became one of the sites JERS got involved in, too, through Tamie Tsuchiyama and then Richard Nishimoto, and the rest is history, as they say. But you went to Tule Lake, and that seemed to be the most impacted as far as personnel. You had Bob Billigmeier, who's a sociologist, and you had Tom Shibutani who, like yourself, had just graduated from Berkeley, still quite young. Younger than you, probably, by four or five years. Then, also up there at Tule Lake, you would have had Frank Miyamoto, who was senior to both you and Shibutani and already had gotten his master's thesis and written on social solidarity in the Seattle Japanese American community.[22] Now, you had a group up at Tule Lake of four.[23] Charlie's comment at Tanforan, recall, was, Funny thing, this study. I never see the other people. To what extent was his half-jesting comment apropos to your own situation at Tule Lake? Or did you see each other on a regular basis and...
Sakoda
No, we didn't see each other on a regular basis, which is partly because I avoided seeing them too often— particularly during a crisis. We only got together formally when Dorothy and W. I. came down every few months in there. Then, we would prepare papers and give papers for discussion. But we didn't do that up to then.
But from the time about in June, I think, of 1942, when you went up there, until Shibutani and Miyamoto left around March of 1943, they weren't people who you saw on a fairly regular basis and talked to about the study and about what you should be doing or what kind of data you should be getting, and how Dorothy was responding to it.
Sakoda
No, we didn't get together among ourselves. Dorothy wrote. She had memoranda on fieldwork. I've got the notes on some of the memoranda. Initially, we had thought that it would be comparable to doing a community study. I think Tom Shibutani wrote an outline; he wrote several outlines. But we had an outline which we were supposed to fill out and we were supposed to write reports on topics like the family. I was interested in talking about the psychological reactions of people. Everybody had his own pet interest. We were supposed to fill in this outline. Then, trouble started. There was a farm strike, coal strike, and a mess hall strike. As these problems cropped up, it became evident that we didn't have time to be focused on an outline of the project as a whole. So Dorothy wrote a memorandum sometime in August [1942], I think, saying that instead of having a set topic in a set hour, we were going to have to work on a point to point basis, which meant that we would have to decide at the time which topics were important and follow those rather than to have a set problem and follow it through. In other words, we couldn't have an outline to follow through because that would cover too many topics and there were too many other things happening. So we shifted from an outline to...
Hansen
... just responding to situations?
Sakoda
Responding to situations. And then, too, the WRA kept changing their policies. At first they said, "We're going to pay [the interned Japanese Americans] a decent wage." It turned out, however, that they couldn't pay them more than the soldiers were being paid. Nonetheless, they gave them jobs. If this policy had continued, there wouldn't have been too much trouble, as long as the internees were fed properly, because the WRA was providing recreation and the like. Then [Dillon] Myer decided that the WRA had to get the internees out of camp and back into society. To do this, the WRA had to speed up the leave clearance policy. They had to get the internees' loyalties straightened out so they would know who was allowed to leave and who had to stay. The policy change from incarceration for the duration to relocation was a big change.
Hansen
Let's move into this point a little bit further. I think what you're saying is that your agenda as a field worker and as part of a project, a research team, had altered as WRA objectives altered. Are you saying that as long as there was a policy of "for the duration," you could concentrate on community development because you'd essentially have the same community? But once the WRA scattered and resettled people, the community was in such a constant state of flux and agitation as to make analysis of community development virtually impossible.
Sakoda
No. As long as there was no trouble we could have concentrated on a community study. But as soon as strikes and political problems appeared, we had to cover them. And this was demonstrated by the loyalty registration processing. People lined up on two sides of the issue, being pro-Japan or pro-American. A large percentage of the people in Tule Lake opted for staying, declaring themselves to be disloyal. Or, even if they were disloyal, not wanting to leave because if they left, they might be forced out and obliged to relocate. So a large number of people opted to stay. The shift in WRA policy from confinement for the duration to relocation on the outside and reduction in the labor force contributed to the unrest.
Hansen
Then, of course, you had a lot of people in between the two polarized positions, right?
Sakoda
Yes. So those are the people who left for the outside. On top of that, you had the segregation of so-called disloyal people in Tule Lake, which became a special segregation center. A lot of other people from other centers came into Tule Lake. Many of those who were in Tule Lake—at least, the Northwesterners—went to Minidoka, and I...
Hansen
... went with them. Let's get back to what you were saying about a base line, that when you do a study such as you were doing, you start out with this idea of getting an overview of the whole community and looking at how social structure developed and evolved. It wasn't just to be a static view of the community;
Sakoda
Actually, there were many more points of view than that. Each person also had his own pet project. Tom Shibutani was interested in rumors. I'm not sure what Frank was interested in. And I was interested in psychological reactions of different groups. So that it was possible to have even more points of view. I think as far as Tule Lake is concerned, we got a lot of the data on work places. Like, I was an interviewer for the Form 26 questionnaire. I was teaching psychology, my sister Ruby was teaching English to Issei women, my brother George ran the hog farm. We didn't get all the work places, but we got some of the work places. I was active in the coop, which ran stores in the center, and I kept detailed notes. We'd get some stories on, let's say, the war from rumors. We did cover some of the background. Not all of it, but some of the background. We also covered social activities—we may have had girl friends, we went to dances, we went to church activities, church services... We did get some of that. The important thing was not to get a static description of the social structure, but to get at attitudes and values, to use W. I. Thomas's terms, to explain what was happening.
Hansen
Where does that enter into the documentation?
Sakoda
It's in the journals, which are entries on specific topics of interest at the time; it's in the diary, which is more personal and trivial, such as what we had for breakfast. It doesn't get into the published material. If you're saying, "Where is it in the published material?" more could have been included, and that's part of the critique. That's part of what you have to do when you look at this material: you have to make a distinction between what was gathered and is available and what was published. Peter Suzuki's conclusion that JERS was a failure is unfair in that he only examined the published data. For example, he could not understand why Minidoka was added to the study when it was not in the original plan. If it's the political conflict that you want, that's what you get. The question is, did we cover any of the other stuff? The answer is yes. There's a lot of other stuff, if you want to look at it. It just wasn't published, partially because there were only three volumes planned: The Spoilage, which has to do mostly with people in Tule Lake Segregation Center, and the story of the loyalty registration, which led to its creation; and The Salvage, which, presumably, takes up those who left and relocated on the outside, particularly in Chicago; and there was a third volume planned called "The Residue," which was to be focused upon those people who remained behind. This third volume, for some reason, was not published.
Hansen
When did that volume become part of the publication planning for JERS?
Sakoda
In the very beginning, because there were to be three volumes: "The Spoilage," "The Salvage," and "The Residue." But "The Residue," for some reason, didn't get written. Even if the material's there—and the material is there—it was not published.
Hansen
But that determination couldn't have been made until after registration. I mean, they wouldn't have known there was going to be a spoilage in that sense, right? I mean, it's about the time that Frank and the others were splitting Tule Lake for Chicago, right?
Sakoda
Yes. That's probably true, yes.
In reading the documentation, there seems to be several different layers: the published material, which focuses very largely in The Spoilage on the political developments; then, when you get down to the interpretive reports that you people submitted, those also seem to be—not as exclusively—heavily involved with the political crisis situation; then, you get down into the journals, which have a whole variety of different things; then, you get down into the letters. Now, you've got a much more variegated kind of thing, and the hog farm comes in there. I was wondering, because there's a reiterated complaint by you in your correspondence to Dorothy Thomas about not wanting to write these interpretive reports. You say it's like pulling teeth, you don't want to do it. I'm wondering what the resistance was on your part, because I've thought about this a lot and tried to empathize with your situation. I said, "First of all, this guy's a young, untrained kid. He has just come out of two years at a university." In fact, you were so green that when you got to Tule Lake [Minidoka, actually], you wrote to Dorothy [on 2 January 1944] and said, "Could you recommend some sort of professional journal in social psychology that I might read?" Then she tells you [in a letter dated 12 January 1944] about the one edited by Gordon Allport. Then there is an alternative one being edited. She said one is better than the other.[24] So you didn't know the professional literature and you didn't have professional contacts. I remember what it was like to be an undergraduate. Now, you were plunged into a very important situation, having to write reports. So I thought maybe you just became really fearful of doing it. Then I started thinking more about it and I said to myself, "No, Sakoda seems like a fairly fearless character. He sticks around when the danger gets tough and he doesn't leave Tule Lake, and then he gets himself embroiled in the middle of things up at Minidoka." I said, "It's not fear why he doesn't want to write these reports. It's got to be something else." My sense of the something else was that you felt—and this is my hypothesis—that it would entail massive reductionism for you to screen out all of these other kind of data you were compiling in your journal and diary... to have to interpret and freeze frame something and present it in terms of these crises that Dorothy Thomas was interested in. I just felt that somehow there was one side of yourself, a more comprehensive data gatherer, at war with this persona that she apparently wanted you to become. I don't really know, of course, what the cause of your resistance was.
Sakoda
That situation, I think, was partially a result of personal interest and point of view. I came from a psychological background and the outline was written in sociological language, and the topics, to me, were unfamiliar, made no real sense. Besides, we really didn't have data for a lot of the topics. For example, if you were told, "Write about the internal security system," you'd have to go out and do a lot of legwork, which you'd have to devote all your time to, and maybe it would even be dangerous for you to be doing it. If the outline said, "Write about recreation," for instance, the same way. I have notes on outdoor entertainment or movies and things like that. I could write about the co-op because I was there and I was taking notes. I did write a report on the co-op. But if I wasn't there and somebody said, "Write about the co-op system," there's no way I could have written a report on it without staying a couple of months and devoting myself to the topic. One of the topics was the family. Well, that's a sociological topic, and to write about the family, you'd have to observe a lot of families there. I was in the midst of a block that was sort of inhospitable and I really didn't get close to many families. I really couldn't write about the family in the abstract. Tom was working in the social welfare department, so he was asked to take that as a sociological topic. He talked with families on social welfare. It's that sort of thing, where the observations that we made and the topics that were listed just didn't jibe at all because the amount of information on any of these topics was meager. If we were told, "Write about the fire protection system," well, we didn't know the first thing about the fire protection system.
Hansen
In terms of a disciplinary interest, you were, in a sense, the odd man out up at Tule Lake, then, because all three of the others [Miyamoto, Shibutani, and Billigmeier] were sociologists and then Thomas herself was a sociologist. So, in a sense, they were speaking a different language from you.
Sakoda
I was interested in psychology and the psychological reactions. I guess one of the reasons for emphasizing issues is that you cannot readily observe reactions in a stable state. In other words, if you looked around and said, "Where's fire protection?" you wouldn't see it at all.
Hansen
You had to see it moving.
You had to see it moving. The only time it moved was when something happened.
Hansen
When there was a fire, for example.
Sakoda
Yes. When there was a fire, then you saw the fire protection system in action. We could see what happened to the scrap wood because they had a system of dumping the scrap wood. Jacoby would say, "Okay," at five o'clock or six o'clock, and everybody would rush to the pile and go after the scrap lumber, which was badly needed to make furniture. It was a visible system of distributing scrap lumber. You could describe that because it was happening.
Hansen
The more it was happening, by implication, then, the more visible it would be to you, right?
Sakoda
So if it weren't happening actively and people were reacting, you couldn't observe it as a participant observer. This is one of the limitations to participant observation. You can't just go to a family and say, "I want to talk to you today about your married life," for example. So there was justification, I think, for the style of gathering data and the kinds of data you're likely to get, which was easier. I think on registration, you got a lot of material from talking to people, some at public meetings when people spoke up. You could identify Kibei, who normally didn't speak, when they would get up to talk.
Hansen
But then you had a whole new set of problems. When the crisis became so great, then it was hard to do participant observation because you didn't want to be seen. Especially, you didn't want to be seen writing something down.
Sakoda
That's right. That was quite a problem. Generally speaking, I think, what you wanted to do was to be a participant and not let your participation obstruct your being an observer, which meant keeping your mouth shut and not saying things that wouldn't further your observer's point of view.
Hansen
Yours was a special type of participant observation, though, it seems, in JERS. In many projects, anthropologists "go native" or sociologists "go native"—that is, they simulate a role in the community they are studying. You were really in the community. You were part and parcel of a public policy that sent you off to camps like Tule Lake. What do you think, in retrospect, about that special type of participant observation? Is it valuable? Is it really pretty much of an impossibilistic kind of activity? Does it weigh too heavily on the field worker? Do you inevitably wind up being accused of being an informer? Is it too much to put people through that kind of participant observation?
Sakoda
I think it's important that you realize that there's that kind of study that can be made. The closest analogy, I think, is the protest years [of the 1960s], and I didn't see anybody doing any kind of study during the protest years. It was so obvious and was important that something dramatic was going on. The whole thing was very dramatic. The only thing, then, you really could have done was participant observation. You could have gone to meetings or talked to some people. You could have done some informal interviewing of sorts. But basically, you'd have to rely on observation, by a team of people, perhaps. But as far as I can tell, nobody did it.[25] But that would have been very useful. There were groups on campus, like the Nisei group, who got very excited because the blacks were organizing and they were claiming that they wanted to be identified as a group. Nisei also got together and also started a movement of that sort.
Hansen
Here at Brown?
Sakoda
Yes. But it's only through participant observation that you could get the real dope. So I think as a method it's important, that it be publicized and kept in mind because the kind of information that you get probably is more real than something you get from a retrospective study two or three years later.
Hansen
But what do you think about putting basically untrained—be frank—kids into that situation? You guys had just finished your B.A's. No professional training. Frank Miyamoto was in a different category. But you, Kikuchi, Shibutani, et cetera—very young and very untrained... What do you feel about putting you in a situation like that at the time? Do you think that was a prudent choice?
The problem is whether you could actually train anybody. If you look at what I did and what Charlie did, for instance—I guess we left the most documentation... When you look at Charlie's diary, there's a lot about his family and all of that, but it also has a lot of the attitudes of the administration, and a lot of that could have been missed. We wouldn't have it if he didn't put it down. Particularly the casual kinds of remarks made by administrators, for example, showing the anti-Japanese cultural bias... I don't think it really takes that much training to say to people, "Well, jot down things that you hear."
Hansen
Were there any benefits to not being trained?
Sakoda
Actually, I was pretty well trained, not by courses or anything, but by the fact that I had been keeping a diary in Japan for six years. Coming back, I had been keeping a diary. I had been involved with Nisei and I had been making these observations. So actually, I was fairly well-trained by then.
Hansen
You'd taken some journalism, too, hadn't you?
Sakoda
I was thinking of going into journalism, yes.
Hansen
So actually, your training, in part, was living in a variety of different situations.
Sakoda
This is why my past history becomes pertinent: I had gone through the stages I was observing. The one thing I got from going to Japan was that sort of objective viewpoint you get of yourself. You can accept being Japanese without getting all upset about things that are going to make you mad.
Hansen
You, at one point in the autobiography that you prepared and allowed me to look at, say that some people regarded you as cold-blooded. The term that's often applied to social scientists is that they're clinicians, who are so detached that they seem to be, in effect, cold-blooded. You gave a little illustration a while ago when dealing with Tom Shibutani, suggesting that even his love life was tainted by his desire to get data. I know in Charlie's diary he reiterated, at least during the early stages of the project, as to how proprietary Shibutani seemed over the project and how getting so many pages of data per day was more important to him than anything else. Charlie had real reservations about getting involved in the project and agonized and agonized whether he should do something like this or not, whether he was capable of doing it and the like. You put it in quotes when you observed that people in camp regarded you as cold-blooded. Did you ever feel cold-blooded? Did you run the danger of becoming spectatorial, where the participant part of your participant-observation got washed out?
Sakoda
Yes. I guess there are situations in which people who get involved too personally wouldn't be able to stand it. If you got really upset about discrimination and all the things that were happening to the Japanese, then it would be very difficult to be objective about it. I was fortunate. Temperamentally, I'm kind of detached about things, but I was also somewhat marginal to the situation. I never talked about this happening to us. It happened to them [was the] point of view that I could take. I guess that partially came from my migration over there [to Japan] in which I left this country. In a way, I left the group to go to Japan. When I came back, I was an outsider. I was struggling as a student. In a way, I didn't lose anything. A lot of these people were losing homes and jobs, and here I was, merely going around collecting data. So I guess my objectivity partially arose out of my social standing: I was an outsider.
Hansen
If you were seemingly detached in attitude, it was because, in part, you actually had been materially detached.
Sakoda
I was materially detached because I didn't lose anything.
Hansen
Familially, almost, you were detached.
Sakoda
George, Ruby, and I lived together in a block dominated by rural Placer County [California] people who were suspicious of us.
One of the things that I found pervasive on the study was the detachment of its personnel. Either they were Caucasian, like Spencer or Billigmeier, and therefore outside of it—they were not real participant observers, they were observers, social analysts—or they were like Charlie, brought up in an orphanage; you were an outsider in the ways that we've been talking about today; Shibutani and Miyamoto, seemed to have lived outside of the community. Togo Tanaka, I know, was the only Japanese American student at Hollywood High School when he went there. So each one of you were bound together, in some degree, by being distant from the community. Now, that kept you, in a sense, from being too involved and therefore losing your objectivity, but it ran the further risk—in the other direction—of being too clinically detached. Did you feel that that was why there was a mandate—or at least it seems to me there was a mandate—on the part of Dorothy Thomas that you people should get jobs within the community, that you should be functioning in some capacity: working for the co-op, working for social welfare or whatever. Was that by design or was it just simply resorted to by you as protective coloration so you could collect data without being the target of a lot of suspicion on the part of people as to why you were doing what you were doing?
Sakoda
I guess it was mostly to have a site that you could observe from. You had to have some kind of a job to avoid suspicion, and the job should be one in which you could meet and talk to people. Tom was in the Social Welfare Department; he could talk to people. It was part of being a participant observer.
Hansen
What did Miyamoto do at Tule Lake?
Sakoda
I'm not sure what Frank was doing. At one point he was involved in setting up public discussions. But I also was teaching a course in psychology, which gave me some status in the community. In between, I took a job in the warden's office with Dr. Harold Jacoby, a sociologist who had headed the Social Welfare Department. He was telling me we should keep a list of all the rowdy gangs who might be troublemakers. (laughter) So after a day, I quit. It wasn't the kind of job in which it would be safe to ask questions, whereas being a teacher, you were looked up to by the Issei and Nisei. It also got you in contact with students. I worked out a questionnaire and handed it to my students. I could do that sort of thing. So it was not a bad situation to be in. The mistake I made, somewhat consciously, was to give my own opinion when I was asked for it at a tense block meeting. I gave my honest opinion that Nisei would not get along in Japan, and they should go and register.
Hansen
Was the only ill-advised job that you took in the camps at Minidoka when you became the labor adviser? Because that put you into a wonderful position to collect data, but it also placed you right in the eye of the storm, or so it would seem.
Sakoda
No, it didn't, because in Minidoka, the tables were turned completely in that the people from Tule Lake who went to Minidoka were called Tuleans—although many of them were Northwesterners who had come by way of Tule Lake—and were thought of as being outsiders and troublemakers.
Hansen
Californians.
Sakoda
Yes, the Californians. The kids came in with zoot suits, slick hair, and that sort of thing. The Tuleans came in and said, "You people are too quiet. You're just submissive." So the dissatisfied people in Minidoka welcomed the Tuleans as saviors. But here I was in a position of, instead of being cast as an inu or something like that, was one of the saviors, going to save the people. So in that role, I was fairly safe in Minidoka. I had to be careful about being identified as being sympathetic to the administration. I was put on the spot when I was asked to go to Utah to look over the military depot which was recruiting workers. When I came back, I gave a report, but avoided trying to recruit families for jobs.
Hansen
You actually, then, had the latitude in your position at Minidoka as labor adviser to get yourself involved as a partisan, as I recall, and you resigned because you felt that the evacuee who was negotiating on behalf of the administrative position was negotiating in bad faith.
Sakoda
Yes. I was associated with the community council. The community council generally was elected on the basis of the people being for them and their being in favor of the people. The group who had been leaders
Hansen
Then you had the study to consider, too. I mean, if you started getting in hot water, you'd end up getting the project kicked out of Minidoka.
Sakoda
So I quit. Yes, the Nisei secretary of the community council quit, also. This was shortly before I came back to Berkeley, anyway. So that was a strategic move I had to make to keep my neutral position. I guess you did have to watch what kind of job you took. That was a good job because I was able to observe political interaction between evacuees and the administration. In Minidoka I was closer to the center of political action than I had been in Tule Lake.
Hansen
But still, your job as labor adviser would have put you in a no-win situation in Minidoka eventually, if you didn't get out, right?
Sakoda
That's right. I would have had to quit eventually. But I had another source of information. I belonged to a group made up of Father Joe [Reverend Joseph Kitagawa], Tom Ogawa, who was the secretary of the community council, Elmer Smith, the community analyst, Helen Amerman, a high school teacher, some high school students that Father Joe looked after, and one or two other people in the administration who were invited to our sessions at night. We would discuss all the things going on. Maybe you've seen some of the memos I wrote, terrific details of what went on in the administration and what went on in the community council. Even after I left, I was still getting letters from Father Joe and others. So I was able to cover some events even though I was in Berkeley.
Hansen
During that interval when you went back to Berkeley before you returned to Minidoka for the camp's closing?
Sakoda
Yes. I was getting letters about what happened to the Nisei high school kids who were charged with vandalism at the high school. Father Joe, Tom Ogawa and Elmer Smith worked hard to get them off. A lot of manipulation.
Hansen
One of the things that you told Dorothy repeatedly about in your letters was that you needed somebody to bounce your ideas and your concerns off of, somebody who would be a responsive individual. When you raised this point first, I think, was when you got to Minidoka, because when you arrived, [John] de Young, the community analyst, happened to be gone from the project. Then you got to know de Young, but pretty soon he was gone again on a permanent basis, and there was a lull between the time that he was there and the time that Elmer Smith got there as his replacement. Oh, I take it back. Even before that, when you were at Tule Lake and the others from JERS had left, there was a point where there was a vacuum. Then Marvin Opler came, and you tried to work out some kind of arrangement with him. Then that backfired a bit. But that's what started it. You said, "If I can only have somebody to talk about this stuff with." It sounded, when you were saying that, as though there had been a period where, initially, you did have somebody to talk about things with. Yet, today you've led me to believe that, in a sense, you and Shibutani and Miyamoto and Billigmeier didn't get together very much to talk about things and bounce your ideas off of one another. Is it just a case of degree here, that you did get together to talk but not to the degree that people might think that you did?
The thing is, I think that, in Tule Lake, Dorothy and W. I. did come up from Berkeley, and we did have formal meetings. We did discuss the outline of what needed to be covered. And Dorothy did write fairly regularly about what topics I should be covering. I did not get together regularly with Tom and Frank because I was afraid of arousing suspicion.
Hansen
That's right. The Thomases did drive up to Tule Lake from Berkeley a couple of times, didn't they?
Sakoda
Yes, they drove up there. Once when Dorothy wanted to come, I said it was alright, while Tom wrote to her: "All hell is breaking loose. Don't come."
Hansen
And once Dorothy Thomas even sent Morton Grodzins up to Tule Lake.
Sakoda
Well, that was when I had to leave Tule Lake because it was designated as a segregation center for the socalled disloyals. She wanted me to go to Gila, which Charlie was leaving.
Hansen
I found the way you characterized Grodzins's excursion to Tule Lake [in a letter to Dorothy Thomas dated 24 May 1943] quite interesting: "I was surprised, to say the least, to receive a visit from your personal emissary, all the way from Berkeley."
Sakoda
I told Dorothy that I did not want to go to Gila, and she did not insist. She also approved of my going to Minidoka, where Hattie's family and friends were going. But the group did get together from time to time. We had a meeting in Phoenix after the registration crisis. That was when I went out to Gila and Poston. Then, after we got to Minidoka, we had a meeting in Chicago. That was just after I got married to Hattie and it became a honeymoon trip for us. So we did have these meetings in which we had formal reports that we gave and discussed. But otherwise, it's probably true that it was hard knowing whether what you were doing was right. After I got to Minidoka, however, I felt that I was on the right track.
Hansen
How did Billigmeier get into the study?
Sakoda
I have no idea.
Hansen
Did you first meet him at Tule Lake?
Sakoda
Yes, I didn't see too much of him.
Hansen
Was he a doctoral student in sociology at Berkeley? Or what was his situation?
Sakoda
I don't remember at all. As I said, I kept away as much as possible and did not see too much of him.
Hansen
I know that he was having trouble for awhile producing. Dorothy Thomas arranged to have Spencer come to Berkeley from Gila and allegedly he and Morton Grodzins pumped Billigmeier for information to try to get his creative juices flowing, to try to get him to write his assigned reports. Dorothy Thomas was very disconcerted that Billigmeier wasn't sending in reports like the rest of you. So I was just wondering if you knew Billigmeier well enough to speculate as to why he had problems being able to produce his reports.
Sakoda
I guess it was probably that participant observation didn't appeal to him. If you're a rank outsider, it's harder to get information. He would have had the same kind of problem we had. He could have talked to people on the administrative staff to get their point of view, which would have been useful. That we found hard to cover.
Hansen
In fact, I think he did do some of that.
Sakoda
There are two sides to the story there. Some day, people are going to have to put together what happened on the administrative side because the story is not complete without it. Professor David Krech, a member of my dissertation committee, read my dissertation and commented, "Well, the Japanese seem so logical
Hansen
You don't remember Billigmeier as a person, though, or how he struck you or how he got along in the community.
Sakoda
No. I have no idea how he got along.
Hansen
Did he live in with the administration or did he live among the interned population?
Sakoda
He lived with the administration.
Hansen
He did. What about Frank Miyamoto? He didn't come by way of Berkeley into JERS. How did he happen to be affiliated?
Sakoda
He was at Puyallup [Assembly Center in Washington], I guess, and Dorothy must have recruited him.
Hansen
So he came by way of Seattle and then he went to Puyallup. How did you get to meet Frank Miyamoto? Was it at Tule Lake?
Sakoda
At Tule Lake, yes. He and Tom and Dr. Jacoby were there to greet me. Dr. Jacoby seemed to be in charge of seeing Dorothy's project get off the ground.
Hansen
Tell me a little bit about your impression of Miyamoto at that time. Did he strike you as somebody who you should be taking directions from, who had more experience, was your senior?
Sakoda
He obviously had some academic training he could fall back on. He liked W. I. Thomas's theoretical framework. At one point he said, "If we're going to write a Polish Peasant, [26] let's go to it." He could have been the leader if he had wanted to because he knew the method and what was going on pretty much, particularly in observation and personal documents. But he did not adopt that role. Tom was much more competitive.
Hansen
In your dissertation, you indicate that the twin sources of your theoretical approach were Kurt Lewin and W. I. Thomas.
Sakoda
Yes. When I went to analyze my data, I had studied Kurt Lewin's system of diagrams he had of what he called a psychological field, and each individual was represented as an oval. A person within the psychological field was represented as a circle, and there were forces, positive and negative forces, and he had arrows pointing one way or the other indicating the force operating on the person. There would be a barrier to the goal with negative forces. These forces would move the person toward or away from the goal. That kind of a picture may not sound like social attitudes. As I recall it, it was almost identical to W. I. Thomas's "definition of the situation" or social attitudes.
Hansen
Could you please amplify on this point?
Sakoda
One person's definition of a situation is his total relationship to it—his knowledge, feelings, desires concerning the situation. The genius in the thing is that what you're doing is relating one person to a particular situation and choosing that part which is relevant to that relationship. It is a subjective point of view. It's possible to multiply that by having many other people with similar relationships, and then start thinking in terms of how people can be related to each other. In other words, a psychological field or social attitude is different from notions like "social structure," for example, or social traits, such as leadership. The expression, "You're a leader if you have followers," implies the importance of the attitudes
Hansen
Not merely, say, that you're a leader if you're tall.
Sakoda
Not if you're tall, because among Pygmies, I'm sure, tallness doesn't count. I used that notion to develop a set of what I called "propositions." I tried to develop an organized set of propositions that could be used to analyze the dissertation material.
Hansen
Those propositions you constructed were grounded in empirical situations that you experienced, right?
Sakoda
It came partly from experience, but also I was trying to sit down and develop something logically that could be built up into a unique statement that could be applied to data. The notion of attitude was part of it. The notion an attitude is organized, that the definition of a situation is organized around certain values, is what Kurt Lewin would have called "goals." In other words, the motivation determines how you would look at a situation. I think that became obvious in many of the problem situations. Like, say the draft situation. Parents were afraid that their kids were going to get drafted and get sent off to war and get killed. People usually didn't express these feelings. But when there was a crisis, it tended to come out in their attitudes. I also stated that the redefinition of a situation was in the direction of tension reduction.
Hansen
Is this something that you arrived at informally during the Evacuation period while you were up in Minidoka, and then had it assumed coherency for you after the Evacuation when you were writing your dissertation? Or did you have a working sense of this phenomenon even at the time you were at Minidoka?
Sakoda
No, I hadn't had that thought at Minidoka. While I was gathering information, I was pretty much gathering information on events, observing what people said: what the administration said at a meeting, what some supervisor threatened—you'll be fired if you don't go back to work—and the reaction of the workers. Every time there was a threat of that sort, people tended to react. If the statement is worded negatively like that, the reaction itself tended to be negative. These things I observed, but I only put the propositions together later on.
Hansen
In graduate school, really.
Sakoda
Yes.
Hansen
In your dissertation you explained that one of the reasons you were attracted to Lewin and Thomas was because both of them had a healthy respect for theory and empiricism. There was this interpenetration and interaction between the two dimensions of social analysis that you found so powerful. I think that this combination probably was the thing that made your dissertation work so well. A lot of students, when they write a dissertation, write it the wrong way out in the sense that they start with a lot of theoretical apparatus and then they go looking for data. They end up plugging the data into their theoretical framework. In a sense, your situation was the opposite. You didn't have much of a theoretical framework. You collected lots of data. You had some ways to organize your data, which is not quite the same thing as having a tight theoretical structure. But then, once you got some insight into structure, you were able to quickly see how your data could make some kind of sense.
Sakoda
As a matter of fact, one of the professors who read the dissertation wanted me to organize the data under propositions, but I insisted on keeping the historical framework intact, indicating in footnotes where a proposition seemed applicable. In the dissertation my main contribution, perhaps, was that I applied the concept of "definition of the situation" to the interacting social situation. One of the social propositions was the need to lower the level of tension—how important an education program is when one tries to put something across.
Hansen
You mean public education?
Sakoda
Yes. In Tule Lake, it was about registration, and in Minidoka it was the closing of the center. The army's
Hansen
And, of course, in your dissertation, you explain that when the WRA administration decided to have a reduction of the Minidoka labor force [and] then, later, when they decided to close down the camp, both of those situations were presented so peremptorily that people didn't have time to adjust to the changes.
Sakoda
Well, yes. The camp closure announcement was a great shock, but there was a period in which the people were allowed to react to it. Myer, especially, was smart enough to allow time for reflection. Evacuees held a protest meeting in Salt Lake City. All the representatives from the different centers got together, and there was a protest to the closing. They felt that it wasn't possible to close all the centers. There would be one or two centers left over where people could stay behind. Myer responded at that meeting. Point by point, he explained that they had no plans to keep any center open. "It's better if you went now than later." So he was fairly persuasive in that situation. Later on, he went to all of the centers and he talked to the people. The same thing happened. They had questions, he answered them. By the time he was through, people were pretty much convinced that he meant business. They were afraid, they were upset, but they were less upset than before; they felt that he meant it. An educational program was useful. The best demonstration of that in Tule Lake was when they organized the co-op. [Don] Elberson was very careful to take it step by step, one day at a time. When delegates from blocks were selected, he was careful to name a Nisei and an Issei delegate from each block. This was different from the community council; the administration said only citizens could become delegates from the blocks, and Issei could not serve. Well, that upset a lot of Issei. That was one of the biggest mistakes the administration made as far as community organization was concerned. Later on, the administration rescinded that. In Tule Lake, what they did was, the Nisei council was required to bring an issue back to the block to be voted on. The Issei dominated the meeting in the block, so the Issei's point of view went into effect. So they were able to overcome the restrictions of the administration. As for the co-op, both Issei and Nisei representatives were elected from each block. When they met, they said, "You can speak either language, Japanese or English, whichever you want."
