What was Don Elberson job at the Poston Relocation Center

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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.

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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.

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.

That was an elected position?

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.

People who were in the co-op?

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.

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.

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

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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?

In general, I stayed away, as a general rule, I guess. I could see Elberson because he was part of the co-op movement.

And that was your job.

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.

She was in a different block from you, then.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You recognized the dangers.

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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.

Did people in your block know you were on the study?

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.

So how did you say it, that you were just writing a paper?

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.

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?

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.

You said "us." It extended to your family, then, too.

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.

So at first it was resistance to registration itself.

Yes.

And then after that, a lot of people voted no, 40 some percent voted no.

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.

After all, your position was not an aggressive one with respect to registering "yes, yes," was it?

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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.

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?

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.

So you had built up some credibility.

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.

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?

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.

How long did that last, where you were consigned to the unsacred circle?

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.

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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.

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...

Were they also in the debate?

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.

And you put your theory to work?

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.

Western classical music.

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.

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.

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

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How did they register their criticism toward you at that point?

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.

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?

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.

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

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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.

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].

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.

And largely propertyless, too.

Yes. They were farm migrant laborers, a lot of them, or they worked in homes or places like that as

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Did you have any contact among them? Were you able to talk with the single Issei men?

In times of crisis, yes, you could talk to some of them. I would sometimes overhear them talking.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Did you say that Jacoby was the head of police?

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Internal security.

And I think you said, too, that he had changed his jobs from social welfare to internal security.

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.

But the same could be said for Minidoka, too, if I read your dissertation correctly.

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.

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?

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.

Because you were married?

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.

This extended to you, too?

No, it didn't extend to me.

No, I mean did the "Tulean" group extend to you?

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.

About 300 and some.

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

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So there was a reservoir, then, of discontent somewhere in families over that.

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.

Did the administration consciously try to play the Minidokans off against the Tuleans?

That's what they were doing.

I mean over and beyond that particular incident. Was that a conscious policy that they carried out?

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.

And it behooved you, too.

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.

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?

That was still difficult. As a matter of fact, I was getting mail from the University of California in the regular

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But you weren't confronted about it, like "What are you doing?"

No, I wasn't confronted directly about it, not really. But there was probably an underlining suspicion that something was going on.

As it turned out, you were working on your dissertation. (laughter)

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.

I'm sure the administration would have preferred you to have had your office in the administration building.

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.

To design it.

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.

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So the nature of your participation changes the nature of your observation.

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

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Volunteers?

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]

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.

Oh, yes.

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.

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.

Are they still both alive now?

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.

Where did they live before?

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.

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?

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.

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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?

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.

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."

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.

And you didn't have to give him anything in return?

I didn't have to give him anything in return, so that worked out pretty well.

That doesn't sound correct. Maybe we could explore that a bit more.

(Laughter) I could talk to him without actually showing what I had written, for example.

You might have gotten him contacts or something like that.

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.

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?

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.

He was used to having a rubber stamp and now he didn't have one.

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.

Do you think he understood human psychology?

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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?

No.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

But Tuleans were involved in that.

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.

But that's what the Tuleans saw. They witnessed this.

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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.

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.

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.

I think it took you about half an hour, didn't it, to traverse the camp?

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.

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]

Yes, the baruka, yes.

And sometimes even a little larger than a baruka would be the mura.

Yes.

Did you see any correspondence between those two, or is that a false or a forced analogy?

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.

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

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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."

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?

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.

And common latrines.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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,

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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.

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.

A teacher who would make racist remarks?

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.

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.

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.

You mean like Catholic priests?

Yes.

I think there were Buddhist priests. Like Kanmo Imamura, for example, was...

He was part of the population, though.

― 404 ―

I see what you mean. But wasn't Father Joe?

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.

Was there a type that became Catholic among the Japanese population? Can you see any kind of social category? Is it a class thing?

I don't know if there's a class or not. His brother Daisuke, known as Father Dai, was at Tule Lake.

