USING ORAL HISTORY TO UNEARTH JAPANESE AMERICAN HISTORY By Valerie J. Matsumoto Japanese Americans in Arizona Oral History Project Workshop November 8, 2003 Introduction In my introductory class on Asian American history, I assign the students—who are usually an ethnically diverse group—to do a research paper on their own or someone else’s family. This involves their doing an oral-history interview with at least one person of a different generation. I want them to understand that everyone is an actor in history, making choices within the context of their society and times. Years ago, a woman student came to talk with me because she wasn’t sure that her mother would make a good subject for this paper. What she conveyed was that they got along but they weren’t very close, because her immigrant mother, a single parent, was always busy with work. The student was afraid her mother’s life wouldn’t be interesting or eventful enough to sustain a whole paper. We talked about it, and I tried to explain that her mother’s experiences as an immigrant and a worker would provide plenty of material for her to place her mother in the context of major themes in Asian American history. With some misgivings, she agreed to give it a try. When I next saw her, this student had gained a very different perspective on her mother. Her mother, it turned out, had led a much more difficult and interesting life than her daughter had realized. The student’s paper recounted her mother’s dreams of life in America and the harsh realities she faced when her marriage dissolved and she had to scramble to find and hold multiple jobs to support her children and herself. Indeed, her mother emerged from this essay as an epic hero, facing each hurdle with dauntless determination and ingenuity. After listening to her mother tell her story, the student
1
blurted out, “Why didn’t you ever tell me about this?” Her mother gazed back at her and said, “You never asked.” Today I want to talk about the importance of asking. I will discuss how oral history started me on the path to researching Japanese American history, some of the lessons oral history can teach, and why I believe this Arizona project is so significant. From Central Arizona to Cortez For me, the adventure of pursuing Japanese American history began when I was an undergraduate at Arizona State University, taking Professor Mary Rothschild’s U.S. women’s history classes in 1976 and 1977. Her class assignments introduced me to oral history, and the opportunity to interview my Nisei mother and Mariyo Hikida. I learned how enthralling the process of oral history interviewing can be. It is said that actors live many lives in one lifetime because of all the different roles they play; in a similar vein, oral historians are privileged to gain insights into a multitude of other lives. Through asking people about their families and experiences, we begin to see both the patterns and the accidents of the past, and how men and women have navigated through the circumstances of various eras. Part of the same fascination that draws people to “reality TV” is this opportunity to glimpse unscripted inner lives. When I was a student, very little had yet been written about Japanese American history from Japanese American perspectives, and the existing literature tended to focus on Issei and Nisei in California. Luckily, through a student job at the Hayden Library at ASU, I met pioneering historian Susie Sato, whose research articles presented the story of Japanese American farmers in the Salt River Valley and the wartime experiences of Arizona Japanese Americans. Aside from Susie’s work, there were some studies of internment camps, including Poston, but they were written not from the point of view of
2
Japanese Americans, but of the European American administrators who ran the camps and the social scientists who flocked to study them during the war. The unusual World War II situation of Japanese Americans in Arizona piqued my curiosity: The boundary line of the military zone from which the Issei and Nisei were uprooted ran through the western half of Washington state, Oregon, and California, and then through Arizona, cutting through Phoenix, Tempe and Mesa. This resulted, as I reported in my undergraduate honors thesis, in a bizarre situation, as half of the Central Arizona Japanese American community was incarcerated in the Poston Camp, and the other half remained in their homes for the duration of the war. I wanted to find out what life was like during the war for both the interned and those not interned. I also wanted to learn about the roles Issei and Nisei women played within the family and community, which had been largely omitted from the literature on Japanese Americans. These interests spurred me to tackle a senior honors thesis on Japanese American women in Central Arizona, which in the absence of other sources, was based primarily on
1 oral history. Susie Sato provided invaluable help in arranging interview contacts with a
range of individuals. First I developed a list of 70 questions organized according to life stages—childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, etc.—and tailored to include local events and Japanese American references. Then, armed with a cassette tape recorder, I set off to interview twelve Nisei women. They generously shared their memories of their parents and early community life, their efforts to juggle farm work and schoolwork, the turmoil and tension of World War II, their courtship and marriage, and compared their relationships with their Sansei children to the relationships they had with their Issei parents. I began to see the similarities in their experiences and those of my parents, who