Hansen
Wise idea.
Sakoda
That was pretty wise, because most of them spoke English. Both the Issei and the Nisei could speak their own language if they wished.
Hansen
Don't you think it's ironic, in light of all that wisdom that was displayed with the co-op at that stage, that later on at Tule Lake, it was the head of the co-op who was murdered?[27]
Sakoda
Yes, right.
Hansen
But that was a different situation by then.
Sakoda
Yes, that was a different situation.
Hansen
This is the second day in a two-day interview with Professor James M. Sakoda by Arthur A. Hansen for the Japanese American Project of the Oral History Program at California State University, Fullerton. The date is August 10, 1988, and the time is approximately 9:45 a.m. The interview is being held today at the home of Professor Sakoda and his wife, Hattie, at 411 County Road in Barrington, Rhode Island.
Jim, I'd like to start the interview today with a large question, then refer to correspondence that you carried on with Dorothy Thomas for some more focused questions, and finally turn to your dissertation and ask you a few questions about its findings. The large question is a comparative one, and that is to compare in ways that you deem useful and fruitful the two fieldwork experiences that you had of some duration during World War II—that is to say, discounting the Tulare Assembly Center month that you spent with JERS—to look at your experience at Tule Lake and then at Minidoka. Dorothy Thomas says, in one of the letters of recommendation that she wrote for you for the doctoral program at Berkeley, that you had even more success at Minidoka than at Tule Lake, and I believe that you allow the same in the prefatory remarks that you make in your own dissertation. So maybe we could explore the nature of the two situations.
Sakoda
I think that it's true that I was more successful in getting material in Minidoka than I was in Tule Lake. Actually, it's a matter of the kinds of material that I was able to get. I guess a lot of it is dependent on the role that I was able to play. Now, one of the things that happened in Tule Lake, because I was in a block with people I wasn't familiar with, I wasn't able to be elected to the community council. I think I was put up for the election, but I lost it to someone else. If I had been a representative to the community council, I would have been closer to some of the central action that took place in Tule Lake. I was elected as representative to the co-op. You know, setting up for the co-op.
Hansen
That was an elected position?
Sakoda
That was an elected position. I was also associated there with the co-op board of directors, and I was going to their meetings, so I took extensive notes. I quite frequently contacted Don Elberson, who was directing the setting up of the co-op, so I was able to follow all the issues of the co-op fairly closely. So that, even though the co-op was not a big issue, it indicated a certain type of interaction that worked out very well. It was a step by step process that Elberson took, and he did a very good job of setting up that whole program—it wasn't rammed down the throat of the people, and it worked out very well. So I was able to follow that. I was also an interviewer, and in that job I could follow the goings on within the office. There was actually a conflict with an outside Nisei supervisor who came in and wanted to reassess the people who had been hired. So there was a little conflict there, and I was able to follow that through. I also made friends there whom I could interview later on about different issues.
Hansen
People who were in the co-op?
Sakoda
The co-op, also, and then in the interview group, the records office group. I was also a teacher there, and as a teacher I had a class. At one point I think I had forty or fifty students in one of the classes. I worked out a questionnaire at one point and distributed it. I could also contact some of the students in off-hours, also. By the way, that's where I met Hattie, who became my wife later on. Also, as a young man who was free, who had some leisure time, I went out on dates, went to dances, went to church services. There was constant activity that I participated in, so that that aspect of the social life of the young people, I could cover fairly well. Within the block George, Ruby, and I were friendly with some of our neighbors. George ran the hog farm and I made some contacts with his associates. Ruby taught English to Issei women, including Hattie's mother, and I made some important contacts with the Issei. I think I mentioned most of this during our session yesterday.
Hansen
Yes, you did. So you started out with a very disadvantageous situation of being among "strangers," but then you compensated for this by the nature of the jobs that you took and by the social activities that you involved yourself in.
Sakoda
Right. The big crisis, of course, was the registration crisis, and my mobility as an observer was quite limited because it was very dangerous to go into other block meetings, where you were a stranger. I did go into one or two block meetings, but you were pretty much limited to the ward meetings to which you belonged and the block meetings to which I could go. So there was a limit to the amount of information that I could get. Also, I avoided contacting the administrative staff as much as possible because I didn't want to be associated [as] being too close to the administration. So I didn't get too much information on the administration. So that the kinds of information I could get, and the political wheeling and dealing, I
Hansen
Did you stay away from all white faces or people who were close to people with white faces? Because later on, that polarization between the nihonjin and the keto or hakujin groups seems to permeate both Tule Lake and Minidoka. But right from the start, did you at Tule Lake stay away from not only administration but those people who were in a quasi-administrative position, like teachers or, say, Bob Billigmeier, who was on the study with you but happened also to be a Caucasian?
Sakoda
In general, I stayed away, as a general rule, I guess. I could see Elberson because he was part of the co-op movement.
Hansen
And that was your job.
Sakoda
That was a natural connection, so that was all right. I did see Harold Jacoby, who was head of social welfare and later of internal security. I saw him on occasion. To illustrate the difficulty of seeing these people, Jacoby once invited our whole family—my sister Ruby, my brother George, and my other sister May plus her husband—to dinner. He sent a message for May to the block manager's office, and so that got around in her block so that people became very suspicious of her.
Hansen
She was in a different block from you, then.
Sakoda
Yes, she was in quite a different block, in a block with [the] Northwesterners. So you really had to avoid that sort of thing in order to be able to carry on without a great deal of frustration.
Hansen
That's an interesting point you make in another sense, too, that it was a volatile issue even among the Northwestern population, which would have been a more assimilated population and closer to the administration. In your own block, if that same news had gotten around, it would have been even more damaging to you.
Sakoda
That's right, yes. And even things like typing at night, that was cause for suspicion. There was enough ground for suspicion, and you just couldn't be too careful, although I did take notes, on occasion, at meetings. During the registration crisis, I was cornered by a group of young kids from the blocks [who] took my notes away and wanted to know what I was going to do with them. I guess it was a tricky situation, but I explained that I was doing research on a dissertation. So I said this was the sort of the thing you couldn't leave up to the hakujin because they wouldn't understand what was going on. One of the kids said, "But who's going to believe a Japanese?" This was the way you had to put the issue in order to get your point across. So it was cold, and they finally let me go.
Hansen
You say a group of kids, but when you're writing about it in your correspondence, you're more specific than that. You say Kibei.
Sakoda
I don't quite remember whether I said Kibei or not, but that's what happened. That was the closest I came to being in danger, although there was always this fear that something might happen. However, my situation, because of the way in which I protected myself, I think, was much better than for Tom and Frank, who lived closer to the administration, saw the administrative personnel more often than I did. [They] felt that they were in much more danger, so they felt that they couldn't stay after the registration crisis, whereas I felt that the whole issue of the registration crisis rested on whether the block was going to allow registration or not. The vote in most blocks was not to register initially, so anybody that went to register then went against the block. I even got up and spoke in favor of registration. I felt that at that point I had to stop simply playing the role of an observer, that I was a participant and I was called upon to give my position, and I felt that I should give my honest position.
Hansen
You recognized the dangers.
I recognized the dangers, but I felt that I had to say what I really felt. I had thought about it a little bit beforehand, so I was able to do that.
Hansen
Did people in your block know you were on the study?
Sakoda
No. I don't think I ever announced openly that I was associated with the University of California, because that could start a rumor of my being a spy of some sort. So not many people knew that. To protect myself, I did tell the block manager, who was an Issei from Oakland and with whom I was on good terms.
Hansen
So how did you say it, that you were just writing a paper?
Sakoda
That I was working on a dissertation. That was my general story. I guess for a lot of people, my being a teacher and my working on a dissertation seemed okay, so I was able to get by with that.
Hansen
You apparently did change the situation around even on your own block, given this tremendous fault line that was created by you standing up and speaking out on your convictions. Notwithstanding that, it seems to me that, by the time you were to leave Tule Lake and go to Minidoka, you had reservations about leaving, that there had been some kind of adjustment on your part and on the part of the block, whereby if you weren't a Sacramento local, you at least had a sense of a larger family unit in the block. Is that correct?
Sakoda
Yes. The whole thing started when the block decided not to register. That was the stand that was taken by the Kibei and some of the Issei, so they all voted that. When I cast a ballot, I sent in a blank sheet of paper, then later on I went on and registered "yes, yes"—that I would be willing to serve in the armed forces and be loyal to the United States. So that put me in a position of being against the block, and people wouldn't talk to us for awhile.
Hansen
You said "us." It extended to your family, then, too.
Sakoda
Yes. Afterwards, it became dangerous to the people to refuse to register, because the administration had begun to take the stand that those who didn't register were going to be arrested. So the agitation against registration started to frighten some of the people, and what they were looking for was a way out of that situation. At one meeting, which I didn't go to because I felt that I wasn't welcome at the block meetings, the Issei chef [who] was my neighbor, with whom I was friendly, got up and made an impassioned plea that they should be careful of the decisions they made, because it might affect their whole future. Around the same time, the administration announced that those who answered "no, no" would not be liable to the draft; they made that clear. So this gave them a way out, that if they did register but registered "no, no," that the kids wouldn't be drafted. The result of all of this was that the block decided to allow registration whichever way you wanted to go.
Hansen
So at first it was resistance to registration itself.
Sakoda
Yes.
Hansen
And then after that, a lot of people voted no, 40 some percent voted no.
Sakoda
But that broke that whole idea of not registering, and there was a sigh of relief, and then people started to talk to us again. After that, I played on the block softball team. I was a pitcher. My position improved, partially because, I think, many of the people realized that my stand had been correct to start with. For example, some of them were told that if they took out repatriation papers, they wouldn't have to register. Later on, the administration turned around and said it didn't matter if you took out repatriation papers, you still had to register. So some of them said, "Gee, I felt real foolish, having taken out repatriation papers." Some of them went and took them back.
Hansen
After all, your position was not an aggressive one with respect to registering "yes, yes," was it?
That's right. I did say that Nisei who wanted to stay in the country should register, be loyal to the United States, that if they went back to Japan—I was there—I said they probably wouldn't be happy there. Then a Kibei got up and said, "Well, that's not true." He said you could be happy in Japan, and he opposed everything I said. Later on, I think he felt rather sheepish about the whole thing. Afterwards, there was the segregation problem when Tule Lake was designated as the place for disloyals. People were trying to decide whether to stay in Tule Lake or leave, to change their answers from no to yes. At that point, I think I was more useful to some of the people, getting information about this and that, what to do and how to do things, so that I was in a much better position by that time. I was actually a positive force for that group that had originally wanted to stay behind.
Hansen
But at Tule Lake itself, during this registration crisis, there were two things in which you faced reprisals. One was in the form of being threatened by a group of young men, whether Kibei or not. That was one instance. And then you were banished, in a sense, socially from the block, you and your family, by not having people talk to you. Now, that seems, actually, to be fairly mild compared to what a lot of people would have faced had they taken similar actions as yourself. How do you account for the difference? I mean, I know it's not mild to be banished or to be consigned to oblivion and to be socially ostracized, or to be threatened, but my sense from reading the journal accounts and diaries of people like Shibutani and Miyamoto is that they were constantly being assailed and had to keep their doors locked at night, had to have clubs ready at hand, had to often leave false scents in one place and then go to another place and reside during the night. The same situation was certainly true at other camps as well among people who even attempted to register or registered "yes." So your situation seems mild. Are you now understating the intensity that you actually experienced at that time?
Sakoda
My situation was similar to that of other Nisei leaders who were respected in their block. Some of them were educated Kibei who were respected in the block up to that point. When the registration issue came up, when they said people should register...None said, "You should volunteer," but you should register. I was in that group which was respected up to that point and not really suspected of anything very bad.
Hansen
So you had built up some credibility.
Sakoda
I had built up some credibility it seemed, and a lot of Nisei leaders had done so, also, by serving in the community council or the co-op, et cetera. Those people, too, were turned against, and they're the ones who felt that "We're working for the people, and they really don't appreciate what we're doing, so I'm going to leave," and a lot of them wanted to leave and did leave. In the case of those who were more closely associated with the administration, the situation became worse because they were seen as being with the administration or being on the side of the administration on different issues, so when the crisis came up, they were starting from a weak position. They were being suspected, and now, suddenly, this was a serious issue.
Hansen
Did your situation ever degenerate to the point that people used symbolic reinforcement, like putting a bag of bones on the doorstep of your barrack or by spitting as you were walking by and saying, "Inu" or "Baka," just like that?
Sakoda
No. It never got that bad. When we went to the mess hall, they would have certain tables reserved for so-called inu, and I don't quite remember the details on this, but I guess we were sort of segregated when we went to the dining room, and that was about the extent of it. Then, people wouldn't talk to us, but nothing overt. Again, [there was] the incident with the young kids.
Hansen
How long did that last, where you were consigned to the unsacred circle?
Sakoda
It didn't last too long. It must have lasted a couple of weeks or so, but it didn't last too long because the whole thing broke very soon after. Part of the difficulty on Tom and Frank's part, as I mentioned during our session yesterday, may have been their perception that things were bad. They were under the feeling of impending doom quite often, I think, and what they perceived may not have been that bad in actuality.
Dorothy, at one point in the correspondence, linked you with Tamie Tsuchiyama—she was from Hawaii—as people on the study who were fully familiar with, and not necessarily opposed to, Japanese culture and Japanese ways. That situation seemed to shape perceptions a bit, too. Perhaps going into a concentration camp and being among people who were from, say, small settlements outside Sacramento that were almost like Japanese mura [villages] would have been frightening or distasteful to people like Tom or Frank. In contrast, having lived in a Hiroshima village and in Tokyo for six years, it must not have been nearly as jarring an experience for you.
Sakoda
No, it's more than that in that I had my so-called "Japanesy" background. I could read Japanese. We liked Japanese music. I learned to play goh. I played goh with my brother quite often. I taught Jacoby to play a simple form of goh. If you get five in a row, you win. When we were at meetings, I would take out a graph paper, and he would draw circles and I would draw "X's," and we would play that on occasion. He wanted a goh board made and wanted to know if anybody could make one, so I made one for him during the crisis, actually. It gave me something to do. That sort of thing. I could play goh, and so could my brother George. We liked Japanese entertainment. Beyond that, it goes into attitudes about "was camp a proper place to have socials and make friends with the opposite sex and even get married?" There was a debate on that, and I took the point of view that that's fine. Why shouldn't people meet the opposite sex and even get married? Whereas Tom and Frank's point of view was that...
Hansen
Were they also in the debate?
Sakoda
One of them was, I think. They took the point of view that Tule Lake was a terribly unnatural place, that you shouldn't do anything like that in such a situation. I saw the situation as being quite natural. We have all the Japanese from different places getting together, and there was lots of leisure time and you could meet girls rather easily without having a car or a lot of expense. It was an ideal situation in many ways.
Hansen
And you put your theory to work?
Sakoda
Yes, I put my theory to work. (laughter) There was also this feeling, I think, on the part of Tom and Frank that somehow what the Japanese were doing was inferior. Like Frank's wife, Michi, went in for classical music, and she hosted a concert once or twice, I think.
Hansen
Western classical music.
Sakoda
Yes, Western classical music. So they were thinking in terms of American culture, Western culture, as being the ideal and the desirable thing, that Japanese culture was no class, et cetera. I think some of that kind of attitude, I guess, probably entered in creating a wedge which did exist generally between people who were what I call marginal or anti-Japanese, pro-American in terms of culture. They tended to be critical of evacuees and their behavior.
Hansen
So it gets back to, in a lot of ways, what you describe in your dissertation as how a participant defines a situation, and your definition of that situation was at variance with theirs. Their definitions led to a series of actions, even, ultimately, leaving Tule Lake, whereas your definition of the situation led you to stay there up until the time of the segregation.
Sakoda
In both Tule Lake and Minidoka, there were constant conflicts between the administration and the evacuees, and you could take either position. Some of the Nisei, like the Nisei council, for example, took the position of the administration, like in the theater project issue. Some official in the administration took it upon himself to make arrangements to build a theater to show movies, which was a good thing except that they wanted to charge for attending the movie to pay for the theater. It was going to be turned over to the co-op, and this was done without the co-op's permission. So the whole issue was, should he have taken upon himself to make this commitment on materials and things when it was going to be turned over to the co-op, without asking the co-op's position? The whole thing went to the community council. The Nisei council, I think, sided with the administration that this was a good idea, and it came back to the block for a vote. There was a former JACL leader who was a representative, and the block directed him to say
Hansen
How did they register their criticism toward you at that point?
Sakoda
At that point, there was a meeting. As I think I mentioned yesterday, an old man got up and said, "This is wrong. In Japan, a woman stands six feet behind the man, and they shouldn't be holding each other and dancing." They were very archaic ideas which wouldn't pass muster in Japan at that time. It's the old culture that some of them brought and clung to. There are scholars, like [Yamato] Ichihashi, who mention [in Japanese in the United States (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1932)] that the Japanese culture retained by the Issei is much older than the Japanese culture in Japan, because that's been Westernized.
Hansen
I try to think of you going through crisis situations in the camps where things got so brittle that they could have broken with the slightest impropriety or perceived impropriety. One of the things that happened in the camps during crises was this retrenchment of Japanized ways and mannerisms and speech patterns and everything, and there were a lot of times when Issei or Kibei would go around to people who were speaking English and tell them, "This is Japan. Speak Japanese." I'm interested in your situation because you could actually take refuge in speaking Japanese and not lead with your tongue, as would be the case with those people who were on the study—or not on the study, even—who were not bilingual and had to always offend by speaking English. Did you speak Japanese most of the time, then, while you were in camp?
Sakoda
No. There wasn't that sort of pressure to speak Japanese. I believe you're thinking of the Tule Lake segregation center atmosphere. I spoke English most of the time, actually. However, if I spoke to an Issei, I could speak in Japanese. Like, if I went to the shower room and took a shower and wanted to carry on a conversation, or went to the barbershop and sat in the barber chair and talked to the barber, things of that sort, and it was an Issei, then I would speak in Japanese. I would say the sorts of things that they would want to hear just to indicate where my leanings were. So in those cases, I would speak Japanese. But otherwise, in a way, unlike some Nisei who tended to speak half-Japanese, half-English as a general rule, speak a lot of mixed Japanese and English, I didn't do that. When I spoke English, I spoke English. As a matter of fact, I went to see this girl who was doing typing for me, and her father said to me, "Can you speak any Japanese? I never hear you speak Japanese." I said, "Yes, I can speak Japanese," which is indicative that my style of speech, perhaps, was a little different from some of the Nisei who were used to a mixture of English and Japanese, and I didn't do that.
Hansen
What about at places where it became an issue, like at public meetings? Increasingly, those meetings were dominated by Issei, and Issei chafed against the regulations that the meetings were supposed to be conducted exclusively in English. So there was a cultural battle going on there, the administration imposing one set of regulations which crippled, actually, the capacity of the Issei to express themselves, but if the Issei had had their way, it would have crippled the capacity of many of the Nisei to participate
Sakoda
It depended. The co-op meetings, they came to the conclusion that you could speak either language. But both the Nisei representatives and the Issei representatives couldn't speak both languages generally, and most of them chose to speak English. In block meetings, however, we were dominated by Issei, and unless the Nisei met separately—in which case they could speak English—I would speak Japanese if we were speaking primarily to Issei. So that I could switch back and forth as the occasion required. I have one note in my diary in which an educated Kibei friend came over. He was teaching English. He came to see my sister Ruby, who was directing the English classes for Issei. He was in the same situation as I was during registration. He said he was a respected leader up to that point. He could speak English and Japanese both. But he favored registration, and people stopped speaking to him. He said one family told him, "Don't come and see us anymore." So we were in identical situations. He came over, and we became acquainted, became friends. When we got together, my brother and I and he, sometimes we would just speak in Japanese, which he found comfortable and my brother found comfortable, and I could speak Japanese if I had to at that point.
Hansen
Sometimes in looking back on the camp experience, and even today, talking in terms of Japanese American history and culture, there's been a tendency on the part of people to not only utilize the categories of Issei and Nisei and Kibei, et cetera, but to reify them so that they become more real than they should be. We have talked about the varieties of Kibei, and maybe it would be instructive to talk about the variety of Issei, because, again, people can characterize the Issei as very reactionary and given to hysterical, punitive type of behavior throughout the camp experience, and it doesn't seem to do justice to that population to manage them within so tight a stereotype. So I was wondering if you could amplify a bit about [that].
Sakoda
Yes. The Issei were different from the Kibei in one measure or respect, and that was, they had a family. So they were tied in with Nisei, who were children, and there was a need to earn a living, for one thing, to have a respectable job, if possible, and then be in favor of things like education and keeping up appearances and the rest. So when it came to issues of being in favor or against registration, they had to be concerned both for the property that they owned, land they owned, for example, in their children's names, they had to worry about the future of the Nisei, so they couldn't absolutely say, "We're going back to Japan. You don't have to register." Some of them did say that, but they still had to wonder what the future of the Nisei was going to be. So their attitude was on the side, generally, of law and order, education, and peaceful solutions, if possible, because that's where the family differs from the single person. So they wavered back and forth, taking a sitting-on-the-fence kind of attitude quite often on these issues. There was another difference among Issei in terms of, for one thing, being Buddhist or Christian, that the Christians were more likely to be somewhat more Americanized; they had more contact with Caucasians in church affairs, for example. So culturally, they tended to lean more toward being lenient toward Nisei in, say, social activities, which becomes the natural thing. Let them learn dancing and whatever. Whereas the Buddhists tended to be more against those things, if they were against it at all. There was a cultural difference also that crops up in the statistics, anyway. There was another difference that I wasn't able to prove statistically but which could be done with the available Form 26 statistics, and that was the upper/lower class difference. People who were urbanized, people who had successful businesses and, particularly, people, if they came from Japan and they were traders, that put them in a different class. But people who were generally successful held themselves above the so-called immigrant group. They felt that they were not being as sophisticated. Sometimes they called them ignorant farmers; they had that kind of attitude. But there was quite a difference between particularly those people who spoke English, who had some college education—they would put themselves above the rest of the Issei. Many of the conflicts would involve listening to rumors and taking hasty action, as in the case of the registration. The more educated ones would not be as precipitous in their actions. At the other end of the scale were the bachelors. This was the Issei counterpart of the Kibei. Kibei would tend not to be attached to families. So the Issei bachelors were those who were farm workers, quite often, who were not successful in getting married.
Hansen
And largely propertyless, too.
Sakoda
Yes. They were farm migrant laborers, a lot of them, or they worked in homes or places like that as
Hansen
Did you have any contact among them? Were you able to talk with the single Issei men?
Sakoda
In times of crisis, yes, you could talk to some of them. I would sometimes overhear them talking.
Hansen
You presented some interesting social categories of analysis, if one were to study the whole Japanese American Evacuation experience. You've talked about generation; you've talked about class; you've talked about religion. Was there a point at which these categories collapsed and that ethnicity alone became predominant, that it overrode these other classifications leading to differential behavior? Were there crises that became so encompassing that those divisions were dissolved and that what you got was a rallying around the ethnic flag? Did you experience that situation while you were at either Tule Lake or Minidoka?
Sakoda
There were some occurrences in which the issue largely became that of the administration against the people generally. The registration broke down in a different way. It was a factional kind of thing. The theater issue partially broke down in terms of Issei versus Nisei, although some of it was the people versus the administration. In Minidoka, they had a boilermen's strike. In a lot of the labor conflicts at Minidoka, it was a matter of the administration trying to put through a retrenchment program, for one thing. When they began to emphasize relocation, one of the things that the administration did was to say, "These people are getting lazy. They're not working very hard. We have to encourage them to leave." One of the ways I think that they tried was to reduce the labor force by one-third. This was contrary to the original concept that "We're going to take good care of these people for the duration." So they changed their minds on that. Then they began to say, "You've got to work eight hours, forty-eight hours a week, full eight-hour work." They tried to enforce that, and in Tule Lake they had labor troubles because of that. In Minidoka, it was even worse because the project director there, [Harry] Stafford, made the 30 percent-cut all at once. He was quite dictatorial when it came to doing things. In the boilermen's strike, they [administration] were trying to reduce the labor force and force the smaller crew to take over the work. A fire broke out in one of the boiler rooms, and they decided that a small crew should man the boiler twenty-four hours a day. Well, this increased the workload tremendously. So after a heated session, the boilermen decided to strike. I think that type of issue was one of we people against the administration. On both sides, however, there were some who were sympathetic with the other side.
Hansen
Edward Spicer once reported, when he was working for the Bureau of Sociological Research at Poston, that while standing alongside Richard Nishimoto during the height of the Poston incident in November of 1942, Nishimoto, in a moment of effusion, said, This is like a social revolution. I haven't seen anything as potentially violent as this since the rice riots in Japan.[28] I was wondering if you had ever seen the camp at either Tule Lake or Minidoka reach that proportion of intensity where it looked as if the internees were ready to take the future into their hands right there and forget about any consequences, to erupt into mass violence against the Caucasian administration or the military police or whomever.
Sakoda
Tule Lake was a large place, and all the trouble that occurred generally occurred somewhat locally. Like, when they had the farm strike. The farm workers felt they weren't fed enough that morning, so they decided to strike. Well, a small group of people were involved, and it didn't affect a large number. The theater business was a project-wide vote, but it wasn't that intense an issue. The big crisis was, of course, the registration crisis, but even there, the height of the crisis was, I guess, when the boys in Block 42 declared that they wouldn't register. So Dr. Jacoby came out and he tried to round them up and take them away, and a crowd gathered around.
Hansen
Did you say that Jacoby was the head of police?
Internal security.
Hansen
And I think you said, too, that he had changed his jobs from social welfare to internal security.
Sakoda
Yes. He showed a lot of guts in doing that. There was some commotion then, so that he had to go back. Then he came back the next morning to get them, and picked them up. A group gathered. But that was Block 42, and it wasn't really a project-wide situation. It was not the kind of situation that occurred later on in Tule Lake, where a whole mass of people gathered around the administration, and [there were] soldiers with guns on one side. It never got to that sort of situation. It was sort of a block by block kind of conflict. You got conflict within the block; there may have been ward meetings. But it never got really that intense. Actually, most of the trouble in Tule Lake could have been avoided by a little judicious handling of the issues. The most extreme action was the taking out of repatriation papers, which led some families to be sent to Japan.
Hansen
But the same could be said for Minidoka, too, if I read your dissertation correctly.
Sakoda
Minidoka was different. Minidoka was a mild place peopled by mild people who did not resort to violence, so that anything they did was kind of mild. Even in the boilermen strike situation, there wasn't a big to-do about it. I never felt in serious danger at Minidoka. So there the conflicts never reached a real high pitch, actually.
Hansen
Does that get back to the question we started with this morning, that if you were able to do better work in Minidoka, it was, in part, because you never felt this danger, that you felt you could go about your business and maybe even take notes when you wanted to without feeling that there were going to be reprisals for doing it?
Sakoda
At Minidoka, my own situation with respect to position in the block was a little better than in Tule Lake, but not a great deal better.
Hansen
Because you were married?
Sakoda
I was married, so we had our apartment. Hattie's parents were in the same block. The block manager was from Tacoma, so my wife knew him, and we became friendly with him. There were a few families with whom the family was familiar. It's not as though we were friends with the whole block, but we were more or less on equal terms. But the big difference in Minidoka was that people from Tule Lake who had gone to Minidoka were outsiders, which bound them together as a group. The Tuleans, so-called, were looked on as potential troublemakers. They came from California and the kids had more outrageous appearances. They would wear jeans and have their hair wild.
Hansen
This extended to you, too?
Sakoda
No, it didn't extend to me.
Hansen
No, I mean did the "Tulean" group extend to you?
Sakoda
Yes. The Tuleans were welcomed by the dissatisfied Minidokans. The block managers had been very cooperative with the administration, and the block managers were mostly Issei, and they were thought to be administrative stooges. The Tuleans, when they came in, came into a situation where the administration pretty much had its own way. Particularly during the registration crisis, the administration was able to persuade quite a number of Nisei to volunteer for the armed forces.
Hansen
About 300 and some.
Sakoda
Yes. And the way they went about it was that, when a Nisei went to register and he wanted to answer "yes, yes," he was told he couldn't answer "yes, yes" unless he volunteered. This was the kind of thing that the
Hansen
So there was a reservoir, then, of discontent somewhere in families over that.
Sakoda
Oh, yes. A great deal of discontent. So the block managers who cooperated with the administration were looked upon as stooges of the administrations. When the Tuleans came in, they were looked on as saviros, sort of. You know, they've come to rescue us from those people. The Tuleans were more outspoken, more active. One of the active people was a man named Kintaro Takeda, from Sacramento. He had carried on the slowdown strike in Tule Lake. The chief steward, a man named Pilcher, was supposedly not providing enough food; he was holding back food. He had done this in the Walerga Assembly Center, I think, where the Sacramento people came from. So when he came to Tule Lake, and a food shortage started to appear, he was looked on as the culprit. They were trying to get him fired, and they [the administration] wouldn't fire him, so they had a slowdown strike in which the hours of serving the meal were delayed so the workers couldn't get to work on time. They were successful in getting rid of Pilcher in Tule Lake. So here was this guy who had come from Tule Lake—a very able guy. He also helped settle the housing situation.
When the Tuleans came to Minidoka, there were enough apartments open, but in order to make room for the incoming people, people in Minidoka were asked by the administration to move to smaller apartments that they had created. In other words, when families got smaller, and they were in large apartments, they were told, "This apartment is too large for you. You had better move to a smaller one." They had created some very small apartments. So some of the Minidokans were persuaded to move into the smaller apartments. The Tuleans had to live in recreation halls, beds lined up in recreation halls, waiting for housing, because the administration wouldn't allow the smaller families of Tuleans to go into the larger apartments that were vacant by then, unless they doubled up—two families in one apartment. A few families did double up, but most refused to do so. Takeda had a count of empty apartments made and found that these were enough for the remaining Tuleans. The administration then said, "Alright, if you're going to insist on the larger housing, we're going to allow the cooperative Minidokans and Tuleans to move back into the larger apartments first." So Takeda went around to the Minidokans in the smaller apartments and told them the situation. They were asked to come to a meeting, I guess. The Minidokans said, "Oh, no. That's all right. Let the remaining Tuleans go into the larger apartments." So the administration didn't have a leg to stand on, so that the whole thing was settled in favor, if you want to put it [that way], of the incoming Tuleans.
Hansen
Did the administration consciously try to play the Minidokans off against the Tuleans?
Sakoda
That's what they were doing.
Hansen
I mean over and beyond that particular incident. Was that a conscious policy that they carried out?
Sakoda
No. They really didn't have opportunities to do that. But clearly what had happened was that the Tuleans had solved the problem that the Minidokans didn't solve. What the Minidokans should have done was to say, "We're not going to go into the small apartments," but they didn't, see? So that changed the view of Tuleans for some people, anyway—not as troublemakers, but as saviors. That carried through pretty much the rest of the project term.