He's the one who wrote the book on Issei and Nisei [ Issei and Nisei: The Internment Years (New York: Seabury Press, 1967)].

He wrote the book. He was quite different. He was less roguish. He was more disciplined.

So you knew them both, then.

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.

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?

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.

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.

I don't know about the role of the Episcopalians. I guess their ceremonies are more High Church, but they're

― 405 ―

Oh, was Father Joe Episcopalian? He wasn't Catholic? I'm sorry, I missed your identification of him.

He was not Catholic; he's an Episcopalian.

And his brother, too.

His brother, too.

Then it probably was a class thing, because the Episcopalians are generally regarded as sort of [an] upper class form of Protestantism.

So he probably got away with more than he might have otherwise.

So he wasn't, then, in charge of an ecumenical Protestant congregation in Minidoka. He had responsibility just for the Episcopalians?

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.

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.

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.

Does it break it down by denomination and sex?

I'm not sure, but I think that it might, yes.

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?

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

― 406 ―

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.

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.

But when they resisted resettlement, they resisted resettling east. They wanted to come back to the West Coast.

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.

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?

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

― 407 ―

Not even two weeks and three days. Three days.

Yes, three days. They had to leave right away. So they were using the three-day notice to force people to leave.

But this happened during that period when you had gone back to Berkeley—March, April, May [1945], whenever it was.

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.

Underground?

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.

Who would take them there and dump them there?

The WRA personnel.

Not the military police.

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.

The evacuee chief of police?

The local sheriff.

― 408 ―

Oh, it was probably the local sheriff from Hunt, [Idaho].

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.

What about the very last train that you went out on? Was that made up of the diehards?

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.

Are you convinced of the integrity of that particular position? Did people honestly and perfervidly believe it, or was it merely a rhetorical measure?

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.

― 409 ―

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?

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.

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?

I must have been in Berkeley.

So that must have been a devastating piece of news for you at that time, when you heard about the bombing.

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.

How soon did you find out that your parents were safe?

It wasn't too long, because we were corresponding. I had written letters.

Was that permissible during the time you were in camp, to write to relatives in Japan?

Yes. I think we had correspondence.

Through the Red Cross?

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.

But it still put you in a position of constant worry. I mean, you were in a scary position one way or the other.

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.

Did it add to your credibility as a person in the community that your parents still were living in Japan?

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.

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

― 410 ―

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.

Is the baby still alive?

Yes, the baby's alive and doing very well.

Who took the responsibility for the baby, the father?

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.

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?

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.

In music education?

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.

Especially for the Nisei.

Especially for the Nisei, but for Nisei like myself, who had nothing. I had my education, but beyond that,

― 411 ―

Except your youth.

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.

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.

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...

Showed up.

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.

Did you also feel you could have been useful for the study at that time, to watch the remaining months?

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.

And then you got alerted to that through the correspondence you were getting?

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.

I'm trying to get this straight. You left about March or something the first time?

― 412 ―

Yes, about March.

And then you came back in June, and you were there because of your mother-in-law passing away?

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.

You were coming back to Minidoka by yourself when you came back these last couple of times, without Hattie?

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.

By yourself?

By myself. Hattie wasn't there. It was fortunate that I stayed, because a lot went on at the very end.

Did you have to convince Dorothy Thomas that it was a good idea for you to stay there?

No, I didn't have any trouble like that.

But you did it at that time largely for the study, didn't you?

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.

I think you mentioned that off-tape, so maybe we ought to put it on tape.

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.

How did your parents survive the war, as far as their health and their well-being?

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.

Was he in his sixties when he died, or seventies?

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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.

When did she pass away?

She passed away in her mid-seventies after we had moved to Rhode Island.

While you were teaching at Brown.

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.

You never saw your dad again, though, right?

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.

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.

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.

In some ways, it's a good thing that they can't realize how bad it was.

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.

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Or the endemic prejudice, really.

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.

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?

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.

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

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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.

Sometimes having kids that are Happa [half Japanese and half non-Japanese ancestry], as they call them...

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.

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

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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.

From the profession?