3
grew up in rural northern and southern California. The rich details of their lives gave dimension to my sense of a vibrant if spread-out community. I was hooked; they whetted my appetite to learn more. When I went to graduate school at Stanford, it was with the aim of doing a booklength study of a Japanese American community.2 By serendipitous accident, I learned about Cortez, a Central California farming community that had been established in 1919 as one of three colonies by San Francisco Issei leader Abiko Kyutaro. I drew on the records of their farm co-op (formed in 1924) as well as on a local (European American) newspaper and internment camp newspapers. However, because so few personal records had survived the war, it was oral-history interviews that revealed the intricate tapestry of the community’s past. I interviewed the handful of remaining Issei, 55 Nisei, and 17 Sansei, trying to interview members of every family in Cortez. Every person contributed to my understanding of the meaning of community and how it shifted from generation to generation. Interviewing these women and men of three generations also reflected shifts in gender roles and ideas of marriage, from the arranged unions of the Issei to their Nisei children’s romantic matches. Oral history was essential to this project—there was no other source through which this past could have been recovered with depth, breadth, and living color. Developing an understanding of the past is critical to gaining an understanding of the present and some clues about what may lie ahead. The great poet and writer Maya Angelou once made this point with a dramatic illustration: she described a psychological study for which volunteers were placed under hypnosis and then told, “You have no
1
“”SHIKATA GA NAI’: Japanese American Women in Central Arizona, 1910-1978,” honors thesis, Arizona State University, May 1978. 2 Farming the Home Place: A Japanese American Community in California, 1919-1982 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
4
future.” Upon hearing this, the hypnotized subjects became light-hearted and carefree, focusing on the present moment. However, when they were told, “You have no past,” they became catatonic. Without the crucial reference points that our histories give us— the sense of where we came from and how we became who we are, how the world works and why—they were unable to move or act. Telling one’s experiences is a powerful act, particularly in the face of historical silence. I will mention the example of one large historical secret—the silence that masked the torture and murder of six million men, women and children. I am speaking, of course, about the Jews, Gypsies, Catholics, homosexuals and others who suffered and died in the Nazi annihilation camps. The first news about these camps, according to one eyewitness, Primo Levi, began to spread in 1942. These rumors hinted at a massacre of such immense proportions, and of such extreme cruelty, that the
3 public at first did not believe them. Many survivors reported that Nazi soldiers and
officers had taunted them about the secrecy of their fate. They said, “However this war may end, we have won the war against you; none of you will be left to bear witness, but even if someone were to survive, the world will not believe him. There will perhaps be suspicions, discussions, research by historians, but there will be no certainties, because we will destroy the evidence together with you. And even if some proof should remain and some of you should survive, people will say that the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed: they will say that they are the exaggerations of Allied propaganda and will believe us, who will deny everything, and not you.”
4
3 4
Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (NY: Vintage International, 1988), p.11. Levi, pp.11-12.
5
However, despite the fact that the Nazis burned all the archives5 in the death camps during the final days of World War II, despite their efforts to obliterate all witnesses, they were not able to bury their hideous secret. The survivors, at great cost, told their stories, and the world, in horror, listened. Perhaps they might agree with the main character of Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel Woman Warrior, who says: “The Chinese ideographs for revenge are ‘report a crime’ and ‘report to five families.’ The reporting is the vengeance—not the beheading, not the gutting, but the words.”6 As the Nazis and their victims and survivors knew, as a Chinese American woman writer in Oakland, California, knew, writing history--controlling the words—is a powerful political act. Whose stories get told, and how they are told, and what stories are omitted—in textbooks, in classrooms, in newspapers, and on television—have tremendous impact on how we think about the past and how we plan for the future. Lessons of Oral History Interviewing The process of doing oral-history interviews with Japanese Americans in central Arizona and central California not only unearthed the fascinating histories of families and communities, but also offered other lessons. I would like to discuss five: (1) First, I learned that everyone has an important story to tell. The life of every person I interviewed could have filled a whole book. (2) The second lesson was that very few people thought that their own lives were remarkable or noteworthy, and yet it was the marvelous details of
5 6
Levi, p.13. Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (NY: Vintage Books, 1975), p.63.