Hansen
And it behooved you, too.
Sakoda
Yes. It helped my situation, because I was a Tulean, and if I talked to somebody, they would look on me as being a Tulean, which was a safe position to be in at that point.
Hansen
Was it safe enough for you at Minidoka to come out of the closet with respect to your work with the University of California? Or did you still pass yourself off as somebody working on a dissertation?
Sakoda
That was still difficult. As a matter of fact, I was getting mail from the University of California in the regular
Hansen
But you weren't confronted about it, like "What are you doing?"
Sakoda
No, I wasn't confronted directly about it, not really. But there was probably an underlining suspicion that something was going on.
Hansen
As it turned out, you were working on your dissertation. (laughter)
Sakoda
But in general, that put me in a relatively safe position, so that was a plus. The other thing was, I was able to get the job of labor relations adviser. This was my role. There was a job of this description. When I took the job, I could have had an office in the administration building. I chose to set up my office in the community council building.
Hansen
I'm sure the administration would have preferred you to have had your office in the administration building.
Sakoda
Yes, they would have preferred me to be in the administration building, but I didn't want to be associated with them. So I sat in with the community council, where I was welcomed, and I was part of the community council. The secretary of the community council, Tom Ogawa, was a very able young Nisei, and he spoke English, and Japanese a little, and we got along very well. He did much of the work of the community council. The chairman was an Issei from Seattle. So I had contacts within the community council, so I could sit in on the meetings and carry on observing what they did. I was friendly with the secretary, so I could get everything that went through the community council, which meant I knew some of the things that came back from the administration. So that put me in a very good position to know what was going on, not only [with] all of the labor conflicts but all of the issues that went to the community council. That partially put me in touch with some of the people in the administration, because there would be some doings, particularly with labor conflicts. Like, the telephone operators were trying to get rid of a Nisei girl and put in a Caucasian worker, but they wanted to keep some of the Nisei workers. Well, that never worked out; the Nisei workers quit. The gatekeeper, there was trouble there, and so I talked to him. They were trying to get rid of what they thought was a troublesome Issei. After talking to him for a while, I got him to quit. So I was able to keep track of the labor trouble and, in the process, get in contact with situations. Like, the statistics office, a new woman came to do the supervising. I had made arrangements that her staff, young Nisei girls, would work on the cards we were preparing. We were taking down Form 26 information, selected information, and adding to it a block address and the status as far as relocation and loyalty were concerned. This was the basis for our statistical analysis. At one point, Dorothy said, "We want to do this, but with our manpower..." She didn't see how we could handle it. What I did was to arrange with the statistics office to do it. So when I went in to check what they were doing, the girls weren't doing much work and the supervisor was having difficulty getting them to work. I talked to them and asked the girls what the trouble was. They were resentful of the supervisor, who really didn't know what was going on. She wanted them to work all the time, eight hours a day. I arranged for rest periods in the morning and in the afternoon, so that the working time was somewhat less. That helped, so they got more work done on the cards. In return, when she had to do a survey, she asked for my help. There was an annual census. They went from door to door, and everybody had to stay home that day, and they took a count of how many people and who were there. She had no way of knowing how to go about arranging all this, so I arranged the taking of the census for her, which helped her as well. So I was able to not only observe what was going on but also get our work done.
Hansen
To design it.
Sakoda
Maybe I was manipulating the situation a little too much, but that worked out very well. You've seen the report on the pickling plant.[29] The pickling plant conflict, the chief protagonist, Dick Sato, had come from Tule Lake, and before that, from Walnut Grove, [California]. He pronounced it "woru natsu guroobu." It's typical of some of the rural people; they speak so much Japanese they can't speak English properly.
Hansen
So the nature of your participation changes the nature of your observation.
Sakoda
Yes, it changes it a great deal. If I had been on the community council in Tule Lake, I would have gotten more of the official interaction there. The difficult part is to get hold of what went on in the administration. Now, in Minidoka, Father Joe, who was an Episcopal minister [priest], liked to meddle in politics, so he got together Tom Ogawa and myself. The three of us were the central figures. Then there was Helen Amerman, who was a high school teacher friendly to evacuees. Elmer Smith, the community analyst, was sympathetic to evacuees, and he didn't get along with a lot of the administrative personnel, I assume. But we constituted the central core of a discussion group. There were some high school students who came to the meetings sometimes. Once in a while Father Joe would have an administrative personnel member join us. Some of them didn't work out too well. So we had this little discussion group going on, and we not only knew what was going on, we also sometimes took action in favor or against certain things.
To me, one of the clearest issues was the gymnasium issue. There, the administration was trying to force an eight-hour workday. What the carpenters were doing was, they would arrive in the morning and they would build a fire if it was wintertime and warm themselves. After a little while, the head carpenter would bang on the saw, and they would start to work. They would work a couple of hours, and he would bang on the saw again, and they would quit work and wait for the truck to pick them up for lunch. They would come back in the afternoon and repeat the same thing, so probably they worked four hours a day or something like that. It was happening all over the place, but particularly true of outdoor work. If you pay a group of people a uniform wage and some work is more attractive than others, there has to be some way of equalizing the task. One way of equalizing it, as far as the workers were concerned, was to not work as hard outdoors. Sometimes they gave them an extra meal or some extra clothing or something like that to compensate. What the administration was trying to do was make them all work eight hours. So one of the things they did was to take the head carpenter out of his supervisory job, and put a Caucasian supervisor in who started to keep time. The idea was they would pay them only as many hours as they worked. This didn't go over very big with the workers, so they quit. So the gymnasium, this was in 1944, wasn't finished. In most places, I imagine, they had finished it. But anyway, the administration felt that, if they didn't finish it during that year, there was no sense in trying to finish it at all, which was probably true. But they thought that the people wanted the gymnasium, so they thought, well, this is a good place to put the screws on. They did a number of things. One was to try what they had thought they were successful [at] doing previously to rally the people around. So they advertised and said, "We want volunteers to come out and work on the project." Well, some who they called "appointed personnel," administrative people, came out and worked, but none of the evacuees did. So they had to give that up. After some negotiation, the community council sent a telegram to Washington to try to get them to have the project director back down. Washington took the point of view that it had to be settled at the project level, which I think was a mistake, because part of their role, I think, was to settle things rather than to just let things be settled at the local level. They wouldn't write to Washington if they could settle it at the local level. It was a method of solving a problem: you spread the problem out over a wider range to try to get it settled. Washington didn't agree to that. I was involved with the negotiation with the administration at that point, too. So the gymnasium was closed. So Father Joe decided, well, he was going to do something about it. I guess he
Hansen
Volunteers?
Sakoda
I don't know if it was volunteers or if they were paid. But they had a crew together, and in a very short time, they got it done. It wasn't completely finished, but for the rest of the duration, they were able to use the gymnasium for dances or ceremonies and things. Which illustrates a lot of things about the relationship between the administration, how they went about things, going about it the wrong way and, again, doing it in an effective way if it was really necessary to get something done.[30]
Hansen
This all kind of illustrates that the people were willing, I think, to go against the grain of their "druthers" in the matter. I think they probably did want the gymnasium.
Sakoda
Oh, yes.
Hansen
Just as they wanted to have the heat during the cold of winter, and they were willing to support the boilermen's strike. In this case, they were willing to do it, too.
Sakoda
It became an issue of the people against the administration, and a lot of it was of that kind in Minidoka. It didn't always affect a lot of people; it was kind of a political issue involving little groups of people. But those were the kinds of issues that I could follow, partially because I was in the community council, close to the community council, being a labor adviser, and then being in Father Joe's group. Father Joe's group also produced information from Washington. Evelyn Rose, who was formerly Dorothy Thomas's student [at U.C. Berkeley], was head of the WRA statistics section, and she was in Washington at that time. She would come around [to Minidoka] and visit, and she joined our group. She finally ended up by marrying Father Joe. She's a demographer, statistician.
Hansen
Are they still both alive now?
Sakoda
Yes. I heard that Father Joe was sick. They had a daughter. They came around once. She was looking for a college to go to, and they visited Brown. She, however, didn't come to Brown.
Hansen
Where did they live before?
Sakoda
They lived in Chicago. The University of Chicago is where she was. He got a position in the Religious [Studies] Department of some sort. So we got news from Washington. Elmer Smith had been with the Minidoka administration, and Tom Ogawa and I had news of what went on in the community council.
Hansen
That leads to another point of comparison between Minidoka and Tule Lake. Your situation was better in Minidoka and therefore you got better data, really; richer data, I think, more variegated. One of the things you're pointing out now is that you were getting more from the administration, and one conduit through which that information flowed was the community analyst, who was Elmer Smith. You had a situation at Tule Lake, at least after, say, March or April of 1943, where there was a community analyst there when the Community Analysis Section was set up, and Marvin Opler came to Tule Lake. In Minidoka, you had a chance to work with another community analyst, John de Young. Could you compare and contrast the situation vis-à-vis the community analyst in Tule Lake and Minidoka and how that gave you information or shut information off from you?
Sakoda
I don't know much about what happened with Marvin Opler. I guess part of the problem was he was trying to find what information I had without Dorothy's knowledge, and I was trying to find out what information he had, and neither of us was willing to really let the other have what we had. Dorothy was fairly strict about letting information out.
Was it because of the newness of the Community Analysis Section? I mean, that was a new division, and all of a sudden their researchers might be seen as encroachers on JERS territory and data?
Sakoda
No, I don't think that was it. I think Dorothy felt that our information was not to be let out to the administration, for example.
Hansen
I know that Bob Spencer felt very threatened at Gila when James Barnett came there from Community Analysis, because he felt that his situation in Gila was precarious and that the WRA administration there would use the creation of a community analyst position in camp as an opportunity to eliminate JERS people. I know he felt himself to be in a threatened position, and Dorothy said, "Just don't worry about it. I'll take care of that at this level. You're to keep an open friendship with this person [James Barnett], but you're not supposed to divulge your data."
Sakoda
As far as John de Young and Elmer Smith were concerned, I got along very well with both of them, and de Young gave me whatever he had.
Hansen
And you didn't have to give him anything in return?
Sakoda
I didn't have to give him anything in return, so that worked out pretty well.
Hansen
That doesn't sound correct. Maybe we could explore that a bit more.
Sakoda
(Laughter) I could talk to him without actually showing what I had written, for example.
Hansen
You might have gotten him contacts or something like that.
Sakoda
But he didn't have the proprietary feelings that I think Marvin Opler had. Elmer Smith was very sympathetic to evacuees and to my cause. There again, there was no problem about discussing things.
Hansen
In what academic discipline were both of those men, de Young and Smith? I know Marvin Opler was an anthropologist, but what about John de Young and Elmer Smith?
Sakoda
Smith was in anthropology. De Young, I'm not sure whether he was sociology or anthropology. Then, also, the chief Nisei officer in the Community Analysis Section at Minidoka was Dick Kanaya, who was interested in sociology. I got to know him well, and he showed me what data he had. I could get the history of the setting up of the community council, for example. The way it worked out was that the administration at Minidoka was very leery about setting up a community council, because they thought that all the trouble at Poston and the other places was due to conflicts arising from that, so they kept dragging their heels. Finally they said, "We're going to make a simple constitution for the community council that is peculiar to Minidoka," and they finally did get it passed. So they had an election in which mostly Issei were elected. By this time, they had gotten rid of the citizenship restriction; that was pretty silly to start with. So they had an election and, presumably, people who were more for the evacuees than for the administration were put in position, so it got started. What happened with the community council was that they felt they had to take a stand that was pro-evacuee. Stafford, the project director, took the stand that "This is what I'm going to do." He wasn't willing to really negotiate or anything like that, so it put the community council in an impossible position after awhile, after a series of impasses.
Hansen
He was used to having a rubber stamp and now he didn't have one.
Sakoda
Well, yes. He used to talk about Japanese psychology, and he would say he couldn't understand Japanese psychology. He found it difficult to be with people. He came from the Department of Agriculture, I guess, in Idaho, and so he just didn't understand what was going on.
Hansen
Do you think he understood human psychology?
He probably took the position of a stern father: I'm right and you're wrong, that sort of point of view. In a way, he could say, "These are the orders from Washington, and we're just going to carry them out," rather than to say, "Here's a problem, we've got to work it out." He had to work through the community council. They did settle a number of issues together. One was the warehouse strike, where he had trouble with his own administrative personnel, who were causing trouble for him. So he cooperated with the community council to settle that. There was also a very interesting small incident. It's the riprap fire incident. Do you know what a riprap is?
Hansen
No.
Sakoda
The riprap was a bunch of branches on the bank of the river to keep the soil from eroding. Somebody set fire to it, and the local people said it was some Japanese fishermen who did, and the Japanese said, "No, we didn't do it." But the idea was, well, somehow we've got to do something about it. The chairman of the community council wanted to settle the matter. He would get evacuee volunteers to fix it. So that became in issue, because why should the Japanese volunteer's fix it? So I talked to him once, and he said—in a typical Japanese-style solution "Do you know, the man that actually set the fire came and talked to me and apologized?" I said, "Oh, is that so?" (laughter) So it was settled by the Japanese volunteering. It was never revealed that it was a Japanese who had done it. So that was a case of cooperation with the administration. But that was the last time, I think, that that happened. After that, it was one conflict after another, like the pickling plant conflict and the gymnasium conflict.
Hansen
That conflict at Minidoka would not have been there, though, had it not been for the infusion of this new population from Tule Lake, right? I mean, the accommodation to what you call a benevolent paternalism probably would have persisted throughout the camp without this new catalyst group?
Sakoda
Yes, it's quite possible that that might have persisted. With the election of the community council, however, there may have been a natural change any way, but I guess the Tuleans were catalysts at speeding the process up. I think there would have been dissatisfaction that would have shown up anyway.
Hansen
In reading, strategically, your dissertation and the different theorems you present in it, it seems that one of the things that might have happened was that you had this reservoir of discontent, and if that would have continued to build without these incremental resolutions that were coming about through labor negotiations, you might have had a big blow-up in Minidoka just as well as having this persisting accommodation pattern.
Sakoda
Their first blow-up was the boilermen issue, which cropped up as a result of the retrenchment program, and that was indicative of this pent-up dissatisfaction. The block maintenance crew of janitors and boilermen was reduced from eleven to four. The three boilermen were supposed to work eight-hour shifts to keep the boilers going. This was necessary to keep the water pipes from freezing.
Hansen
But Tuleans were involved in that.
Sakoda
Not directly, actually. That was almost purely Minidoka men, most of them, although the Tuleans being there may have helped. But that was pretty much local. I think that was their first big blow-up, which wasn't that big, actually. The boilermen refused to work the new schedule. The strike lasted about a week or so, I think. It was a typical Minidoka solution, which is the workers went back to work on the old schedule. Stafford said, "On what basis would you go back to work? We're not going to increase the number of workers." So the workers said, "Well, we'll go back to work on the old schedule," which meant they didn't have to tend the boilers at night. So they settled the problem. But the people said, "The only ones that suffered were the people. We're the only ones that suffered," and this was a typical Minidoka solution: everybody out for himself, and the people suffer. This was kind of a typical Minidoka attitude. There wasn't enough determined opposition to the administration to cause a serious blowup.
Hansen
But that's what the Tuleans saw. They witnessed this.
Yes, that's what they saw. That sort of thing persisted throughout, that there wasn't a galvanizing of all the people against the administration at any particular point. Any trouble tended to be less severe, less galvanized, less total, maybe, than it would have been at Tule Lake.
Hansen
Did the layout of the camp at Tule Lake and the one at Minidoka affect the situation? You have a map of Minidoka in your dissertation, and the way that Minidoka was configured was quite unlike most of the camps that I've seen.
Sakoda
I think that did help the people from being organized. The blocks were strung around. In Tule Lake, you had wards made up of nine blocks, a three by three cube. It had seven wards, I think. So you had everybody massed together, even though it was much larger than Minidoka, 20,000 people as against 10,000. In Minidoka, it was one block following another block strung along a long string in a semi-circle, so that allowed for less concentration of the people, less interaction. In other words, if you lived in Block 1 and you had to go over to the last block, it would be a long walk.
Hansen
I think it took you about half an hour, didn't it, to traverse the camp?
Sakoda
Yes. And the administration was way off, too, well to the center upon the hill, so that kept everybody more or less separated. Also, the administration tried to keep from dealing with blocks as units. They didn't like the idea of people being in control of a block, so they had groups of blocks. I don't remember if they called them wards or not, but they were trying to deal with groups of blocks rather than blocks as units. It's an issue here of the natural unit of action. In the family, it would be a family as a unit. In the city, it would be blocks as the unit. Not everybody really associated within the block, but those were kind of face to face and could form a natural unit. In the block where there was a common mess hall and common laundry room and facilities, the block was a natural unit. You had a block manager, a common post office, mail delivery, and the like.
Hansen
I once read a community analysis report [written by Morris Opler, the community analyst at the Manzanar War Relocation Center, but based upon information supplied by a Japanese American who had lived in a Japanese village for several years prior to World War II] that discussed the similarity between the block and Japanese village units, how sometimes it was... Is it the baruka?[31]
Sakoda
Yes, the baruka, yes.
Hansen
And sometimes even a little larger than a baruka would be the mura.
Sakoda
Yes.
Hansen
Did you see any correspondence between those two, or is that a false or a forced analogy?
Sakoda
I wouldn't have put it that way, although if you wanted to, that would be the analogy. I was trying to put it in terms of street terms here. But actually, a block was smaller than a village, but it could be a little hamlet kind of a situation, where people were likely to interact with one another. That would have been the natural unit, and it seems to me, for better or for worse, an administrator should have dealt with the natural unit. You're going to meet strong opposition, but on the other hand, when you have control, you're going to have stronger control. You certainly will have better communication. What they were doing was to lose communication by not dealing more directly with the block.
Hansen
One of the reasons I asked you that question [was] because I think the community analyst who made that comparison was somebody who was under the sway of [the anthropologist] John [Fee] Embree [1908-1950],[32] and largely his book Suye Mura [:A Japanese Village (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930)]. It's a book that, in your JERS correspondence, you mentioned reading. You didn't mention it too favorably because you felt that it was too heavy on structure; apparently you distrusted structuralization type studies, preferring to look more at the way in which people behaved rather than just the way they were socially constructed.[33] When you got into the Tule Lake camp, you mentioned a term which one hears more
Sakoda
No. The ward was never a real unit. It was a basis for electing some officials. I think they had a planning commission which was based on the ward, and some of the meetings for that reason were ward meetings. But aside from that, nobody ever said, "I belong to Ward 2." It was always, "I belong to Block so and so."
Hansen
Was there anything intermediate between the family and the block? For example, I can well envision a block being compounded of populations from different hamlets in an area and these subunits having an integrity of their own. Did that integrity eventually dissolve, and did the block absorb these different groups?
Sakoda
No. It's like living on a street. You don't meet everybody, except with a common mess hall, you're likely to get together.
Hansen
And common latrines.
Sakoda
But the more natural unit, of course, was the barrack, composed of our six apartments. They all faced the same way, so your neighbors are on the same side, you had one on each side and others toward the ends. That association is likely to be stronger than for the block as a whole, so you did have that. That was one of the strong associations that I had, that our next-door neighbors were Mr. Kaya, the chef, and his wife, who had worked in a home before. We did communicate quite often.
Hansen
You and I were talking yesterday after our taping session about these reunions that get announced in the vernacular press with increasing frequency, and we observed how they have camp reunions. Your brother had reported on one held in Sacramento recently for Tule Lake and said it was kind of a bust because it didn't make any sense. Tule Lake was a big place. Then we discussed how it probably would be more logical to have block reunions. If you were to design a reunion that you would feel most comfortable attending, get the most satisfaction out of, who would be on the invitation list? Would it be this circle of Father Joe and the others in the discussion group at Minidoka that you had? Or would it be people at one end of your block? Who would it be?
Sakoda
If it were Minidoka, then certainly it would be Father Joe's group. That would form a very tightly knit group. As a matter of fact, they did say we should meet occasionally, but I've never paid much attention to it. I don't think they really had a reunion. But that would have made a nice group to me, because then you would really know the people that you worked with. There are also, possibly, work situations. For example, if you worked in the hospital or a hog farm or a poultry farm or whatever, where you had a group of workers who were intimately together, that would also make a nice situation. Or if you had a church group, that might be good. Or even if you were from the same town and you were in Tule Lake and you could get together, everybody from Placer County or something like that, that might work out, because at least you'd have some chance that you would know some people. But with 20,000 people invited, and a lot of them from Sacramento and you're from Los Angeles, there's not much chance of knowing anybody.
Hansen
When did you feel most within the bosom of the community at Minidoka? Was it during this period where you were the labor relations adviser, where you were doing something "for the people" in a very direct way? Did you feel that then you got the reinforcement all the time of people? You were an outsider to almost any unit.
Sakoda
Yes. I guess there wasn't a time when I really felt that I was really looked on as an insider. I was always, I think, somewhat of an outsider, not only because I came from the outside but because my activities were within certain groups. I was certainly an insider as far as Father Joe's group or as far as the community council was concerned. Within the block, we had Hattie and her parents and some people from Tacoma,
Hansen
It's interesting. The group that you felt most at home with was actually a group that cut across lots of different lines. It was a cosmopolitan, international group, in a way. You weren't Catholic, you're Buddhist; you had a Catholic [Episcopal] priest; you've got a Caucasian community analyst; even high school kids in that particular group. But you spoke what you could call the same language.
Sakoda
Yes. That was the best period. There's a scene in which I'm leaving the meeting with a Nisei girl, and we passed by a mess hall—this is toward the end—where there were some Issei with a white tablecloth on the table, and they're drinking and eating, and they're celebrating the fact that Japan won the war and they're going to come and rescue them. We passed by and they're singing some songs, and I tell the Nisei girl, "There's another victory celebration going on here." "What's going on?" I explain to her that they're celebrating the victory, that Japan's sending an army and they're in Salt Lake City and they're on their way, and they're making flags and getting ready to welcome the army. She says, "Why don't we go up close and look in and see what's going on?" So I told her, "That's not a good idea." She was so naive about the whole situation. She was there at the meeting and I was walking home with her. But that sort of situation was what happened at the very end. Also at the very end, things were getting worse. In the high school, I reported that the kids were getting rougher and less polite and the like. Then there was vandalism at the high school, directed toward one of the teachers who the students disliked, and they broke some windows and scattered some paper around. Some kids were rounded up. Some of them were actually involved, some of them were not.
Hansen
A teacher who would make racist remarks?
Sakoda
Yes. They were disliked. The net result was that some kids were taken to court, and there was some talk about putting them in jail. Father Joe got together with the project lawyer and with Elmer Smith, and Elmer Smith testified in favor of the kids. He was set up as a university professor. So they testified. They did quite a bit, and they finally were able to get the kids off without going to jail, on probation. But that sort of action was taken by the group. If that hadn't happened, it's quite possible that some judge would have said, "Put them in reform school" or something.
Hansen
In your dissertation, you didn't actually use the term charismatic, but I think you had that phenomenon in mind in describing a particular type of person who could be followed quite apart from a lack of universal public support, at least get followed further than other people who didn't have this same kind of quality. It strikes me that somewhere lurking behind that particular proposition in your mind was somebody like Father Joe. [The dialogical development in what follows is damaged by the interviewer's mistaken notion that Father Joe Kitagawa was a Catholic, rather than Episcopalian, priest.] I'm thinking that [within the Japanese American community] Catholics are a minority among a minority, Christians. In almost all of the camps, Catholicism was a very small part of the Christian population. Yet, Father Joe was able to affect changes, like the one that you just articulated. You told me you were going to tell me a little bit more about him, and maybe we can take some time to do that right now and comprehend why a spokesman for a distinctly minority group was able to have the force that he apparently had.
Sakoda
In the first place, the Catholics seemed to have a certain amount of privilege in the camps. They were allowed in the camps, whereas other religious groups, I think, were not. I'm not sure of that now.
Hansen
You mean like Catholic priests?
Sakoda
Yes.
Hansen
I think there were Buddhist priests. Like Kanmo Imamura, for example, was...
Sakoda
He was part of the population, though.
I see what you mean. But wasn't Father Joe?
Sakoda
Father Joe was an evacuee, but there were Catholics, I think, who were not. Anyway, Father Joe's situation was, I guess, mostly his own inclination. He liked to meddle in politics, and he made a point of getting together the people he felt were used to him. So he got Tom Ogawa; he got myself; he got Elmer Smith, who was quite sympathetic. From time to time, he would also get other people from the administration. There was one guy who was sent from Washington who he thought might be helpful. He came to the meeting, I think, a couple of times. But he just didn't seem to understand how to handle evacuees, so Father Joe finally gave up on him. And there was another fellow in adult education who came to a meeting of our group a couple of times and who seemed to be sympathetic. But then he later turned out to be anti-evacuee. Father Joe collected these people consciously and got them together. He also had information both through his church connection and through the administration.
Hansen
Was there a type that became Catholic among the Japanese population? Can you see any kind of social category? Is it a class thing?
Sakoda
I don't know if there's a class or not. His brother Daisuke, known as Father Dai, was at Tule Lake.
Hansen
He's the one who wrote the book on Issei and Nisei [ Issei and Nisei: The Internment Years (New York: Seabury Press, 1967)].
Sakoda
He wrote the book. He was quite different. He was less roguish. He was more disciplined.
Hansen
So you knew them both, then.
Sakoda
Yes. Father Dai did a tremendous job of interpretation, for example. He would take long passages and do a tremendous job of interpreting. Father Joe didn't like to do ordinary chores, like priestly chores and things. There was a woman, Mrs. Ogawa, who looked after his needs, would cook for him. He didn't like American food, so she would cook Japanese food for him. So he was rather spoiled. He didn't learn how to drive, for example. He always insisted on somebody else driving him around, which was ridiculous because it took manpower just to get him around places. There was a companion [Caucasian] woman who helped with the church affairs, and she always complained about Father Joe not being considerate. For example, when we left on the last train out of Minidoka—this is quite dramatic—someone had to drive the church car back, so he had Mrs. Ogawa and this Caucasian woman, I think—she was a middle-aged woman—drive the church car. She complained that she felt that Father Joe should have gone with her and helped drive the car, but Father Joe preferred to take the train. (laughter) Mrs. Ogawa had prepared lunch for him. It turned out to be a Japanese-style lunch, which was quite elegant. So we were sitting on the train while—I forgot her name—she presumably was struggling with the car going to Seattle.
Hansen
I have read that, at least in other camps, there seems to have been a good deal of antagonism directed toward the small Catholic group. Not to the point that they were regarded as inu or targeted to be beaten up or anything, but just a cordoning off of the Catholics from the empathetic feeling of the population. Is that something that you noticed either at Tule Lake or at Minidoka?
Sakoda
No, I didn't have any inkling of that sort of idea. These kids came to the meetings, Father Joe's high school kids, they were really nice kids. Some of them went on to college and did well. I had no inkling of any kind of prejudice. I don't know where it would have come from.
Hansen
I just thought that, if there was some sort of resentment on the part of Buddhists toward Christians, that the Catholics would bear the brunt of it because theirs was a more formalized brand of Christianity, replete with ritual and dogma and things that would distance them a bit more. Also, the fact that the Catholics were the Christians who originally went over to Japan as missionaries and had provoked a lot of retaliation within the Japanese population. So that's what I was thinking about.
Sakoda
I don't know about the role of the Episcopalians. I guess their ceremonies are more High Church, but they're
Hansen
Oh, was Father Joe Episcopalian? He wasn't Catholic? I'm sorry, I missed your identification of him.
Sakoda
He was not Catholic; he's an Episcopalian.
Hansen
And his brother, too.
Sakoda
His brother, too.
Hansen
Then it probably was a class thing, because the Episcopalians are generally regarded as sort of [an] upper class form of Protestantism.
Sakoda
So he probably got away with more than he might have otherwise.
Hansen
So he wasn't, then, in charge of an ecumenical Protestant congregation in Minidoka. He had responsibility just for the Episcopalians?
Sakoda
I think that's true. He had only the Episcopalians to take care of. I don't know how large his congregation was. I didn't pay too much attention to it, actually. In the pickling plant thing, Father Joe did manage to send this one guy out of camp just to get him out of the way, so he did have control of the group.
Hansen
But you didn't know his congregation sufficiently to comment on their social composition—like, were there a lot of doctors, et cetera, people who had wealth, in the Episcopalian group.
Sakoda
No, I have no idea. Although, with the Form 26 data, you could trace that very easily, because they do give the religious group. That's the kind of information you don't get about a group of people through a U.S. census.
Hansen
Does it break it down by denomination and sex?
Sakoda
I'm not sure, but I think that it might, yes.
Hansen
We were talking a little about the closing of Minidoka. Both your dissertation and an M.A. thesis written [in 1965] at [the University of California at] Berkeley a few years after your study by a student named Matthew Speier ["Japanese American Relocation Camp Colonization and Resistance to Resettlement: A Study in the Social Psychology of Ethnic Identity Under Stress"] address this topic. Speier's thesis deals specifically with the resistance to relocation and resettlement, and the ultimate resistance he documents was to the closing of the camps. Yours is a focused case study of it, dealing with what happened at Minidoka. But where there's a correspondence between your two studies is in terms of the psychotic behavior that was exhibited on the part of some people, suspension of disbelief. They wanted so much to believe, like you described, that the Japanese army had invaded the United States, were in Salt Lake City and would soon be coming out West to liberate the camps. I don't believe you mention this specifically in your dissertation, but Speier mentions that in some of the camps, the last recalcitrants had to be put on the departing trains at bayonet point, they were so resistant to going. They weren't even persuaded by closing down the mess halls and shutting off of the toilets and the water facilities and everything; they finally had to be marched away. They felt that unless they were forcibly removed, they would lose their claim to rewards from the Japanese government who, presumably, had won the war. In any event, could you talk a bit about the situation at Minidoka and how you saw this behavior exhibited?
Sakoda
At Minidoka, the relationship between the evacuees and the administration had more or less deteriorated to a point where they weren't talking to each other very much. So that when closing time came, the people said, "We really have no place to go. We can't possibly all leave." It was a genuine feeling. On the part of our group, for example, we felt that it would be very difficult to close it down. I remember Evelyn Rose came from Washington, and she couldn't believe that we were thinking like this. But she had come from
Hansen
So you're saying there was a correlation between, objectively, what they had in the way of alternatives and means and the kind of behavior that they exhibited. Because sometimes it's easy to see this situation as just a particular paranoid style based upon nationalism or something, but it was really people who didn't have the means to be able to set themselves up on the outside who stayed in camp, largely.
Sakoda
If you had a store or if you had a farm, many of them were just waiting for the West Coast to open up so they could go back. Even as early as December, some families left, and by January, people started to leave. These were people who felt that if they went back, they could get back to their homes.
Hansen
But when they resisted resettlement, they resisted resettling east. They wanted to come back to the West Coast.
Sakoda
That's right, yes. They wanted to come back to the West Coast. So you have to distinguish those people with means of going back on their own from people who felt that they had no place to go and no means to support themselves. What the administration did was to try to force people to leave, and they did this by closing down the school, in the first place. They started to close mess halls one by one. When the number fell below a certain number, they would close the mess hall. When the mess halls closed, they would also start turning the outside lights out. They also closed some of the utility rooms in different blocks, so the place got darker and darker. You started to see jackrabbits running around the place. You'd have to walk several blocks to a mess hall or to a utility room. Father Joe lived in Block 4, and they were going to close Block 4 down. It had something to do with the hospital. He made a petition, so they didn't close that block down. These were means of trying to force people to leave, and people then began to realize that if they stayed, it was not going to be very pleasant. One guy said, "They're going to kill us if we stay, so we'd better leave." These negative measures certainly did help, but at the same time, you found this small group of people—actually, a fairly large number of Issei, not Nisei, but Issei—believing that Japan had not lost the war, that Japan was winning the war. Even when the surrender was announced, many of them refused to believe that Japan had really surrendered. Some of them said, "All right, there was a signing of the surrender, but peace terms had not been made." It wasn't clear what the actual settlement was going to be.