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.

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.

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.

Disproportionate power, you mean.

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.

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.

No, no. Frank Miyamoto is on; it's Shibutani that's not on.

I take it back. Miyamoto is on.

Miyamoto's on The Salvage.

Not The Salvage, The Spoilage.

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.

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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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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

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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?

And in a small community, a pseudonym is really easy to decode, isn't it?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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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....

The course I taught in Tule Lake.

Yes, Psych[ology] 1A, I think it was.

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.

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.

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

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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?

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.

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?

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...

This is at which one, Tule Lake or...

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

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So they didn't really enter into the thinking of the camp unless there was a crisis and they were drawn into the camp.

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]

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?

Yes. When she came to Tule Lake, you mean?

Yes.

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.

Even as early as the Tule Lake point?

Yes. She didn't come up to Minidoka.

Did you dread her coming up to Tule Lake from Berkeley or welcome it, at that point?

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.

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?

Yes, I think to a large extent I was able to do that. I'm not sure to what extent I really unburdened myself

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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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Did you have any discussions with W. I. Thomas about that activity?

No, I don't think I ever discussed with W. I. directly as to how to go about keeping a journal.

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So were the conferences that you had more in terms of the interpretive reports that you were writing?

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.

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?

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]

That's right. Showing us up.

I think there was some sense of competition.

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.

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...

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?

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

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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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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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.

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.

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.

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

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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.

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.

The reports office?

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.

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.

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.

In the diary that Charlie Kikuchi kept in the Tanforan Assembly Center, it mentions the WCCA's policy

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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.

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?

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.

In Japan, as a Nikkei [Japanese American]...

Like in Japan, I didn't come across that term at all.

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?

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.

Had you been in the assembly center at Puyallup, you would have heard the term, probably.

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.

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?

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.

You said he even got a worse one at Minidoka than he did at Heart Mountain.

Yes.

And at Heart Mountain, he got pretty rough treatment, because they had the anti-draft movement there.

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

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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...

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.

You were still getting the record, but you were disguising your data.

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.

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?

I suppose part of it may have been a rationalization, but at that point, I had the feeling that it was something

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You could record it, but who was going to believe it?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

But she was willing to, in a sense, give away a category if it was going to have negative consequences for the Japanese people.

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

― 430 ―

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

Yes, it's quite possible.

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?

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]

So this low point that you were feeling that you mention in here had now changed quite dramatically.

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."

I was surprised at that when I saw that, but I can understand now what you've been telling me.

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.

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Plus, somebody else you were romantically involved with, Hattie, was leaving.

Yes.

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?

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.

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...

That's the aftermath of the registration.

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."

(Laughter)

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

― 432 ―

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.

Tamie.

Tamie leaves. That doesn't leave very many.

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?

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.

She didn't do the third volume, "The Residual." In a sense she did wash it out, right?

In many respects, it was up to me, really, to write that third volume.

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.

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)

And she wanted you to turn in receipts.

She wanted me to turn in receipts, so I got mad and said, "I don't have any receipts."

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.

There weren't any hotels to be had. There was a time when there was a lot of travel. Once I slept overnight

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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?

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.

This is where you would take exception, right? This was a promissory note of hers that was not redeemed. Is this right?

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.

It's her book.

Hers and Nishimoto's.

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?

Yes.

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?

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.

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.

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

― 434 ―

So she expressed in an extreme way what some other people were thinking, right?

Yes.

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?

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.

So he was there almost as long as you, then?

Yes.

Did you have a closer relationship with him after the other two, Miyamoto and Shibutani, had left?

No, I really didn't see very much of him.

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.

Yes. That was when Morton Grodzins showed up.

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.

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.

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?

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.

You mean going back and forth?

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.

― 435 ―

So if it hadn't been for the Hattie thing, you might have capitulated and gone to Gila.

I would have very easily.

So the Hattie thing was the difference, then.

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.

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?

Yes, some people from Tule Lake went to Gila, but only a small number.

And you had, what, about a thousand or two thousand that went to...