6
their childhood games and chores, the holiday celebrations, the songs they listened to on the radio, the endless field work, their parents’ admonitions and foibles, the baseball and dances that broke the monotony in camp, what it felt like to leave camp and how they found jobs and homes again—all these details made the past come alive and gave the community history dimension. It is individual experiences of the past, whether descriptions of everyday life or gripping dramatic events, such as when, at the end of World War II, Jane Hudnall was abducted from her workplace in Japan by MacArthur’s advance troops—it is these experiences that engage audiences and help them connect with the past. Community history strikes me as being a kind of mosaic art, wherein oral history provides many fragments that are painstakingly pieced together to form a large dazzling scene. All the smaller pieces are crucial to constructing the bigger picture. (3) Third, I also learned practical mechanical lessons, sometimes through embarrassing mishaps. For example, I learned the importance of taking an electrical cord for my tape recorder, in case there was an opportunity to plug it in. I once interviewed an articulate Sansei woman, only to find out afterward that the batteries had given out early on and when I replayed the tape, we sounded like aliens in the cantina scene from the first Star Wars movie. This taught me to check my batteries periodically, and to bring along extra batteries, just in case. (4) I also learned that qualitative sources—such as oral history—can tell us things that quantitative data—statistics—cannot. For example, the census
7
data for the past half century reports that among Japanese Americans interracial and interethnic marriage has increased steadily. What the statistics cannot tell us is what this trend might mean for Japanese American communities. Oral history interviews with Nisei and Sansei suggest that the community is changing and adapting, and that multiracial children are taking active roles in the Japanese American community, as scholars, artists, organizers, performers, and leaders. So, statistics can reveal the choices that people are making, but can’t necessarily tell us what these choices might signify. Oral history can further our understanding of such developments. (5) Fifth, oral history can provide insights that alter the way we think about the past. I always ended my interviews in Cortez with summing-up
7 questions that reviewed the interviewee’s life to date: “What was the
happiest time in your life?” “If you had your life to live over, would you do anything differently?” “Is there anything I haven’t asked that you’d like to add?” These questions seemed to work well. However, it became clear that one question to which Nisei responded readily posed problems of translation for the Issei: “What was the most exciting event in your life thus far?” The Nisei who translated for me when I interviewed the Issei had difficulty asking this question. In Japanese, it became “What was the most memorable event you experienced?” The fact that the question could not be asked the same way in both languages made me aware of the nuances I was missing in the
7
My complete oral history interview questions for the Nisei and Sansei appear in Farming the Home Place, Appendix B, pp.225-9.
8
Issei’s responses, due to my lack of facility with Japanese. It also alerted me to differences in ways of perceiving and thinking about the world.8 The responses to this question further underscored generational and cultural differences. Nearly all of the Nisei men and women said that getting married and the birth of their children were the most exciting events they had experienced. By contrast, and to my surprise, the Issei did not cite these occasions. Instead they talked about something each had experienced alone, often linked with nature. For one Issei woman, it was a spiritual revelation; for an Issei man, it was seeing the sun setting behind Mount Fuji as his ship set sail for the United States from Yokohama. One woman described a night she still remembered vividly. She had come to America as a teenager and was working as a nursemaid for a Japanese consular official in Washington D.C. from 1927 to 1930. Young and far from home, she felt lonely for her parents and familiar surroundings. One night when the diplomat and his wife were away attending a social function and all was quiet, she went outside by herself. She looked up and saw the beautiful full moon and thought, “My mother and father in Japan may also be looking at the moon.” Suddenly she felt connected to her family by the shining moon, and it eased her loneliness.
9
For the Issei, whose marital partnerships were arranged by their parents, getting married meant crossing the threshold of adulthood but it did not include expectations of romantic love. Affection was viewed as the outgrowth of a relation, not a prerequisite. The Nisei, however, who had watched Clark Gable
8
This paragraph appeared in my essay, “Reflections on Oral History: Research in a Japanese American Community,” Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork, ed. Diane L. Wolf (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), pp.166-7.