Hansen
You have talked only about Issei and Nisei, and the reason you're not talking about Kibei is that most of them had already determined to go Tule Lake?
Sakoda
I guess a lot of the Kibei were in Tule Lake. I guess there were some who were left behind. I didn't run across too many Kibei at Minidoka. But there was certainly a distinction between Issei and Nisei; there was conflict within the family in believing or not believing what the war situation was. The way it developed in Minidoka, there would be a so-called news analyst. He, say, would come out in the morning, and people would gather around and he'd tell them what the latest news was. Presumably, he had a shortwave [radio] set or something. You'd see people writing down information, and it would be passed on to other people in the project. They would actually say that Captain So-and-So had arrived in Seattle and Captain So-and-So had arrived in San Francisco, boats had arrived in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Then there was news that someone had seen a Japanese flag outside of Salt Lake City. Some people actually got into a car to look for the flag, but couldn't find it. But the story was that the Japanese were on their way to Minidoka and were going to rescue the people. So they really didn't have to leave; all they had to do was hold out. That story, plus the story that those who refused to leave would be rewarded by the Japanese government, so that they should not leave willingly. The people who had refused to leave were most likely to believe these stories. So as time to leave got closer and closer, the stories got more and more extreme. In the meantime—I actually wasn't there—the administration started holding block meetings, and people were
Hansen
Not even two weeks and three days. Three days.
Sakoda
Yes, three days. They had to leave right away. So they were using the three-day notice to force people to leave.
Hansen
But this happened during that period when you had gone back to Berkeley—March, April, May [1945], whenever it was.
Sakoda
No, this was later than that. I went back in June once, and then I went back in September and October of 1945, in time for the final closing. By September, people were getting lots of three-day notices. What happened was that people were then saying, "I've gotten a three-day notice. They're going to pack my things and take me out to the station, and that's better than doing your own packing." But they felt that having a three-day notice was kind of a badge of honor or something. At least they could say they didn't go out on their own; they didn't plan to go out. They were forced out. So the three-day notice was being used fairly extensively. The people were quite often prepared to leave; they were packed and ready to leave. But some of the diehards at the very end refused to leave, and some of those people went into hiding.
Hansen
Underground?
Sakoda
Under the houses. One fellow they caught hiding under the house. What they would do would be they would take them in the car and take them to the station and just dump them out at the station. The administration at Minidoka felt that that was where their responsibility ended.
Hansen
Who would take them there and dump them there?
Sakoda
The WRA personnel.
Hansen
Not the military police.
Sakoda
Not the military police; it was WRA. They would take them in a WRA car. Their belongings would be packed for them, and they would be taken out to the station. I saw a couple of these at the station. Hattie's mother had died of a hysterectomy operation, and Hattie and I were at the station. She was going back to Berkeley. This Issei fellow in tattered jeans was sitting by the sidewalk. I talked to him and wanted to know what the story was. He said he had been given a notice. I asked whether they had really given him a notice that he had to leave. He said he didn't know whether he had gotten a notice or not, because he couldn't read. He thought he was supposed to leave on the sixteenth or whatever the date was, but he was told that he had to leave right away. So they had brought his stuff, his shopping bags and things, and he was dumped at the station and all his belongings were there. Elmer Smith was there, and he said the WRA should do something about this. They're responsible for doing something. But they said he wasn't their responsibility, and he watched what they were going to do. Finally, some sheriff or somebody put him on the train just before he left, so he was forced on the train.
Hansen
The evacuee chief of police?
Sakoda
The local sheriff.
Oh, it was probably the local sheriff from Hunt, [Idaho].
Sakoda
Put him on the train, so he was actually forced onto the train. There were a number of these [cases] where they actually had to be taken out forcefully. Now, a lot of them went willingly after receiving a three-day notice, which was proof they left unwillingly, but a few of them had to be forced out. So the very ending was really a sad affair.
Hansen
What about the very last train that you went out on? Was that made up of the diehards?
Sakoda
The very last train... I guess there was one man whose family was forced out, and all his belongings were out there. So Elmer Smith and I put them in the vestibule of the train. Then I talked to the man. He was incoherent a little bit, but he said that he didn't want to leave, that they forced him to come out here. So he was forced on the train. When we got to Seattle, I guess the WRA really wasn't there to take care of him. But the next day, I think it was, there was a woman barber, a Kibei barber, who also resisted leaving. I had talked to her once when I went to get my hair cut, and she thought she had been cheated out of her barbershop at the time she was evacuated, and she was very resentful. She didn't want to go willingly. On the day she was supposed to leave, she wanted a statement from the acting project director that she was being forced to leave, and the project director didn't want to sign anything. So she refused to leave on the last train and was put in jail overnight and arrived in Seattle the next day. When she came the next day. I talked to her. She came off the train just all broken up, and she said she and her husband had been put in jail overnight, and then they were put on the train. So there was some force used at the very end. Perhaps not a lot, but more than at other centers. I think there certainly were more three-day notices handed out in Minidoka than most places. Part of it, I think, was the result of this bad feeling that developed. I think also part of it was the fact that the WRA really hadn't arranged very much at the other end, because although they had some housing project they could go to, many of them ended up in hostels which were set up in churches with beds lined up and accepted that temporarily until something could be worked out. So many more could have been arranged, I think, for them. In the meantime, they believed that Japan was still winning the war; but then when they got out there [to the West Coast], they found that the ships hadn't arrived.
Hansen
Are you convinced of the integrity of that particular position? Did people honestly and perfervidly believe it, or was it merely a rhetorical measure?
Sakoda
No. My guess is, if you took the Issei, about half of them sort of believed it; that's quite a number, although some of them weren't diehards about it. A smaller group absolutely believed it, and it took them a long time to realize that that wasn't so. Hattie's uncle was one of those who believed it. He and his wife were diehards. They didn't have any children in camp there, and they were able to take the position that they were going back to Japan and they don't have to go out willingly. But I talked to them. I told them, "You better go out, and we'll get you some welfare aid and health aid, housing aid." So I arranged it for him, so he said okay, then he'll go. He finally wasn't one of those that resisted to the very end. I saw him in Seattle afterwards. I had arranged for housing in Renton, [Washington], which was some miles away from Seattle, and he didn't want to go to the Renton housing project, which would have been a better housing project. He ended up in a Seattle rooming house run by some Japanese. I guess this was typical; people wanted to keep together. He was cooking dinner with another couple. I think they had made sukiyaki and they were sitting there. He seemed to be quite happy about it. He said that he was getting so much for clothing allowance and so much for welfare and so much for the housing allowance. He had to look for a place to stay, and he said this was better than WRA, meaning WRA camps. He had realized coming out was an improvement, even though temporary. About his belief about the war, he conceded that ships hadn't arrived, but kept saying "but the peace treaty really hasn't been settled yet, so we don't know what's going to happen." So I told him that's not so, that Japan had already signed the peace treaty and knew exactly what was going to happen. Japan was going to lose Korea and Formosa and the South Sea Islands. So I told him definitely that the conditions were known and that there was going to be no more peace treaty. There was silence for awhile, then I think he finally believed me at that point. He said it must have been the atom bomb; for a small country, Japan had done very well. But it was only then that he really did believe me.
I've had this nagging question in the back of my mind since we first started talking about your family going back to Hiroshima, and then you and your siblings returning to the United States and your parents still being back there. They presumably were back there during the entirety of the war. Were they victims of the A-bomb or not?
Sakoda
No, they were far away enough. They were about ten miles away out of the city, so they were far away enough so they weren't hit by the atomic bomb. My father... No, they weren't in Hiroshima anyway. They were in around the outskirts of Tokyo, where he had a hog farm. So they were safe from the atomic bomb. I did, however, lose some relatives and Nisei friends in Hiroshima.
Hansen
Where were you at the time that the A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima? Were you in Berkeley or back at Minidoka in August of 1945?
Sakoda
I must have been in Berkeley.
Hansen
So that must have been a devastating piece of news for you at that time, when you heard about the bombing.
Sakoda
I don't quite remember what my reactions were then. Of course, later on I heard we had lost some relatives, I had lost some Nisei friends there.
Hansen
How soon did you find out that your parents were safe?
Sakoda
It wasn't too long, because we were corresponding. I had written letters.
Hansen
Was that permissible during the time you were in camp, to write to relatives in Japan?
Sakoda
Yes. I think we had correspondence.
Hansen
Through the Red Cross?
Sakoda
I'm not quite sure what it was before, but I have some correspondence... Maybe it was afterwards, but even before... It was probably before the war, but I had correspondence with my parents. We had a clear understanding that we were American citizens, that I should show my loyalty to the U.S., so there was no confusion about that.
Hansen
But it still put you in a position of constant worry. I mean, you were in a scary position one way or the other.
Sakoda
Yes. But I was never confused about that. A lot of Nisei were confused because they felt that there was all this injustice and it was all unfair, and why should they show any loyalty? But I was never confused about that, and part of it, I think, is because I was in Japan and I had come back. In spite of all the hardships, I had made the choice.
Hansen
Did it add to your credibility as a person in the community that your parents still were living in Japan?
Sakoda
No. I don't think many people knew that, so that didn't matter one way or another. Actually, I don't think we mentioned it very often; it didn't seem relevant at the time.
Hansen
You had a couple of real emotional setbacks during the course of the Evacuation, quite apart from the Evacuation itself. One involved your sister Ruby, who on the strength of reading your wartime diaries and journals I would say that you were very close to and who seemed to be a very dear and valuable person... her relocating out of Minidoka to Camp Savage in Minneapolis, [Minnesota], and then dying there. Then, too, there was the tragedy of your mother-in-law, which you have already discussed somewhat. So within the course of those wartime years, you experienced a lot of emotional tragedy, and then you went through a number of other things as well. Yet, probably there's a balance sheet that you keep and consult when you reflect on those years and try to assess the situation. As you draw up the balance sheet on World War
Sakoda
On the whole, if you consider my prewar situation, I'm a poor, struggling student, I've only got a few dollars to my name, I really don't have family support. I have some family friends I could fall back on, but not to any great extent. So from that point of view, it was very meager living I was experiencing. From that, I got into being a research assistant, being paid not a great deal but being paid a little bit while I was in camp, which provided a little bit of extra money. I was also disbursing funds for people who did clerical work or typing or things like that for me, and I also became a teacher and got positions that would have been unthinkable on the outside. I got married. My brother, who was very shy, got married. My sister Ruby went out to teach. She had a college education in Japan, so she was teaching. The only unfortunate part about her was that she was a blue baby; she had this leaking heart. I guess it was never known. I don't know why it was never diagnosed in that way. But if it had been known, she probably never would have had the baby.
Hansen
Is the baby still alive?
Sakoda
Yes, the baby's alive and doing very well.
Hansen
Who took the responsibility for the baby, the father?
Sakoda
My sister May had him for awhile, but she couldn't handle him, so my sister Ruby's husband's parents took him over for awhile and brought him up, actually. After he grew up, he came to Los Angeles. Now, he has an auto shop in El Paso, Texas, and is married to a Mexican girl. But he's doing very well. So that part of it worked out reasonably well. Ruby was a jolly sort of person. It was unfortunate that more wasn't known about her heart condition much earlier. It's kind of incredible that they didn't find out earlier.
Hansen
It helped you get the blessing of your future mother-in-law, though, that Ruby, before moving to Minneapolis, had taught an English class at Minidoka in which she was enrolled, right?
Sakoda
Yes. Hattie's mother used to come to Ruby's class. Hattie was mad once because somebody remarked that Hattie's mother was looking after her daughter's interest by coming to the classes. (laughter) Ruby was able to really live a good life in camp because she was teaching and all these Issei women used to come around and talk to her. There were some Issei women who were more intellectual than others, and they liked to talk to her because they could talk to her more at their own level. Mrs. Shibata, who has a big nursery now near Oakland, used to come around quite often and talk to Ruby a lot. She was intellectually inclined. But I got to talk to some of the Issei as a result of that. My married sister May went out to Alliance, [Ohio]. Her husband didn't care for the Nisei very much actually, but he was an aviation engineer. He got a job in his field in Ohio. He later came back to California, but he was able to work in his field. He was working for Lockheed in California, so that worked out very well. As a matter of fact, one of the mysteries of the whole Evacuation process is that after the war, May wanted to go into singing, and I told her, "What you should do is to go in and get a teacher's certificate." So she went and got a teacher's certificate and started to teach.
Hansen
In music education?
Sakoda
Not necessarily music. She was teaching little kids, I think, which she liked very much. That wasn't possible before. You couldn't get a teaching [job]. So jobs opened up fairly widely. If after Evacuation it had been just like it was before the war, it would have been even worse, because they lost all their belongings and they lost their land and their businesses and the like. The Issei lost a lot, but the Nisei certainly were much, much better off. If you look at the balance sheet overall, certainly it's much better.
Hansen
Especially for the Nisei.
Sakoda
Especially for the Nisei, but for Nisei like myself, who had nothing. I had my education, but beyond that,
Hansen
Except your youth.
Sakoda
Actually, what probably helped me most was the notion of gaman—grin and bear it—which was instilled in me. Picking cucumbers for ten hours a day, being fired from school jobs, first arriving in Berkeley without a friend and little money. So it was a big climb upwards. From that point on, it was a regular academic career and getting my Ph.D. and then getting a job at Brooklyn College and the University of Connecticut and Brown University, one of the best schools in the country. The whole event put me on that particular ladder upwards, which, if it had not been for Evacuation, that probably wouldn't have happened.
Hansen
Yet, there's a strange poignancy that pokes its way through your letters to Dorothy Thomas concerning your leaving Minidoka. Aasel Hansen has written a piece ["My Two Years at Heart Mountain: The Difficult Role of an Applied Anthropologist"] that was published in a book by Harry H. L. Kitano, Roger Daniels, and Sandra Taylor, Japanese Americans: Relocation to Redress [Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1986], and he describes how as a community analyst, he sat outside of the Heart Mountain camp when the lights from the community were going out for the last time, and where there had been 10,000 people and problems, and then sensing, that all of a sudden it had dissolved into nothing, reclaimed by the desert.[34] You were one of the few people on JERS that actually saw the thing [Evacuation experience] through from beginning to end, and this quality comes into your writing during the latter stages of your stay at Minidoka, that there was a reluctance, almost, to leave that center. Yet, what was waiting for you was an academic opportunity at Berkeley and the Bay Area and all of what that meant, and freedom. Maybe you could recount a little your personal experience at the end of your time at Minidoka and what you were going through and why you had this ambivalence.
Sakoda
When Hattie and I left Minidoka for Berkeley the first time, I had some run in with the relocation office. I had made plans to leave, and I went in there [the camp leave section office] and arranged for getting tickets. They said it would take a few weeks. When I went back and asked about the tickets, they told me that they wouldn't be available for a month. I thought that somebody was out to do me in. So I went to the head of the hospital administration—who was a decent guy, a local guy—and I told him I needed those tickets out of the camp. He got me train tickets. So these people in the leave section must have been surprised (laughter) when the tickets...
Hansen
Showed up.
Sakoda
That was a case of camp politics and the need to use influence to get things done. The last day, I was packing my things. Father Joe said, "We're going to have a meeting on a kid who's coming up for trial. We need you. You've got to come to the meeting." Here I was busily packing away. (laughter) I finally did go to the meeting. He said, "Which is more important, your going to Berkeley or coming to the meeting for the kid?" It was like that at the very end, and I was kind of reluctant to leave because things were still going on. I could be useful in the place, at least for some people.
Hansen
Did you also feel you could have been useful for the study at that time, to watch the remaining months?
Sakoda
Yes. At that point, I guess I had thought that, well, it's going to close now. You might as well leave. But I guess what I hadn't anticipated was that so much would go on at the very end.
Hansen
And then you got alerted to that through the correspondence you were getting?
Sakoda
No, I went back in June to check on the progress of the closing program. I had planned on this visit. Then Hattie's mother passed away, so I had to go back again. Then I decided to stay until the very end. I think I didn't intend to stay until the very end, actually.
Hansen
I'm trying to get this straight. You left about March or something the first time?
Yes, about March.
Hansen
And then you came back in June, and you were there because of your mother-in-law passing away?
Sakoda
No, that was later. I came back in June, I think, just to check up on things. Then I went back again in September. I guess that was when Hattie's mother passed away. Then she [Hattie] went back to Berkeley.
Hansen
You were coming back to Minidoka by yourself when you came back these last couple of times, without Hattie?
Sakoda
In June, yes, I guess I was by myself. What happened, I guess, was, after the funeral, I decided to stay on, and I stayed on until the very end.
Hansen
By yourself?
Sakoda
By myself. Hattie wasn't there. It was fortunate that I stayed, because a lot went on at the very end.
Hansen
Did you have to convince Dorothy Thomas that it was a good idea for you to stay there?
Sakoda
No, I didn't have any trouble like that.
Hansen
But you did it at that time largely for the study, didn't you?
Sakoda
Yes. At the very end, yes. I guess mostly what we had thought was that, well, the place is closing down, this is it. But actually, the end was probably the most dramatic of all. About Hattie's mother passing away, that was the other real tragedy because... I guess I didn't mention that she had worked hard all her life to have a grocery store. She was really a hard working woman.
Hansen
I think you mentioned that off-tape, so maybe we ought to put it on tape.
Sakoda
Hattie's mother had a grocery store, and she worked very hard at that. Hattie's brother George was in camp for a short time. She had a brother who was in camp for a short while. He went out on student relocation, and then he went to Camp Savage as a Japanese instructor. So Hattie's mother had brought up two children decently. At one point, her husband had a mental illness, and he couldn't work for a few years, so she carried on by herself. At the time the family was evacuated, they had to sell the rights to the store. She had to sell the piano and her living room furniture. Hattie said that a lot of things just went for twenty-five dollars. So basically, they lost everything they had. While in camp, clearly Hattie's mother was in a situation like a lot of Issei: for the first time, it was like a vacation, like living in a camp, actually, a recreational camp. It was a little rough in many ways. You lived in a little room and all that, but then you had a community dining room. But in camp, you had classes you could take and you had religious services and entertainment. I think she enjoyed life in camp. Her husband went out to work in Boise, [Idaho], as a gardener in a country club. I guess she wasn't really anxious to go out there, but just before closing, she went out there. She had to have an operation for a hysterectomy, as I mentioned earlier, and the best doctor was a member of the country club, so he was supposed to care for her. But he was out of town when the operation was supposed to be done, and another doctor did the operation. I guess he bungled the operation, because she died of complications. It was just supposed to be a simple operation, but she died. She had really come to a point where she could have joined us in Berkeley; she was looking forward to that.
Hansen
How did your parents survive the war, as far as their health and their well-being?
Sakoda
My father was a great eater. While I was in Brooklyn, he died in Japan of cancer of the stomach, which is a common ailment in Japan, actually. Too much soy sauce, salty food, and the like. He had a reasonably good life, I think.
Hansen
Was he in his sixties when he died, or seventies?
Let's see. I'm not quite sure. In his early sixties, I guess. My mother was left alone. After the war, she came back to this country and she was living with my sister May for awhile. She couldn't stand one of May's kids, so she left and lived by herself in Los Angeles in a room in a Little Tokyo hotel. She went to all the different kinds of church affairs. She kind of enjoyed herself that way.
Hansen
When did she pass away?
Sakoda
She passed away in her mid-seventies after we had moved to Rhode Island.
Hansen
While you were teaching at Brown.
Sakoda
Yes. So as far as the war was concerned, they did survive the war without too much difficulty. They owned a home in Tokyo, but my mother moved out to the countryside in Saitama-ken, where my father had started a hog farm.
Hansen
You never saw your dad again, though, right?
Sakoda
No, I didn't. I wasn't able to go back. But one thing that happened was that, when the American troops landed in Japan, many people were fearful that terrible things were going to happen to them. It turned out that many of them [American soldiers] were handing out chocolate candies to kids, and things like that. Some of George's friends were out there, so they would visit my father and bring things. They enjoyed that kind of accidental connection, kind of going back and forth. In many ways, this business of the Issei, particularly, having trust in Japan, you can think of it in a number of ways, but you can ask yourself the question, was that trust really justified? Much of it was myth about their winning the war and all. But as it turned out, it seems to me that when Japan was conquered by the U.S. and [General Douglas A.] Mac Arthur took control of Japan, it became a protégé of the U.S. Not only that, it became the U.S. outpost against the Russians. I think this changed everything, as far as the Japanese in this country are concerned, that alien land laws and restrictive covenants were done away with. Almost everything at the national level changed in favor of Japan and Japanese in this country. I have a feeling that happened because of Japan's position with regard to the U.S. The people suffered because of Japan's war with the U.S., but with the peace with the U.S., I think the whole thing was reversed. You'd wonder why, when they had kicked the Japanese out of the West Coast, finally they had achieved something that the segregationists wanted all along, why they allowed the Japanese to go back to the West Coast. Not only that, but why did they open up jobs? Why not open up jobs for blacks and for Hispanics? Why only for the Orientals? I think negotiation between nations has something to do with that.
Hansen
Japanese Americans are judged, pro and con, so much in terms of international relations between the United States and Japan. Sometimes it is one of the strengths of their situation. But sometimes, also, like with the Evacuation or the current trade imbalance, Japanese Americans can be victimized.
Sakoda
Yes. When you hear people talk about V-J Day, for example, in Rhode Island—we're the only state that celebrates V-J Day—people will say, "Look at what they did. They had Pearl Harbor, had the sneak attack. They did terrible things to our prisoners, so therefore we're justified in having V-J Day." There is confusion in a lot of people's minds about the U.S. citizens who were evacuated and incarcerated—they're lumped together with Japanese in Japan. So that confusion, I think, persists in this postwar period. It turns out that now it's in favor of the Nisei and Sansei. The Sansei will never realize how bad it was; they just have no idea how bad it was and how bad it could have been, because it's improved so much.
Hansen
In some ways, it's a good thing that they can't realize how bad it was.
Sakoda
They're in a strange situation. There's a very peculiar Sansei phenomenon that they're very dissatisfied because quite often they want more identification as Japanese, and they talk about relocation and visit the relocation center sites and things like that. They have really no way of identifying with the Japanese. They can taste the food, but that's about it. They don't know the language, the culture, or anything.
Or the endemic prejudice, really.
Sakoda
Yes. They now go to school and they complain about prejudice. During the protest years when I was teaching at Brown, I heard some of their complaints. They were complaining about how the Chinese were being treated in Chinatown. They imitated black protest groups and got a group of Orientals together. They didn't have this realistic feeling of having experienced prejudice themselves. Most of the students at Brown, they're the sons of owners who don't live in Chinatown; they live in Queens or someplace. They come to a place like Brown and they're complaining about all the prejudice. It's ridiculous, actually. They're trying to feel that there is prejudice, and they don't really experience it themselves. So there's a dilemma with the third generation.
Hansen
There's been an outpouring of literature of one sort or another about the Evacuation in recent years, largely as a response to the development of Asian American consciousness, Japanese American consciousness, and now, of course, the redress issue. I've always felt that, as a genre, the literature is kind of wanting, that there are definite parameters that the literature has to operate within that makes the subjects not as interesting as they otherwise might be. There's a preoccupation, just like in Dorothy Thomas's preoccupation at times with JERS, with looking at certain kinds of things. There's too rigid an agenda set as this redress measure is before Congress and before the people, and the emphasis on the rightness or the wrongness, the political and Constitutional dimensions of the Evacuation. I know that somebody like yourself, as a social scientist, has over the years thought that there are other interesting topics that might be explored and certainly should be explored. You've even generated data in which those topics could be carried out. So I was interested in having you think out loud for a spell. If you were in the position right now of teaching a seminar on the Japanese American Evacuation and you were going to think about some interesting topics, given the nature of the data that's available, what might be some of the topics you would think fruitful to explore—ones that haven't already been researched and written about time after time?
Sakoda
The usual story that's told, and partially, I think, there is an ultimate purpose in telling that story, is that the camp was a terrible place. It was in the desert. It was hot in the summer and cold in the wintertime. It was dusty in the summer and it got muddy during the wintertime. You hear about the dust seeping in. You've read about the dust seeping in through the windows and up through the cracks, and the grass growing up through the cracks in the floor. Latrines were terrible, wide-open toilets. The mess hall was terrible. The kids ran around wild, no family life. I guess that's the usual story that's been told. Even regarding the postwar years, the stories have often emphasized the fact that they came back and there was a lot of prejudice and people shooting at their windows, night raids and that sort of thing, some of which happened. Certainly, some groups tried it. But I would think that there are other stories. That story line is necessary in some ways to awaken the people to realize what an injustice had been done. But if you look at it overall, as we just did, the other story is that things worked out much better than before the war. While the Issei lost a lot, I don't think as a group we'd ever want to go back to the situation before the war, even if we had all our farms and stores, because there was really a lot of prejudice. If you had a going concern and you were successful, it was all right. But for the group as a whole, it was terrible. Now, the Sansei have this term coined for them "model minority." They resent that. What are they doing? They're resenting being called a positive name. They used to be cursed before, and now they're being favored with a phrase that they think is disadvantageous to them, because now they're not entitled to scholarships. They have to struggle to get into the university because they think there's a quota against them, and you go to Berkeley and places, you see Orientals all over the place. Basically, what seems to have happened is that they've overcome a serious racial barrier. I don't know if it's the first time or not. They still get together among themselves and the like, and there is prejudice and all of that. But the big racial barrier that kept them out of decent jobs, for example, has pretty much been broken.
Hansen
If the Asian American Studies Program at Berkeley or UCLA wrote you a letter and said, "Dr. Sakoda, we know you're an emeritus now, and we know you generated an awful lot of data back in the 1940s for this JERS project, why don't you come out to California? We have this tremendous documentary resource out here, so why not teach a doctoral-level seminar of students from a multiplicity of social science-humanities disciplines and see if you can't generate some doctoral dissertations and other research papers." Let's say you actually directed that seminar and had some students in it basically asking you, "Are there interesting
Sakoda
The whole Evacuation and Resettlement Study collected tremendous amounts of statistical data, and we had some fieldwork to go with it, also. The Form 26 interview data on tape, coupled with behavioral data such as loyalty status and date of relocation, is a great basis for studies. That's the first thing I would do. With that available, it is possible to examine the background of Issei, Nisei, and Kibei. Field notes can be used to show the interactions of the Japanese with the WRA. I would think there's a tremendous opportunity to investigate notions such as the size of the concentration of Japanese—some people say that they shouldn't have concentrated too much, it was better if they had scattered—and see to what extent the size of the concentration made a difference to the extent they were Americanized or not Americanized. You can pinpoint all of the communities all up and down the West Coast in terms of the size, what occupations they got into, whether they were Buddhists or Christians, whether they lived in California or the Northwest, what the isolated tended to do and become as against those who were concentrated. Then you have this rural-urban comparison. Was there an advantage to scattering? Or is there some advantage, also, to being concentrated, and what was the effect of the concentrating? It seems to me that, while it is true, for example, that marginality, getting away from the group, had helped people to move up the ladder, quite often, I think that the Issei, with their old ways, did better in terms of bringing children up. They simply did a good job with the Nisei, and I don't think the Nisei are doing as good a job with the Sansei, bringing them up. So there's a question of this concentration and old culture against dispersion and American culture; under what circumstances, in what way is it [the former] good? I think there's a lot of leeway, at least intellectually, for discussing not only what happened to the Japanese, but also to other groups. Now the Cambodians and the others are coming in, and they're repeating the same sort of pattern. So you could ask, "Are these people going to go through the same kind of thing?" The question arises again: You want to get rid of the prejudice. You want things to work out well. Do you have to scatter in order to achieve that? The WRA policy was to get people out and scatter them, not have too many in one city. They told you that Cleveland was closed, (laughter) there were twenty Japanese there. It was kind of a ridiculous idea, actually. So you had that kind of idea as against what's going on on the West Coast now. The Japanese are coming in with a lot of money, and they're building big hotels and new enterprises, so things are changing a great deal. The notion of concentration, I think, is suddenly losing its meaning. It would seem to me that there are implications from the past where you could get ideas of how things were, how they went, and then talk about where we are now, like the Sansei. I think Sansei have a lot to want to ponder about, because, in a way, they're neither in the Japanese community solidly nor out of it. They're kind of half-in, half-out.
Hansen
Sometimes having kids that are Happa [half Japanese and half non-Japanese ancestry], as they call them...
Sakoda
Sometimes it works out well. But as I said before, what was important was to keep the middle-class stance, because that was what was instrumental in getting the Orientals accepted on the West Coast. To break the racial barrier, they had to break the social barrier first. Then there are the many conflicts between evacuee residents and the administration that can be analyzed through differing attitudes and values. One can analyze types of leaders on both sides and the reaction of residents—Issei, Nisei, Kibei.
Hansen
Turning to a slightly different matter, what do you think accounts for the rather marked and pervasive silence of JERS scholars on Japanese American Studies in the period since the war? In a sense, one would have predicted, from what you did as a dissertation, that there would have been more development along those lines, using the data that you had collected, but even generating new data that would have some correspondence to it. Miyamoto, except for reprinting two, now three, times, his master's thesis from 1939, hasn't written too much about the topic until this last reassessment of JERS. Aside from The Derelicts of Company K [:A Sociological Study of Demoralization (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1978)], Shibutani hasn't written much on it. Spencer wrote a few articles after the war, mostly dealing with Japanese American Buddhism and some dealing with linguistics in the community, but he's been pretty much silent on that topical area most of his career. So it doesn't seem to matter if the scholar was a Japanese American or an Anglo American, but almost no one, if you do a literature search, has
Sakoda
I guess what happened was that we were, basically, students on the way to being graduate students, and the contract was that we would get dissertations out of it, so we did. Beyond that, I think, there wasn't any encouragement to do more.
Hansen
From the profession?
Sakoda
From Dorothy, for one thing. In other words, it's as though we had gotten what we wanted, we gave her what she wanted, and she could do what she wanted with what she got. As a matter of fact, that's acutally the way it worked out, because when the books were published, she took over and did what she wanted. While we got our names on the books as contributors, actually we weren't consulted about writing the books. So you find this demarcation between what we got and what she got. I guess there is, perhaps, the feeling that what she got was hers and what we got was what we had contracted for.
Hansen
You or somebody else, Miyamoto, in the plenary session at the Berkeley conference held last September,[35] made the remark concerning the old European notion of the mentor and the student, and the mentor has a proprietary claim to everything that the student does. Is that some of what you saw at work in Dorothy, then? And where do you think the origins of that would have been with her, because she's not from a European academic...well, she did go to the London School of Economics, I think, at one point.
Sakoda
That possibly is kind of a personal thing with her, because she did this with Marvin Opler.[36] Marvin Opler wanted to get into Tule Lake, and she told him, "Absolutely no. You get your own information." So she had sort of a dog in the manger, proprietary attitude toward the material. It may have been European, but I guess part of the problem is that, when we first entered in, we were undergraduates. If we had been graduate students, it may have been different. Also, the Nisei attitude of deference toward elders and Caucasians probably was a factor.
Hansen
Disproportionate power, you mean.