About a thousand.

That went to Minidoka.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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?

― 436 ―

That's right, yes.

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?

Yes. She couldn't be responsible for us if somebody got hurt or anything like that.

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.

That's right, yes.

Then there was to be a conference of the study down in Phoenix, but I don't think that conference ever came about.

I did meet with Dorothy in Phoenix, yes.

Is that the time you went down to Gila?

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.

Tell me about that session. Was that just you alone, or were there other JERS members meeting in Phoenix, also? Do you recall?

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.

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.

No.

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.

I'll have to go to my diaries on that.

― 437 ―

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think it was good to get reactions from other people, because at that point we weren't sure what we were

― 438 ―

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.

Sure.

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.

At that point, I had gone... Did I go to Poston? Yes, I must have gone to Poston. They were in Poston, right?

Yes. I think you went to Gila and then went over to Poston.

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.

You heard about "X" before this, right? He doesn't figure in your correspondence until this time.

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.

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.

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.

For The Spoilage?

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.

You'd met him before that at a couple of get-togethers of the project personnel.

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.

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He read your reports. He commented on your reports.

Yes.

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...

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.

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?

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.

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?

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]

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I know. There are headnote summaries of the case histories and then the case histories follow, that's it.

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.

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?

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.

These were the ones that became the "old Tuleans."[60]

Yes. All the Tuleans who really should have left.

And the administration let them get away with that.

They let them get away with it.

So in a sense, they set up a potential problem there.

That's right.

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."

That's right.

"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?

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.

But, of course, it was the community analyst's job to try to get the project director's ear, right?

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That's right.

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.

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.

If people could have had access to those.

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.

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?

Actually, nothing much came of that, as I recall.

So you weren't much beyond a B.A. until after the war.

That's right.

So the course work was limited.

Yes.

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?

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

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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.

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.

You were taking classes then, right?

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.

Did you see Dorothy very often during that time? Or Nishimoto?

I don't think I saw Nishimoto very often. I think I saw Dorothy from time to time.

You must have seen her after The Spoilage came out, because it came out in 1946, when she was still there

― 443 ―

Yes, I was still there.

Do you remember your reaction?

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.

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?

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.

Tryon was on your dissertation committee too, wasn't he?

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.

Who was your dissertation director?

Dr. David Krech, who was a social psychology professor.

Was he also the principal adviser for your dissertation?

He was my principal adviser. There was a third person [Martin Bernard Loeb] who was outside of the department.

Who helped you the most, in terms of your thesis?

Dr. Krech was quite helpful. He had authored a social psychology textbook in which he had propositions

― 444 ―

I believe that, in your acknowledgments for your thesis, you thanked Lloyd Warner, the person from whom you had taken a correspondence course?

I hardly remember that.

Was there anybody else back at Harvard who you met during that period?

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.

Was there an intellectual battle at that time between psychology and sociology? Is that what you're intimating?

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.

As you were just indicating about sociology, right?

Yes. I think they finally broke it up. Some names escape me.

Who intervened for you in respect to getting you your first position at Brooklyn College?

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.

Did you like the job at Brooklyn when you had it?

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.

But you had five different classes.

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.

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?

Yes, I think I asked a couple of publishers, but nothing came of it. I really didn't try that hard.

What got you the position at the University of Connecticut? How did that come about?

― 445 ―

[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."

And this was some four or five years after the war, right?

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.

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.

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.

Pretty good job to get.

Yes. It was a reasonable move to make at that point, although I could have been comfortable at Connecticut.

And during all this time, did you have intermittent contact with Dorothy Thomas?

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.

How did your relationship change as you became more ensconced in professional life? Did it take on more of a peer relationship?

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.

Did you ever see her at sociology conferences after you came to Brown?

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.

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?

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.

― 446 ―

Do you have autographed copies of both of those books from Dorothy Thomas?

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.

I would be interested to see the way in which she inscribed your copy of The Spoilage.

The book was simply signed by Dorothy and Richard Nishimoto.

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.

You're quite welcome.