9
and Carole Lombard, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire on the silver screen, had formed different hopes and dreams. Their attitudes about marriage reflected the norms of the larger U.S. society in the 1940s and 1950s. As a historian, I understood and expected this, but somehow I was still surprised by the contrast in responses. I was much struck by how one generation chose events involving groups of people as the “most memorable” and how another generation focused on individual experiences. There were too few surviving Issei for me to pursue this further, but it provided a healthy jolt to my thinking. Addressing Gaps in Japanese American History For the rest of the allotted time, I’d like to talk about some major gaps in Japanese American history and the potential of this Arizona project to address them. In Asian American history generally, and Japanese American history more specifically, there are a number of sadly understudied areas. I will mention two: Nisei youth culture of the 1920s and 30s, and the rebuilding of communities during the Cold War and the Age of Aquarius. Scholars of prewar Japanese American history have tended to focus, understandably, on immigration and labor. What has been very little studied is the wide array of Nisei youth organizations and activities during the Jazz Age and the Great Depression. My on-going research on Nisei young women in Los Angeles revealed that in this era of immigration exclusion and discriminatory treatment, Nisei urban youth created their own dynamic networks and took part in sports, clubs, dances, community service, talent shows, musical and theatrical performances, and often were called upon to represent the ethnic community in civic events. One of the Los Angeles Japanese
9
This paragraph, except for my revision of the final sentence, appeared in my essay, “Reflections on Oral
10
American newspapers reported at the end of 1938 that there was only one day in the entire year on which no organized Nisei event had been scheduled. (It was July 20.) When I tell my mother (who grew up in rural Oakland, California) about the Nisei activities in Little Tokyo, she always says, “I just knew those city kids were having more fun than we were!” What about the Nisei in Arizona? Were they all spending their nonschool time, like my mother and Mariyo Hikida, helping their parents with farm work? Did they have clubs? Did churches or the YWCA and YMCA sponsor ethnic youth organizations? Were they allowed to go to dances? Did they go on dates? What were their favorite bands and movies? Were their Japanese American sports leagues, or were the Nisei accepted in mainstream athletics? Baseball? Kendo? Did they take part in or attend cultural performances? Did they learn odori—traditional dance—or flower arrangement, or how to fold origami? Who taught them? How did the climate of race relations in Arizona affect Nisei youth and their ability to socialize and find jobs outside the ethnic community? Were they welcome in high school and college organizations? What were their aspirations for the future? Please forgive my putting in a personal plea here, but historians know very little about what has happened in and to Japanese American communities over the past half century. In Asian American history at large, the two decades between the end of World War II and the Immigration Act of 1965, are particularly a blank slate. We don’t know how Japanese Americans rebuilt their communities after 1945 or how they weathered the Cold War. What kind of work did they find? Did they participate in any political organizations? What kinds of values did they seek to instill in the third generation? What kinds of cultural practices did they adapt and maintain? How did the Nisei and the
History,” p.167.
11
Sansei negotiate the generational turmoil and social ferment of the 1960s and 1970s? How did they deal with sex and drugs and rock and roll? After grappling with the issue of military service during World War II and the Korean War, how did they respond to the Vietnam War draft? The Arizona anti-miscegenation law was overturned in 1952 [1957?], although public opinions changed more slowly. How did Japanese Americans deal with intermarriage, a marked trend, within and outside the ethnic community? How have they dealt with the growing presence of multiracial members of the community? What kinds of career paths did the Nisei follow? How do Sansei and Yonsei work trajectories compare? How did the Redress Movement affect the Arizona Japanese Americans? The Arizona Japanese American Oral History Project has the potential to contribute greatly to our understanding of common patterns and regional variations in the Nikkei past. The unusual wartime division of the community alone offers a valuable opportunity for comparative study. Poston, the largest of the internment camps was located in Arizona, as well as the Gila Camp; did internees from these camps settle in Arizona after the war? What impact did this have had on prewar Japanese American enclaves? Much more research is needed to paint a fuller picture of Japanese American history, before and after World War II, and particularly in places outside the West Coast. I anticipate that the Arizona project will broaden and deepen our knowledge of Japanese American families and communities, examining the legacies of the past and suggesting creative directions for the future.
12