Sakoda
Yes, because by the time we ended up, we were much more mature, and she might have seen possibilities of coauthoring a book. Like The Spoilage is mostly Rosalie Hankey's material, and she could have certainly coauthored that. The Salvage, two-thirds of it is case histories, Charlie Kikuchi's case histories, and they're just plunked in there.
Hansen
The one person, actually, who had graduate status and a little bit more claim to being able to enter into a coauthorship is, ironically, the one person who was left off both of the studies that we've mentioned, and that's Miyamoto. As you pointed out yesterday, he's not on either one of them.
Sakoda
No, no. Frank Miyamoto is on; it's Shibutani that's not on.
Hansen
I take it back. Miyamoto is on.
Sakoda
Miyamoto's on The Salvage.
Hansen
Not The Salvage, The Spoilage.
Sakoda
I mean The Spoilage, yes, along with Hankey, Grodzins, and myself as contributors. He was more senior than us, and I would have thought his being on the West Coast and associated with sociology, and in contact with the Asian programs, he would have done more. I don't know what kind of holdings they have at the University of Washington.
Pretty good. Actually, they do. They have, probably, among other university-based Japanese American archival collections, maybe the third or fourth most data available up there.
Sakoda
I had thought at one time I might deposit my stuff there, because of the Minidoka stuff, but I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it. In my case, I did a statistical analysis of the concentration problem, and it was data that Dorothy and I had developed jointly. She had turned over the basic analysis to George Kuznets, Dorothy's statistical colleague at Berkeley. So when I had done my own analysis and I sent her a copy of it, she didn't say anything, so I just had to drop it. So she wasn't encouraging me, in other words, to publish it.
Hansen
But beyond her, let's suppose you had wanted to proceed on your own. I mean, there's a point at which you outgrow a mentor and her particular influence starts to lessen. Was there a problem in academic life as a whole, and even in the cultur as a whole, that this was not a worthwhile topic to write about, that it was marginal and it had to with an issue that was really not very significant. It was a minority study, so to speak. Did you get any of that feeling? Would you have been given as much academic credit and status, say, if you'd worked on a topic like that back in the 1950s?
Sakoda
I don't think that was involved. Certainly, I talked to some commercial publishers about publishing the dissertation, but they weren't interested. I talked to [the] University of California Press after Dorothy died, and they weren't interested, either. So I was interested in getting that published, and I thought it was theoretically oriented, an analysis which is always useful, was valuable. So I would think that, of all the things I've done, I think the best thing I've done is the social interaction model, which solved the problem in social psychology of going from the individual level to the group level. The problem is if you're talking about individuals interacting with each other and you have the psychological field of one individual, and then you introduce another psychological field which is different, how do you show them acting in a common field? I solved that problem by using a checkerboard and having the pieces representing individuals adopt different attitudes and moved differently with respect to each other—positive approach if it's positive toward the others, and you withdrew if it's negative. So that a group could then interact and you still would have the notion of different attitudes each one has, but they can interact on a single board, which they couldn't if there were different boards, as it were.
Hansen
You included that checkerboard in a primitive schematic format in the appendix to your dissertation. Apparently, you developed it even further later on, didn't you?
Sakoda
Yes. That was computerized by my son, Bill, and so we have a computerized version of it, which is better than just trying to make moves by hand and doing calculations by hand. I did run off more situations, which was of interest. So that the model, certainly from an academic point of view, I think, is worth pursuing, although that, again, I didn't do too much with. I wrote one article, and that was it.[37] But I could have pursued that a little more. Also, the evacuation of the Japanese from the West Coat can be viewed as a great social experiment, with community analysts and the JERS as observers. A detailed census is taken of every family, coded and preserved on tape. There are records of interactions among evacuee residents, as well as between residents and the administration, through tension-raising issues such as strikes, the registration and segregation programs, the final eviction, ending of the war, change in climate on the West Coast for returning Japanese, and finally the payment of reparations. A graduate student at another university recently wrote to me asking for my advice on studying the evacuation process since his professors were trying to discourage him from it. I encouraged him to stick with it, which he said he would.
Hansen
Some Nisei, allegedly, were reluctant for a long time to talk about the Evacuation to their kids. I think it was Charlie Kikuchi who to me said that he sometimes thinks that this allegation has been something of a bad rap against Nisei, for often it was a question of their kids not asking them about the Evacuation rather than the parents not telling them about it. But the analogy has been made that a lot of Nisei don't like to talk about the Evacuation in the same way that women do not like to talk about rape. I was wondering if that reluctance had its counterpart in academic work, that even though academics pursue topics that are unseemly for other people to pursue, still there is a dimension to this that, somehow or other, the topic of the Evacuation was an unpleasant one that had best be left behind, and to move on, and that one way of
Sakoda
I would think that if I had given a colloquium or something in a university on the topic, I think a lot of people would have been interested. I'm not quite sure why I didn't pursue that. Part of the difficulty with the data is the way we treated it as we were gathering it. We had a feeling that we had to be secretive, and I think part of that still holds. Here you have all these names in the journals, and if you write about it, you have to talk about people, and what are you going to do with all these identifications?
Hansen
And in a small community, a pseudonym is really easy to decode, isn't it?
Sakoda
Yes. One way or another, somebody's going to find out who you're talking about, so I think that's also a hindrance to using the material freely. Perhaps the best thing to do is to have field notes organized more into a report of some sort and referred to by footnotes, in which you don't have to worry about the names so much. Actually, this is what I did in my reports, referring to the source as an Issei, Tulean, et cetera. Because certainly, if you're going to the original documents, you run across names, and some of the names, you don't recognize anymore. You haven't written down the last name and you have only the first name and that sort of thing, and it makes it difficult to identify the person, so the original field notes are difficult for anyone to use.
Hansen
In a lot of fields, the first fieldwork that a person does becomes, actually, a fund that they later exploit for a good portion of their career. There are only so many times you go out into the field and really amass a lot of data, and then the way in which you massage it and use it later on is what a career often amounts to. Yet, a lot of people in the project explicitly don't seem to have done that. Do you think it's been done in a disguised way, that, in a sense... The clearest case, perhaps, is Shibutani. He wrote about rumors in a crisis situation, and that's very explicit, dealing with rumors in the Japanese American community at the time of the Evacuation. Later on, he wrote from the standpoint of a global theorist about rumor theory. A good portion of his case studies in this work are drawn from the Evacuation. So it seems that, although he is no longer writing specifically about the Evacuation, he's still writing about it.[38] Is that true of you, even though you've moved to social statistics? Is the Evacuation experience that you had still primary as you work out problems and situations in social psychology or in social statistics?
Sakoda
My problem is that I went from social psychology to social statistics. I became more into the statistics, and then I went into computers. So that I still have a connection with the model, in terms of the computer. But I changed fields, actually, is what it is.
Hansen
But did you change fields or did you emphasize one portion of your orientation against another? Because somebody could have predicted, from looking at the work that you did at Minidoka, that you had a strong inclination toward statistics. When I got your curriculum vitae that you sent to me, I looked through it and was surprised only at the extent to which you had moved in the direction of statistics. You had become a statistician. Yet, you were a person who, in your dissertation's preface, remarked upon your being so influenced by Kurt Lewin and W. I. Thomas because they were interested in not only hard data but also qualitative materials, and especially the interpenetration of those two types of data. Yet, you shifted from the one to the other, and I wonder if you haven't felt lonely for leaving behind as an orphan this one aspect of your intellectual interest.
Sakoda
I don't think a tie-in between the two is really what's needed to make it complete. As I read my dissertation, in discussing the possibility of trying to get that published, it seemed to me it's not in readable form, that what is needed is more free flowing narrative. So when the conference[39] came along and I had a chance to write something, I started to go back to my autobiography, for one thing, and tried to bring that in. Then I brought in the statistical data, which I felt was unique and important, and then discussing the theory of it. So I've got the feeling now that somehow a more readable, global approach would be more suitable for publication. So from that point of view, I think, right now, if I had to publish the dissertation, it seems to me it's better if I rewrote it. You saw the conference report on Minidoka that I wrote.[40] You know, bringing more of my background and bringing more of the statistics into the picture I think makes for better reading, rather than Minidoka alone. It turned out that a lot of these conflicts represented much ado about
Hansen
You covered pretty much, in your own experience, the whole sweep. You were in on the ground floor and saw it through to the end.
Earlier we alluded to your teaching the psychology course, but I'd like to talk about it a bit more now. I'm interested in the kind of people—I know one of them was your future wife, Hattie—who were attracted to taking that course and the way in which you used the resources available to you in the camp as food for psychological thought....
Sakoda
The course I taught in Tule Lake.
Hansen
Yes, Psych[ology] 1A, I think it was.
Sakoda
I taught two courses, I guess. The first course was an adult education course, Personality and Adjustment, and I had an enrollment of about sixteen or seventeen, mostly young people in their early twenties. The class met once a week on a Saturday and I generally lectured or mixed lecturing with discussion for two hours. I used the idea of cultural conflict as a major theme, which gave me a chance to discuss my three types of Nisei and their adjustment in camp. I was reading [Everett V.] Stonequist's [ The Marginal Man :A Study in Personality and Culture Conflict (New York: Scribners, 1937)], which fit nicely. The second course was Psychology 1A for college course credit. I ordered secondhand textbooks from an outfit in Chicago. Those who wanted to go to college but hadn't done so yet enrolled in the course. I started with about seventy students and ended up with about twenty who finished. Part of the reason for the drop was that after the registration crisis young people left in droves. That's the course that Hattie came to. She was planning to go out to college when I began taking an interest in her. She used to come to see Ruby because she was in charge of the adult English education classes and she had started to teach a class of Kibei. Hattie also knew my sister May, since they both taught music in the grade school. Hattie's mother came to Ruby's class, so there was quite a crossing of paths. Once Ruby played a joke on Hattie by telling her that she was failing my course. Hattie must have gone home and studied real hard because she got the highest grade in the final examination.
Hansen
One of the things that you write to Dorothy Thomas about—and this is in August of 1942, when you're at Tule Lake—is you tell her that you're going to be in this debate in which you intend to point out the advantages of marriage in camp. We've already discussed that. But you mention the people who were going to be involved in the debate. One person who you mention that we've referred to before in this interview is Dr. Harold Jacoby, who retired recently and now is an emeritus sociologist at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, [California]. He was up at the conference that was held in Berkeley last year on the reassessment of JERS. He had started out in one position in Tule Lake and then switched to another, and it would seem to me that the switch actually would have put him in a less positive light with respect to the people in the community and, by implication, would have also affected your position by association. He went from social welfare, which would seem to be helping the people, into the security force, which would seem to involve meting out punishment, whether justly or unjustly. I wonder if you would comment on Jacoby, what he was like? I saw him at the conference in Berkeley, and physically he struck me as a big bear of a man. He must have been even bigger back in Tule Lake days. But do tell me about him and if the camp population's attitude toward him, and even your own, changed as a result of his switch in employment.
Sakoda
I don't quite remember the politics of the situation, but I think I recall it was probably a political move then. Somebody maneuvered to get him out of the social welfare situation. When he was there, I think things went better for the poorer evacuees. He was quite a nice guy. I liked him and they all liked him. When he became the head of the wardens, it did change his position, so that while I might have worked for him as a social welfare worker... I worked for him for one day, and then I decided not to. He wanted me to start making a list of all the rowdies around the place, and I decided I better not get into it, so I quit working for him. At the time of the registration crisis, he was the one who had to go out and arrest the young men
Hansen
In the mid-1970s, Jacoby was connected in a loose way with a woman who was viewed as the bête noire of the Japanese American community, a woman named Lillian Baker, who headed a group called Americans for Historical Accuracy,[41] and then they [Jacoby and Baker] later broke over different positions. When I saw Jacoby in Berkeley, we were in the rest room during a recess from the conference proceedings, I mentioned his connection with Baker. He said something like, "Oh, she's a lunatic." But he's written some reviews of books on the Evacuation that I've read, and his position seems to be quite consistent. This is probably what attracted him to Baker, and that was the position that Baker had originally started out on, that the wartime camps for Japanese Americans were not concentration camps, they were relocation centers, and he's been consistent in feeling that there has been an overdrawing of the harsher dimensions of the War Relocation Authority centers. Does that surprise you that he would take this position? Or is it a position consistent with what you would have felt Jacoby might have taken?
Sakoda
The picture that is generally drawn—almost immediately you bring out the watchtower and the soldiers with drawn bayonets. Actually, for most people, they were invisible; you hardly ever thought about the barbed wire fence or the soldiers. When it came down to it, they [the interned Japanese Americans] were more afraid of being tossed out than being kept in. The big fear was they would be tossed out. When they were told, "You should go," they didn't want to go. "Go relocate." "No, we don't want to relocate." The fact they were rounded up and they couldn't go out was true in the beginning, but after the relocation program started, that was no longer true. So this image of a barbed wire fence—actually, the fence for a lot of people didn't exist. For example, in Tule Lake, there was a mountain outside of the gate that people regularly climbed. They got out of the place to climb the mountain. In the desert, people often wandered around the desert looking for wood to make canes and things. The picture that these people were rounded up and mistreated—that's really not true, even though there were serious conflicts. But in many respects, as I said, that's the message that needed to get out, because on the outside, people were saying these people were being pampered and something's got to be done about it. The opposite side of that is, "We're being mistreated," both of which are not correct.
Hansen
You know what doesn't appear in your reports and in the reports of almost anybody who I've seen writing about the Evacuation, except in a symbolic sense, is the military police. Where were the military police at Tule Lake and at Minidoka, and to what degree did you get a sense of them? Did you as a field worker ever talk to military police or take account of their situation? Or was that just another world from camp?
Sakoda
I'm not quite sure exactly where they were located; I really couldn't pinpoint that. But if you went to the gate when you had to leave...
Hansen
This is at which one, Tule Lake or...
Sakoda
Tule Lake or Minidoka. You'd probably find the military police there. That's the only time you would really see them, but not interact with them. So since I lived in Block 25 [in Tule Lake], I rarely went to
Hansen
So they didn't really enter into the thinking of the camp unless there was a crisis and they were drawn into the camp.
Sakoda
That's right. Unless there was some crisis... Father Joe had rumors that some of the girls were sleeping with the military police, but that was the only time you'll see it, the military police entered in my notes.[42]
Hansen
You mentioned in early [19 January] 1943 in a letter... Actually, the letter came from Dorothy to you. It says, "Dear Jimmy, I think we had a swell conference, don't you? Begin now to get ready for our Salt Lake City conference, which I'm going ahead and planning for the last week in March." Now, it sounds as if the project was starting to congeal a little bit insofar as getting together. You're still in California. She's actually in the Bay Area, and she can have the freedom to make her way up to Tule Lake. When she came up to Tule Lake during those times, did she bring along her husband? And did you all meet as a group, with Frank Miyamoto and Shibutani and Billigmeier and yourself?
Sakoda
Yes. When she came to Tule Lake, you mean?
Hansen
Yes.
Sakoda
Yes, they came together. I'm not sure whose room... It must have been the recreation hall or something, and we would get together and have a regular meeting in which people would get up and give reports and we would talk about it.
Hansen
Even as early as the Tule Lake point?
Sakoda
Yes. She didn't come up to Minidoka.
Hansen
Did you dread her coming up to Tule Lake from Berkeley or welcome it, at that point?
Sakoda
I didn't dread it. I don't know if I welcomed it or not. No, I didn't mind it at all. As I said, Tom was sometimes afraid that their [Dorothy and W. I. Thomas] coming would arouse suspicion, but that didn't really bother me.
Hansen
But this was a chance to discuss things. And you write back [to Dorothy Thomas] after that [on 25 January 1943], "The conference was really good. I now have the feeling that we're getting someplace and that I know what I'm doing. Those of us here should get together at least once a week to talk things over, but so many of my nights are taken up with meetings." You had started to teach [Psychology] 1A. So it seems as though you wanted more collegiality, but the opportunity didn't present itself. This is when you start developing your strategy for keeping information. You say, "I want to make my journal available to others, and to facilitate that, I've started to write my diary separately. Until now, I have also limited my diary to what I did. From now on, it's also going to include some of my reactions to things and all trivial things which might be important but which won't go into my journal. My diary should reflect life as I have seen it. I'm going to try to keep my journal as objective as possible, writing it in the third person." Now, this seems to me to be a perfect response for somebody in social psychology, that on the one hand, you're monitoring the sort of things that are of a very personal nature, and yet at the same time, you're trying to objectify and deal with society at large. How did that strategy work? I haven't been able to avail myself of either your diary or your journal yet. Did you feel that you were able to divide those up and have a disinterested objectivity in the journal and then a more passionate and more private kind of soliloquy in your diary?
Sakoda
Yes, I think to a large extent I was able to do that. I'm not sure to what extent I really unburdened myself
Hansen
But when you wrote a report to submit to Dorothy Thomas or to present at one of these conferences, it was usually compounded of material that was in your journal, and rarely did you make much reference to your diary. Is that true?
Sakoda
I would think that's probably so, yes. In my diary, quite often I said things like, "I went and talked to So-and-So," "I stopped at the store," then "I had this for breakfast," or whatever the kinds of things that I did. I guess less often I unburdened myself. Although I guess that tends to appear throughout the journal and the diary, in that if I ran across a person, I said things like, "She seemed to be afraid of me," or "He didn't say anything," or "He looked as though he was mad at me." So I would make observations of that type as I went along. So you get some of that in the diary. The diary sometimes carries on, say, about a person at some length, and it turns into a journal type piece. There's kind of a crossing over sometimes.
Hansen
Charlie Kikuchi and I had an interesting discussion about how to designate the genre of what the record was that he was maintaining for JERS, because it was kind of a conflation of a diary and a journal, that it had diaristic dimensions to it but then there was also a journal like quality to it, too. I get the feeling that the record you maintained was more bifurcated, that the journal became much more self-consciously about others, while the diary was focused on yourself. But then even your diary turned out not to be satisfactory for you because you felt it was too bland, too much of a chronicle or daybook, and so you had to find some other, more satisfying format to record your personal struggles.
Sakoda
There were a few times, not very often, though, that I kept a separate, private diary. That was during my courtship period. Part of it you'll find in the diary, part of it you won't. But there weren't that many times that I used it. I have a diary of the trip to Chicago, for example, which was kind of a honeymoon, and part of it is in shorthand, I think. I haven't transcribed that, so in that sense, it's private. But I didn't really use that to that extent.
Hansen
W. I. Thomas had a deserved reputation for being a person who had not only thought about but utilized the personal document in his research, and I think even you had mentioned in the course of your writing that W. I. Thomas regarded it as the almost quintessential type of documentation. If he was involved in these meetings, did he encourage you in the way Charlie Kikuchi has told me he encouraged him to keep a diary, to keep a journal? I know that was Charlie's major contribution to the study. But what about for people like yourself and Miyamoto and Shibutani, who also submitted journals and diaries. Was that at the behest of W. I. more than anything?
Sakoda
No. You've got to remember that I'd been keeping a diary all along, so when the war broke out and I was taking a course in social psychology, it was just an extension of what I had been doing. So it's something that I had already been doing before, and it just became more focused on reactions to the war, for example, or our reactions to Evacuation type things rather than just my goings and comings. I often wrote down comments about Nisei that I met, their relationships, and details on whom I danced with at parties. By the way, Charlie said that I was responsible for his starting to keep a diary.
Hansen
Did you have any discussions with W. I. Thomas about that activity?
Sakoda
No, I don't think I ever discussed with W. I. directly as to how to go about keeping a journal.
So were the conferences that you had more in terms of the interpretive reports that you were writing?
Sakoda
Generally, people gave reports and then there were comments on them. Usually we had topics we were asked to write up. At one meeting Frank gave a report on the social structure, including a good political section. Tom reported on family and community disorganization. I gave a straight account of the broadcast affair and the co-op. I had also written a report on the adjustment of different types of Nisei, my chosen topic of interest, which I did not have time to present. Bob Billigmeier gave a report on the school situation and the administration. We were always behind on the writing of reports on assigned topics. In addition there were the structural reports we were to write up on current political events. Frank was interested in collective behavior, Tom on social disorganization and reorganization, while I concentrated on personal adjustment. I had a feeling that I wasn't doing enough and began to put more into the separated diary. There is a list of reports that we were asked to report on and is on deposit in the Bancroft Library at Berkeley. Some of the topics are structural, such as the wardens, the fire department, and the social welfare department. Others were events such as the Broadcast Affair and the Co-op Report.
Hansen
Did you feel a sense of competition, during those conferences, with the other members of the study? Did you feel that you were somehow one of the bright students pitted against several of the other bright students in order to make a presentation to a professor?
Sakoda
I guess there was some sense of competition. Frank was probably the best organized. I got some snide remarks from some people that I was turning things out right and left. (laughter) Bob Spencer has a note in it. He says, "Hey, those people at Tule Lake are really turning stuff out."[43]
Hansen
That's right. Showing us up.
Sakoda
I think there was some sense of competition.
Hansen
This is in February. The next month [in a letter to Dorothy Thomas dated 10 February 1943] you say, "I've begun to keep my diary separately, and as Tom suggested, I've expanded into more than just a review of what I did during the day, including as much as possible my reactions to events going on about me. The emphasis here is definitely on the `I,' whereas in my journal, I try to be as objective as possible." But the diary itself was shifting in part because of your conversation with people on the project, so now it's how you actually felt about it—not that you just did these things, but what was your reflection on that.
Sakoda
I felt that I had to be better organized and began to put headings on my diary items and put more material into the separate diary. Well, in February 1943 I was in the midst of the...
Hansen
Registration crisis, that's right. On February 27, [1943, in a letter to Dorothy Thomas] you note a couple of interesting items that get us into some things I wanted to talk about with you in greater depth. "I live a life of slight insecurity now. I've always had to watch out, I suppose,and things aren't too different. Every person who gets up and speaks against the crowd is an inu, so that is no longer a great privilege to be called one. The accusations become so common and so absurd that it has gone beyond the bound of usefulness. Everyone who works at the ad[ministration] building, for instance, must be an inu because they call the Caucasians `Mister' and must tell them a lot of things that go on within the colony." Then you say in the same paragraph, "For the first time"—this is February 27, 1943"—I feel that I would be happier out of here than in here." There are a couple of things here. One gets us into the whole business of the inu thing. Some people have said, in describing it [the labeling process] in terms of deviant sociology, that sometimes you get a period in which there's almost an epidemic, that a certain mentality, a social psychological state exists at which it just spreads like wildfire.[44] It's like you describe here. It [the term inu] starts to outlive its usefulness. It gets so loosely applied to people that it doesn't have very much meaning, and this seemed to be an epidemic state, as you've described it. Is that fair?
Sakoda
That's fair, yes. It was happening all over the place. The issue was, do we register or not register? There were people who were afraid that if they didn't go and register quickly, they wouldn't be able to register. So the situation was made for creating inu accusations, because some people were going to register no
Hansen
You say it [the inu charge] outlived its usefulness, but I would suspect that, for certain people, it was highly useful to call people, even promiscuously like this, inu.
Sakoda
The term inu really means spy or traitor. Spy is an undercover agent kind of a thing or a traitor in the sense of working for the other side when you're on this side. That's the real meaning of the word. If you're living in a situation where you're passing information, let's say, to the administration, or seem to be working for the administration, then you could be charged with being an inu. Like the JACL. The JACL was clearly putting itself in a situation where they were saying, "We've got to cooperate," which means "We've got to turn people in," for example, which is a very dangerous thing to say and declare, but they put themselves into that kind of a situation. So if they were declared to be inu, it was the right context, because their being Japanese but still willing to work with the FBI to turn people in was very serious. But here in the registration business, it was your business whether you wanted to register or not. If you didn't want to register, that was fine, but that shouldn't have obstructed your purpose of registering or not, so the situation was not really made for the inu interpretation. When a person who had been loyal and wanted to register went and registered, he was not turning anybody in; he was just taking a position that differed from the majority.
Hansen
But you're talking about whether inu was any longer an accurate term; but whether it was still a useful term or not is something quite different, right?
Sakoda
But if you had too many inu, then it's no longer useful, because then it's not focused because it's dispersed among a larger number of people.
Hansen
That's what I'm trying to get at, because it seems that through the camp, this accusing people of being inu was a constant sort of thing. It was useful up to a point, to where you could effect your desired end, but if you got so many people so frightened, it seemed that then they had to abate their fear, and in some way, they had got to turn on the people who were generating the inu accusations. It did outlive its usefulness. Apparently, even when the inu accusation became tendentiously applied to someone, it was still somewhat useful. But then, at some point, it lost its social utility value. Clearly, to your mind, this occurred during the registration crisis.
Sakoda
One of the topics that could be investigated more thoroughly is the history of a crisis or the history of a protest leader. This was a very clear-cut case, almost typical history. Here you suddenly had a crisis, and the usual leaders in the block, for example, got pushed aside, and people who were very low in status, like the Kibei, suddenly cropped up as leaders and they had a solution: Don't register. They were going to sacrifice themselves and they were going to be willing to be sent to jail, et cetera, so it looked as though they were the real leaders who were going to save the day. It turned out that this particular stance was dangerous because people might have gotten arrested wholesale. Quite often, this is the history and the fate of the protest leader. When they're required, they're fine, they're welcome. But as soon as the issue has settled, they're a danger, they rock the boat, so you've got to get rid of them. This was exactly what happened here.
Hansen
During this time, there was a process going on that, in the parlance of the sociology of deviance, can be called "deviant manufacturing," in the sense that it became a cottage industry in the camps, that a crisis came along, and then, all of a sudden, you started seeing an accusation here and an accusation there and an accusation in all sorts of different places. Did you feel that this inu accusation process was spontaneous for a while and then afterwards became self-conscious, that some people quite consciously went into the business of manipulating the population for their own ends by ascribing deviant status to different people, pointing the finger at them in a crisis environment?
Sakoda
I guess it became kind of natural to the situation. What was happening was that in order to not register and not be punished, people felt it was necessary that all blocks not register. It was this idea that they [the WRA administration] can't punish everybody. So you had Kibei leaders, for example, going to other blocks to foment a movement against registration, trying to make sure that not only their block but other blocks
Hansen
One way the administration seemed to want to solve inu accusation crises was by taking out the so-called leaders of the group who were deemed responsible for the intimidation and the name-calling and the mobilization. Did you feel that that was an appropriate response to this kind of problem? It was really a problem in civic health, almost, because it entailed psychological health as well as physical well-being. But do you think that was a wise decision on the part of the administration or not? You saw it in two different camps.
Sakoda
Yes. It almost always happened. Something went wrong, then the first thing they said was, "There must be an agitator," and they looked for an agitator. The protest leader was the obvious guy to corner. You could get rid of those people, but if the whole trouble was not due to agitation, that people were afraid of their kids getting drafted or, in the case of the closure, people were afraid of leaving camp, in the first place, there were no agitators in some cases, and they were looking for somebody that didn't exist. In Minidoka, Yoshimi Shibata came to recruit people for the camouflage net factory; he wanted to look for workers. He couldn't get any. So he recounts that Stafford called him into the office and said, "There must be somebody behind all of this. I'll get my secretary out and you can tell me who it is." He told him he didn't know of anybody, that people are just not interested in working in the camouflage net factory. But Stafford couldn't believe that. The whole thing was due to some agitator. Now, somebody could have pointed to me, I suppose. Tom Ogawa and I and others had developed a reputation of being anti-administration. But this is why I resigned when I did. (laughter) When things got hot, I could have gotten in trouble with either side, so I resigned. But there was always this search for agitators, sometimes there was one, but quite often there wasn't. They should have looked at the root causes rather than who happened to be speaking at the moment. In the boilermen's strike, all of the people involved in the action were the boilermen. They were upset. When they said, "Let's strike," it was kind of spontaneous. If you had said, "Who's the agitator?" you could have pointed to, say, a lawyer who might have been supporting them or maybe not, but was involved in the negotiations or something. You could have said, "He's the agitator." Quite often, I think it was the wrong concept to start with.
Hansen
Shibutani's 1966 book on rumors is called Improvised News, [45] and I think he has some marvelous passages in there that must have been informed by his experience at Tule Lake, because one of the things he says about rumors is that they, as the title of the book indicates, are not totally fictitious lines of reasoning, that when you have a vacuum and you can't get reliable news, people come up with the best explanation they can. You asked me yesterday [during lunch at Brown University] how historians deal with the problem of explanation. Shibutani's question was, "How does a community that is bereft of reliable news sources deal with explanation?" One way is through rumor. He also goes on to say that most rumors have a kernel of truth to them. I'm wondering, since one of the most pervasive types of rumors that existed in the camp were those about inu, if you were of the cast of mind that believed that where there was all of this smoke, there must have been some fire.
Sakoda
I think that the accusations, if they were made, were not groundless. Take my case, for example. If somebody said that I was a spy, it was not totally groundless. I was doing research, and I was being paid by the University of California to do the research. You could have said, "He's secretly getting information without telling people what he's doing. He's sending it off somewhere and getting paid for it." All of which was true. So these accusations were not groundless. If the accusation that I was a spy had been made, it would have been partially true. What I had to do was to defuse it sufficiently so it wouldn't look as bad as it might sound. I think in many cases, that's the sort of the thing that happened. For example, the chairman of the community council was accused of being an inu. The question was, "Is it true that he was an inu?" Well, what he was doing at that point—this was at closure time—he was chairman of the
Hansen
Now, when a major crisis hit, it would seem that inu would have been a term that got stretched to the point of almost infinite elasticity. I suppose that in those cases the threshold dividing inu and non-inu in the population would be anybody who had anything to do with the administration or with the hakujin. You saw that at least in one instance at Tule Lake, I guess, during the period of the registration. Did it ever quite reach that point in Minidoka where just to have a job near the administration left you open to the charge of being an inu. Like, a lot of the Nisei girls in some of the camps got designated as inu because they worked in the administrative offices as typists.
Sakoda
Minidoka was relatively relaxed as far as accusations of that type were concerned. The fact that the community council and some people were declared inu, the whole thing wasn't taken too seriously. It wasn't that kind of a crisis situation, either. During the whole time I was there, it was a much relaxed atmosphere. There wasn't a feeling of real crisis, even though we did have strikes and a number of things. So I found it much more relaxing in terms of what I did and where I went, although I had to still be careful. Both Tom Ogawa and I were careful to take pro-evacuee positions, such as in the gymnasium construction situation. Tom actually told Stafford, the project director, that he had to take an anti-administration position, which was a mistake because Stafford could not understand that he was not really administration. I was talking with Graham, who was in charge of newspaper reporting.
Hansen
The reports office?
Sakoda
Reports office, yes. I was talking to Graham once in his dorm, I think, and one of the cleaning women there was from my block. I thought, "Uh-oh." (laughter) But you did have to avoid situations of that kind.
Hansen
Probably the most elaborate description of the inu phenomenon and psychology comes out in Alexander Leighton's book, The Governing of Men, [46] at the time of the Poston Strike, when, you had an enforced situation of people every night guarding the jail in one of the Poston I blocks and you could have protest meetings of some 5,000 people. There were nightly bonfires where those from each block gathered with flags bearing block numbers resembling the rising sun. There was all kinds of symbolism dealing with inu—wieners displayed on sticks, bones left at different people's doorsteps, and things like that. Little kids were going around the camp and barking at the heels of certain people like they were curs. When I read Leighton's book, I was fascinated by why the dog was chosen as the symbol of treachery and what the origins of its usage in that context might have been. Why the detestation for the dog? I wondered if there could have been any linkage between inu and eta.[47] How did that attribution of inu take on the quality of just dirt? It almost seemed like the eta thing of being an outcast, being outside the pale of the society.
Sakoda
The dog is an animal that quite often gets used in remarks that are derogatory. You know, you say, "She's a dog." The word is used also for stones. If you're making a stone fence and you have all these ill-shaped rocks, they're called dogs. There's a term in Japanese which is inujini, which means "dog death," which is a meaningless death. I don't think of it in a deep sort of way. The dog just happens to be used in a very derogatory way, and, in particular, inu happens to be used as "spy." I can only attribute it to the fact that it's a domestic animal which happens to be thought of in a very negative way. As far as I know, you don't get connotations like "the faithful dog" and that sort of image in the Japanese literature. There is a statue of a dog in Tokyo, I believe, who met his master at the train station, and continued to do so even after his death. But that was a real dog.
Hansen
In the diary that Charlie Kikuchi kept in the Tanforan Assembly Center, it mentions the WCCA's policy
Sakoda
In the literature, I don't think you have very many references to dogs in a good context. Japanese usually did not allow dogs the run of the house when floors were straw mats, and they were more likely to treat them like domesticated beasts. I guess that's the only way to really look at it.
Hansen
Did you ever hear the term inu used in Japan when you were there in the 1930s? Or did you ever hear it used in the prewar United States, prior to Pearl Harbor? Or was that term a creation of the post-Pearl Harbor situation?
Sakoda
In the prewar period, you didn't have this confrontation in a face to face situation. I never heard the term inu before the war, but there was no need for it then.
Hansen
In Japan, as a Nikkei [Japanese American]...
Sakoda
Like in Japan, I didn't come across that term at all.
Hansen
So when did you start hearing it and begin to get a very clear...Sometimes the connotative sense of a word is more apparent than the denotative sense. When did inu start to become, for instance, something that you had to be frightened of being accused of being? When did you start feeling that? Was it at Tulare? Before Tulare? At the time of the Tolan Commission hearings? Or when?
Sakoda
Tulare was a place that was fairly well run, and there weren't very many incidents. People remember it as a place they liked. I was there only a month, and I wasn't doing very much. I wasn't involved with the administration, so I didn't really have any opportunity there.
Hansen
Had you been in the assembly center at Puyallup, you would have heard the term, probably.
Sakoda
At Puyallup, we might have heard the term, yes, but I wasn't there either. The JACL took the position at the time of evacuation that Nisei should cooperate with the U.S. authorities. Some of them got leadership positions, which Issei resented. In Tule Lake, I don't think I heard it early in the game. It was probably at registration that it really became an obvious term.
Hansen
Do you remember the Nisei sergeant who accompanied the Army recruitment team at Tule Lake? When the recruitment team, as part of the registration process, went to each camp, they were accompanied by a Nisei sergeant who would present the case for registration. In a lot of the camps, the Nisei sergeant got hissed and hooted at and called inu and everything else. Did that happen at Tule Lake?
Sakoda
I don't remember a Nisei sergeant. If I look back over my notes, I might find that. He may have been there, but I don't recall an incident of that sort. I know when Ben Kuroki, who's a flyer, came to Minidoka, he got very cold treatment.
Hansen
You said he even got a worse one at Minidoka than he did at Heart Mountain.
Sakoda
Yes.
Hansen
And at Heart Mountain, he got pretty rough treatment, because they had the anti-draft movement there.
Sakoda
I guess one reason was the feeling toward the administration, and it was a negative feeling there. I talked with Ben Kuroki, and he said he was going to go to Washington and tell Dillon Myer what was going on
Hansen
I think you mentioned one interesting thing in that connection in Minidoka [which] was that there were a lot of people on the block who didn't even express sympathy when a person had their son killed because they had originally told them that they shouldn't have allowed their son to enlist in the military. I think another interesting topic for somebody to write on is this Ben Kuroki thing. I think your account of it in your correspondence, at least, is real interesting,[48] because he apparently took a tour around the different camps, and it's kind of an index of where the camps were at at that particular time on a very important issue, the reopening of selective service to the Nisei.
On February 27, 1943, you wrote in a letter to Dorothy Thomas that "those in the block who have registered already are often told to get out because they are probably inu. I'm not typing out my diary and journal on the registration because I don't want to have them laying around, even though it's all for the good of the Japanese people. I'm pretty sure that the WRA officials can't make head or tail out of the whole mess. John Doe will never learn what actually went on in the minds of the Japanese people. This is probably the saddest part of the whole evacuation and resettlement history, and when the story is told later, it's going to have to be told in a manner that is fair to the Japanese people." Now, then, there seems to have been some conscious conviction on your part that, although there was a danger and you were taking due precaution, nonetheless you didn't want to be overly cautious for fear that the record was going to be weighted in a particular direction—that you did, as a participant observer, have an insight and a contribution to make that should be taken account of, not necessarily adhered to, but at least taken into account when somebody wrote up the final history. Did that prompt you throughout the time that you were associated with the study? You gave verbal expression to it here at a particularly critical juncture, but was that something that...
Sakoda
Usually, you had these two roles, right, the participant and the observer, and you could carry out the two roles without much conflict. So you were a teacher and you taught, and you said what you wanted to say. If you wanted to oppose the administration, you could oppose the administration or criticize the people if that was necessary. You could go on being a participant and also being an observer. But with the registration crisis, there was a conflict between the two because you felt that what you had to record might be dangerous to the people you were observing. It was the same way that you would talk about sexual exploits and things like that, you wondered whether it was fair to a person that you should record that. But if you wanted the reality of whatever it was that you were doing... That was the dilemma. So you remained acutely aware of the dilemma. At that point, what I did was to start using initials, I started switching initials, too, so that the initials couldn't be traced directly.
Hansen
You were still getting the record, but you were disguising your data.
Sakoda
Yes, I was disguising the record. Then I said I was not going to type it up right away, so that it wouldn't be available. I wouldn't be sending it out, for example, right away. These were ways of trying to avoid the conflict directly, avoid having to give something up or having to not write about it, destroying the diary, or whatever it was that could be done. Or not writing about it. But the feeling was, as an observer, you had to write about it, but then you had to protect yourself and protect others. It was a difficult situation, and I guess you had to be prepared to run into those situations.
Hansen
Did you have this pervading and persisting feeling that all of what you were doing was for the good of the Japanese people, as you articulated here?
Sakoda
I suppose part of it may have been a rationalization, but at that point, I had the feeling that it was something
Hansen
You could record it, but who was going to believe it?
Sakoda
Who was going to believe it? Which shows the right context to put it in. It was us against them. That was the way I put it.
Hansen
At the plenary session in Berkeley last September, the remark came up about Dorothy Thomas's attitude toward the Evacuation, and I think the way it was characterized by one of the former JERS member panelists—it might have been yourself—was that Dorothy Thomas certainly was opposed to the policy of Evacuation, but her stance was, "It's happened. Now what we've got to do is to make a record of it and get on with that." Was that a position, you think, that was widely shared on the JERS group? Particularly for those of you of Japanese ancestry, it would seem that it would not say nearly enough. I'm loading that question. Let me ask it again. What I'm saying is that Dorothy Thomas seemed to treat the Evacuation not simply as business as usual, but as something that had happened. Here was a sociological problem, involuntary migration of a people, that should be documented. You were all students of social science. You were involved in this project. But you were also victims of a societal prejudice with important public policy implications. Could you look at the Evacuation in the same way as Thomas did and simply get on with the job?
Sakoda
Oh yes. Like Tom and I, for example, we took courses and we wrote papers and we were told it was important to record what's going on. So I think we were more impressed with that need than with anything else. Whether it was unjustified or not, in a way, at that point, was secondary. If we didn't record it, nobody else would. Actually, I think, that's the way it worked out, that not everybody was recording all of this.
Hansen
But then you were adding something, and that was "this is all for the good of the Japanese people." I'm wondering if Dorothy Thomas would have felt obliged to add that.
Sakoda
Dorothy would have seen from the point of view of a social scientist that it was not necessarily for the people, but for the discipline, that we'd like to know what happens to these people and it was important to record it. Whether it turns out positively or negatively for the people, I think she would have felt you needed to record it. Except that she was aware that it could be made difficult for certain groups. For example, when we were doing the statistical analysis, she was trying to pick the variables to be used. We had the Issei-Nisei-Kibei, the generational break; we had occupations, agriculture and nonagriculture; and we had age differences and the like. I said that religion was very important. At first she felt she didn't want to have Buddhists thought of as bad, being disloyal: if you're a Buddhist, you're disloyal; if you're Christian, you're good, you're loyal. She didn't want that implication attached to religion. But I said this was a most important variable. She felt that with all these other variables, we could account for this difference. But there was no way to account for a difference because I think religious preference was almost a primary distinction. There was an Issei-Nisei-Kibei difference, but the Buddhist-Christian difference cut across all of these generational identities. There was an Issei Buddhist-Christian difference, and it held for Kibei and Nisei also.
Hansen
But she was willing to, in a sense, give away a category if it was going to have negative consequences for the Japanese people.
Sakoda
Yes. She might have, actually, cut that out if I hadn't insisted or if she hadn't seen for herself how important it was. As a matter of fact, even now, to me it was a problem being associated with Buddhists. I kept harping on the Buddhists being more conservative and more of them were disloyal, and they were less likely to make leaders, and things of this sort. I was looking for teachers who would say, "But if you're Buddhist, you know you're better off in another way," and maybe you were. They certainly survived the situation. Maybe they were not as successful in some ways, but in some ways maybe they were, so there were compensating
Hansen
But when something like religion was the most important variable, as a social scientist there was an overwhelming desire to say, "We have to take it into account," right?
Sakoda
Also the fact that, if you don't have this variable, there's no way of talking about cultural differences. You can't go into a town and say, "What's the cultural differences of this town?" You can talk about occupation, but that doesn't do it. Nisei-Issei-Kibei doesn't do it, because there was likely to be the same proportion of each in different places. So you needed another variable.
Hansen
One variable that doesn't come through very much at all in the whole project, and it's kind of ironic since there was a feminist who was heading the project, was gender. In fact, it seems to be discounted to a large degree. Did that ever get raised in any of your conferences that gender needed to be taken more account of? Was that a reason for bringing Rosalie Hankey on to the project?
Sakoda
I don't know whether that was a consideration at all or not. I don't think that made any difference. Bringing Rosalie in I don't think changed the focus. Of course, there was Tamie Tsuchiyama.
Hansen
And Dorothy Thomas rode a long ways with Tamie, well after it seemed she had objective reasons for letting Tamie go. Thomas mentioned in her correspondence, I believe, how both Alfred Kroeber and Robert Lowie were somewhat sexist in their attitude. Bob Spencer denies that,[49] but Tamie seems to have felt it and Dorothy Thomas felt it from her dealings with them and other people in the Berkeley administration.
Sakoda
Yes, it's quite possible.
Hansen
Seemingly you reached your low point on March 3, 1943. This is what you wrote [to Dorothy Thomas] on that day: "Never felt so low since I came to the project as when I found myself unable to agree with the whole block." This was when you were isolated. I guess for a while at Tule Lake, you were still on a half-time stipend or a part-time stipend, because the amount of wage money that shows up in your correspondence is pretty minuscule. By March of 1943, things were coming apart in terms of the project at Tule Lake, at least insofar as personnel were leaving. You said that Tom Shibutani was getting ready to go out, that he was waiting for his leave clearance. You heard that Charlie Kikuchi was going off to Chicago from Gila. You say, "Since I shall be left virtually alone in the colony, I was wondering how you wanted me to reorganize my work." How did that workload change for you when you became the team? What did that mean for you?
Sakoda
As a matter of fact, in some ways, things opened up as a result of registration because of the gap between those who were opposing and those who were in favor. Those who were in favor were more likely to talk to you about what had transpired, so it opened up some avenues. Then the whole issue was focused on segregation, people getting ready to leave, some people getting ready to stay, people deciding "I'm not on any list, what am I going to do?" "We want to go there and I'm not on that train list" or "We're a group. Shall we stick with the group?" et cetera. I must have talked to a large number of people at that point, because I wrote a long, long report.[50]
Hansen
So this low point that you were feeling that you mention in here had now changed quite dramatically.
Sakoda
It changed dramatically, and I had even got to a point where I was saying, "Gee, if I leave now, I'm going to miss the people coming in."
Hansen
I was surprised at that when I saw that, but I can understand now what you've been telling me.
Sakoda
Because here were new people coming in, and they were going to be more violent, and here the old Tuleans were going to get swamped by these new people. I might have done well to stay on, actually, to view that transition, although from a participant's point of view, I couldn't very well declare myself "disloyal" just to stay.
Plus, somebody else you were romantically involved with, Hattie, was leaving.
Sakoda
Yes.
Hansen
On March 16, you wrote to [Dorothy Thomas] as follows: "Neither of the case histories are usually either complete or in any way comparable. Another problem is that the concept of typology that I am employing, while derived from observation of people, nonetheless tends to be hypothetical and not empirical. Our theoretical framework, too, has not been built up. The importance of genetic factors, cultural factors, influence of group ways, and Frank's emphasis on interaction still requires empirical verification." At this point, it seemed like you were concerned that the theory was being stretched, becoming somewhat threadbare, in the sense that what you weren't getting was the supportive data, that the theory wasn't emerging out of the data but instead being superimposed onto the data. Was this a problem arising out of your being left alone? That now you were running here, there, and everywhere and you couldn't do the kind of in-depth research that you wanted to do? Was that what you were trying to communicate to Dorothy Thomas?
Sakoda
I'm not sure what the context of that was. I had written a report on the psychological reactions, which was kind of my point of view, and I suppose at the time I really didn't have all that much data to fill in all the cracks. I was planning to give a questionnaire to my psychology class, but little came of that. That letter clearly shows my state of confusion about what we were supposed to do. By July that year Dorothy had decided to abandon the attempt to cover everything on a structural outline and move to a "point to point" approach favored by W. I. Thomas. We were to follow a few topics intensely and continuously, while keeping up the general observations in a journal. These topics turned out to be current political events, which are the focus in The Spoilage and my doctoral dissertation on Minidoka. These fit in well with the theoretical framework developed using definition of the situation, rise and fall in tensions, the social interactional process based on these. What I tended to do later on was not to fill the thing in but rather to take events as they came and concentrate on the events, which was much easier, because then you covered events, and if there were people and events, then you could discuss them. Then later on, somewhere later on, you could try to see where the different types I talked about appear. Some people won't appear. Like, rowdies tended not to appear in Minidoka. I stopped contacting young people who went to dances because I was married now and I didn't go to dances. Little kids, I generally didn't observe as a group, although I did make a few young friends, both in Tule Lake and Minidoka.
Hansen
You even say that [in a letter to Dorothy Thomas dated 16 March 1943] in this connection: "It's easier to get material from Niseis, for instance, than from Isseis or Kibeis. Among the Niseis, most material can be gotten from the marginal personality type, whereas the rowdy person, or those who are `Japanesy,' are difficult to get any material from." But this is at the same time, too, that in your psychology class you were thinking about using a questionnaire because you were concerned about your case studies being so thin and so divergent that you couldn't get any patterns, and that bothered you. In late March [20] 1943—when the registration crisis was quieting down—Dorothy wanted you to go out to a conference. You told her: "I'll have to be more careful than I've been in the past, and for that reason, I think that going out to a conference is inadvisable." So you didn't want to do anything then that would give you a profile that people...
Sakoda
That's the aftermath of the registration.
Hansen
But it was just when things were on the mend, I guess, and you were trying to... You irked Dorothy quite a bit by one remark that you made [in Sakoda's 20 March 1943 letter to Dorothy Thomas]: "I'm sorry to hear that Charlie's leaving for Chicago. I guess, in general, the evacuation end of the study has sort of washed out."
Sakoda
(Laughter)
Hansen
And she fired back a letter to you [dated 22 March 1943]. It said: "I vehemently disagree with your statement that the evacuation end of the study has sort of washed out." Now I got from your comment that you were fishing in Dorothy Thomas's waters so as to secure a reaffirmation from her that you were still being thought
Sakoda
No, that was a genuine feeling. I think when Frank and Tom left, we were all saying, "This is the end of it. No more data. The problem is, do we have enough material for our dissertations?" It actually looked at that point that maybe it was all going to be a washout, and I think that was a genuine feeling. What I hadn't anticipated was that Minidoka might be even better than Tule Lake in terms of gathering data. That was totally something I hadn't expected. If Frank leaves, Tom leaves, I'm the only one left. Charlie leaves, Bob Spencer leaves.
Hansen
Tamie.
Sakoda
Tamie leaves. That doesn't leave very many.
Hansen
So if it wasn't for Rosalie Hankey, who came into Gila and then ended up going to Tule Lake, and you going to Minidoka, as far as the evacuation part of the study, it was washed out; it was all resettlement by then, wasn't it?
Sakoda
Yes. She could have gotten somebody to go to Gila, I suppose, but she never did.[51] In a way, it was washed out, except that Rosalie did pretty well in Tule Lake and I did very well in Minidoka. At least from my standpoint it turned out pretty well, but she [Dorothy Thomas] never used the material.
Hansen
She didn't do the third volume, "The Residual." In a sense she did wash it out, right?
Sakoda
In many respects, it was up to me, really, to write that third volume.
Hansen
Dorothy wrote to you toward the end of the same month, March [22] 1943, and said: "Re the diary, you are right. I do not want you to censure anything, even your feelings of irritation toward me and the study." I don't find in your correspondence with Dorothy Thomas too many statements of irritation that you have toward her. Of course, you knew she would read anything that you would send in in the way of a diary. Could I read your diary and your journal resourcefully so that I can find that kind of irritable information? Actually, it might be in there. I haven't looked at your diary and journal, but in your correspondence I'm not finding any irritations.
Sakoda
I suppose I kind of suppressed them. I never expressed them to her directly. Actually, she was very supportive, and I had no difficulty at all. There was one thing. I was dating a girl, and I had made some advances to her. So she wrote back and said, "You should take it easy," which I thought was unfair. (laughter) Was it fair or not? She was being motherly, I think, trying to tell me how to fix the situation, I guess. That was one case. The other case was when I went out to Salt Lake City. She said, "Keep all your hotel receipts." In Salt Lake City, I couldn't find a hotel; there wasn't a hotel to be had. Finally, I had seen one of the Nisei girls there, and she was working in a home. So she arranged so that I could stay in her room while she stayed upstairs. On the way back, I still didn't have a hotel room. There was a Nisei hostel or something, and they let me stay there. I might have paid something for that. Anyway, when I came home, I didn't have any receipts. (laughter)
Hansen
And she wanted you to turn in receipts.
Sakoda
She wanted me to turn in receipts, so I got mad and said, "I don't have any receipts."
Hansen
You said, "I'm not good at that kind of thing." So when, in the correspondence here, there is mention of the business about switching the conference from the Hotel Utah to the New Grand Hotel, both hotels of which I know...One, the Hotel Utah, which is just about to end its history, is a very elaborate kind of establishment hotel, and then the New Grand now is a kind of down-at-the-heel sort of place. But you weren't even able to stay in the New Grand, as it turned out.
Sakoda
There weren't any hotels to be had. There was a time when there was a lot of travel. Once I slept overnight
Hansen
So it bothered you that she'd think you could just go out and have your situation be the same as hers. In this letter of hers to you in late March [22] of 1943, she was complimentary to you, saying: "You in Tule Lake and Tamie Tsuchiyama in Poston have an unparalleled opportunity to get the whole picture. Both of you are excellent observers, and you have another thing in common: tolerance of and understanding of the Japanese people. This, as you pointed out, is going to be very important in our final analysis." We talked a little already about this. But in a sense, this commentary must have not only cheered you because she was being complimentary, but it probably also fit the facts as you saw them, that it was indeed the case. Now, she says here in the same letter, talking about Tamie, "I assured her, as I assure you, that although our publication plans cannot be made yet for obvious reasons, I promise that the integrity of authorship of the individual workers will be preserved." Did she have in mind here the integrity of authorship relative to these research reports that you were submitting to here or the study's first publication, which became The Spoilage?
Sakoda
She couldn't falsify the reports. She was probably talking about her publication plans. At this particular point, she was thinking in terms of coauthorships and things like that, I imagine.
Hansen
This is where you would take exception, right? This was a promissory note of hers that was not redeemed. Is this right?
Sakoda
Depends on whether you think being listed as a contributor amounts to the same sort of thing. I don't know, it's very unclear to me what status that is. Whether it entitles you to say, "I coauthored the book," probably not. I can't go around saying, "This is my book." It's not my book.
Hansen
It's her book.
Sakoda
Hers and Nishimoto's.
Hansen
Probably that's a situation you've come up against when you've submittied vitae in the past. What credit can be given to being listed as a "contributor" to a book?
Sakoda
Yes.
Hansen
I was curious about something you wrote [in a letter to Dorothy Thomas dated 30 March 1943] that I found quite interesting: "I find it easiest to talk to those who have been branded as inu, for one thing, and also those who know that I'm doing research work for my Ph.D. thesis. It means that too much secrecy is detrimental, because it cuts down the field of contact. I usually don't mention my UC connection because of the financial angle involved." I understand the UC connection, I think, but I thought it was very ironic that you found it easiest to talk to inu. In other words, they had nothing to lose and they could tell you things?
Sakoda
That's right. They were already branded and they had nothing to lose. It was the same way with the marginal people. I found it easiest, first of all, to talk with marginal people, because they hated the Japanese and they were willing to say anything.
Hansen
I looked at it the other way. I thought you would be so circumspect about not being seen talking to somebody who was branded an inu, that they would be the hardest for you to approach. Maybe the easiest to talk to once you'd approached them, but the hardest to approach initially.
Sakoda
No. As a matter of fact, Tom and Frank had difficulty finding people to talk to, and I was able to use my role, my kind of marginality, to talk to them somewhat on equal terms. But their marginality was one in which they would criticize the Japanese for not volunteering, for example, or not having been kinder to the administration, whatever. They had a point of view which they weren't able to express openly in their own block, and I would listen to them without getting upset. Except there was one girl, my typist that I always talked to. She disliked the Japanese so. I would really lecture to her that she ought to make more
Hansen
So she expressed in an extreme way what some other people were thinking, right?
Sakoda
Yes.
Hansen
You write here [in Sakoda's letter to Dorothy Thomas dated 30 March 1943], "I have been pointing out, though, that the Japanese stand to lose if they leave up the writing of the whole story to the WRA," and this is where you mention the incident that you related to us already about the Kibei stopping you. Then you explained that, with the other people going, you were going to have to cover a broader field, which, I think, you successfully did. Then you agreed with Dorothy Thomas that the study was not washed out, and that therefore you and Bob Billigmeier would carry on. How long did Bob Billigmeier stay after the others left?
Sakoda
I don't think he stayed very long after that. Bob stayed through the segregation hearings, so he stayed sort of until the end there.
Hansen
So he was there almost as long as you, then?
Sakoda
Yes.
Hansen
Did you have a closer relationship with him after the other two, Miyamoto and Shibutani, had left?
Sakoda
No, I really didn't see very much of him.
Hansen
So you still stayed away, then, even after the registration thing had quieted down. It looks like you helped students in relocating as a way of doing things. Then Dorothy tried to get you to go down to Gila.
Sakoda
Yes. That was when Morton Grodzins showed up.
Hansen
Yes. But ultimately you did travel down to Gila and spend some time. Originally, it was scheduled that you would be down there a month, but it doesn't seem that you're down there that long.
Sakoda
I was there about a week, actually.[52] Dorothy readily agreed to my not going to Gila if I didn't want to and was willing to have me go to Minidoka.
Hansen
There exists a document, that I've read, which was generated by you and Spencer during your time at Gila. It relates to some kind of a forum that you and Spencer held in which the two of you raised questions and provided answers for them.[53] But what was your reading of that situation, if you could separate your own emotional situation vis-à-vis your wife to be, which is not very easy to do? But looking at the Gila situation objectively, as going down there as opposed to, say, remaining at Tule Lake or going to another camp, how did you read that situation when you went down there to Gila for a visit?
Sakoda
I really hadn't thought of what Gila would be like, actually, but since the Tulare group was there, I think Gila would have been a natural for me to follow up. Since Reverend Imamura was there, that would have allowed me a continuation of our relationship. In many respects, if I could have been in two places at the same time, it might not have been a bad idea, it would seem to me, for me to go to Gila.
Hansen
You mean going back and forth?
Sakoda
What I'm saying is that Gila would have had its attractions for that reason. There would have been continuity of sorts. Also, the Tulare people said that Gila was a dull place, which would have served as a contrast to Minidoka, where the relationship between the administration and the evacuees became worse and worse.
So if it hadn't been for the Hattie thing, you might have capitulated and gone to Gila.
Sakoda
I would have very easily.
Hansen
So the Hattie thing was the difference, then.
Sakoda
That was the difference, no mistake about that. Although the Tule Lake-Northwesterner-California connection, I think, was more important from a statistical point of view, anyway. You know, the impact that the Tuleans had in Minidoka.
Hansen
Actually, you wouldn't have had that at all at Gila. You would have had some people from Tule Lake who might have been put in Gila?
Sakoda
Yes, some people from Tule Lake went to Gila, but only a small number.
Hansen
And you had, what, about a thousand or two thousand that went to...
Sakoda
About a thousand.
Hansen
That went to Minidoka.
Hansen
By this time, you and Hattie were carrying on something of a courtship. She was in your psychology class. You made an interesting remark here [in a letter to Dorothy Thomas dated 22 May 1943]. You said, "She's the smartest girl in my class, and I'm sure you [Dorothy Thomas] are going to like her." You continued, "Charlie"—I guess referring to Charlie Kikuchi—"I'm afraid, won't find her just his type." Then later on, you said something like, "I guess I can't please everybody on the study." What was your connotation there? What were you attempting to put across?
Sakoda
Charlie was opposed to anything that was "Japanesy." He particularly disliked "Japanesy" girls, too quiet and all that. Hattie had aspects of being quiet. She had had quite a bit of Japanese school education and was obedient to her parents and all of this. So she did have aspects of that, so that's what I was referring to.
Hansen
Then you got this visit from Dorothy Thomas's personal emissary, Morton Grodzins, that we talked about earlier. You write [in Sakoda's letter to Dorothy Thomas dated 24 May 1943], in respect to the discussion you had with him, the following: "Morton wanted me to be frank with you and say what I wanted to. Well, frankly, I don't want to go to Gila and, furthermore, feel that I can be of as much use staying here." So there was even, at that point, thoughts in your mind of not leaving Tule Lake, of staying right there, like we had mentioned before. But then going on with your talk with Morton, you said, "Talking to Morton was good for me. He impressed me with the fact that both Tom and Frank did the unwise thing by not staying. I had that feeling too, but lately I was coming around to the point where I was feeling left behind, that the time was approaching when I should leave too." We discussed that matter a little before. You felt that maybe their reading of the situation was that they read more into it than it deserved and that there was valuable data that they might have been losing by being scared out of Tule Lake and going off to Chicago?
Sakoda
The thing is that the crisis blew over in a very definite sort of way. After that, it wouldn't have been bad at all, even in Tule Lake. All in all, I think if they had wanted to stay, they could have stayed. The only thing is, they had families and, probably, the wives were so frightened that they couldn't stay long enough to get over the crisis. I guess that's the way it happened.
Hansen
Dorothy Thomas's position would have been one in which she was honestly, I think, mixed in her response. Probably, as a research project director, she would have preferred that they stay a little bit longer. I think that's what Morton Grodzins was trying to communicate. But at the same time, she didn't want it on her conscience that she was putting these people and their family in the fire, right?
That's right, yes.
Hansen
And she felt that same way about you. I think at one point she even said, "Now, look. If you have any doubts, feel free to leave,"[54] right?
Sakoda
Yes. She couldn't be responsible for us if somebody got hurt or anything like that.
Hansen
So this attitude of hers was consistent with what you said before about Dorothy Thomas not wanting to put the information about Buddhism in the data sheet. She did have a solicitude for the people and, particularly, the people on the study like yourself. So it wasn't an attitude on her part of, well, everything for scholarship.
Sakoda
That's right, yes.
Hansen
Then there was to be a conference of the study down in Phoenix, but I don't think that conference ever came about.
Sakoda
I did meet with Dorothy in Phoenix, yes.
Hansen
Is that the time you went down to Gila?
Sakoda
That's when I went to Gila. I met Bob Spencer and spent about five days talking to people I knew, and some whom I met through Bob and others. Then we took a bus to Phoenix to meet Dorothy and W. I.
Hansen
Tell me about that session. Was that just you alone, or were there other JERS members meeting in Phoenix, also? Do you recall?
Sakoda
Tamie gave a report on Poston. We discussed the future of Gila with Bob. There was a discussion of the resettlement project—neither Tom Shibutani or Frank Miyamoto were there. I think I discussed the status of Nisei.
Hansen
After you had nixed the opportunity to go to Gila, Thomas wrote to you, saying, "We've written Martha Okuda, who was formerly teaching assistant in sociology at the University of Washington and who's now in Lincoln, Nebraska, and asked her whether she'd be interested." I was just wondering if you happened to have ever run across Martha Okuda in your career.
Sakoda
No.
Hansen
Then, at that juncture, JERS hired Rosalie Hankey. At this point, you were apparently having a tough time using the designation "Dorothy" instead of "Dr. Thomas." You even say this in one of your letters [dated 24 June 1943] to her [Dorothy Thomas]: "I know I should have said `Dorothy,' but maybe I'll remember to be more American the next time." You addressed her as "Dear Dr. Thomas." By the next letter [dated 29 June 1943], you're calling her "Dorothy," so you had made the switch. This was late June 1943. "I suppose I should have something to show for all the money I spent on the trip, but I only have a meager diary which doesn't amount to very much." This related to your Gila trip, and you were concerned about that.
What Dorothy wrote to you on June 30, 1943, is very ironic in light of the paper that you've just finished writing and permitted me to read: "Reminiscences of a Participant Observer." Here's what Dorothy Thomas wrote to you on June 30, 1943: "Dear Jimmy. Your notes regarding the struggles of a participant observer are very interesting. We should certainly have a chapter on the particular problems of the participant observer." It's come about now, forty-some years later. At this point, too, was when you met Marvin Opler, and you've already established that you don't recall too much about him.
Sakoda
I'll have to go to my diaries on that.
You said, "I'm carrying on an undercover tussle with Opler to see who can get the most information from each other. He pumps me, and I pump him." Then Dorothy told you that Opler was being very unprofessional and irresponsible trying to get information from you he knew that he shouldn't. This gets into meatier matters. This was in July [19] 1943. You were still at Tule Lake, and you wrote to Thomas, saying: "I have never been good at covering any incident, because I never knew what we were after. But I think I can do better on segregation. Since our study of the relocation centers evolve largely around incidents, I shall concentrate at the present time on them." I'd always believed that it was Dorothy's thinking that riveting upon incidents as foci for attention should be the method of documentation used by the study. But it seems like this approach actually came from the grass roots, from people like yourself.
Sakoda
Yes. We had topics that she would assign us from time to time. You'll find reports on, at least early in the game, sort of the structural features of the place. Frank did the best on that, I think. If you look at what he has published, it was different aspects of camp, like hospitals and the like. But later on, it came down to events like registration and, after registration, segregation, so that made for a very neat topic. You were taking a whole event and concentrating on the whole event. So I had two big reports there. I'd like to someday see them.[55] That would give it some kind of continuity, if you take that—segregation—and then portions of Minidoka, the closing, especially. I think that would make a fairly neat picture of what went on with the people who stayed behind. There were people who were leaving who had to make a decision; there were people who were staying who had to make a decision as to why they stayed.
Hansen
You said an interesting thing which I hadn't thought of before, and I think it even surprised you. The anticipation would be that so many bad feelings had occurred during the course of the registration that it would have been "good riddance to bad rubbish" on the part of the population that remained, but what you said is they got along quite amicably and there seemed to be very little differentiation between those who were staying and those who were going.
Sakoda
That's right. From my point of view, it was the fact that I could be useful, because they were trying to get train lists straightened out and things like that, and I could be useful. I guess for the most part, people had done what they wanted to, and those who stayed were staying. Also, the people who were staying for convenience rather than conviction about their loyalty status had doubts about whether they were making the wise decision—particularly when the disloyals began to come in from other centers.
Hansen
Is the main thing then, like what you talk about in your dissertation, the abatement of tension, that as long as there was tension, then there were enemies, and then you had pro and con. But once the tension got resolved, you could adjust things amicably.
Sakoda
Yes, I guess that's right. George, Ruby, and I had established ourselves as respectable citizens with good jobs. We were not close to many in the block, but made close ties within our barrack, particularly the chef and his wife. I joined the block softball team as its pitcher.
Hansen
Dorothy started to send reports all over. When I gave a presentation ["The Sociocultural Contribution of the JERS Team at Gila: A Historian's Perspective"] in September at the conference at Berkeley,[56] my critic was Peter Suzuki, and Suzuki critiqued my paper in part by saying, "You know, it's very common practice in team research to send material back and forth and have other people comment on it." Well, as I look over my notes from the plenary session of that Berkeley meeting, I see that it was established by the panel members that group research was a very new thing at that particular juncture, that there was the idea of the individual scholar, and it even extended to who owned the material that got generated. Was the data collected for the enhancement of an individual scholar or for a team? So group research being a rather new thing at the time, and you being rather new to the game, how did you like...I've never seen you in your JERS correspondence stating, "Hey, I don't want so and so on the project reviewing and criticizing my reports." In fact, you say just the opposite: "I really enjoyed getting the critiques from Mr. X or Nishimoto or whoever it was." I'm wondering how you honestly felt about it at the time, having your fieldwork being exchanged back and forth with Spencer or Nishimoto or whoever else on the study.
Sakoda
I think it was good to get reactions from other people, because at that point we weren't sure what we were
Hansen
You seemed willing to be a critic as long as it didn't infringe too much upon what time that you had. So you didn't mind this give and take. In fact, you welcomed it.
Sakoda
Sure.
Hansen
You gave [in a letter to Dorothy Thomas dated 19 July 1943] a description of Richard Nishimoto, Mr. X, which I found intriguing: "It's hard to describe `X.' He's shrewd and calculating, I think. He doesn't look at all like a Nisei, and more like an old Issei. There's something unsettled about him that makes him seem more bachelor than a married man with children. Perhaps he has a gambling streak, willing to stake a lot for greater glory. Anyway, he looks upon his part in the study as a role in a detective story, and he seems to be enjoying it. I only met him once, and I didn't see him in action." You had only met him once, but you gave a very interesting characterization of him; I think it's going to be hard for anybody who writes on Nishimoto in the future to resist quoting your graphic verbal portrayal. May be you could tell me more about the context in which you did meet Nishimoto and elaborate on your illuminating, albeit cryptic, characterization of him.
Sakoda
At that point, I had gone... Did I go to Poston? Yes, I must have gone to Poston. They were in Poston, right?
Hansen
Yes. I think you went to Gila and then went over to Poston.
Sakoda
I must have gone to Poston. I went back from the conference in Phoenix with Tamie and spent a few days there. Nishimoto then appeared, and I met him at that point. So I really didn't have much to do with him. I just met him like that. I don't know where I got all those (laughter) objections.
Hansen
You heard about "X" before this, right? He doesn't figure in your correspondence until this time.
Sakoda
I may have heard about him sort of offhand, but he really didn't figure in that much at the point with what we were doing.
Hansen
While we're on "X," and "X" becoming Nishimoto, you did get a chance to meet him later on at JERS sessions, so why don't we just talk a bit about how you came to perceive him and his role in the study.
Sakoda
Dorothy brought him on as coauthor, and what he was doing was reading the manuscripts that Frank and I had written. He was writing, I think, the first draft.
Hansen
For The Spoilage?
Sakoda
For The Spoilage, I think. So I don't know how much of that first part that he wrote. I don't know who wrote the second part, either. I thought that it was based on a lot of Rosalie's Hankey's materials. Whether he wrote the first draft of that or not, I don't know. Maybe he did. But anyway, he worked at that. We met a couple of times socially, I guess.
Hansen
You'd met him before that at a couple of get-togethers of the project personnel.
Sakoda
Probably, yes. It's been a long time. Unless I go back and look at my notes, I really don't have any clear description beyond what you see there. He was not a young Nisei, obviously, more like an Issei.[57] In Berkeley he had this affair with a Nisei girl, and his wife came up and cornered him. But beyond that, I really didn't have that much to do with him.
He read your reports. He commented on your reports.
Sakoda
Yes.
Hansen
And you commented on his comments, and seemed to find him perceptive. I'm just wondering, to use a word like "shrewd"... There's a difference between shrewdness and being highly intellectual. He was really trained as an engineer. He went into social science, as it were, by the seat of his pants. Was he one of the few brilliant people whom you met in the course of the war, you know, whose intelligence just shone forth? Could you see that here was a person who would capture the fancy of Dorothy Thomas, that he had charisma, brilliance, whatever, that would...
Sakoda
No, I didn't see him in that light. He did seem to understand what the Issei were doing and saying, and he had some insights into that, so he was useful from that point of view. Maybe he understood camp politics quite well, which a lot of Nisei did not. A lot of the Nisei leaders were too young or inexperienced. They really didn't understand what somebody might term "Japanese psychology," the way the Issei thought and how they acted, and this was part of the reason they got into so much trouble. But he was shrewd, in those terms, he was shrewd. He understood what was going on. So when he read what I wrote, he could probably conjecture how the Issei really felt. But he was useful because it would have been difficult for Dorothy to comprehend some of the feelings of the Issei or the Kibei.
Hansen
Do you think there was any other person on the project who could have synthesized things in the way that Nishimoto apparently did? Were they too young and too much outside the pale of Issei understanding to be able to speak with authority? To use that term the Hirabayashis used, was Nishimoto a "credible witness"[58] on what occurred in the camps?
Sakoda
I think it was particularly true regarding what happened in Tule Lake afterwards, after segregation. It would have taken somebody with knowledge of Japanese and Japanese expressions, and some knowledge of the kinds of factions that were developing. Most of the field workers were marginal, sort of anti-Japanese in attitude generally, against Japanese culture. All this talk about "Let's have a Japanese school and start teaching Japanese and have exercise in a military kind of manner," all of that would have been hard to fathom at all if anything like that would go on. Nishimoto was kind of an antidote to the heavy overloading of the staff with Nisei who were more marginal than an accepted member of the group.
Hansen
Rosalie Hankey Wax once allowed in a letter to me [dated 2 December 1980] that... This reaction came out of a feeling of anger that, apparently, her Tule Lake field notes had not been archived with the rest of the JERS material at the Bancroft Library at U.C. Berkeley. In trying to understand Dorothy Thomas's whole strategy for producing books and coauthoring the first one with Nishimoto, Wax told me that she felt that Dorothy Thomas had as a guiding model the experience of W. I. Thomas and The Polish Peasant, whereby there was Ziniecki representing the Polish point of view, and then, of course, W. I. the social-scientific one. With The Spoilage, explained Wax, you had a similar situation, that Dorothy Thomas searched for an ethnic counterpart like Znaniecki which she ultimately found in Richard Nishimoto. This position is at least commended by logical symmetry. Do you find, though, that it is persuasive, or merely spiteful?
Sakoda
It seemed to be Dorothy's way of doing things. When I left Minidoka, Father Joe said that Dorothy Thomas was trying to recruit Tom Ogawa to write a report on Minidoka. Kikuchi's diary was handed over to a sociologist at Penn State to edit. I think Rosalie had a gripe, and I think the gripe is legitimate, that if Nishimoto was going to be the coauthor, she had equal rights to being a coauthor as well, because two-thirds of the material that's used in The Spoilage belongs to her. I think she has a legitimate gripe. The second volume [ The Salvage ], the same way, aside from the background materials which I suppose Dorothy could have written by herself using secondary sources. She quotes the statistics that I have gathered and she gives me credit for that, and that's not a large segment; it's only a chapter. Then, the rest of it is case histories and the case history portion is certainly solidly Charlie Kikuchi—no comments, no analysis, just case studies thrown in there.[59]
I know. There are headnote summaries of the case histories and then the case histories follow, that's it.
Sakoda
And the summaries are terrible. They characterize people by how they look. (laughter) It doesn't say what kind of Issei or Nisei. So it's very difficult to understand the pattern of coauthorship, unless you think of the contributors as being coauthors.
Hansen
Bob Spencer couldn't quite understand the hold, the spell almost, that Nishimoto seemed to possess over Dorothy Thomas; it was an enigma to him. Of course, he got out of JERS before Mr. X became Richard Nishimoto. He'd only met him one time, down in Poston. He didn't leave a memorable characterization like you did, but he just never was able to fathom Nishimoto's contribution to JERS and his relationship to Thomas. It always puzzled him that Nishimoto should emerge out of obscurity, as it were, and then, all of a sudden, be catapulted to the coequal role in terms of the study's flagship publication.
At the time of the segregation, you wrote [in a letter to Dorothy Thomas dated 15 August 1943] that "the most interesting development now is the resistance to leaving Tule Lake, evidenced by the people not appearing for interviews and those who tell us interviewers that they just won't leave." Now, hadn't it been decided by that point that they were to leave?
Sakoda
People's statuses were determined, but at the interview it was possible to change your status, for one thing. There were people who were supposed to leave [who] decided that they weren't going to leave because they wanted to stay in Tule Lake. The administration more or less accepted that, that if you were put on a train and you didn't appear, well, nothing much was done about it. So this was part of the problem in Tule Lake. There were a lot of Tuleans who were not really disloyal.
Hansen
These were the ones that became the "old Tuleans."[60]
Sakoda
Yes. All the Tuleans who really should have left.
Hansen
And the administration let them get away with that.
Sakoda
They let them get away with it.
Hansen
So in a sense, they set up a potential problem there.
Sakoda
That's right.
Hansen
Because the so-called "pro-Japan" element could always point to them and say, "Let's have a resegregation movement because we've got these loyalists in here."
Sakoda
That's right.
Hansen
"So far," you say, "there has been no talk of informers or doggies." So at this point, that situation had settled down. Then you were getting engaged, and you asked Dorothy to buy you and Hattie matching rings, which she did. You seemed to be delighted with her choice. You then tell her [in Sakoda's aforementioned letter of 15 August 1943]: "I spent the evening with Dr. Opler, who's beginning to feel like a king around here because of his influence over [Raymond] Best [Tule Lake's director]. The liberal elements are `in' now, and that's something." Then you comment on Opler: "He wields quite a bit of influence over Best, according to his own account." Did you ever meet Best yourself? Or did you avoid him as part of your general policy of avoiding administrators unless absolutely necessary?
Sakoda
I don't remember. I may have met him. Generally speaking, I didn't deal with the project director in Tule Lake, although I did so in Minidoka.
Hansen
But, of course, it was the community analyst's job to try to get the project director's ear, right?
That's right.
Hansen
But he felt that he had gotten it and was in the saddle there. It looks like the reason you had some confusion a while ago when we were talking about Bob Billigmeier was that Bob Billigmeier was in a state of flux, that he had left Tule Lake and then he came back, and that's apparently why that was going on.
Sakoda
He took notes at the official hearings of what people said about why they wanted to stay in Tule Lake. Those notes were used extensively, and that was pretty helpful in bringing out the attitudes of the people. In the case of the registration crisis, much more could have been made of our field notes.
Hansen
If people could have had access to those.
Sakoda
No, if Nishimoto had wanted to... This is the problem with bringing on some outsider to do the writing. They're not going to bother with all of those notes; they don't even know anything about what things have happened. So the field notes were hardly used at all.
Hansen
Maybe there was even a tendency to "Postonize" things, too, because Nishimoto had that Poston background in terms of the strike.
You, apparently, started to take some course work through the University of Chicago about this time. Dorothy Thomas wrote and told you that when you got up to Minidoka that Lloyd Warner's student, John de Young, was going to be the social analyst there, and he could arrange for you to take a correspondence course from Lloyd Warner at the University of Chicago, which you did. You even read some of Warner's writings. How much work did you take from Chicago?
Sakoda
Actually, nothing much came of that, as I recall.
Hansen
So you weren't much beyond a B.A. until after the war.
Sakoda
That's right.
Hansen
So the course work was limited.
Sakoda
Yes.
Hansen
Then you got into the coverage of segregation, and we've talked about that. I think, actually, we've fairly well covered things. I don't think that we have much more that we need to cover, and I think that, in the course of talking about your dissertation, we ended up talking a lot about Minidoka, so I think we'll just be rehashing stuff that we've already gone over with these particulars. But before we wind up the interview, is there anything that you would like to add, anything that you would like to ask of me?
Sakoda
No, I don't think I have anything to add or ask in particular. I guess when the transcript comes back, we'll have to look some things up and clarify things.[61] You know, we've been talking about things which happened over forty years ago, much of which I don't remember. Although I did reread some of the things you sent me,[62] and I've been working on this conference report,[63] so I read some of the journals, but not all of the journals. So there are big gaps in what I remember. Having the whole thing brought together has been pretty helpful, kind of ties things together.
It seems to me that the use of a narrative approach to registration and segregation in Tule Lake in The Spoilage leaves some important problems undiscussed as issues. For example, we have mentioned the apparent importance of leisure time in the development of attitudes toward work and play. In the relocation center there was not only ample time for leisure time activities, but also numerous opportunities for entertainment, casual socialization within the block, in the work situation and in class and party situations, both for Nisei and Issei. The parental hold on Nisei was weakened as a result of the welfare kind of life. It was difficult, for example, for Issei parents to prevent their growing teenage children from learning to
Hansen
One period I'm not clear about is that between the time you came back once and for all from Minidoka to Berkeley, and you got settled in and started doing your graduate work. You were working for a while with JERS. You were employed by the study for a year. I was unsure of exactly what you were doing then, whether you were doing statistical work or writing reports based upon the data that you had collected, or precisely what the nature of your employment was during that period. Also, what was the nature of your relationship with Dorothy Thomas, because by the time you ultimately left Berkeley, she had already left herself to take a new position at the University of Pennsylvania. So I just wanted to get into your graduate work, I guess, at Berkeley.
Sakoda
I had applied for an assistantship in the Psychology Department, but I didn't get it, even though I had recommendations and all. There was some feeling, I think, that the university was afraid to hire a Nisei coming back. So Dorothy took me on as a graduate assistant. Dorothy was beginning to make plans for publication. Richard Nishimoto appeared and later Frank Miyamoto appeared with a report on Tule Lake, including an account of the registration program there. Bob Spencer showed up, and so did Rosalie Hankey. Morton Grodzins, I believe, was finishing up his dissertation on the West Coast political situation, and Dorothy didn't want to publish it for fear it would create enemies. She thought that a book of case histories would present a more favorable picture of the Japanese. There was also George Sabagh, Dorothy's favorite graduate student in demography, and his wife. There was some partying, and I remember Rosalie getting drunk and singing songs.[64]
Now, what was I doing. For one thing I was keeping detailed field notes of interviews with Tuttle at the WRA office and with Nisei students who were coming back and beginning to organize meetings and dances. I was also working on reports for Dorothy, I believe, including one on the segregation program at Tule Lake. I also worked on the Form 26 cards, I think, although Dorothy turned the ultimate analysis of the data to George Kuznets, her statistician associate.
Hansen
You were taking classes then, right?
Sakoda
I took classes mostly in psychology, I think, but I was also wondering whether to go into sociology or anthropology or into Oriental languages. My draft status was changed to 1A, and I applied for a Japanese language teaching job in Minnesota. I was accepted, but the University of California wouldn't release me from my job with Dorothy, which she had gotten by swearing that I was essential. It was clear that Dorothy wanted me around to help, and she was willing to try to get me a deferment if she could. Fortunately, the 1A was changed to 4A, possibly because my parents were in Japan. Dorothy also helped me to get an assistantship after a year in the Psychology Department. After that I was clearly on the path to a Ph.D. in social psychology, with an emphasis on statistics.
Hansen
Did you see Dorothy very often during that time? Or Nishimoto?
Sakoda
I don't think I saw Nishimoto very often. I think I saw Dorothy from time to time.
Hansen
You must have seen her after The Spoilage came out, because it came out in 1946, when she was still there
Sakoda
Yes, I was still there.
Hansen
Do you remember your reaction?
Sakoda
I guess I was disappointed. The book was largely about Tule Lake as a segregation center, which could have been told as an exciting conflict between the incoming segregants and old Tuleans who stayed behind. The section on registration mentioned a report by Tamie Tsuchiyama on Poston and by Bob Spencer on Gila, but no mention was made of Frank Miyamoto's report on registration and my report on the segregation process. Bob Billigmeier is given credit for recording the segregation interviews.[65] There was also no reference even to field notes in the registration section. There are some in the segregation section, but no mention of the author in the footnotes, which makes it difficult to trace the source. Also, the analysis of difference in the rate of disloyals—by Northwest versus California, by Christians versus Buddhists, by rural versus urban—were not fully developed. In a footnote, George Kuznets is given credit for a coming monograph, which never appeared.[66] He once asked me whether Kibei fell between Issei and Nisei, which is a natural assumption. As it turned out, the disloyalty order was Kibei, Issei, Nisei. There is a picture of the blocks in Tule Lake in three different shades, showing where the loyal and disloyal blocks happened to be. Little mention is made of the importance, for example, of the area occupied by people from the Northwest, who produced fewer disloyals than blocks dominated by Californians. It was a disappointment to me because I had spent a lot of time and effort getting the information from Form 26 sheets coordinated with block addresses.
Hansen
When you were taking classes at Berkeley after the war, they must have been for you a lot easier to comprehend—I mean, the theoretical courses you were taking in graduate school as a result of what you had gone through during the war years in terms of doing social research. Doing papers for a graduate class, it seems, would have been almost old hat at that point for you. Was that true or not?
Sakoda
Before the war, I had written some papers, writing about some of the Nisei that I had met. I remember one personality class where the reader had written [that] this was the most interesting paper he had read. I had done some writing and analysis that seemed to get by. Afterwards, I took courses... Some of it was statistical. I know I was becoming interested in factor analysis. I was research assistant for Dr. Robert Tryon, who had developed cluster analysis, and I had persuaded him to teach a course in cluster analysis, which he did. So I wasn't aware of being at that much of an advantage. As a matter of fact, I was weak in basic experimental psychology and failed the preliminary examination the first time around.
Hansen
Tryon was on your dissertation committee too, wasn't he?
Sakoda
Yes, he was [on] my dissertation committee. I imagine that the field work helped me mature and get control of some concepts, like concepts of attitude, for example. This was in the Psychology Department, so I had gravitated to Kurt Lewin's concepts, which were somewhat like W. I. Thomas's concepts, so that was helpful, I think.
Hansen
Who was your dissertation director?
Sakoda
Dr. David Krech, who was a social psychology professor.
Hansen
Was he also the principal adviser for your dissertation?
Sakoda
He was my principal adviser. There was a third person [Martin Bernard Loeb] who was outside of the department.
Hansen
Who helped you the most, in terms of your thesis?
Sakoda
Dr. Krech was quite helpful. He had authored a social psychology textbook in which he had propositions
Hansen
I believe that, in your acknowledgments for your thesis, you thanked Lloyd Warner, the person from whom you had taken a correspondence course?
Sakoda
I hardly remember that.
Hansen
Was there anybody else back at Harvard who you met during that period?
Sakoda
I met Dr. Gordon Allport in psychology, but I took some sociology seminars, including one by Sam Stoffer and Talcott Parsons, who was the outstanding theorist, but I couldn't understand the sociological concepts. That wasn't too helpful. But the atmosphere must have helped because I developed my checkerboard model while I was at Harvard. It was rather ironic since Parsons was Dorothy's enemy, intellectually.
Hansen
Was there an intellectual battle at that time between psychology and sociology? Is that what you're intimating?
Sakoda
Perhaps. It was the social relations department, at that time, but it had sociology, anthropology, and social psychology all in the same department. I guess there were some conflicts. What happened was, the students were required to know everything from all those fields, which was rather difficult.
Hansen
As you were just indicating about sociology, right?
Sakoda
Yes. I think they finally broke it up. Some names escape me.
Hansen
Who intervened for you in respect to getting you your first position at Brooklyn College?
Sakoda
That was rather interesting. I was in psychology, and I had just finished my dissertation. I was applying for a job. They were looking for jobs for me. Dr. Abraham Maslow from Brooklyn College happened to be at the University of California, so he heard about my looking for a job. I guess he was told I was a bright student, and so he got me a job.
Hansen
Did you like the job at Brooklyn when you had it?
Sakoda
Brooklyn was an interesting place. It was in some ways rather difficult, in that they had small classes, meaning classes of thirty, and we were assigned five of them. Usually, you taught not more than three different kinds of courses, maybe only two different kinds.
Hansen
But you had five different classes.
Sakoda
I had five classes. I probably taught two statistics courses and three social psychology courses. I had workbooks stacked quite high that I had to go through at the end of the semester. Students had to study some kind of group.
Hansen
Did you, early on, in that period when you were at Brooklyn, try to get your dissertation published? Is that when you first started to look into the possibility of publication?
Sakoda
Yes, I think I asked a couple of publishers, but nothing came of it. I really didn't try that hard.
Hansen
What got you the position at the University of Connecticut? How did that come about?
[At] Brooklyn, there was a change in chairmanship, so I had to leave. Connecticut, I'm not quite sure where I heard about it. I think there was a University of California connection somewhere, somebody there. Anyway, the job was available. There was another one available in the U.S. Department of Defense as a researcher, and when I went to see the guy in charge, he said, "I couldn't hire a Japanese."
Hansen
And this was some four or five years after the war, right?
Sakoda
Yes. Then this job in the University of Connecticut came up, and I applied for it. The former chairman of the Psychology Department had gone to the University of Texas, and he wanted me to go there. But his offer didn't come through soon enough, so I took the job at the University of Connecticut.
Hansen
I think you were telling me off tape that your years at Connecticut were fairly profitable—intellectually satisfying, and also you were able to buy a home.
Sakoda
Yes. We lived in the faculty apartments for about three years, and then we built a home. So we were able to get some equity in the home. I got into computer programming when IBM offered a summer course at MIT, where they established a computer facility for New England colleges. I also got on the NIMH [National Institute of Mental Health] computer committee to pass on NIMH computer grants. We were there for ten years. I would have been promoted to associate professor, but our neighbor, Bob Burnight, who had gone from the University of Connecticut to Brown University, was looking for a statistician-computer type. I was offered the job, so I came to Brown.
Hansen
Pretty good job to get.
Sakoda
Yes. It was a reasonable move to make at that point, although I could have been comfortable at Connecticut.
Hansen
And during all this time, did you have intermittent contact with Dorothy Thomas?
Sakoda
Yes. Dorothy was at Penn, and we did go to see her now and then. So we did keep up our social contact with her. Hattie stayed with Dorothy while I was at Harvard, and we were close when W. I. passed away.
Hansen
How did your relationship change as you became more ensconced in professional life? Did it take on more of a peer relationship?
Sakoda
Yes, it was more a social relationship, except that she was in demography and I was in sociology. So she was helpful in some ways in my making contacts within the demography group.
Hansen
Did you ever see her at sociology conferences after you came to Brown?
Sakoda
Yes. I used to go to demography meetings quite often, because our department was heavily involved in demography. So I did see her there, too. So we did keep up a relationship, and it was friendly. I also saw Evelyn [Rose] Kitagawa at the demography meetings. Dorothy once asked me whether I cared to take out the theory portion of my dissertation; she'd be willing to help get it published. But I said no, I didn't want to take it out, so that was the end of that. So she did have some ideas that it might be publishable, but she didn't want the theory part in there.
Hansen
Did you reflect back upon the project and what publications had issued forth from the project? Like after, say, The Salvage appeared. Your name is listed as a contributor on the title page of The Salvage. Was there any discussion or reflection upon that?
Sakoda
No, we never did discuss that. As a matter of fact, I was surprised my name was in there, because I had assumed my name was on The Spoilage, and Tom and Frank were working on The Salvage portion. I hadn't realized that Tom Shibutani's name wasn't on that and my name was. I guess it turned out that she felt that the statistical work I had done was important, so I'm the only one in the study to get my name on both The Spoilage and The Salvage.
Do you have autographed copies of both of those books from Dorothy Thomas?
Sakoda
I have an autographed copy of The Spoilage, but I lost my copy of The Salvage. I must have lent it to somebody. I've got three copies of The Spoilage, so somebody must have returned the wrong one.
Hansen
I would be interested to see the way in which she inscribed your copy of The Spoilage.
Sakoda
The book was simply signed by Dorothy and Richard Nishimoto.
Hansen
Well, that brings us to a close of two days of extensive and intensive interviewing. I first read your dissertation many years ago [in 1973], liked it very much, and wanted to meet you. I imagined then what you looked like, and the way in which you had responded to situations at Minidoka. I told my wife [Dr. Debra Gold Hansen] about you over the years and said, "This guy really got into his job." I didn't know as much about the Tule Lake connection as I did about the Minidoka situation because I came to you by way of your dissertation, which, as I say, I really liked—and still do, for that matter. I think you made the principled and correct choice when you told Dorothy Thomas that you would not to let go of the theory part of the dissertation just to gain her assistance in getting it published. I think it's certainly true that the empirical part of your dissertation is what makes it interesting to a wider public, but the theory part is really what relates the events at Minidoka to social science, that makes it not simply about Japanese Americans, but about people in certain types of situations. So I think that someday it will see some form of publication. You may not be around to see that come about, but I hope you are. Perhaps this collection that Yuji Ichioka is editing for publication [Views From Within: The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study] will focus interest on the work you and the other researchers in the JERS project accomplished. I'm certain, too, that the legacy of JERS will not stop with the small number of volumes that have come forth to this date. I suspect that there's going to be a whole series of studies, and I think that when people in future days come to recount some of the plusses of the Evacuation experience, one of them will be the accomplishments of the people like yourself who put not only their minds on the line, but also their hindquarters, to document a major social disaster for posterity. To talk, as some critics have done, so preponderantly about the opportunism of those in JERS and to carp about this, that, and the other negative aspects of the study will lessen with time, I predict, and the larger picture of JERS's achievement will come into focus. In any event, Jim, on behalf of the Japanese American Project of the Oral History Program at California State University, Fullerton, I want to thank you very much for the privilege of being able to converse with you these past two days.
Sakoda
You're quite welcome.
Notes
1. Prior to our interview, Dr. Sakoda sent me a copy of a paper, "The UnResettled Minidokan Evacuees, 1943-1945," that he had presented at a conference at the University of California, Berkeley, on 19-20 September 1987. This conference—"Views From Within: The Japanese American Wartime Internment Experience"—was organized by Professor Yuji Ichioka of the Asian American Studies Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. When Ichioka, two years later, edited selected papers from that conference into a published volume, it included two essays grounded in Sakoda's conference presentation. See "Reminiscences of a Participant Observer," 219-43, and "The `Residue': The Unresettled Minidokans, 1943-1945," 247-84, in Yuji Ichioka, ed., Views From Within: The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study (Los Angeles: Asian American Studies Center, University of California at Los Angeles, 1989).
2. For a brief yet informed discussion of this cultural concept, see Harry H. L. Kitano, Japanese Americans: The Evolution of a Subculture (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976), 136.
3. For a discussion of "Japanization" at the Manzanar War Relocation Center, see David A. Hacker, "A Culture
4. See Tsuneishi's tribute to Kikuchi, "In Memoriam: Charles Kikuchi 1916-1988," vii, in Ichioka, Views From Within. Now retired, Warren Tsuneishi held the position of chief of the Asian division of the Library of Congress in 1989 when his tribute to his "best friend" was published. For information on Kikuchi in relationship to his role with the Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study, see John Modell, ed., The Kikuchi Diary: Chronicle from an American Concentration Camp. The Tanforan Journals of Charles Kikuchi (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1973, 1993); Charles Kikuchi, "Through the JERS Looking Glass: A Personal View From Within," 179-95, and Dana Y. Takagi, "Life History Analysis and JERS: Re-evaluating the Work of Charles Kikuchi," 197-216, in Ichioka, View From Within; and Charles Kikuchi, interview by Arthur A. Hansen, 1-3 August 1988, Japanese American Project, Oral History Program at California State University, Fullerton (hereafter cited as Kikuchi to Hansen, CSUF-OHP).
5. The reference here is to a draft of "Reminiscences of a Participant Observer," as cited in fn. 1 above.
6. See George Nakagawa, Seki-Nin (Fullerton, Calif.: Japanese American Project of the Oral History Program at California State University, Fullerton, 1989).
7. In 1980, the Commission on the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians was instituted by the U.S. Congress. After its blue-ribbon members held hearings in several major U.S. cities and listened to the testimony of over 750 persons, it released its findings in a volume entitled Personal Justice Denied (1982). Drawing the conclusion that the wartime eviction and detention of Japanese Americans was the product of "race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership," the Commission recommended that each living victim be compensated with $20,000. Following a six-year effort, the Commission's work bore fruit when President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which mandated that the U.S. government not only reward the recommended redress monies but also formally apologize to Japanese Americans for their wartime mistreatment.
8. For this unpublished paper ("As They Await Evacuation: The Impact of the War Between America and Japan on the Values of Different Types of Japanese on the Coast"), dated 22 April 1942, see Box 10 Folder 55, Collection 3830, Department of Manuscripts and University Archives, Cornell University Libraries.
9. For biographical information on Jimmie Omura and a brief discussion of his monthly pre-World War II magazine, Current Life, see Arthur A. Hansen, "James Matsumoto Omura: An Interview," Amerasia Journal 13 (1986-87): 99-113. For a personal perspective on Omura's role as a journalist during the Japanese American Evacuation, see James Omura, "Japanese American Journalism During World War II," in Gail M. Nomura et al. eds., Frontiers of Asian American Studies: Writing, Research, and Commentary (Pullman, Wash.: Washington State University Press, 1989), 71-80. Among the articles written by Kenny Murase for Current Life were: "Who's Who in the Nisei Literary World" (October 1940): 8-9; "That Old Indian Summer" (November 1940): 5; "William Saroyan and the American Short Story" (January 1941): 3-4, 14; "From the Valley of the Sun" (August 1941): 2; "A Nisei Artist Speaks" (September 1941): 6-7; "Nemesis?" (October 1941): 3-4; and "Opportunities A wait in Defense Industries" (January 1942): 15.
10. Kikuchi also wrote for Current Life. See, for example, "Joe Nisei Looks for a Job" (January 1941): 3-4, 12-13; "U.S. Japanese Opposed to War" (July 1941): 5; and "The Nisei and Marriage" (August 1941): 8-9.
11. Adamic's book included an essay based upon Kikuchi's life, "A Young American With A Japanese Face," 185-234. This essay has been evaluated perceptively by Yuji Ichioka in the larger context of Adamic's treatment of Japanese Americans. See Yuji Ichioka, " `Unity Within Diversity': Louis Adamic and Japanese-Americans," working paper, Asian/Pacific Studies Institute, Durham, North Carolina, 1987.
12. This short unpublished work by Murase is included in the diary that Charles Kikuchi maintained for the Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study. See Kikuchi's entry for 29 March 1943, written while he was interned at the Gila War Relocation Center—Charles Kikuchi Collection, Special Collections, University Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles. For Kikuchi's discussion of Murase and his characterizations of his "progressive" contemporaries, see Kikuchi to Hansen, CSUF-OHP.
13. As cited in fn. 8 above.
14. This incident is covered in detail by Sakoda in the "relocation diary" he maintained for the Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study. See his entry for 4 April 1945 in Folder R21.81W, Tule Lake Relocation Center [TLRC], Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study [JERS], Bancroft Library [BL], University of California, Berkeley. Hereafter all references to this collection will be cited as JERS, BL-UCB.
15. During World War II Marvin Kaufmann Opler (1914-1981) was a community analyst for the WRA at the Tule Lake center. His older brother, Morris Opler, served in this same capacity at the Manzanar center. For a biographical and scholarly overview of Marvin Opler, see the obituary for him penned by Morris Opler in the American Anthropologist 83 (September 1981): 617-21.
16. Hoshiyama and Kunitani both served as observers for JERS while interned at the Tanforan Assembly Center. For their Tanforan reports, see, respectively, Folders B8.19-25 and 8.29, Tanforan Assembly Center [TAC], JERS, BL-UCB. After being transferred to the Topaz War Relocation Center, Hoshiyama continued for a short while to perform this same role. See Folders H9.04-06, Central Utah Relocation Center [CURC], JERS, BL-UCB.
17. Earle Yusa was employed as a JERS observer at both the Tanforan Assembly Center and the Gila War Relocation Center. Although unproductive during his stint at the latter camp, Yusa did produce three short reports at Tanforan. See Folder B8.38, TAC, JERS, BL-UCB.
18. Dr. William Isaac Thomas (1863-1947) was a pioneering American sociologist who contributed distinguished work in the areas of cultural change, personality development, and ethnography. For an appreciation of Thomas and his work in the context of the Chicago School of Sociology, see Martin Blumer, The Chicago School of Sociology: Institutionalization, Diversity, and the Rise of Sociological Research (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) and Lester R. Kurtz, Evaluating Chicago Sociology: A Guide to the Literature, with an Annotated Bibliography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
19. The two short reports Sakoda produced for JERS while sited at the Tulare Assembly Center are untitled but dated, respectively, 18 May and 24 May 1942. See Folder B.8.40, Tulare Assembly Center [TuAC], JERS, BL-UCB. In addition, Sakoda maintained a substantial journal for the period beginning with his departure on April 24, 1942, from Berkeley, California, extending through his days at the Tulare center, and ending with his transfer to the Tule Lake War Relocation Center on June 14, 1942. See Folder B12.20, TuAC, JERS, BL-UCB.
20. This portion of Sakoda's work with JERS, covering the period from 1 June through 26 June 1943, is detailed in his Tule Lake diary. See Folder R20.83E, TLRC, JERS, BL-UCB.
21. For information on the background of this research project at the Poston center as well as its major published results, see Alexander H. Leighton, The Governing of Men: General Principles and Recommendations Based on Experience at a Japanese Relocation Camp (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1946). A comprehensive collection of both the primary and secondary materials pertinent to this project is housed at Cornell University; see D. Gesensway, M. Roseman, and G. Solomon, comps., Guide to the Japanese-American Relocation Centers Records, 1935-1953 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Department of Manuscripts and University Archives, Cornell University, 1981).
22. Miyamoto's master's thesis, completed in the mid-1930s, was first republished in the prewar period as a section of a work entitled University of Washington Publications in the Social Sciences 11 (December 1939): 57-130; then, in 1981, it was republished once more as Number 2 in the Occasional Monograph Series of the Asian American Studies Program of the University of Washington; finally, in 1984, it was republished still another time as a book, Social Solidarity among the Japanese in Seattle, by the University of Washington Press in cooperation with the Asian American Studies Program of the University of Washington. Included in the 1984 volume is a highly useful introductory essay by Miyamoto.
23. The four field workers alluded to here are: Shotaro Frank Miyamoto; Tamotsu Tom Shibutani; Robert Billigmeier; and James Sakoda. Still a fifth JERS field worker at Tule Lake was Haruo Najima, but he produced very little work there for the study following his transfer from the Tanforan Assembly Center. For the voluminous correspondence, reports, journals, diaries, etc. generated by the other four field workers, see Folders R20.00-R22.20, TLRC, JERS, BL-UCB.
24. The precise quotation from Thomas reads: "I am checking on the Journals that you are interested in and will let you know about them later. I have been informed that the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, edited by Allport, is better than the Journal of Social Psychology edited by Murchison." Sakoda's correspondence with Thomas is archived in Folder W.125D, JERS, BL-UCB.
25. See, however, Barrie Thorne, "Political Activist as Participant Observer: Conflicts of Commmitment in a Study of the Draft Resistance Movement of the 1960s," 216-52, in Robert M. Emerson ed., Contemporary Field Research: A Collection of Readings (Boston: Little Brown, 1983). Interestingly, Thorne alludes, 247, to the classic work on participant observation, Doing Fieldwork: Warnings and Advice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970) by Rosalie Hankey Wax, Sakoda's JERS cohort: "The researcher may find her wit and diplomacy tested when she is publicly asked to commit herself to one or another `side' (skills clearly revealed in Rosalie Wax's practices for continuing fieldwork in the face of constant crises in the highly factionalized environment of the Japanese relocation camp)." Recently, one anthropologist (Peter Suzuki) and two former Tule Lake internees (Ernest Kinzo Wakayama and Violet Kazue Matsuda de Cristoforo) have charged Wax with grossly violating her social-scientific "objectivity" during her fieldwork at Tule Lake to become, in effect, a government "informer,"resulting in catastrophic consequences for her "victims." See Peter T. Suzuki, "Anthropologists in the Wartime Camps for Japanese Americans: A Documentary Study," Dialectical Anthropology 6,1 (1981): 30-32, 60 fn. 215, and "The University of California Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study: A Prolegomenon," Dialectical Anthropology 10 (1986): 193-97, 201-205; Edgar Wakayama, "Passing the Torch from Father to Son Because It Should Never Happen Again," UNR Times 7 (Winter 1989-90): 5-8; Violet Kazue de Cristoforo, "J' Accuse," Rikka 13,1 (1992): 16-30. See also, in ibid, Rosalie H. Wax, "Response by Rosalie H. Wax," 31-2; Violet Kazue de Cristoforo, "Further Clarification," 32-4 and "General Comments," 34-6; and George Yamada, "Two Letters to Rosalie Hankey Wax, 36-7. See also the 23 September 1981 testimony in San Francisco, California, of de Cristoforo's brother, Tokio Yamane, to the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) reprinted as "Ordeal of Tokio Yamane," Rikki 12,1 (1987): 10-14, and de Cristoforo's own CWRIC testimony in the Amerasia Journal 8 (1981): 93-101. For Wax's rebuttal to Suzuki's accusations, see her 1981 CWRIC testimony. For a defense of Wax's role as a field anthropologist at Tule Lake by a JERS colleague, see S. Frank Miyamoto, "Dorothy Swaine Thomas as Director of JERS: Some Personal Observations," in Ichioka, Views From Within, 52-8. For biographical information on Peter Suzuki (1928- ) and Violet Kazue Matsuda de Cristoforo (1917- ), see Jeffrey Paul Chan et al. eds., The Big Aiiieeeee! (New York: Meridian, 1991), 369-70 and 353-55.
26. The reference here is to the five-volume study W. I. Thomas had coauthored with Florian Znaniecki between 1918 and 1920, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. For information on this work, see " The Polish Peasant in Europe and America : A Landmark of Empirical Sociology," Chapter 5 in Blumer, The Chicago School of Sociology, 45-63.
27. For details on the murder of the person in question, Yaozo Hitomi, on 22 July 1944, see Richard Drinnon, Keeper of Concentration Camps: Dillon S. Myer and American Racism (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1987), 126, 296, and Sue Kunitomi Embrey et al. eds., Manzanar Martyr: An Interview with Harry Y. Ueno (Fullerton, Calif.: Japanese American Project, Oral History Program at California State University, Fullerton, 1986), 84-5.
28. The quoted passage here is imprecise. In a letter to Dorothy Thomas dated 20 October 1943, Richard Nishimoto, reflecting on the Poston Strike in November 1942, wrote as follows: "It was nothing like the attempted mess strike in Gila [reported on by Rosalie Hankey]. We had about fifty of that kind, finally coming to the climax in November. The situation leading up to it was so bad. The emotional stress and motivational urge became so great that the strike happened without premeditation. There was a complete unanimity of opinion and unity of action among evacuees. It was a mass movement of people. [Edward] Spicer [an anthropologist then associated with the Alexander Leighton-led Bureau of Sociological Research at the Poston center] at the height of the incident cried, `A social revolution!' I never experienced anything like it except once before in my life—the rice riots in Tokyo (Riots were all over Japan. I only saw those in Tokyo.)"
29. For this report by Sakoda, dated 26 November 1944, see Folder P8.15, Minidoka Relocation Center [MiRC], JERS, BL-UCB.
30. This incident and what it reveals about the relationship between the administration and the detained community at the Minidoka center is discussed and analyzed by Sakoda in his 1949 University of California, Berkeley doctoral dissertation, "Minidoka: An Analysis of Changing Patterns of Social Interaction," 269-320, especially 284-98.
31. In this report ("Social and Political Organization of the Block at Manzanar"), dated 7 March 1944, Opler wrote:
32. For biographical information on Embree, see the obituary of him written by Fred Eggan in the American Anthropologist 53 (July-September 1951): 376-82.
33. In a letter to Dorothy Thomas, dated 26 February 1944, Sakoda wrote: "From reading Suye Mura I know what my criticism of many of these [sociological and anthropological] works [recommended to Sakoda by the eminent sociologist Lloyd Warner] is going to be. The formal structure does not give too much incite [sic] into human behavior. For instance, soldiers from the country are supposed to give the Japanese Army their reputed strength, but so far I do not feel that Suye Mura reveals this. I know I am going to be prejudiced toward demanding more dynamics and less formal structure, which at the same time means a definite emphasis on individuals, so you might as well watch out for it."
34. The following passage, 37, communicates Hansen's precise language: "The last trainload of evacuees left Heart Mountain on the evening of Saturday, November 10, 1945, and the final trend report was written [by Hansen] in an empty camp on November 19. The two paragraphs that follow complete that report:
`Heart Mountain was never a lovely place. But when it was full of people and one knew many of the people, even the barracks did not look so black and bleak. On Sunday and Monday, November 11 and 12, it was truly unlovely. It was cold, quiet, and empty. Trash heaps lined the streets. The atmosphere of desertion and desolation was made more marked by lonesome, hungry cats crawling over the trash heaps.
`The community was obviously and totally dead. Since then, the project staff, acting now in the role of morticians, have been preparing the physical remains for such disposition as awaits a dead community.'
35. As cited in fn. 1 above.
36. For Marvin Opler's interpretation of JERS, see his review of its flagship postwar publication, The Spoilage, coauthored by Dorothy Swaine Thomas and Richard S. Nishimoto, in the American Anthropologist 50 (1948), 307, 331.
37. See James M. Sakoda, "The Checkerboard Model of Social Interaction," Journal of Mathematical Sociology 1 (1971): 119-32.
38. The title of Tamotsu Shibutani's 1944 University of Chicago master's thesis is "Rumors in a Crisis Situation." His doctoral dissertation, completed in 1948 at the same institution, is entitled "The Circulation of Rumors as a Form of Collective Behavior." For his later published study on rumor, see Tamotsu Shibutani, Improvised News: A Sociological Study of Rumor (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966).
39. As cited in fn. 1 above.
40. As cited in fn. 1 above.
41. For information on Baker and the group that she headed, see the interview with her, O.H. 1474, by Arthur A. Hansen in the Japanese American Project of the Oral History Program at California State University, Fullerton. For insight into Baker's perspective on the Evacuation, see also the following two volumes authored by her: The Concentration Camp Conspiracy: A Second Pearl Harbor (Glendale, Calif.: AFHA Publications, 1981) and Dishonoring America: The Collective Guilt of American Japanese (Medford, Ore.: Webb Research Group, 1988). See also the Lillian Baker Collection at the Hoover
42. For information on the role of the military police at the WRA centers, see Reagan Jack Bell, "Interned Without: The Military Police at the Tule Lake Relocation/Segregation Center, 1942-46" (master's thesis, California State University, Fullerton, 1989), and the pertinent interviews by Bell and Arthur A. Hansen included in Part 5 ("Guards and Townspeople") of the present oral history project: Japanese American World War II Evacuation Oral History Project (Munich, Germany: K. G. Saur, 1993).
43. The reference here is to a letter from Dorothy Thomas to Sakoda, dated 19 January 1943, where she writes: "Excerpt from a letter from Bob Spencer: `We here received all the materials from the Bunch up in Tule Lake. It's quite a tome, isn't it? Charlie [Kikuchi] and I are somewhat put out. Both of us feel our efforts have been surpassed.'" See also Sakoda's return letter to Thomas, dated 25 January 1943, wherein he states: "Guess we showed up the Gila bunch, didn't we?"
44. For a full discussion of this point, see Arthur A. Hansen, "Demon Dogs: Cultural Deviance and Community Control in the Japanese-American Evacuation," Western Conference of the Association for Asian Studies Selected Papers (New Series No. 10, 1983).
45. As cited in fn. 38 above.
46. As cited in fn. 21 above.
47. See Rosalie H. Wax, "The Eta as Outcastes and Scapegoats Among Japanese-Americans, Kansas Journal of Sociology 1 (Fall 1965): 175-87.
48. In his letter to Dorothy Thomas, dated 15 May 1944, Sakoda writes: "Ben Kuroki was given a poor reception here [Minidoka War Relocation Center], and Acre, the Reports Officer, just about broke his neck trying to make it seems [sic] as though Ben received a `roaring' welcome. Ben made a hit with the younger kids, but was being called all sorts of names by the Isseis. I'm afraid the visit here confused him quite a bit, and hope that it doesn't become another [Charles] Lindbergh."
49. For Thomas's position on this matter, see her letter to Richard Nishimoto [Mr. X], dated 8 January 1944, in Folder W1.25A, JERS, BL-UCB. For Spencer's denial, see the interview with him in the present volume, 192, 208-209.
50. See James Sakoda, "The Segregation Program at Tule Lake," in Folder R20.90, TLRC, JERS, BL-UCB.
51. Actually, Rosalie Hankey replaced Robert Spencer as a field anthropologist at the Gila center for JERS in July 1943 and remained there until being transferred to the Tule Lake center in May 1944. See Wax, Doing Fieldwork, 65-125.
52. See fn. 20 above for the reference to the archival source covering Sakoda's trip to the Gila center.
53. See "Block SurveyBlock 64," Folder K8.36, Gila Relocation Center [GRC], JERS, BL-UCB.
54. In Dorothy Thomas's letter to Sakoda, dated 1 March 1943, she wrote: "I am enclosing a definite offer for work in Chicago. This you should consider as a sort of insurance policy. Keep it to use if the situation gets too hot."
55. See James Sakoda, "The Relocation Program at Tule Lake," and "The Segregation Program at Tule Lake," R20.84 and R20.90, TLRC, JERS, BL-UCB.
56. As cited in fn. 1 above.
57. Richard Shigeaki Nishimoto (1904-ca. 1955) was born in Japan and hence, technically, was an Issei. Coming to the United States at an early age, he graduated from Lowell High School in San Francisco in 1925 and, four years later, received a degree in engineering from Stanford University.
58. See Lane Ryo Hirabayashi and James Hirabayashi, "The `Credible' Witness: The Central Role of Richard S. Nishimoto in JERS," in Ichioka, Views From Within, 65-94.
59. See Dorothy Swaine Thomas (With the Assistance of Charles Kikuchi and James Sakoda), The Salvage (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1952).
60. For a discussion of the situation of "Old Tuleans," see Rosalie Hankey, "The Development of Authoriatarianism: A Comparison of the Japanese-American Relocation Centers and Germany" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1951), 93-103.
61. This process of clarification was completed by Professor Sakoda in fall 1993.
62. The material referred to here is the World War II correspondence between Sakoda and Dorothy Thomas.
63. See the two essays by Sakoda in Ichioka, Views From Within, cited in fn. 1 above.
64. The events and personalities alluded to here by Sakoda are vividly depicted in his "relocation journal," as cited in fn. 14 above.
65. For the mention of the Tsuchiyama and Spencer reports, respectively, see Thomas and Nishimoto, The Spoilage, 67, 68. For Miyamoto's report ("The Registration Crisis Tule Lake Relocation Center"), see Folder R20.36, TLRC, JERS, BL-UCB. For the Billigmeier and Sakoda reports, see fn. 23 and fn. 50, above.
66. See Thomas and Nishimoto, The Spoilage, 107, fn. 49: "Statistical analysis of `The Ecology of Disloyalty' will be presented, in full, in a forthcoming monograph in this series by George M. Kuznets."
67. Clyde Kay Maben Kluckhohn (1905-1960) was an American anthropologist who taught at Harvard University and achieved distinction for his work on Navajo cultural values systems and patterns.
Index
- Adamic, Louis, 370
- Agriculture, 392-93
- Allport, Gordon, 377, 444, 449n24
- "Americans for Historical Accuracy," 420
- Amerman, Helen, 397
- Artesia, Calf., 351
- Atomic bomb, 408, 409
- Baker, Lillian, 420
- Bancroft Library, 423, 439
- Barnett, James, 399
- Berkeley Buddhist Church, 366
- Best, Raymond, 440
- Billigmeier, Robert, 350, 377-79, 380-83, 387, 423, 434, 440-41, 443
- Boyle Heights, Calif., 351
- Brown University, 378, 414
- Buddhists, 348-49, 363, 365-66, 403-404, 429
- Bureau of Sociological Research, 393, 449n28
- Burnight, Bob, 445
- Camouflage net factories, 425
- Catholic Church, 403
- Chinese Americans, 414
- Christians, 348-49, 363, 366, 403, 404, 429
- Civil Liberties Act of 1988, 447n7
- Commission on the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, 447n7
- Communists, 369-70
- Concentration camps, 420
- Current Life, 369
- Dai, Father, 404
- Daniels, Roger, 411
- de Young, John, 381, 398, 399, 441
- Demography, 358
- Depression, 345, 351-52, 354
- Derelicts of Company K, The (Shibutani), 415
- Diaries, 422
- Draft, 384
- Elberson, Don, 385, 386, 387
- Eliot, George, 360
- Embree, John Fee, 401
- Endo, Mr., 362
- Episcopalians, 404-405
- Excelsior High School, 352, 353, 354
- Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 421
- Form 26 questionnaire, 358-59, 376, 392, 405, 415
- From Many Lands (Adamic), 370
- Funakoshi, Japan, 343, 344
- Gangs, 353
- Gardena, Calif., 346
- Gila War Relocation Center, Ariz., 382, 399, 434, 449n28
- Governing of Men, The (Leighton), 426
- Grodzins, Morton, 374, 382, 416, 434, 435, 442
- Hankey, Rosalie. See Wax, Rosalie Hankey
- Hansen, Aasel, 411
- Heart Mountain War Relocation Center, Wyo., 411, 450n34
- Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan, 343, 409
- Hog farms, 354
- Hoshiyama, Fred, 372, 448n16
- Hospitals, 346-47
- Houseboys, 362, 363-64, 366-67
- Ichioka, Yuji, 446
- Imamura, Jane, 373, 374
- Imamura, Kanmo, 366, 373, 374, 403-404
- Improvised News (Shibutani), 425
- Inu, 349-50, 423-24, 425-26, 427, 433, 440
- Issei
- Americanization of, 344, 350-51
- bachelors, 392-93
- childrearing practices, 344-45, 346, 350-51, 359-61, 441
- class differences among, 392-93
- culture, 391
- employment patterns, 344-45
- Kibei, compared to, 392
- language of, 385, 391-92
- leadership role, 441-42
- religion of, 392
- and registration crisis, 392, 393
- women, 344-45, 386
- Jacoby, Harold, 350, 380, 383, 387, 393-94, 419-20
- Japan
- Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), 390-91, 424, 427
- Japanese American Evacuation
- administration of,See also War Relocation Authority375, 393, 415
- and churches, 366, 403-405, 429
- concentration camps compared to, 420
- cooperation with, 427
- demographic data concerning, 348, 358-59, 376, 392, 405, 415
- goals, 375
- impact, 410-11, 412, 414, 441-42
- Japanization during, 348, 349, 389-90, 391-92
- labor issues, 393, 393-98, 400, 425
- and pets, 426-27
- psychological aspects, 405, 406, 442
- reasons for, 447n7
- research and writing about, 375, 411, 414, 415-18, 428
- resettlement, 405-408, 410, 411, 412
- resistance to, 393-94, 399, 424-25, 441-42, 449n28
- treatment of internees, 420
- and women, 360
- Japanese Americans. See also generational groups
- communities of, 346, 350, 351, 363
- demographic patterns, 358-59
- discrimination against, 346, 414, 444
- divisions among, 348-50, 351, 392-93
- education of, 352-53
- employment of, 354, 364, 365
- ethnic identity, 348, 349, 380, 391, 413-14
- gender roles, 350, 354-55
- Japanese vs. western values among, 390, 391
- leisure activities, 352
- medical practices, 346-47
- and other ethnic groups, 352-53, 365
- religion of, 348-49, 363, 403-405, 429
- returns to Japan, 344, 345, 352, 354-55
- social structure, 392-93
- stereotypes, 413
- wartime allegiances, 403
- Japanese Americans: Relocation to Redress (Kitano et al.), 411
- Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study (JERS)
- administration by Thomas, 382, 383, 416, 432-33, 435
- archives for, 374, 423, 439
- and camp administrators, 399
- and community analysts, 375, 376, 398-99, 440
- conclusion of, 431-32, 433
- conferences of, 374-75, 381-82, 422-23, 432-33, 435, 436, 438
- constraints on, 428-29, 432
- criticism of, 376, 446
- data gathered, 358-59, 368, 376-77, 384, 398-99, 415-17, 428-30, 431
- diaries, 367-69, 379, 422-23, 439, 440
- field sites, 373, 374
- field workers,See also individual names 372-74, 376, 378-80, 432-33, 448n23.
- funding for, 373
- goals of, 368, 428, 429
- informants, 448n16
- publications from, 376, 416-17, 432, 433, 434, 438, 440, 442-43
- recruiting for, 372, 374, 383, 439
- and registration crisis, 378
- research design, 374-77, 383, 429-31, 436-37
- training provided, 378-79
- use of materials, 398-99, 415-16
- value of, 446
- Japanese language, 345, 346, 391-92
- Japanese language schools, 345, 346, 347, 348, 351, 362, 391-92
- Jewis, 351
- Kanaya, Dick, 399
- Kaya family, 402
- Kibei
- Americanization of, 354, 356
- definition of, 358
- education of, 345, 355-56
- employment patterns, 344, 356-57, 361
- ethnic identity, 354, 356-57
- family relations, 346
- gender relations, 357-58
- girls, 357
- Issei compared to, 392
- in Japan, 345, 355, 361
- language, 356, 362
- marginalization of, 357, 361, 362
- marriage patterns, 358
- and registration crisis, 424
― 455 ― - Kikuchi, Charles, 353, 361, 417
- Kinoshita, Bob, 370
- Kitagawa, Rev. Joseph, 381, 397-98, 402-406, 411, 421, 439
- Kitano, Harry L., 411
- Kluckhohn, Clyde, 443, 452n67
- Krech, David, 382-83, 443
- Kunitani, Mitch, 372, 448n16
- Kuroki, Ben, 451n48
- Kurose, Asano, 360
- Kuznets, George, 417, 442
- Labor unions, 365, 369, 393
- Lancaster, Calif., 346
- Leave clearances, 375
- Leighton, Alexander, 426, 449n28
- Lewin, Kurt, 383-84, 418, 443
- Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, Calif., 346
- Loeb, Martin Bernard, 443
- Loyalty registration, 350, 358, 375, 386-89, 393-95, 423-25, 427, 430
- Manzanar War Relocation Center, Calif., 401, 449-50n31
- Markets, 365
- Maslow, Abraham, 444
- Matsuura, Issei, 366
- Matsuura, Jane, 366
- Meiji Period, 350-51, 368
- Military police, 420-21
- Minidoka War Relocation Center, Idaho
- administration of, 381, 393-95, 397-401, 406-407, 449n30
- block structure, 401
- Caucasians at, 397
- churches, 404, 405
- closure, 385, 405-408
- community analysts at, 398, 399
- community council at, 380, 381, 391, 393, 399, 400
- gymnasium at, 397-98
- labor issues at, 397-98, 400, 425
- layout of, 401
- living conditions, 414
- military recruiting at, 393-94, 427-28
- Tuleans at, 380, 394, 395, 400-401
- unrest at, 394, 395, 397-98, 400-401, 425-26
- Miyamoto, Michi, 390
- Miyamoto, Shotaro Frank, 347, 349-50, 368, 374, 375, 376, 415, 416
- Mori, Mr., 365
- Murase, Kenny, 369-70, 371
- Myer, Dillon, 385, 375, 427
- Najima, Haruo, 448n23
- Nisei
- conservatives among, 346, 348, 350
- differences among, 357
- education of, 356
- employment patterns, 357
- ethnic identity, 346, 348, 354, 356, 363, 369
- gangs, 353
- girls, 357, 358, 360, 371
- Hawaiian, 357, 358, 359
- language of, 346, 385, 391-92
- leisure activities, 353, 354, 363, 441
- marginalization, 353-54, 369-70, 371
- in military, 394-95, 427-428
- and other ethnic groups, 371
- personality traits, 416
- progressives among, 370
- Nishimoto, Richard Shigaeki, 374, 393, 433, 437-42, 446, 449n28, 451n57
- Opler, Marvin Kaufmann, 372, 381, 398, 399, 416, 436, 440, 448n15, 449-50n31
- Opler, Morris, 401, 448n15
- Oda family, 366
- Ogawa, Tom, 381, 396, 404, 425, 426, 439
- Omura, Jimmie, 369
- Ota, Lillian, 370
- Outline of History (Wells), 367, 368
- Parsons, Talcott, 444
- Participant observation, 378, 382, 428, 436, 449n25
- Polish Peasant in Europe and America, The (Thomas and Znaniecki), 383, 439, 449n26
- Poston War Relocation Center, Ariz., 393, 426, 449n28
- Progressives, 370
- Puyallup Assembly Center, Wash., 383, 427
- Redress, 414, 447n7
- Registration. See Loyalty registration
- Repatriation, See also Sojourners 360, 388-90
- "Residue, The," 376, 432
- Reunions, 402
- Rose, Evelyn, 398, 405-406
- Rumors, 406, 421, 425, 450n38
- Sabagh, George, 442
- Sakoda, Bill, 417
- Sakoda, George, 344, 347, 350, 351, 356, 359, 364-65, 373, 386, 410
- Sakoda, Hattie, 382, 386, 394, 402, 407, 410, 411, 412, 430, 434-35, 440, 445
- Sakoda, James M.
- birth, 344
- childhood, 351
- courtship and marriage, 434-35, 440
- diary keeping, 367-69, 421-22, 423
- dissertation, 382-85, 400-401, 405, 417-19, 431, 443-46
- education, 351, 353-56, 364-65, 367, 369
- employment, 362-64, 365-67
- ethnic identity, 390
- family background, 343-44
- father. See Sakoda, Kenichi
- friends and colleagues, 369, 381, 402-403, 434
- JERS
- as Kibei in Japan, 345, 354-56, 359, 360-62
- language facility, 362, 391
- mother. See Sakoda, Tazu Kihara
- personalty of, 378
- political interests and activities, 369-71, 380-81
- reading tastes, 360, 367
- religion, 365-66
- research focus and theory, 358, 418, 442-46
- resettlement, 407, 408, 410, 411-12
- residence, 351
- siblings, See also individual names 343, 344
- teaching positions, 380, 386, 411, 414, 419, 444-45
- wife. See Sakoda, Hattie Kurose
- Sakoda, Kenichi, 343-44, 351, 353-55, 359-60, 366, 412-13
- Sakoda, Ruby, 350, 356, 368, 373, 386, 409, 419
- Sakoda, Tazu Kihara, 344-45, 359-360, 409, 413
- Salvage, The (Thomas), 376, 416, 439, 445
- Sansei, 413-14
- Sato, Dick, 396
- "Seki-Nin" (Nakagawa), 359
- Shibata, Yoshimi, 410, 425
- Shibutani, Tamotsu, 349-50, 421, 436
- Shoda family, 373
- Silas Marner (Eliot), 360
- Smith, Elmer, 381, 397, 398, 399, 403, 404, 407, 408
- Social history, 358
- Sojourners, 344, 345, 352, 354-55
- Sonada, Kazumi, 370
- Spicer, Edward, 393, 449n28
- Speier, Matthew, 405
- Spencer, Robert, 366, 374, 380, 399, 415, 423, 430, 432, 434, 436, 437, 440, 442, 443, 451n51
- Spoilage, The (Thomas & Nishimoto), 376, 377, 383, 416, 431, 433, 438, 441-46
- Stafford, Harry, 381, 393, 399-400, 425
- Stoffer, Sam, 444
- Suye Mura (Embree), 450n33
- Suzuki, Peter, 376, 437, 449n25
- Takasugi, Kingo, 373
- Takasugi, May Sakoda, 343, 344, 360, 373, 387, 410, 413
- Tanaka, Togo, 380
- Taylor, Sandra, 411
- Thomas, Dorothy Swaine, See also Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study 373, 416, 421, 429, 442
- Thomas, W. I., 368, 373-74, 376, 382, 383, 418, 421, 422, 431, 439, 448n18, 449n26
- Tryon, Robert, 443
- Tsuchiyama, Tamie, 373, 374, 390, 430, 432, 433, 435, 438, 443
- Tsuneishi, Warren, 352, 370, 371, 373
- Tulare Assembly Center, Calif., 373, 374, 427
- Tule Lake War Relocation Center, Calif., 350, 382-83, 390-93, 396, 397
- block structure, 350, 379-80, 401-402
- Caucasians at, 387
- community analysts at, 398
- community council, 385, 386, 396, 397, 390-92
- fire protection, 377, 378
- internal security, 393-94
- layout of, 401
- leave clearances from, 420-21
- military police, 420-21
- military recruitment at, 427-28
- murders at, 385
- pickling plant at, 396-97
- population of, 350, 379-80, 387, 401, 402
- registration crisis at, 375, 378, 386, 387, 388-89, 393-94, 423-25, 427, 441
- schools, 386, 419
- as segregation center, 375, 389, 390, 437, 440, 441
- Social Welfare Department, 380
- unrest and riots at, 392-94, 419-20, 425-26
- University of California, Berkeley, 364-65, 372
- University of Southern California, 347
- University of Washington, 415-16
- Van Nostrand, Professor, 367
- Views From Within (Ichioka), 446
- V-J Day, 413
- War Relocation Authority (WRA), 348, 375, 376, 406, 407
- War Relocation Authority Community Analyst Section, 398-99, 401, 440
- Warner, Lloyd, 441, 444, 450n33
- Wax, Rosalie Hankey, 430, 432, 436, 438, 439, 442, 443, 449n25, 449n28, 451n51
- Wells, H. G., 367
- White King Soap Factory, 346
- Women, 344-45, 350, 356, 360, 372, 386
- Young Democrats, 369
- Yusa, Earle, 372-73, 448n17
- Znaniecki, Florian, 439
- Zoot suiters, 380
Courtesy of K.G. Saur
http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=ft0p30026h&brand=oac4
Title: Japanese American WW II Evacuation - Part III: Analysts
Date: 1994
Contributing Institution: K.G. Saur
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